My notes and quotes I've collected

"Now the tangle of imperialist rivalries in Europe is trying to straighten itself out in the form of a bloc pledged to defend Poland, and possibly Rumania, from Nazi attack. Should this arrangement work out—and that is still far from certain—we would begin to hear, no doubt about 'poor little Poland' under the Nazi heel. 'Poor little Poland'! Will the bosses of Britain, France, and this country call upon the workers to defend 'democracy' in Poland? Will the Stalinist patrioteers here and in those other countries echo this cry? We may be sure they will, if the bosses want it that way. But they will forget that in Poland the Ukrainian minority has been crushed, the Jews vilely persecuted, the Germans, Czechs, and other minorities kept in virtual bondage. They will conveniently forget that Poland has been and is a military, semi-Fascist dictatorship." - Socialist Appeal, April 7, 1939.

"Stalin feared an attack on the part of Hitler and he was trying his best to get the capitalist democracies into a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The Communist parties were shouting for collective security, defending capitalist democracy and calling for a war against fascism." - The Militant, June 14, 1941.

Hahah
Know I know everything you know Ismail.

This is probably the longest thread in this group and one of the most, if not the most, valuable. Thanks Ismail.

"The British bluntly offered our Commander-in-Chief, Krylenko, one hundred rubles per month for every one of our soldiers provided we continued the war [against Germany]. Even if we did not take a single kopek from the Anglo-French, we nevertheless would be helping them, objectively speaking, by diverting part of the German army.

From that point of view, in neither case would we be entirely escaping some sort of imperialist bond, and it is obvious that it is impossible to escape it completely without overthrowing world imperialism. The correct conclusion from this is that the moment a socialist government triumphed in any one country, questions must be decided, not from the point of view of whether this or that imperialism is preferable, but exclusively from the point of view of the conditions which best make for the development and consolidation of the socialist revolution which has already begun.

In other words, the underlying principle of our tactics must not be, which of the two imperialisms it is more profitable to aid at this juncture, but rather, how the socialist revolution can be most firmly and reliably ensured the possibility of consolidating itself, or, at least, of maintaining itself in one country until it is joined by other countries."
(V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol. 26. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1977. p. 445.)

July 1927:
"The CCP Central Committee was unable to use the rich period of the bloc with Kuomintang in order to conduct energetic work in openly organizing the revolution, the proletariat, the peasantry, the revolutionary military units, the revolutionizing of the army, the work of setting the soldiers against the generals. The CCP Central Committee has lived off the Kuomintang for a whole year and has had the opportunity of freely working and organizing, yet it did nothing to turn the conglomerate of elements (true, quite militant), incorrectly called a party, into a real party. . . . The CCP sometimes babbles about the hegemony of the proletariat. But the most intolerable thing about this babbling is that the CCP does not have a clue (literally, not a clue) about hegemony—it kills the initiative of the working masses, undermine the 'unauthorized' actions of the peasant masses, and reduces class warfare in China to a lot of big talk about the 'feudal bourgeoisie'... That is why I now believe the question of the party is the main question of the Chinese revolution."
(Lars T. Lih & Olev V. Naumov (ed). Stalin's Letters to Molotov. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1995. p. 141.)

1929:
"By the way, I think that it's time to think about organising an uprising by a revolutionary movement in Manchuria. The isolated detachments being sent to Manchuria to perform isolated tasks of an episodic nature are a good thing, of course, but they are not enough. We have to go for bigger things now. We need to organise two double-regiment brigades, chiefly made up of Chinese, outfit them with everything necessary (artillery, machine-guns, and so on), put Chinese at the head of the brigade, and send them into Manchuria with the following assignment: to stir up a rebellion among the Manchurian troops... to occupy Harbin and, after gathering force, to declare Chang Hsueh-liang overthrown, establish a revolutionary government (massacre the landowners, bring in the peasants, create soviets in the cities and towns, and so on). This is necessary. This we can, and I think should, do. No 'international law' contradicts this task. It will be clear to everyone that we are against war with China, that our Red Army soldiers are only defending our borders and have no intention of crossing into Chinese territory, and if there is a rebellion inside Manchuria, that's something quite understandable, given the atmosphere of the regime imposed by Chaing Hseuh-liang. Think about it. It's important."
(Ibid. p. 182.)

"Howard: May there not be an element of danger in the genuine fear existent in what you term capitalistic countries of an intent on the part of the Soviet Union to force its political theories on other nations?

Stalin: There is no justification whatever for such fears. If you think that Soviet people want to change the face of surrounding states, and by forcible means at that, you are entirely mistaken. Of course, Soviet people would like to see the face of surrounding states changed, but that is the business of the surrounding states. I fail to see what danger the surrounding states can perceive in the ideas of the Soviet people if these states are really sitting firmly in the saddle.

Howard: Does this, your statement, mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution?

Stalin: We never had such plans and intentions.

Howard: You appreciate, no doubt, Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has long entertained a different impression.

Stalin: This is the product of a misunderstanding.

Howard: A tragic misunderstanding?

Stalin: No, a comical one. Or, perhaps, tragicomic.

You see, we Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution. For example, our country wanted to make a revolution and made it, and now we are building a new, classless society.

But to assert that we want to make a revolution in other countries, to interfere in their lives, means saying what is untrue, and what we have never advocated."
(J.V. Stalin. Works Vol. 14. London: Red Star Press Ltd. 1978. p. 137.)

It is interesting to compare these words with Trotsky's here:

"We said to Poland: 'What do you demand? The independence of Poland? We recognize it. Do you fear that we will overthrow the bourgeois government of Warsaw? No, we will not meddle in your internal affairs. The Polish working class will overthrow you when it thinks it necessary.'"
(Leon Trotsky in 1920, quoted in Thomas T. Hammond (ed). The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1975. p. 97.)

Stalin was in effect repeating a standard answer to bourgeois journalists and government members.

Winston Churchill in The Hinge of Fate:

"'Tell me,' I asked, 'have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?'

This subject immediately roused the Marshal.

'Oh, no,' he said, 'the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.'

'I thought you would have found it bad,' said I, 'because you were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.'

'Ten millions,' he said, holding up his hands. 'It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plough the land with tractors. We must mechanise our agriculture. When we gave tractors to the peasants they were all spoiled in a few months. Only Collective Farms with workshops could handle tractors. We took the greatest trouble to explain it to the peasants. It was no use arguing with them. After you have said all you can to a peasant he says he must go home and consult his wife, and he must consult his herder.' This last was a new expression to me in this connection.

'After he has talked it over with them he always answers that he does not want the Collective Farm and he would rather do without the tractors.'

'These were what you call Kulaks?'

'Yes,' he said, but he did not repeat the word. After a pause, 'It was all very bad and difficult—but necessary.'

'What happened?' I asked.

'Oh, well,' he said, 'many of them agreed to come in with us. Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk or the province of Irkutsk or farther north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers.'

There was a considerable pause. Then, 'Not only have we vastly increased the food supply, but we have improved the quality of the grain beyond all measure. All kinds of grain used to be grown. Now no one is allowed to sow any but the standard Soviet grain from one end of our country to the other. If they do they are severely dealt with. This means another large increase in the food supply.'"

Kim Il Sung in 1994:

"'Another problem is how to treat 'wicked capitalists,' as Rev. Mun Ik Hwan expresses the term,' Kim Il Sung continued. 'I think that depends on how we view them. Capitalists should not be considered 'wicked' because they exploit others; the point is whether they sell out the interests of their country or nation. Those who earn for the nation are laudable; those with money should donate money for the sake of their country. That would decrease the number of wicked capitalists!' ...

Kim Il Sung said that this is the kind of communism being built in Korea, adding: 'There is no purpose in going a long way to make enemies in large numbers. We are going to make as few people our enemies as possible. We insist that a person not be subjugated to others and must refrain from doing things that are harmful to the nation; then everyone can be our friend.'"
(Won Tai Sohn. Kim Il Sung and Korea's Struggle. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. 2003. pp. 199-200.)

"He [a Hungarian interviewee] traced the process of collapse to the cynicism of the leaders, exemplified, among other things, in the joke Brezhnev told Willy Brandt (according to the German magazine Der Stern) during his visit to the Soviet Union. Brezhnev reportedly asked Brandt: 'Do you know what Marx would say if he were alive today? Workers of the world, forgive me.' The story made a deep impression on my Hungarian informant. It was, in his words, 'as if the Pope made fun of immaculate conception. Surely that would be the end of the church as we have known it.'"
(Paul Hollander. Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 2002. p. 241.)

"It was evident from the beginning that if workers' councils [in Yugoslavia] were to have unlimited authority in each individual production unit the result would be a system of free competition differing from the nineteenth-century model only in the ascription of ownership to particular concerns; no economic planning would be possible. Accordingly, the state reserved to itself various basic functions concerning the investment rate and the distribution of the accumulation fund. The reforms of 1964-65 further reduced the powers of the state without abandoning the idea of planning; the state was to regulate the economy chiefly through the nationalized banking system.

... The gap between more and less economically developed parts of the country tended to grow wider instead of narrowing; pressures on wages threatened to push down the investment rate below what was socially desirable; competitive conditions led to the appearance of a class of rich industrial managers whose privileges excited popular discontent; the market and competition caused an increase in inflation and unemployment."
(Lezsek Kolakowski. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth, and Dissolution Vol. III. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978. pp. 475-476.)

"Milovan Dilas, one of the leading Yugoslav Communists in the forties and fifties, cannot be regarded as a revisionist. His ideas on the democratization of socialism were condemned by the party as far back as 1954, and his later works (including the famous New Class, which we have already discussed) cannot be considered Marxist even in the lowest sense. Djilas completely gave up utopian ways of thought, and has many times pointed out the links between the original Marxist doctrine and its political realization in the form of bureaucratic despotism."
(Ibid. p. 478.)

"Millions of Poles were killed in German death camps throughout the war, and with considerably less sustained outcry from the [Polish 'government-in-exile' at London]. Indeed, only that very month the Germans were annihilating some 50000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, and far less was heard from London on this matter. Katyn was an infinitely more sensitive issue because the men killed there, as Polish underground leader Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski described them, 'had been the elite of the Polish nation . . .,' that is to say, the friends and family of the exiles in London. Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step towards implementing a social revolution in Poland, and on the basis of class solidarity, the London Poles felt one officer was worth many Jews or peasants."
(Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945. New York: Random House. 1968. p. 105.)

"Stalin was distrustful of Germany's intentions and believed that in the event of war with Hitler possession of the Baltic States would strengthen the Soviet defensive position, particularly since the Estonian and Latvian governments were not unfavorably disposed towards Germany... No doubt the erection of a cordon sanitaire against eventual German aggression was uppermost in Stalin's mind... Soviet reasons for annexing the Baltic States on the eve of the German march eastwards are thus patent."
(Thomas T. Hammond (ed). The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1975. pp. 214-215.)

"I said to Choe Dok Sin, 'Whether one lives in the north or in the south, one must consider the question of reunification with top priority given to the nation. Only when the nation exists are there social classes and isms, don't you think? What is the use of communism, nationalism or a belief in 'God' without the nation?'"
(Kim Il Sung. With the Century Vol. 2. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1992. p. 46.)

A good antidote to people who claim that Soviet policy on fascism was all well and good until STALINNNNNNNNNNNNNNN came in and ruined everything.

"Mussolini's government was one of the first in western Europe to recognize the Soviet Union officially in 1924. Moreover, in the case of Germany, extreme German nationalism even of the early Nazi variety was seen as useful to the USSR, and at the Twelfth Party Congress in Moscow in 1923 Nikolai Bukharin stressed that the Nazi Party had 'inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.' On June 20, 1923, Karl Radek gave a speech before the Comintern Executive Committee proposing a common front with the Nazis in Germany. That summer several Nazis addressed Communist meetings and vice versa, as the German Communist Party took a strong stand for 'national liberation' against the Treaty of Versailles and inveighed against 'Jewish capitalists.' It is said that a few of the more radical Nazis even told German Communists that if the latter got rid of their Jewish leaders, the Nazis would support them...

The Comintern line [by its Fifth Congress in 1924] held that Fascism represented the right wing of capitalism, while the non-Communist Socialist parties represented its left wing. The aim was to establish the equivalency of both the latter movements, leading to the notorious official labeling of social democracy as 'social fascism.'"
(Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. London: UCL Press. 1995. pp. 126-127.)

Where is this massive library of books with quotes relating to revolutionary leftist ideology?

I just read a lot.

Ismail do you have anything on Stalin's report on the five year plan? Or anything like that where Stalin explains the five year Plan?

Ismail do you have anything on Stalin's report on the five year plan? Or anything like that where Stalin explains the five year Plan?

You could just search his Works. Marx2Mao has them in PDF format: http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/Index.html

You could just search his Works. Marx2Mao has them in PDF format: http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/Index.html

Thanks

I just read a lot.

Is most of this available online, or print sourced?

Is most of this available online, or print sourced?

Print sourced.

Ismail, anything on Socialism in one country?

There's various quotes on SOIC. See my post here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/communism-....html?t=154339

As for the Holodomor, see Fraud, Famine and Fascism which is available online, as is Famine in the USSR: 1929-1934 which is a collection of materials from the Soviet archives translated into English.

I'd prefer that this thread be kept as a place to store quotes rather than a place to ask me questions.

Thank you

I posted this in another thread, so yeah. On the movement of Soviet troops into eastern Poland following the Nazi German invasion of Poland proper:

"The population of the area did not oppose the Russian troops but welcomed them with joy. Most were not Poles but Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians. U.S. Ambassador Biddle reported that the people accepted the Russians 'as doing a policing job.' Despatches told of Russian troops marching side by side with retiring Polish troops, of Ukrainian girls hanging garlands over Russian tanks."
(Anna Louise Strong. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream Publishers. 1957. p. 80.)

"To be sure, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to the U.S.S.R. The Party, the Government and the Soviet people knew that despite the Soviet-German non-aggression treaty, fascist Germany would start a war against the U.S.S.R. sooner or later. While realising the threat of aggression on the part of fascist Germany, and preparing the country and the armed forces for defence, the Soviet Government abided strictly by the terms of the non-aggression treaty, so as not to give the ruling circles of Germany the slightest pretext for violating the treaty and committing aggression. It was only when large German fascist forces began to concentrate at the western frontier of the U.S.S.R. that the Soviet Government took a number of preventive measures to repel a possible enemy invasion. The neutrality treaty with Japan, signed in April, 1941, enabled the Soviet Government to move some military units from the interior of the country to reinforce the country's western, defences. At the same time the Soviet Government drew up and adopted a mobilisation plan to convert industry to war production during the second half of 1941 and in 1942.

But as the very first days of the war showed, these measures proved to be belated and inadequate for beating off the onslaught of the enemy's huge army. One of the reasons for this situation was Stalin's misappreciation of the strategic situation on the actual eve of the war. Stalin, who exercised supreme leadership of the country and the Party, had reliable information on the concentration and deployment of the German fascist troops at the western frontier of the Soviet Union, and of their preparedness for an invasion of the U.S.S.R. But he considered such reports to be provocations. He believed that they were aimed at inciting the Soviet Government to take steps which could be used by Hitler as a pretext for violating the non-aggression pact. The enemy, he thought, would then have started a war against the Soviet Union in a situation unfavourable to it, and would have had grounds for blaming the war on the Soviet Union. To deprive Hitler of any pretext whatsoever for attacking the U.S.S.R., Soviet troops were not instructed to deploy and take up defense positions along the western frontier in anticipation of attack."
(B.N. Ponomarev (ed). History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1960. pp. 547-548.)

Molotov notes this in Molotov Remembers as well.

Here's an old quote of mine from November 2010:

The view that the lend-lease saved the USSR is used by right-wingers. It's rather odd to state it as if it is an absolute fact.

"Nor was Moscow saved by war material from America. Almost none of the eventual $11 billion worth of American Lend-Lease aid to the USSR arrived in time to save Moscow. American assurances of aid may have made Stalin more willing to throw material reserves into the struggle for his capital after October. But all told, Lend-Lease came to only 6% of Russian war material, most of it coming after Stalingrad. The thesis of Russian primitivity is inconsistent with the theory that Russia was saved by importing huge amounts of American goods along thousands of miles of railway.

The war material with which the Red Army saved Moscow and the bulk of the USSR was produced at home."
(Francis B. Randall. Stalin's Russia. New York: Free Press. 1965. p. 281.)

Isaac Deutscher noted in his otherwise quite hostile biography of Stalin that, "One might sum up broadly that the fire-power of the Red Army was home produced, whereas the element of its mobility was largely imported." (Stalin: A Political Biography, p. 512.) So basically the lend-lease, if it played a vital role, played such a role as to allow the Red Army to enter Eastern Europe or something, which isn't quite what I think the capitalist powers would have wanted.

In Geoffrey Robert's Stalin's Wars (2007) we read that (p. 164) such support was limited from 1941-42. Thus, "Most of this aid arrived after Stalingrad, so its main role was to facilitate victory rather than stave off defeat." Lend-lease assistance certainly helped, and the Soviets didn't ignore it. "Towards the end of the war the Soviet authorities began to reveal to citizens the full extent of the material support they had received." Again, such aid helped mobility. I've actually seen it used as a condemnation by conservatives concerning FDR's conduct during WWII, that the aid allowed the "commies" to take over Eastern Europe.

"When Feuchtwanger told Stalin how he found some manifestations of the cult tasteless and excessive, Stalin agreed, but said that he only answered one or two of the hundreds of greetings he received and did not allow most to be printed, especially the most excessive. He claimed that he did not seek to justify the practice, but to explain it: evidently the workers and peasant masses were simply delighted to be freed from exploitation, and they attributed this to one individual: 'of course that’s wrong, what can one person do – they see in me a unifying concept, and create foolish raptures around me.'

Feuchtwanger then asked a very legitimate question: why could he not stop the most excessive forms of rapture? Stalin responded that he had tried several times but that it was pointless as people assumed he was just doing so out of false modesty. For example, he had been criticised for preventing celebrations of his 55th birthday. According to Stalin, the veneration of the leader was the result of cultural backwardness and would pass with time. It was difficult to prevent people expressing their joy, and to take strict measures against workers and peasants. Feuchtwanger responded that what concerned him was not so much the feelings of workers and peasants, but the erection of busts and so on. Echoing some of his comments (above) about the abuse of the cult, Stalin answered that bureaucrats were afraid that if they did not put up a bust of Stalin, they would be criticised by their superiors. Putting up a bust was a form of careerism 'a specific form of the 'self-defence' of bureaucrats: so that they are left alone, they put up a bust'....

His interventions often reveal a concern to tone down, or to be seen to be toning down, some of the excesses of the cult... There are many examples of this. While a draft report for Pravda described a reception of a delegation of kolkhozniki of Odessa province in November 1933 as a reception by Stalin, Stalin himself added the names of Kalinin, Molotov and Kaganovich. He also criticised the writer A. Afinogenov for highlighting the 'vozhd' [leader] rather than the collective leadership of the Central Committee in his play Lozh'. When the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (IMEL) produced a history of 30 years of the party in 1933, he removed some references to himself....

Stalin continued to pay close attention to the editing of reports of Kremlin receptions for publication in Pravda. He would sometimes (but not always) cut out or tone down the references to the endless clapping which accompanied these quintessentially cultic occasions. He also tried to reduce the language of adulation, or to distribute it more equally with other colleagues....

While some members of the Politburo approved the renaming [of a electromechanical factory after Stalin in 1936], others proposed a discussion of the issue. However Stalin declared emphatically that he was not in favour, writing 'I am against. I advise that it should take the name of Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kosior, Postyshev or another of the leading comrades.' Nevertheless, despite Stalin's objections, on 25 March the Politburo went on to approve the attaching of Stalin’s name to the factory."
(Balázs Apor, Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones & E.A. Rees (eds). The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. pp. 37-39.)

"While the SKP struggled through semi-legality into clandestinity, the new Finnish state was meeting the problem of relations with its powerful neighbor to the east through a policy of what might be termed anti-Soviet neutralism. Two wars within a few years put an end to that policy. The attack launched against Finland by the Soviet Union at the end of November, 1939, was not aimed at annexation: its primary purpose evidently was to strengthen the USSR's defensive position on the Leningrad front, and the Finns could almost certainly have obtained peace by acceding to the Kremlin's limited territorial demands....

The settlement... could not be called punitive: it consisted mainly of the annexation of the Karelian Isthmus and other territories around Lake Ladoga, with the obvious aim of guarding the Leningrad marches.

What is worth noting is that the Russians did not insist—as they clearly could have done—on the relegalization of the Finnish Communist Party as part of the 1940 peace settlement."
(Thomas T. Hammond (ed). The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1975. pp. 434-436.)