Quotes by Joseph Stalin
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Joseph Stalin. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin,18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 – 5 March 1953), real name Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jughashvili was a Georgian revolutionary and the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 until 1953. He served as both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he ultimately consolidated power to become the Soviet Union's dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism while his own policies are known as Stalinism.
Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire (now Georgia), as a youth Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He went on to edit the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. After the Bolsheviks seized power during the October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin's newly renamed Communist Party in 1917, Stalin joined its governing Politburo. Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin's 1924 death.
Under Stalin, socialism in one country became a central tenet of the party's dogma. Through the Five-Year Plans, the country underwent agricultural collectivisation and rapid industrialisation, creating a centralised command economy. This led to severe disruptions of food production that contributed to the famine of 1932–33. To eradicate accused "enemies of the working class", Stalin instituted the Great Purge, in which over a million were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed between 1934 and 1939. By 1937, he had complete personal control over the party and state.
Stalin's government promoted Marxism–Leninism abroad through the Communist International and supported European anti-fascist movements during the 1930s, particularly in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, it signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, resulting in the Soviet invasion of Poland. Germany ended the pact by invading the Soviet Union in 1941. Despite initial setbacks, the Soviet Red Army repelled the German incursion and captured Berlin in 1945, ending World War II in Europe. The Soviets annexed the Baltic states and helped establish Soviet-aligned governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea.
The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war as global superpowers. The tensions that arose between the Soviet-backed Eastern Bloc and U.S.-backed Western Bloc became known as the Cold War. Stalin led his country through the post-war reconstruction, during which it developed a nuclear weapon in 1949. In these years, the country experienced another major famine and an antisemitic campaign peaking in the doctors' plot. After Stalin's death in 1953, he was eventually succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced him and initiated the de-Stalinisation of Soviet society.
Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Stalin was the subject of a pervasive personality cult within the international Marxist–Leninist movement, which revered him as a champion of the working class and socialism. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Stalin has retained popularity in Russia and Georgia as a victorious wartime leader who established the Soviet Union as a major world power. Conversely, his totalitarian government has been widely condemned for overseeing mass repression, ethnic cleansing, wide-scale deportation, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines that killed millions.
Of course, in order to build something new, one has to economize, accumulate means, temporarily limit one's requirements, borrow from others. If you want to build a new house,
you save money temporarily and limit your requirements, otherwise you might not build your house.
Direct elections on the spot to all representative organs, up to the supreme organ, are a better guarantee of the interests of the working population of our boundless country.
Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!
Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.
A certain inequality in regard to property still exists in a socialist society. But in a socialist society there is no unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities.
Universal, equal, direct and secret elections in the U.S.S.R. will be a whip in the hands of the population against poorly functioning organs of government.
Words are one thing -- deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
Remember how the first world war broke out. It broke out as a result of the desire to redivide the world.
It is difficult to say which is more menacing. But both of points of war danger -Japan and Germany exist and both are smoldering. In comparison with these two principal focal points
of the war danger, the Italo-Ethiopian war represents an episode.
In my opinion, there are two focal points of the war danger. The first focal point is the Far East zone of Japan. The second focal point in the zone is Germany.
American democracy and the Soviet system can exist simultaneously and compete peacefully. But one cannot develop into the other.
If things should go too far and deportation of all whiteguard emigres from the United States were demanded, this would be an attempt against the right of asylum promulgated in both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.
For instance, our country wanted to effect a revolution, and did effect it, and now we are building a new classless society.
Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes.
One of the successes of the cause of the friends of peace is the ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance.
This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.
I have in mind repeated statements by Japanese military men containing threats against other states.
Ah, these diplomats! What chatterboxes! There's only one way to shut them up -- cut them down with machine guns. Bulganin, go and get me one!
Only when we succeed in creating such an order under which people receive for their labor from the society not according to the quantity and quality of labor, but according to their needs, will it be possible to say that we have built up a communist society.
In a socialist society, everybody is obliged to work even though he is remunerated for his labor and not yet according to his needs, but according to the quantity and quality of the labor expended.
Why will our elections be universal?Because all citizens, excluding those deprived of vote by court, will have the right to vote and the right to be elected.
Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship.
Not a few organizations exist in our country which function poorly. Sometimes it happens that this or that local government or organ have to satisfy one or another of the many-sided and ever increasing demands of the working population of town and countryside.
American Communist Party legally exists in the U.S.A., it nominates its candidates in the elections, including Presidential elections.
Have not fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany claimed that they have attained
similar results as in U.S.S.R.? Have not both been achieved at the price of privation and personal liberty sacrificed for the good of the state?
It was necessary, temporarily, to limit certain requirements, accumulate necessary means, strain forces. We acted precisely in this way and built a socialist society.
Having consolidated its power, and taking the lead of the peasantry, the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society.
Many understand state socialism in this way. Sometimes a system is concealed behind this term in which the capitalist state, in the interests of preparation for the conduct of war, takes upon itself the maintenance of a certain number of private enterprises.
We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes.
This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, this is only because Russia has no an army which can reach Paris in 1945.
Revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle.
The people will always attempt to find the positive aspects of all circumstances, which, in themselves, are not susceptible to danger.
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this -- who will count the votes, and how.
The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages...onward, to victory!
This war is not an ordinary war. It is the war of the entire Russian people. Not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads, but to aid all people groaning under the yoke of Fascism.
If Stalin was such a bad guy, why do all these people have to resort to attributing to him almost entirely quotes he didn't make, or manipulate his actual quotes just enough to make them seem evil?
The situation is that in Germany capitalism has remained, classes and class struggle have remained which all the same will break into the open, which includes also the field of struggle of parties representing opposing classes just as it broke through in, let us say, Spain.
Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. Without farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the nationalist question, is actually, the farmers' question.
