Last but not least, the factor which prevented Trotsky from succeeding Lenin was his Jewishness. Trotsky… — Richard Pipes
Last but not least, the factor which prevented Trotsky from succeeding Lenin was his Jewishness. Trotsky hated to be reminded that he was a Jew. Whenever anybody come to him asking him to help other Jews, he would explode in anger and insist that he was not a Jew but an ‘internationalist.’ On one occasion he said that the fate of the Jews concerned him as little as the fate of the Bulgarians.
p. 81Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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The Empire was traditionally run by a bureaucracy and a gentry, after 1880 reinforced by a political-police organization. This political policing was a Russian invention; Russia was the first country to have two police systems, one to protect the state from its citizens, and the other to protect the citizens from each other. Subsequently, this dual structure became a fundamental feature of totalitarian states.
p. 17
According to Marx, the evolution of capitalism would inevitably lead to the pauperization of the proletariat and then, just as inevitably, to its radicalization. It is interesting that Bento Mussolini arrived at an identical judgment ten years later. Before the outbreak of the first World War, Mussolini had been the closest analogue to Lenin in the European socialist movement, being equally revolutionary and anti-reformist. He was the Lenin of the Italian Socialist Party with the difference that, whereas Mussolini managed to rally behind him a revolutionary majority and expel the reformers, in Russia, Lenin found himself leading a minority and forced to break away from the Social-Democratic Establishment.
p. 36
We cannot determine whether or not he had met Lenin during their common exile in Switzerland; Mussolini once cryptically remarked: ‘Lenin knew me better than I knew him.’
p. 37
