It is surely indisputable that no single leader in the twentieth century exerted as great an influence on the course of world history as Lenin.
Dmitri VolkogonovThe man who occupies the first place in an undemocratic state can give himself any award that takes his fancy, but it does not increase his authority - rather, the contrary. This was something Brezhnev and Chernenko did not understand. In all, Stalin had about as many decorations as, say, Mekhlis, and four or five times fewer than Brezhnev
Dmitri VolkogonovDogmatism grew from the soil of simplistic and frequently wrong concepts. Dogmatism is like a ship that has run aground: the waves run, the ship stays put, but the impression of movement persists
Dmitri Volkogonov