I read a quote recently, it was either Lenin or Stalin, one of their aides said, "Now, comrade, we will have freedom!" and Lenin (or Stalin) replied, "Freedom to do what?" The implication that freedom was not something the communist was going to permit.
For some reason, I can't find this quote with Google or any other search engine.
It's Lenin who's reported to have said this. I found this quote from a Ph.D. thesis -
"At first, the Socialists were[...] in favour of affiliation to the Comintern. Before committing themselves finally they dispatched Fernando de los Rios to Russia as a rapporteur. 'But where is liberty?' asked that bearded individualist from Andalusia. 'Liberty,' replied Lenin, 'what for?'" Subsequently in a vote of 8,809 to 6,025 "the Socialist party pronounced themselves against the Russian connexion." (See Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, pp. 46, 103-104)
I. Slater, “Orwell and the road to servitude,” T, University of British Columbia, 1977., p. 201 (DOI)
I haven't consulted the book myself, but it may be where I read it originally. I've also seen it in the form 'La Liberté? Pour quoi faire?'
It's from a conversation between Lenin and Fernando de los Ríos, who visited Moscow in 1921. The Spanish socialist party, PSOE, had sent de los Ríos to Moscow to discuss PSOE's proposed membership of the Third International.
Whether he really said it I don't know, but it certainly does reflect a real divide between Bolshevism on the one hand, and social democrats and anarchists on the other corner. On most things, anarchists are closer to the Bolsheviks, but this is the irreconcilable difference. De los Ríos and the PSOE ended up on the social democrat side of this divide.
In other words, definitely not an 'internet quote' - if it was made up, it was made up in the 1970s or earlier.
To develop Carlos Martin's comment, you can find the phrase on page 73 of Mi Viaje a la Rusia sovietista by Fernando de los Ríos:
El periodo de transición de dictadura - continuó diciendo Lenin - será entre nosotros muy largo..., tal vez cuarenta o cincuenta años; otros pueblos, como Alemania e Inglaterra, podrán, a causa de su mayor industrialización, hacer más breve este período; pero esos pueblos, en cambio, tienen otros problemas que no existen aquí; en alguno de ellos se ha formado una clase obrera a base de la dependencia de las colonias. Sí, sí, el problema para nosotros no es de libertad, pues respecto de ésta siempre preguntamos: ¿libertad para qué?
which roughly translated would be something like
The transitional period of dictatorship - Lenin continued - will be very long for us ..., perhaps forty or fifty years; other countries, such as Germany and England, can make this period shorter because of their greater industrialisation; but on the other hand those countries have other problems that do not exist here; in some of them a working class has been created based on dependency on colonies. Yes, yes, the problem for us is not freedom, because respecting this we always ask: freedom for what?
This was published in 1921, based on a visit in 1920.
There is a published working draft of Lenin's article "Economics and Politics in the Era of Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (Экономика и политика в эпоху диктатуры пролетариата)
Lenin's Complete Collected Works (Moscow, 1970, vol. 39, p. 264)
This is a set of remarks on a handwritten working draft of an article he was going to publish. It doesn't contain any coherent discourse.
My translation of the text on the screenshot:
"Freedom" = that of a commodity owner
Real freedom for wage workers; for peasants
Freedom for exploiters
Freedom for whom?
ditto from whom? from what?
ditto in what?
The article as it was published contains this excerpt:
Общие фразы о свободе, равенстве, демократии на деле равносильны слепому повторению понятий, являющихся слепком с отношений товарного производства. Посредством этих общих фраз решать конкретные задачи диктатуры пролетариата значит переходить, по всей линии, на теоретическую, принципиальную позицию буржуазии. С точки зрения пролетариата, вопрос становится только так: свобода от угнетения каким классом? равенство какого класса с каким? демократия на почве частной собственности или на базе борьбы за отмену частной собственности? и т.д.
which means:
General talk about freedom, equality and democracy is in fact but a blind repetition of concepts shaped by the relations of commodity production. To attempt to solve the concrete problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat by such generalities is tantamount to accepting the theories and principles of the bourgeoisie in their entirety. From the point of view of the proletariat, the question can be put only in the following way: freedom from oppression by which class? equality of which class with which? democracy based on private property, or on a struggle for the abolition of private property?—and so forth.
The draft seems to have been cited by Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek in this form:
Freedom - yes, but for whom? To do what?
The other answers mentioned Fernando de los Ríos and his book with a similar quote.
In the context of the book (which also describes the conversation about the dictatorship of the proletariat), the meaning seems to be: "When you're talking about freedom, you'll have to ask "whose freedom", "freedom from what" and "freedom of what" first, because a bourgeois's definition of freedom and a proletarian's definition of freedom don't quite agree"
