The content of the struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks embraced every aspect of the change that a revolution would bring about. The Mensheviks… - Ruth Fischer

The anti-Nazi camp also was split down the middle, split by an ax wielded by Stalin—an ax called social fascism—by which the Communist half of the anti-Nazi camp was made into the silent ally of Hitler.

In 1923, Stalin’s terrorist subduing of the revolting Georgians contributed substantially to Lenin’s break with him.

The Bolsheviks were able to take power in 1917 in spite of their numerical insignificance not because they had fashioned a fool-proof coup d’état but because they advanced on the crest of a revolutionary peasant wave, which in the hinterland had carried out revolutionary slogans months before they were taken over by the Bolsheviks. At the head of this vast peasant mass, the Bolsheviks were enabled, in the first phrase, to overcome the resistance of large urban groups and, later, when foreign intervention and the regrouping of the White forces had reduced Soviet Russia to the Grand Principality of Moscow, to overcoming all counter-revolutionary attempts and throw the invaders back to the borders of the country.