Yuri Maltsev on Stalin's infatuation with penicillin

The country is flooded with penicillin, however.  In 1946, Stalin was impressed with how effective it was at fighting disease and ordered that the Soviet Union have the same amount the West does.  The "plan" has never been altered, but 89% of citizens have built-up a resistance to penicillin's effects.  But it is still prescribed because there is nothing else.

~ Yuri N. Maltsev, "The Soviet Medical Nightmare," The Free Market, August 1990

Levrentiy Beria on justice during the Stalin era

Show me the man and I'll find you the crime. 

~ Levrentiy Beria, Deputy Premier under Stalin

George Watson on the left-right view of Stalin and Hitler in 1936

By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.

~ George Watson, "Hitler and the Socialist Dream," Independent, November 22, 1998

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact