Words matter. These are the best Soviet Quotes from famous people such as Olga Tokarczuk, Roger Scruton, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Wladimir Klitschko, Masha Gessen, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I didn’t believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.
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.
Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn’t manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.
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.
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 is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.
If there’s ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
When I came to Congress in 1993, the traditional idea that all politics stopped at the water’s edge was alive and well. Americans had been unified for the previous four decades against the threat from the former Soviet Union and communism.
Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.
The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.
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.
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.
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 mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It’s a way of protesting.
Putin himself made his original fortune in the early 1990s, when he stole the funds that had been entrusted to him to buy food in Europe to relieve the starvation in Leningrad that occurred during the economic collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union.
If we look decades ago, we know that NATO allies contributed a lot of equipment close to the border of the Soviet Union.
My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.
One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message – all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn’t funny anymore.
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.
Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
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 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.
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.
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.
Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.
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!
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.
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.
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.
If you’re so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you’re a Republican. If you’re kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you’re a Democrat.
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.
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.
Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.
There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it’s not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.
America likes you only if you’re on the side she selects. If you don’t go along with her totally, you’re automatically considered to have entered the Soviet bloc.
The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.
Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized… World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
Chernobyl’ is supposedly about the lies, arrogance, and suppression of criticism under Communism, but the mini-series portrays life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as inaccurately, and melodramatically, as it portrays the effects of radiation.
If we can deter the Soviet Union, if we can deter North Korea, why on earth can’t we deter Iran?
I was proud of my Soviet country, of wearing Young Pioneer uniform, bombarded by my mother’s Communist propaganda.
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.
