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.
Just because the boogeyman of the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, it doesn’t mean the world is living angelically.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s learn from history and take a look at other infamous socialist central-planning experiments like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan. Like those two disasters, the Green New Deal would cripple our country and sacrifice Americans on the altar of environmental extremism.
I decided to create a sports club during the Soviet times. It was my dream.
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.
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
Carter’s hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.
To all the countries of the former Soviet Union: look at us, everything is possible.
In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.
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.
Reagan did not wait out the Soviets; he beat them.
Now that we are used to globalisation it’s hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if ‘the Russians love their children too.’
Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room.
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.
It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It’s reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
I would not sacrifice myself for a system like the Soviet system to be established in Greece.
By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
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.
Even in the former Soviet Union, they have good copies of my movies.
The Ukraine has a long history of either being part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere.
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.
The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.
Perhaps my information hurt the Soviet Union more than it helped. I have no idea. It was not something I ever discussed with the KGB officers that I was dealing with.
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.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
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.
Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers’ councils, people’s councils, call them what you want, popular committees.
In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.
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.
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.
Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.
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.
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.
My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.
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.
Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.
Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we’d have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.
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.
During my many years in international business and public life, I have had the good fortune of sitting down for lunch with people with whom I completely disagreed, in practice and principle: Soviet communists, heads of state from various unsavory regimes, benighted religious figures, corrupt business leaders.
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.
I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.
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.
When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them – lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.
I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.
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.
