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

Stalin’s direct appeal to proletarian instincts, begun in the 1923 fight against Trotsky, was continued and amplified into a new manipulatory device which developed to its full flower during the dekulakization period of the 1928-1929.

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.

A nationalized industry, or partially nationalized industry, can be integrated into a classic capitalist economy without breaking it contour. What decides the character of nationalized economy is the relation between man and man, is whether the working class has the key role in its control. Without a fundamental change in the class structure, nationalization alone equals not socialism but state capitalism. Under state capitalism the exploitation of the worker continues and can even be intensified.