The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside. - Leon Trotsky

Nicholas is sometimes compared with his half-crazy great-great-grandfather Paul, who was strangled by a camarilla acting in agreement with his own son, Alexander “the Blessed.” These two Romanovs were actually alike in their distrust of everybody due to a distrust of themselves, their touchiness as of omnipotent nobodies, their feeling of abnegation, their consciousness, as you might say, of being crowned pariahs. But Paul was incomparably more colorful; there was an element of fancy in his rantings, however irresponsible. In his descendant everything was dim; there was not one sharp trait.

Both Hitler and Mussolini have plagiarized and imitated practically everything from everyone. Mussolini stole from the Bolsheviks and from Gabriele D'Annunzio, and found inspiration in the camp of big business. Hitler imitated the Bolsheviks and Mussolini.

The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and, very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.