Jonathan Brent > Quotes

“the Bolsheviks’ intention to build a utopian society based on radical equality produced so many enemies so quickly. Part of this had to do with their need to turn the assumptions of Western liberal democracy upside down, thereby concentrating all power in the state. Only this could guarantee such equality. The result was that from a political standpoint, the individual counted for nothing. It was an equality based on an absence rather than a presence of rights.”
― Jonathan Brent, Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953—The Hidden History of Stalin's Deadly Conspiracy