The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variated than anyone could have expected..

Lenin, Letters on Tactics (1918)

There are individuals – a mere handful in the history of mankind – who, while themselves being the product of an imminent catastrophic change, leave their mark upon an entire epoch. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is one such giant mind, one such giant will...

However mighty such giants of history may be, the universal-general principle that they symbolise and embody dissolves all the narrowly individual. The ordinary measuring rod of the qualities, failings and passions characteristic of the people of that age is not applicable to them. It is not a question of the personal characteristics of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin but what he symbolises... He has gathered to himself like a magnet everything in the revolution that is expressive of will, power, ruthless destruction and constructive persistence. Everyone who values what the workers' revolution brings with it in its cleansing whirlwind cannot but value and cherish its symbol, its embodiment – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

True freedom exists only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some people by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a person does not tremble for the fact that tomorrow he may lose his job, home, bread. Only in such a society is real, not paper, personal and any other freedom possible.

If capitalism could adapt production not to obtaining maximum profit, but to the systematic improvement of the material conditions of the masses, if it could direct profit not to satisfying the whims of parasitic classes, not to improving methods of exploitation, not to the export of capital, but to the systematic improvement of the material conditions of workers and peasants, then there would be no crises. But then capitalism would not be capitalism.