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“... Since 1956 it has been official policy in the USSR to criticise the abuses of power by Joseph Stalin in the period of the so-called Cult of the Individual. It is a widely-held misconception in the West that such criticism ended in the Brezhnev years. In fact, party textbooks continued to castigate Stalin ...”

“... In 1969 Stalin’s closest associate, Vyasheslav Molotov, in retirement and disgrace, transferred to the Central Party Archive in Moscow 77 letters and notes which he had received from Stalin in the tumultuous decade 1925-36. The letters were stored in complete secrecy for 20 years ...”

“... who think that the Cold War could have been avoided with a little more accommodation of Stalin’s demands will find a pretty severe douche in Gromyko’s turgid and plodding prose, with its endless reiteration of the correctness of Soviet policy and the official Kremlin propaganda line. Anyone looking for chinks of negotiating light in Gromyko’s ...”

“... encountered Marxism in the early Thirties, knocked around with Claud Cockburn, and discovered in Stalin the benevolent daddy he never had at Hassocks. French dismisses his politics as a private quirk; but though his Marxism was certainly idiosyncratic – what other Communist cheered on the invasion of Suez? – it was a good deal more central to his ...”

“... is nothing here about the problems and tensions of a Soviet Union facing the consequences of post-Stalin relaxation; very little on earlier uprisings in East Germany and Poland in 1953, or on the Polish October itself. Shown in isolation, Hungarian leaders behave as if they had no continuous rapport with Moscow, as if Rakosi did not attempt to play politics ...”

“... became instantly recognisable everywhere as the Red Dean. His faith in the Communist Party, and in Stalin in particular, was unshakeable. Purges and famines, executions and persecutions passed him by. Though he never saw the need actually to join the Party, he remained a tankie to the last, until he was finally winkled out of the deanery in 1963, when he was ...”

“... lived in this part of Europe had to endure in the 1930s and 1940s. Hitler’s enemy in the East, Joseph Stalin, was just as murderous in his pursuit of a utopian programme, different though Stalinist Communism might have been from the hierarchical racist ideology of the Nazis. Up to five million people, mostly Ukrainians, were sacrificed to the ...”

“... model of the rebellious exile Leon Trotsky. But Scargill has always preferred Trotsky’s enemy Joseph Stalin. He is an unswerving member of the British Stalin Society. In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle pointed out that modern leader-figures must give voice to emerging currents of social passion and ...”

“... the censors’ nervousness about putting on the play, which, despite lukewarm encouragement from Stalin, was pulled from production at the Meyerhold Theatre on the eve of its premiere in the autumn of 1932. This was probably just as well, since Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, killed herself a few weeks later. Suicide ...”

“... this department that got him rehabilitated by the Party apparat. He had been briefly unpersoned by Stalin’s purge of the generally pro-Bukharin leadership of the American Communist Party – known to history and to aficionados as the Lovestone faction – but his talent as a ‘proletarian writer’ gained his re-admission. Some of his short stories were at ...”

“... Party history. It is worth remembering that Lenin’s only serious political dispute with Stalin was over the latter’s handling of national problems (Stalin and his henchmen were too brutal for Lenin’s taste on one occasion). National issues, moreover, have been the stuff of Soviet development and ...”

“... a handful of elderly men and women who walked, solitary more often than not, with a portrait of Joseph Stalin on a pole or clasped like an icon to their chests. There was the Andreyevsky (St Andrew’s) flag and the black, yellow and white flag, a reassertion of the right to rule of Imperial Russia. By their banners and signs, these demonstrators ...”

“... Three girls wearing Tory rosettes on – well, you can guess where. True, it featured articles by Joseph Stalin (‘Why I’m voting Labour’) and Winston Churchill (‘Why I’m voting for Maggie’). The actual authorship of these articles may be controversial but no complaint has been received from Messrs ...”

“... than none, even if those human beings were morally equivalent to Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. And I grant that if there is a nuclear war only individuals of such vastly diminished moral stature – viz. those responsible for the war – are likely to survive. However, even if one accepts that deterrence is the best bet for peace, the ...”

“... a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus. Dodds wrote of the waves of ‘inter-racial savagery’ between Muslim Tatars and Armenian Christians that had laid waste to the refineries and the surrounding boom town. Crude World is Peter ...”