Top 44 Stalin Quotes

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

I wanted – and still want – to tell my mother’s story. She fled Stalin’s army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.

As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase ‘nothing about us without us.’ To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.

In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He’s a Russian emperor.

‘Daddy used to be a Georgian,’ Stalin’s son, Vasily, once said. Actually, the dictator didn’t truly become Russian; he remained Georgian culturally. Yet he embraced the imperial mission of the Russian people.

The Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists – Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

I’m sorry to say this, but Putin is spreading lies. He is doing this with the goal of removing Stalin’s Russia responsibility for starting the war jointly with Nazi Germany. I assumed he is ashamed of that.

After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

Stalin is a shameful stain on our country’s history.

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.

Cromwell is just as much of a bloody dictator as was Stalin.

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late ’80s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph’s mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin’s murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

I love the cinema, but I’m not a fascist about it. I’ve had some of my best experiences watching things on TV. But if I were Stalin, I would force everyone to be in the theater.

While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel… it is a product of both British and Stalin’s anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.

Because of my parents’ love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia – first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he’d never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they’d go back to the Urals and fight. They’d never surrender.

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors – Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953.

Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.

Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.

I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.

There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today… they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin’s Russia: it’s like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

Stalin’s machine can be started up again at only a moment’s notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin’s empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin’s most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

Criticism in the universities, I’ll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It’s Stalinism without Stalin.

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules.

It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.

Nicholas I has been called ‘Genghis Khan with a telegraph.’ Stalin was ‘Genghis Khan with a telephone.’ But Mr. Putin is not Genghis Khan with a BlackBerry.

Show me where Stalin is buried and I’ll show you a Communist Plot.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on ‘formalism.’ There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich’s compositions and Prokofiev’s were no longer to be played.

Under Stalin, artists weren’t dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn’t eat lunch.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read ‘Reader’s Digest’, listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.