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 came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.
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.
In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.
The people who built the space program – both Soviet and U.S. – were readers of science fiction.
There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.
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 grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.
It fell to President Harry Truman to contain Soviet expansionism. He built America’s first peacetime alliances, starting in Western Europe, then in Asia.
I feel that an understanding could be reached with Germany which would result in a lasting peace with Europe and believe that a German victory is preferable to a British and Soviet victory.
If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn’t get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
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.
America has the best athletic programs. Even when the Soviet Union existed, that was Mickey Mouse compared to the U.S.
I don’t know about scared, but ‘Chernobyl’ definitely made me deeply uncomfortable. Almost addictively uncomfortable: don’t know what that says about me. But I came to love the tatty Soviet brutalism of it.
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.
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.
Instead of more talk about salmon and high-speed rails, more criticism of the Supreme Court or more praise for the Soviet’s Sputnik mission – President Obama should use his State of the Union Address to tell the American people the truth about the fundamental financial challenges our country faces.
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.
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.’
In the first day of the Soviet Army’s arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything… I can only conjecture what could have happened.
Even the Soviet Union, with its huge nuclear arsenal, was a threat that could be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But suicide bombers cannot be deterred. They can only be annihilated – preemptively and unilaterally, if necessary.
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.
The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.
What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.
NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
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.
1989 was such a very, very important year in Europe. The wall fell, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and so many things happened – in 15 minutes, the world changed.
I’m communicating with the directors of the Soviet companies, and I see that it is wrong, but when I go to the official discussions, they discuss we should change the color of the walls.
Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.
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 always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.
For me, my father was, and still is, a symbol of qualified persons in the Ministry of Foreign Trade under Soviet conditions.
In the ’80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that – I was barely old enough to chew back then – but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.
Growing up in the Soviet Union, ballroom dancing wasn’t the coolest thing to do. But that probably made me tougher, because it wasn’t an easy task to do ballroom dancing and not get bullied. And I never got bullied in my life, even though I changed to five secondary schools in three different countries.
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.
Ukraine and Israel have long-standing historical ties. Our nations have together experienced all the tragedies in recent history – the Holodomor and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the totalitarian Soviet regime.
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.
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.
