
“For a long time I've been telling Stalin that Beria is a crook but Stalin won't listen.”
Quoted in "Armed truce: the beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46" - Page 65 - by Hugh Thomas - History - 1986
Interview (5 October 1990) as quoted in La Repubblica https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1990/10/05/parla-kaganovich-non-siamo-dei-mostri.html
“For a long time I've been telling Stalin that Beria is a crook but Stalin won't listen.”
Quoted in "Armed truce: the beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46" - Page 65 - by Hugh Thomas - History - 1986
The Caucasus, March, 1936
The Kennan Diaries
“Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union.”
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships
Context: Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union. There are many common features but also certain differences. Stalinism exhibited a much more subtle kind of hypocrisy and demagogy, with reliance not on an openly cannibalistic program like Hitler's but on a progressive, scientific, and popular socialist ideology.
This served as a convenient screen for deceiving the working class, for weakening the vigilance of the intellectuals and other rivals in the struggle for power, with the treacherous and sudden use of the machinery of torture, execution, and informants, intimidating and making fools of millions of people, the majority of whom were neither cowards nor fools. As a consequence of this "specific feature" of Stalinism, it was the Soviet people, its most active, talented, and honest representatives, who suffered the most terrible blow.
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships
In North Atlantic Treaty Organization letter: Volumes 15-16. Quoted by Asle Toje in America, the EU and strategic culture: renegotiating the transatlantic bargain.
Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 306
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships
Context: The anti-people's regime of Stalin remained equally cruel and at the same time dogmatically narrow and blind in its cruelty. The killing of military and engineering officials before the war, the blind faith in the "reasonableness" of the colleague in crime, Hitler, and the other reasons for the national tragedy of 1941 have been well described … Stalinist dogmatism and isolation from real life was demonstrated particularly in the countryside, in the policy of unlimited exploitation and the predatory forced deliveries at "symbolic" prices, in almost serflike enslavement of the peasantry, the depriving of peasants of the simplest means of mechanization, and the appointment of collective-farm chairmen on the basis of their cunning and obsequiousness. The results are evident — a profound and hard-to-correct destruction of the economy and way of life in the countryside, which, by the law of interconnected vessels, damaged industry as well.