It could and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed the White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, … - Leon Trotsky

In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhuman, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity.

The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies — open and undisguised — seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement.

The Russian proletariat found its revolutionary audacity not only in itself. Its very position as minority of the nation suggests that it could not have given its struggle a sufficient scope — certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state — if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem.