By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.
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As quoted in Michael Ellman, The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1934, Europe-Asia Studies, September 2005, page 823Vladimir Lenin
» Vladimir Lenin - all quotes »
Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.
Anton Chekhov
I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a country of small peasant economy, and it is up to us to realize this quite clearly.
Vladimir Lenin
Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.
Miguel de Unamuno
The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman.
Louis Pasteur
Lenin, Vladimir
Lennon, Florence Becker
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