From a book review of History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks by Sean McMeekin.

‘The knell of private property sounds’, wrote Karl Marx. ‘The expropriators are being expropriated.’ Nothing could have been more true. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks had embraced violence and terror: ‘A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,’ said Lenin. But he had also, since the early years of the twentieth century, used ‘expropriation’ – the Marxist-Bolshevist euphemism for bank robbery – to raise party funds: the planning and execution of a run of violent but daring heists was how the young Stalin had first won Lenin’s approval. When a worthy and prim comrade criticised this style of banditry, Lenin just laughed and said, ‘That’s precisely the type of man we need.’