3 Quotes & Sayings By Richard Stites

Richard Stites is a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he also directs the Center for Research on World History. He received his B.A. from Colorado College and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and is a specialist in modern Russian history, especially Soviet history and Russian women's history Read more

His books include Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1988); Europe in the Age of Catherine the Great (1996); The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism (1993); Peasant Nationalism and Social Protest in Russia: The Decisive Years, 1905-1907 (1980); The Guardians: A New History of the Romanovs (1982); The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (1992); The Romanovs: Rulers of an Empire (2000).

1
A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology". Richard Stites
2
Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter, " thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience. . Richard Stites