Quotes from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: “Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I’m in some sort of destroyed city and I can’t find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM...”1”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4 Yagoda,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“twenties, served as his judge in 1937 and even denounced a”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers. At”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“The Bolsheviks were atheists but they were hardly secular politicians in the conventional sense: they stooped to kill from the smugness of the highest moral eminence. Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough. Stalin told Beria the Bolsheviks were “a sort of military-religious order.” When Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, died, Stalin called him “a devout knight of the proletariat.” Stalin’s “order of sword-bearers” resembled the Knights Templars, or even the theocracy of the Iranian Ayatollahs, more than any traditional secular movement. They would die and kill for their faith in the inevitable progress towards human betterment, making sacrifices of their own families, with a fervour seen only in the religious slaughters and martyrdoms of the Middle Ages—and the Middle East. They”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“The Party justified its “dictatorship” through purity of faith. Their Scriptures were the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, regarded as a “scientific” truth. Since ideology was so important, every leader had to be—or seem to be—an expert on Marxism-Leninism, so that these ruffians spent their weary nights studying, to improve their esoteric credentials, dreary articles on dialectical materialism. It was so important that Molotov and Polina even discussed Marxism in their love letters: “Polichka my darling . . . reading Marxist classics is very necessary . . . You must read some more of Lenin’s works coming out soon and then a number of Stalin’s . . . I so want to see you.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“Party-mindedness” was “an almost mystical concept,” explained Kopelev. “The indispensable prerequisites were iron discipline and faithful observance of all the rituals of Party life.” As one veteran Communist put it, a Bolshevik was not someone who believed merely in Marxism but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong—even though it’s wrong all the time.” Stalin did not exaggerate when he boasted: “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.”2 Nadya”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, quote from Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words.
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