Simon Sebag Montefiore:
"In the Soviet Union, Leninism and Stalinism were one and same: a utopian totalitarian creed, founded on repression, bloodletting and the destruction of personal freedom. Thanks to Lenin, this ideology took the lives of over 100 million innocent people in the 20th century."
John Gray:
"...However many people are killed or die in utopian experiments of different kinds, the dream of the utopia never comes about. But what eventually emerges is something different – not the utopia but a reversion to something more like normal life, but only after terrible and pointless suffering...."
The New Yorker, May 2020