By Lenin
"We do not pretend that Marx or Marxists know the road to socialism in all its concreteness. That is nonsense. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces will lead it, but concretely, practically, this will be shown by the experience of the millions when they undertake the act."
"The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie."
— On World War I
"[By prolonging the war] we unusually strengthen German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then the peace will be worse because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace which we are now being forced to conclude is an indecent peace, but if war commences our government will be swept away and the peace will be concluded by another government."
— On the Brest-Litovsk Treaty
"[The bourgeoisie] practised terror against the workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, whereas the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, plunderers and their accomplices in the interests of the workers, soldiers and peasants."
— On the Red Terror
"[Y]ou must attempt first to build small bridges which shall lead to a land of small peasant holdings through State Capitalism to Socialism. Otherwise you will never lead tens of millions of people to Communism. This is what the objective forces of the development of the Revolution have taught."
— Justifying the New Economic Policy
"Comrades! The insurrection of the five kulak districts must be mercilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution demand it, for 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.
1. Hang (absolutely hang, so that the people can see) no fewer than 100 known kulaks, fatcats, and bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain.
4. Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.
Do it so that, for hundreds of kilometers around, the people see, tremble, know, and shout, "They are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucking kulaks."
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Find tougher people."
— Lenin's "Hanging Order" (emphasis in the original)
About Lenin
Only our grandfather Lenin was a good leader
All the other ones are such shit.
All the others are enemies and such fucking assholes.
All the other ones are such shit.
All the others are enemies and such fucking assholes.
— Grazhdanskaya Oborona, "Everything Is Going According to the Plan"
My impression [of Lenin] was not so good as I'd rather thought it would be. I, of course, realised that he had immense strength of will, and integrity in the sense that I think all his public acts were dictated by something that he really believed to be for the public good. But his defects, as they struck me, were two. One, that he was very narrowly orthodox in his adherence to Marx. If he wanted to prove a point, he thought it enough to quote a text of Marx. No fundamentalist was ever more addicted to scripture than he was to Marx. And I thought that seemed to me rather narrow. The other thing I didn't like about him was that he was quite clearly rather cruel. In both these respects I thought he resembled Oliver Cromwell. In fact, I thought he might be a reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell.
