Dmitri Volkogonov quotes:

All revolutions are bloody. The October Revolution was bloodless, but it was only the beginning

The man who occupies the first place in an undemocratic state can give himself any award that takes his fancy, but it does not increase his authority - rather, the contrary. This was something Brezhnev and Chernenko did not understand. In all, Stalin had about as many decorations as, say, Mekhlis, and four or five times fewer than Brezhnev

It is surely indisputable that no single leader in the twentieth century exerted as great an influence on the course of world history as Lenin.

Dogmatism grew from the soil of simplistic and frequently wrong concepts. Dogmatism is like a ship that has run aground: the waves run, the ship stays put, but the impression of movement persists

We rarely know who our ancestors were. Who can even remember the names of their great-grandparents? They have vanished into the dim and distant past