Russia- Leadership

Question 1

Communist Manifesto

Answer 1

“For each, according to their ability, to each according to their needs”

Question 2

Constituent Assembly Elections

Answer 2

“Our rising has been victorious. Now they tell us: ‘renounce your victory, yield, make a compromise’. With whom? You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong - to the dustbin of history!”

Trotsky to the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, 27th October 1917

Question 3

Russia After Revolution

Answer 3

‘The Bolsheviks did not inherit a ship of state, they took over a derelict hulk.’ - Lynch [2000]

Question 4

NEP

Answer 4

“You must first attempt to build small bridges which shall lead a land of small peasants holding through State Capitalism to Socialism. Otherwise you will never lead tens of millions of people to Communism.” Lenin

Question 5

NEP- one of his frankest and rarest admissions of failure

Answer 5

“the real meaning of the New Economic Policy is that we have met a great defeat in our plans and that we are now making a strategic retreat”,

Question 6

NEP- Pragmatism

Answer 6

“Let the peasants have their little bit of capitalism as long as we keep the power.” - Lenin

Question 7

Lenin

Answer 7

“First and foremost Lenin symbolses the Russian revolution as a movement of the poor and oppressed..against the great and the powerful…Lenin possessed a second quality - humaneness. Thirdly, lenin stands for …purposfulness, realism, common sense, will-power… We must judge the successes and failures…as part of an experiment which had unexpectedly to be made in conditions of quite exceptional difficulty, with desperately inadequate resources, material and human..”.
Frm Christopher Hill, Lenin ad the Russian Revolution , 1947. Hill is a British Marxist historian

Question 8

Lenin- Revisionist Perspective

Answer 8

‘If Lenin had never existed, a socialist government would probably have ruled Russia by the end of 1917.” - Robert Service

Question 9

Lenin- Western Liberal View

Answer 9

“Without Lenin’s intervention it would probably have never happened at all” -Orlando Figes

Question 10

Lenin- Western Liberal View

Answer 10

‘The tragic and sordid history of the Russian Revolution…teaches us that political authority must never employed for ideological ends. It is best to let people be’. - Richard Pipes

Question 11

Lenin- powerful orator

Answer 11

Nikolay Sukhanov, a socialist activist and a famous critic critic stating “Lenin is an orator of a great power who is capable of simplifying a complicated matter… the one who is pounding, pounding, and pounding people’s minds until they lose their will, until he enslaves them.”

Question 12

Stalin- Industrialization

Answer 12

‘The failures and shortcomings cannot disguise the fact that by 1941 the main aim of Stalin’s policy of rapid industrialisation had been achieved. The USSR ….was one of the world’s great industrial powers.” N. Westward, 1973