'We will never get anywhere,' Goebbels wrote, perhaps remembering his discussions with Fledges, 'if we lean on the interests of the cultured and prop… - Curt Riess

[Goebbels] specialized in articles on [[w:Bolshevism |Bolshevism of a decidedly pro-Russian tone. He worked on a speech, ‘Lenin or Hitler?’ In this comparative study he came to the conclusion that Hitler’s ideas were superior. Nevertheless, the comparison was not necessarily unflattering to the Russian.

But Goebbels was not a Communist in any sense of the word. And he took pains to say so. ‘Communism is nothing but a grotesque distortion of true Socialist thought,’ he wrote to Count Reventlow, a rightist politician. ‘We and we alone could become the genuine Socialists in Germany, or, for that matter, in Europe.’

In a number of contributions published in the Voelkischer Beobachter [Goebbels] celebrated Lenin as the national liberator of his country. ‘The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international, but because it is national—because it is Russian,’ he wrote to a leftist friend. ‘No Czar has ever aroused the national passion of the Russian people as Lenin did.’