Soviet Quotes by Daniel Silva, Joseph Stalin, Lennart Meri, Harrison Salisbury, Craig Mazin, Billy Graham and many others.
I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.
The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages…onward, to victory!
Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.
I got a cable from New York saying that what I’d written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn’t make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me.
What compelled me about the story of Chernobyl more than anything else was something very universal. Yes, Chernobyl happened because in many ways, the Soviet system was deeply corrupt and evil, but the Soviet system did not arrive to us from some other planet. It was devised by humans.
I am well aware that there are prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, including some who have said they have chosen to resist the law because of religious reasons.
[Russians] want to bring us down to make them feel better about the failure of the Soviet Union. I don`t mean bring us down as in collapse, but bring us down a notch in a big way.
When the States already had nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels.
The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik. The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the Moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the Moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits the earth this year his name will be Ivan.
I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.
The U.S., together with trans-Atlantic allies, never recognized the occupation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union. Moscow faced pressure or retaliation every time it tried to move toward official recognition, or at least acceptance, of its claim that the Baltic states were Soviet republics.
JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.
Empires will come and go. The Soviet Union collapses; China can become a superpower, but ‘Blue Peter’ stays the same.
The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.
As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.
In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.
On the day I became Soviet leader, in March 1985, I had a special meeting with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them: ‘You are independent, and we are independent. You are responsible for your policies, we are responsible for ours. We will not intervene in your affairs, I promise you.’
I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.
Japan’s diplomatic efforts could have had a broader international perspective. Relations with the U.S. are, of course, the cornerstone of Japan’s diplomacy, but the U.S. acts on its global strategy. For instance, Washington suddenly got closer to China in the early 1970s as part of its strategy against the Soviet Union.
Word spread about us in what was then the Soviet Union and we received an invite from President Brezhnev to perform there, which no other Western act had previously done.
If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Think about it: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, North Korea, the former Soviet Union – they all start with the intention of leveling the playing field – or making things better for the little guy – and instead, they created misery, poverty, destruction and a permanent ruling class of bureaucrats.
The breakup of the former Soviet Union has caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recover economically, they could produce vast amounts of food.
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history . . . . [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.
The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.
My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.
I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There’s a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences.
As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
A Soviet man is a product of invisible changes, degradation and progressive deformation. Breaking the chain of those changes is hard. Perhaps they are irreversible.
I did Our Daily Bread for King and that made me popular in the Soviet Union; King was amused by that.
After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.
If the Russian word “perestroika” has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, i.e. progressive development, a fundamental change.
Unlike the former Soviet Union that respected the strength of West, Putin’s Russia ignores talk of sanctions, claims land, and supports rebels in Ukraine with impunity.
When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.
With respect to the situation in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, in both countries the Soviet Union had been working hard to create an infrastructure of those who shared their point of view and were prepared to take over the countries.
We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.
Dentists, doctors, surveyors from Latvia wanted to come to England, do anything to get away from the Soviet regime.
NATO was built to counteract the Soviet Union in its day and time. At this point there is no threat coming from the Soviet Union, because there is no Soviet Union anymore. And where there was the Soviet Union once, there is now a number of countries, among them the new and democratic Russia.
There (in the Soviet Union) it was a science. In order to be a coach, you had to study in school.
The Democrat Party of the 1980s chose the Soviet Union over Ronald Reagan, in Nicaragua, and in Moscow as well. Now, all of a sudden, they don’t like Russia and they don’t like the Soviet Union?
Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.
Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there’s no doubt about that.
I’ve been to China and Russia, and I don’t know anything about Chinese or Soviet relations.
Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads – they are not there accidentally. Soviet infantry manual, issued in the 1930’s Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
According to the Office of Technology Assessment, 3 Minuteman missiles and 7 Poseidon missiles could destroy 73 percent of oil-refining capacity in the Soviet Union.
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.
Japan cannot conquer China with America in her rear, Soviet Russia on her right and England on her left – her most powerful enemies in the South Sea all flanking her. It is this international situation that constitutes one of Japan’s great weaknesses.
That the existence of the Soviet Union has an international revolutionary significance is a commonplace equally recognized by friends and foes.
Los Angeles County government is a “Soviet-style system,” with too many people only sort of in charge and no person sufficiently at the helm to take responsibility.
You know, the Democrats want to balance the budget by raising spending and raising taxes. The Soviet Union had a balanced budget.
The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.
Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.
There was no testimony of conspiracy – Oswald’s efforts to get in touch with the Soviets and with the Cuban Fair Play groups in New York were rebuffed, rebuffed at every step.
There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration…. The United States does notconcede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.
I got the idea [for Anthem’s theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word ‘I.’
The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology … . For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, MA.
Without a tutor to help me in the study of Marxism-Leninism, I was no more than a theorist and, of course, had total confidence in the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s America reacted to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. We supported a war that left a nation torn to pieces. And as the last Soviet tank left the country, so did we.
I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.
I see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy of the XX century.
If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.
During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs – you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through – but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.
I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian.
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
We are incarcerating more people on a per capita basis in California than any country in the world other than South Africa or the Soviet Union.
What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
A document was drafted in the State Department in July 1946 by an official named Samuel Klaus. This indicated that there were then 20 alleged Soviet agents, 13 alleged Communists, about a dozen sympathizers, and about 75 suspects in the department, according to the FBI.
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.
At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.
In the event of a victory over Germany by Soviet Russia and England, Bolshevism in Europe would inevitably follow. Under these circumstances I would prefer to see Germany win the war.
Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.
We need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.
If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.
In 1972-73, the Soviets began running operations against me. In 1977, these operations became very serious.
But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that’s why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.
A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive – especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages.
One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party
All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held ‘elections.’ Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.
Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.
When I used to theorize about a nuclear standoff, I didn’t really have to understand what was happening inside the Soviet Union. It is a lot harder now to build a theory that can encompass all the complications of today’s conflicts.
Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war in Afghanistan, unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
In ‘Chernobyl,’ which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film – or, for that matter, in Russian television or film.
Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.
I think Putin wants to recreate as much of the Soviet Union as he can through a variety of different means. He’s invaded parts of Georgia, took Crimea, southeastern Ukraine, bases in other countries.
My mother was a doctor, and I grew up with her in a little apartment belonging to my grandmother, because the Soviet Union never saw fit to let our family have its own apartment.
My mom grew up in the Soviet Bloc, and she was a Tiger Mom. We didn’t get away with much.
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.
One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I’ve seen it three times, is Bondarchuk’s ‘War and Peace.’ Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.
It is one of history’s great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.
Soviet people are better off materially and richer spiritually.
The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace, not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our failures.
I am certain that my family – my grandmother, mother and myself – had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn’t have any money.
Just imagine: I, a Premier, a Soviet representative, when I came here to this city, I was given a plan – a program of what I was to be shown and whom I was to meet here. But just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, ‘Why not?’ What is it, do you have rocket-launching pads there? I do not know
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Historians don’t really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.
I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.
Wojtyla was a warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.
We liberate our nation’s heart inside of Indonesian independence!! Ibn Saud liberated Arabian’s heart inside of Saudi Arabian independence one by one!! Stalin liberated Soviet-Russian’s heart inside of Soviet one by one!!
The new European Soviet.
One of the successes of the cause of the friends of peace is the ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance.
Already liberals are trying to rewrite the history of the Cold War to remove Reagan from its core, to make him a doddering B-movie actor who happened to be standing there when the Soviet Union imploded. They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.
And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?
If we look decades ago, we know that NATO allies contributed a lot of equipment close to the border of the Soviet Union.
Working under the Soviet system made you very paranoid – people were afraid of everything – and this paranoia is still in people’s minds.
In light of 50 years of bondage of Eastern Europe, [invading the Soviet Union in 1948 to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons] was probably a reasonable thing to do.
Soviet rocket troops possess enough equipment to be able, if need be, to sweep any aggressor from the face of the earth at whatever point of the globe he may be and whatever military power, territory, or economy he may possess.
Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
Honduras is strongly anti-Communist, maintains no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and has provided vital support for United States-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
We still have many shortcomings and failures to fulfill the Party’s demands, especially as regards the liquidation in some of our people of survivals of the accursed past in consciousness and conduct and the fulfillment of the demands of our Soviet ethics and military discipline.
Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.
I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
Even in the former Soviet Union, they have good copies of my movies.
We played ten packed-out shows at the Kremlin in just seven days and only discovered later that everyone in the crowd for the first three nights was a politician. They had all come from the nine Soviet time zones just to see us.
If you ask anyone on any street corner in the world what the Soviet Union looks like, they would probably have very strong opinions. And they probably would be wrong.
If the U.S. has its Vietnam… the Soviet Union has its Czechoslovakia. If the U.S. has its blacks and chicanos, then the Soviets have their Jews.
Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
It must be clearly understood that Soviet players do not seek simple systems in the opening, but try to formulate opening systems in which everything is complicated, distinctive, or new.
The Army I grew up in was focused on high-intensity conflict against a peer competitor called the Soviet Union.
Ukraine is a vital link for Europe: our energy transportation networks; our location between the European Union and Eurasia. We’re the melting pot of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. The democracy we founded with the Orange Revolution has to be an example for other post-Soviet states.
I don’t think that the Soviet Union and China are accidents, aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that Leninism comes out of Marx’s basic convictions.
One must say bluntly that it is an unattractive sight when, with a view to smearing the Soviet people, leaders of such a country as the United States resort to what almost amounts to obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching about morals and humanism.
In the name of ‘mutual assistance,’ the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.
In Soviet-Russia the Jew is forging the tool with which he wants to enslave Europe.
The people who built the space program – both Soviet and U.S. – were readers of science fiction.
For years before my Navy enlistment, I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGB’s history of political intrigue in preparation for a career in intelligence.
It doesn’t work the same way everywhere. The Americans are the most gullible, because they don’t like to deny co-workers’ requests. People in the former Soviet bloc countries are less trusting, perhaps because of their previous experiences with their countries’ secret services.
The Soviet Union represents a threat in terms of might. It is a joke in terms of its economy and what it has to offer the Third World – a laughingstock to countries that are looking for an economic-development model.
Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.
In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything bad about the Soviet Union. At least this is how my grandfather used to remember me. Around 1981, I became a pro-capitalist person and it stuck.
As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the ’50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.
In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn’t stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.
We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.
What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.
Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public.
Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty – the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union – accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.
It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.
Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
I’m very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.
Since I have fought against these Jewish-Soviet ideas in Germany, since I have conquered and stamped out this peril, I fancy that I possess a better comprehension of its character than do these men who have only to deal with it in the field of literature.
No one is born a Communist… in the Soviet Union farmers keep on looking in the barn for their horses even after they have given them to the collective.
Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko’s is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars.
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.
It is therefore not true that the mere existence of the Soviet Union is capable of assuring the victory of the revolution in other countries.
Addressing issues, including controversial ones, as well as domestic issues of the former Soviet Republics through the so-called coloured revolutions, through coups and unconstitutional means of toppling the current government. That is absolutely unacceptable.
Why not admit that the words separation and church do not even appear in the US Constitution, he added. Instead, they do appear in Article 52 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union attempted to export communism to the entire world. We know what came of that. Now the West is trying to export democracy, including to regions where there is no traditional foundation for it. That cannot end well.
It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?
All peoples enjoy freedom, and freedom for the development of their culture… There is no Jewish problem in the Soviet Union at all… I have many friends who are Jews.
In Northern Estonia, the Soviet authorities didn’t have a recipe on how to fight against the popularity of Finnish TV. Audiences didn’t want to watch hardcore Soviet propaganda.
The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.
Germany is one of the medium powers of the world. It is a non-nuclear power. It is in a lower class than the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom and others.
The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians’ mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.
Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.
Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he wants from the relationship with USA. In return for good relations, he wants lifting of sanctions, ratification, approval of his wars in Ukraine and Syria, and his dream of dreams, an acknowledgment of his sphere of influence in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union.
We must not fall into the trap of projecting our own morality onto the Soviet leaders. They do not share our aspirations, they are not constrained by our ethics, they always consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind other states.
I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. ‘Please don’t take away our precious Soviet Union! – We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!’
When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school – Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.
In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush’s order calls this Soviet-style abomination ‘a full and fair trial.’
Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
In the first moments, the members of the Presidium who were with me at the Secretariat were taken to the Party Central Committee under the control of Soviet forces.
That’s what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don’t conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don’t fit, then they kill them. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union and China.
A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.
All the Baltic countries have been steadfast in support of allies of the United States since they gained their independence following the fall of the Soviet Union and have continued to be supportive in the ongoing war on terror.
I was proud of my Soviet country, of wearing Young Pioneer uniform, bombarded by my mother’s Communist propaganda.
I am truly happy that I am able to travel from time to time to the USSR the country I love above all. I always have been, I am now and will always be a loyal friend of the Soviet Union.
It’s a war to control our children. State control through drugs, just as practiced in the Soviet Union. With Hillary [Clinton] and Tipper [Gore] leading the charge!
I grew up a little girl in the Soviet Union playing at a small sports club. Tennis gave me my life.
Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.
It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union’s most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House.
The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world – no ideals.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.
It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
When I was young, communism, which had a certain allure to me, was clearly a failed experiment in the Soviet Union and in China. And yet, anti-communism was as bad.
It is not true that were the Soviet Union to disappear the remaining states could easily live in peace.
But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.
The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.
I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
Equity means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. It is the very DNA of Marxism and everything bad flows from it, as we saw in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
In the end, one or the other will triumph – a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.
The rout of fascism, in which the Soviet Union played the decisive role, generated a mighty tide of socio-political changes which swept across the globe.
Communism is born out of misery, and if the West does not show more understanding, those people will take up arms and turn to others, that is the Soviet Union.
A Soviet diplomat, like a skilled chess player, does not expect his opposite number to give up something for nothing, not even a pawn.
It was a very difficult time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Jobs were difficult, and you had to fight to have anything nice.
Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.
America has the best athletic programs. Even when the Soviet Union existed, that was Mickey Mouse compared to the U.S.
Just because the boogeyman of the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, it doesn’t mean the world is living angelically.
To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important – it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.
I decided to create a sports club during the Soviet times. It was my dream.
President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.
The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for “Joey Bananas”)
Was the Soviet Union reformable? I would say no. They said, ‘Okay, the Soviet Union isn’t working.’ They would say, ‘No, it’s great. We just need democracy, political pluralism, private property.’ And then there was no Soviet Union. The European Union is the same.
If we haven’t become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese – am I wrong? – are becoming a commercial civilization.
The Soviet Union collapsed without a lot of people thinking it should or would, whereas for Estonia, it was something we’d been praying for for 60 years.
You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.
Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.
Brits are very, very expressive, whereas the Soviet and Eastern European way is much more stern, stone-faced. Vladimir Putin-esque in some way.
Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It’s what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.
I certainly wouldn’t say that we loved the arms race. Trillions of dollars were used to stoke it. For our economy, which was smaller in size than the American economy, it was a burden. But one cannot agree with the statement that the arms race played the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.
The United States will rightfully go on deploring human rights excesses in the Soviet Union. And it is hardly likely Americans will one day espouse the communist ideology. But nowhere does it say we cannot live in peace with the U.S.S.R. In the nuclear age, there is truly no alternative.
Open the books … and you will be staggered to see how much American money has been taken from the United States Treasury for the benefit of Russia. Find out what business has been transacted for the State Bank of Soviet Russia, by its correspondent, the Chase Bank of New York [owned by the Rockefellers].
And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.
If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.
I decided to go into politics because of our Soviet-style government.
The revolutions of my century, the 20th century – the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba – failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.
When I was starting out in 1988, I was doing cartoons on President George H. W. Bush, Iraq and the fall of Soviet Union.
To give [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] even covert support is on a par with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world, nor on our own consciences.
However, the treaty exists and it puts us in a different position toward the Soviet Union than the one we have toward other countries. Yes, the treaty exists. Nor does it exist on only one side. Look how w3e’re situated geographically and you’ll see that India is very important for the Soviet Union.
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.
It’s essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.
I think it’s more difficult now to write a spy thriller with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many authors have tried, but few have succeeded in capturing the interest of readers.
Long after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian state and its security operatives still know who their long embedded human assets are, recruited by a mixture of bribery and blackmail. Some of those human assets are still in positions of influence.
I think his [Reagan’s] policy toward the Soviet Union was more risky than most people realize, and it was risky because of the paranoia and fear among the isolated old guard in Moscow.
There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it’s not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.
In the ’80s, before I was born, my dad played in the old Soviet Top League in our home country of Armenia. He was a small but very quick striker. ‘Soviet Soldier’ magazine actually honoured him with its ‘Knight of Attack’ award in 1984.
I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.
The Soviet Union’s termination, which brought to an end the bipolar world, ushered in an era of U.S. hegemony. Hegemony, however, should not be confused with omnipotence. Hegemony is not omnipotence but is certainly preponderance.
Propaganda was an important arm of the Soviet diplomacy, very important.
Chechnya was part of that whole wave of entities of the Soviet Union that had a very separate sense of identity, of political and social history, that set them apart from the rest of Russia.
By the 1970s, Western sanctions had hollowed out the Soviet economy. Ultimately, however, what brought down the Soviets was their inability to repair the catastrophic damage that began with the meeting of Igor Gouzenko and the RCMP.
The external Soviet empire lasted 45 years. It is shattered, beyond redemption or repair.
I’m for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn’t win, the British Empire couldn’t win, the Soviet Union couldn’t win. That’s stupid. It’s a waste of resources; a waste of America’s best and brightest.
In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn’t get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn’t have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.
In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
During my first press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.
The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it’s a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.
Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.
In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.
American Communists have the opportunity to preach freely their ideas. It would be absolutely wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for activities of the American Communists.
If Berlin fell, the US would lose Europe, and if Europe fell into the hands of the Soviet Union and thus added its great industrial plant to the USSR’s already great industrial plant, the United States would be reduced to the character of a garrison state if it were to survive at all.
The Soviet Union has become the seacoast of the universe.
We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyone in America assumed that there would be wars to follow – wars over the reunification of Germany, over the nations within the sphere of Soviet influence, and more. There weren’t, because George H. W. Bush’s policies and diplomacy prevented that.
The rise of the Soviet school to the summit of world chess is a logical result of socialist cultural development.
If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.
A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.
The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.
I am a citizen of the Soviet Union and I think sharp measures need to be taken against anti-Soviet forces that are trying to make their way into the leadership. In addition, it is vitally important to maintain the lines of communication with Germany through Poland.
I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.
Strengthen an adversary led by a dictator who dreams of reassembling the old Soviet empire? What an extraordinarily dangerous lack of judgment.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, a traumatic shock to me, ended any ambivalence I had about the Soviet Union, and all cooperation with Communists in united fronts.
The visual impact of a United States battleship springs from its ability to put Soviet ships on the bottom of the sea and to put devastating firepower ashore – nothing else.
Although Perm is one of the biggest cities in Russia it felt like a different kind of Russia. In Moscow, you have the Kremlin, St. Basil’s, a lot of Soviet iconography everywhere. In Perm, it was a different side of Russia. A little more folksy. If Moscow is an iron statue of an eagle, Perm is a matryoshka nesting doll.
In Russia, the people have been brought up tough. It used to be the Soviet Union. The thing everybody thinks of when they think about Russia is how tough the people are.
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.
The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.
In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before.
…the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant…has painfully affected the Soviet people, and shocked the international community. For the first time, we confront the real force of nuclear energy, out of control.
When I came to the Senate in 1997, the world was being redefined by forces no single country controlled or understood. The implosion of the Soviet Union and a historic diffusion of economic and geopolitical power created new influences and established new global power centers – and new threats.
If government ownership of land and natural resources was the best way to protect the environment, then we should have found a Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain came down. Instead, there was one environmental horror story after another.
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.
One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn’t lost it.
A likely source for terrorists seeking to buy or steal nuclear materials is the former Soviet Union.
As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization in education is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.
Reagan did not wait out the Soviets; he beat them.
There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.
Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can’t decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans.
I said in court a long time ago that I didn’t see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.
A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: “The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man’s tragedy will begin: his finitude.”
There’s an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it’s called ‘Come and See.’ Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.
Nellie Kim, an Olympic champion from the former Soviet Union, got a 10 right after me in ’76, but nobody talks about that.
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That’s not a record to be proud of.
Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
Would Colonel [Bernie] Sanders honeymoon in the Soviet Union?
Whatever the drawbacks and failures I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration
Nothing in our lifetimes has been more heartening than when people of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe broke the grip of communism. We have aided their progress and I am proud of it.
Black identity since the ’60s has been a totalitarian identity. It’s enforced. And if you don’t subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.
As for the United States’ future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors – the Soviets and, before them, the British.
The reason why there is now no communist government in Paris is because in the circumstances of 1945 the Soviet army was not able to reach French soil.
After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.
Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.
Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries: the Soviet Union, for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country.
How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
The only law we broke was the Brezhnev doctrine that once a country is in the Soviet bloc it cannot be overthrown.
Today’s Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.
When I was 13, I read ‘Et la paix dans le monde, Docteur?’ a physician’s account of working with Medecins Sans Fontieres during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. It was this book that inspired me to work for MSF.
In those years, it was easier to win the Soviet Championship than a game against ‘Iron Tigran’.
Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don’t know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it’s not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one.
I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.
I wanted to show something that Americans don’t usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.
When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.
Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia.
In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
A government that intended to protect the liberty of the people would not disarm them. A government planning the opposite most certainly and logically would disarm them. And so it has been in this century. Check out the history of Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and Cambodia.
Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.
The neutron warhead is a defensive weapon designed to offset the great superiority that the Soviet Union has on the western front against the NATO nations.
The establishment of an American Soviet government will involve the confiscation of large landed estates in town and country, and also, the whole body of forests, mineral deposits, lakes, rivers and so on.
There is no evidence to support the belief that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ever questioned Americas power. He questioned only the President’s John F. Kennedys readiness to use it. Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (1966) Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.
[Referring to the trouble he had with the peer reviewers of Anglo-American astrophysical journals because his ideas often conflicted with the generally accepted or “standard”” theories.]
[Referring to the trouble he had with the peer reviewers of Anglo-American astrophysical journals because his ideas often conflicted with the generally accepted or “standard”” theories.]
Utterly absorbing…. If you did not have the opportunity to witness the Soviet empire in its death throes, Lenin’s Tomb will take you there.
Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.
There was no race – but to the extent that there was an arms competition, it was almost entirely on the Soviet side, first to catch up and then to surpass the Americans.
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
The United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon
I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners – Stalin, for example – must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.
Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition – the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War.
There are also many instances where people hostile to the Soviet state are attempting by means of deceit and provocation to poison the minds of our citizens and compel them to believe in monstrous lies.
To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest
I was a Ukrainian folk dancer in my teens, and I toured the country in 1991, shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union.
China’s propaganda approach with the West is different than the one used by the Soviet Union, which used Western belligerence to maintain its control over its domestic audience. China’s strategy is one of influence and inertia.
At present, England, America, France, Italy, and Japan constitute the so-called ‘Big Five.’ Even with the rise of Germany and Soviet Russia, the world has only seven Powers. When China becomes strong, she can easily win first place in the Council of Nations.
I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.
Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.
In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn’t get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn’t have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.
The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You’ll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.
As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country.
My television teaches me that everything was wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to the programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were angels, and the Stalin era was so festive that the heroes of the day must still be celebrated today.
Russia is actively using gas diplomacy for its expansion over the ex-Soviet space in a bid to become a regional superpower.
I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don’t want this European Soviet Union.
If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.
Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!
I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.
My 40 years in the foreign service and the careers of many of my friends became associated with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the putting in order of what came after – the building of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. It`s hard to recall today how improbable victory in the Cold War appeared.
I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.
What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth…The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.
Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.
For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say – that’s the main thing. Second, it’s a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.
Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn’t manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.
Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.
In the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin invaded the Republic of Georgia. Let’s call it for what it is. Here is Vladimir Putin with a failing Soviet franchise. And when he can’t win the hearts and minds of his neighboring nations, he uses energy extortion, masked gunmen and barbed wire.
I’ve never been to the Soviet Union and the main reason for that is I was warned several times by people from the KGB who had defected to the West that it would be very unsafe for me to go there
We don’t live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union’s; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.
Today in Ukraine, many people struggle to survive, older ones often see the breakdown of the Soviet system as a loss of stability and security for average people, and therefore a certain hostility to quickly acquired wealth is from their point of view quite understandable at the first look.
In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito’s partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.
Our country vanished from the map of Europe after the attack of the Soviet Union against Poland. That is our history. It is a very difficult one.
It is now well-known that the Taliban’s creation was facilitated by the CIA and the ISI as part of the 1980s anti-Soviet war.
Unlike side issues like unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press.
We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn’t cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn’t cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.
Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair – just keep laughing, until you are dead.
When I turn on the TV in Russia I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It’s a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward.
Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.
Ronald Reagan reignited the American economy, rebuilt the Military, bankrupted the Soviet Union and defeated Soviet Communism. I will do the same thing.
In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.
I think George H.W. Bush was confronted with some huge challenges – the invasion of Kuwait, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union – that he managed with great aplomb.
Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I’d say.
Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.
They [The Soviet Union] are the focus of evil in the modern world.
You know, terrorism in Afghanistan had everything to do with the support for the mujahidin by Saudi Arabia and by the CIA that sought to create an international religious extremist group to fight the Soviet Union.
When I handed over the names and compromised so many CIA agents in the Soviet Union, I had come to the conclusion that the loss of these sources to the U.S. would not compromise significant national defense, political, diplomatic interests.
The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, we had many problems of our own for which no one was responsible but ourselves: the economic downfall, the collapse of the welfare system, the separatism, and of course the terror attacks that shook our country. In this respect, we do not have to look for guilty parties abroad.
The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.
Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War’s most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.
Like several hundred thousand fellow Karelians, we became refugees in our own country as great power politics caused the borders of Finland to be redrawn and left my home town as part of the Soviet Union.
[2015] it’s a time that there’s a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it’s a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.
The Communist Party and the Soviet Government display constant concern to strengthen the country’s defensive might and raise the combat readiness of the Armed Forces.
I don’t worry about superpower confrontation. You know, I lived through the Cold War days, and where everybody was worried about a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. I think we’re going to get along fine with Russia, and I don’t see them as internationally ambitious.
The Soviet Union wasn’t so closed – it wasn’t North Korea. It was a practical system. People were creative and industrious, so if they wanted to see Western TV programs, they would invent a way to do so. It’s strange in a way. There was an official truth, and there was daily life.
With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.
I remember my time growing up. It was a little bit difficult because the Soviet Union was broken.
I always like it when I win, especially against a Soviet.
The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.
The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s.
Soviet Union foreign policy is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the key is Russian nationalism.
The post-Soviet mafia wove a spider’s web of dirty money around the world. Where better to attack it than to start with the Ukrainian criminal heavyweights – the ‘family’ and its closest circle?
Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition – the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War
In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.
Mr. Gorbachev initiated Glasnost, Perestroika, so he was already, you know, way disenchanted with the rigid Communist ideology, and he was looking to become an international leader. He was more accepted actually outside of the Communist Soviet Union than inside.
I’ve always criticised American policy when I’ve disagreed with it. Just as I’ve criticised British policy. I was violently anti-Suez and pro-American in 1956, just as I was violently anti-Soviet on the invasion of Hungary which took place at the same time.
From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They’ve inspired lust and admiration. They’ve turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements.
During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.
The Soviet State had never made radiation something that was publicized in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the Soviet Union had experienced a number of serious accidents involving radiation since the 1950s and had covered it up a number of times.
Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan’s consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union – the only competing world empire at the time – was bound to collapse!
Over the course of the year 1990, the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had many conversations with President [Mikhail] Gorbachev and other Soviet officials.
We lived in a totalitarian system for more than 70 years, and our views are still under its influence. Many heads of state in the former Soviet republics believe that they must have total power.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.
I have met in my life two big destroyers: Gorbachev, who destroyed the Soviet Union, and Cameron, who destroyed the United Kingdom to some extent, even if there is no wave of Scotland to become independent.
My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink.
The Soviet Union could not exist without the image of the empire. The image of the empire could not exist without the image of force. The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall.
Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you! In America, you watch Big Brother. In Soviet Russia, Big Brother watch you!
I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms, we have always been trying to be pragmatic.
I consider myself Russian-American because I’m American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.
In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.
Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.
I look at Obama, a young man, a good-looking person. That is my first impression, I feel sorry for him. He looks 100 percent like Lukashenko, when I came to power after the breakup of the Soviet Union
The orthodoxy of America is as rigid as that of Soviet Russia. There is one point of view allowed. If you start a conversation from another point of view, the words dry in your mouth.
We have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early ’90s, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is – you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth.
The Soviet State does not need either illusions or camouflage. It can claim only that world authority which is confirmed by the facts.
It seems that probably Putin’s father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn’t have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
A Russian Reversal quote on Uncyclopedia’s Soviet Union article? How original.
In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend.
Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.
Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women’s emancipation is only a slogan in – but also, I should say, in many places outside – the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers’ toil.
If there’s ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
I have argued that the Soviet story is one of the interaction of speculative excess or utopian aspirations with refractory reality.
Our new Soviet constitution will, in my opinion, be the most democratic constitution of all those existing in the world.
It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
The miracle of Grenada is how quickly the Cuban workers beat their plowshares into Soviet AK-47s.
The triumph of the analytical movement, which formed in the ’30’s and ’40’s, was precisely what earned the Soviet masters the acclaim of chessplayers the world over. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that, for today’s chessmasters, the watchword is practicality.
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.
By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
My parents called themselves progressives. The agenda was a Soviet America…the slogan of the communist party in those days was peace, jobs, democracy. Sound familar? The communist party is the democratic Party.
Anyone who would understand the Reagan victory of 1980 and the movement that eliminated the Soviet Union and revitalized America must read-indeed must study-Craig Shirley’s brilliant, comprehensive work.
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.
Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.
American democracy and the Soviet system can exist simultaneously and compete peacefully. But one cannot develop into the other.
I think you know what’s new about this the Democrat Party not liking the Russians. That’s a first. The Democrat Party not liking the idea the Soviet Union back together.
Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.
Ronald Reagan defeated Soviet communism without firing a shot.
We have our differences with Russia. And some of those differences produce conflict. But by no means is this the Soviet Union. We have far more areas of cooperation with Russia than we have areas of conflict.
The collapse of the Soviet Union could not have been a source of national pride for many in Russia. The one person who has capitalized on this the most has been Vladimir Putin.
As is well known, ‘McCarthyism’ was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: Accusations of Communist taint, without factual basis; bogus lists of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.
All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?
I want to tell them (western countries) just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out.
NATO and the USA wanted a complete victory over the Soviet Union. They wanted to sit on the throne in Europe alone.
Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.
I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.
The first gold medal we had won for the Soviet Union. This one we won for each other.
So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.
Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.
Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.
In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.
If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
The Soviet Union was a very useful ally in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
In the era of Khruschev the Soviet Union had publicly declared itself a supporter of the Indian stand on Kashmir. In 1962 a Russian veto had defeated a Security Council resolution on the plebiscite issue. By 1965, and after the fall of the Kruschev regime, Russian attitudes were significantly modified.
[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.
…the West’s main weakness remains unchanged: it cannot grasp the fact that it is facing an acceleration in the unfolding of Soviet convergence strategy which is intended to procure the subservience of the West to Moscow under an ultimate Communist World Government.
In America, you drive car. In Soviet Russia, car drive you!
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.
If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.
You would think that if neoliberals were in any way honest, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first thing to do is get rid of the Red Army and the KGB, and build up the economy. Instead, they just get rid of the economy and keep the military and the KGB.
When the Soviet Union broke down, Georgia suffered a huge deal. Pretty much the whole of the 90’s was known as ‘the black decade… because we had a lot of electricity blackouts.
The chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.
There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.
The serious problem is the education of the peasantry. The peasant economy is scattered, and the socialization of agriculture, judging by the Soviet Union’s experience, will require a long time and painstaking work. Without socialization of agriculture, there can be no complete, consolidated socialism.
The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.
The Soviet system will not evolve into American democracy or vice-versa.
In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.
I believe that renunciation of the Soviet Union was an expression of the free will of the Russian people.
Bin Laden’s role in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had made him a hero around the Middle East.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Malicious attacks on the Soviet Union produce a natural feeling of indignation.
During the election in 1989, there was the first Soviet election with alternative candidates to local government. I myself arranged special training for them.
This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who could follow his own way of thinking, of believing.
Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that’s the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.
In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.
To most people in the UK, indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up US and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
Trump’s affinity for Russia dates back at least to the late 1980s, during the time of the Soviet Union, and it intensified after his financial empire collapsed.
