Leon Trotsky — "The Soviet Union is a degenerated workers' state."

"You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!"

"The bureaucracy, which has become an end in itself, has been replaced by another bureaucracy, which has become an end in itself."

"The October Revolution was a democratic revolution, carried out by the working class."

"The history of a revolution is for us first of all the history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny."

"Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service."