In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls - the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book 'Everyday Stalinism,' called 'ordinary life in extraordinary times.'

Keith Gessen

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

A. N. Wilson

Many legitimate forms of ownership, mainly cooperative and communal, had not been used to any effective extent mainly because of the imposition of Stalinist restrictions.

Alexander Dubcek

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Alistair Horne

Though not the longest battle in history - that was Verdun - Stalingrad was certainly the most pitiless, an adjective that reappears regularly in Mr. Beevor's classic work.

Alistair Horne

I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.

Amity Gaige

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.

Amor Towles

We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.

Amor Towles

Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.

Andrew Solomon

I'm sorry to say this, but Putin is spreading lies. He is doing this with the goal of removing Stalin's Russia responsibility for starting the war jointly with Nazi Germany. I assumed he is ashamed of that.

Andrzej Duda

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

Andy Grove

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

Anne Applebaum

The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.

Antony Beevor

The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.

Antony Beevor

Stalin's policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.

Bob Ainsworth

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

Brian Cox

All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's.

Conrad Black

Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.

Douglas Hurd

Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

Edgar Bergen

Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.

Edmund White

The United States must not allow North Korea to exacerbate tensions between our key strategic allies in Asia. As the leader of the free world, the United States needs to support our regional allies who are standing up to a Stalinist regime that is intent on developing nuclear weapons.

Evan Bayh