Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.

Simon Sebag Montefiore
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More Quotes By Simon Sebag Montefiore
  1. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.

  2. Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.

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  4. Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They...

  5. Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and...

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