Quotes from William Taubman

They had to pay taxes on fruit trees whether or not they bore fruit, Gorbachev remembered, "so peasants cut down their orchards.

Moscow State University."4 MGU was to the USSR what Harvard is to the United States—except that in the Soviet Union there was almost nothing else, no Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, no Ivy League, no equally distinguished state universities, no elite liberal arts colleges. Moscow the city was itself unique:

As the saying goes, in the hanged man's home don't mention the rope.

As the result of the war, Stalin's economic administrator, Nikolai Voznesensky, informed him in January 1946, the USSR lost 30 percent of its national wealth.

You may tell anyone you want," Khrushchev continued, "that we will never accept Adenauer as a representative of Germany. He is a zero. If Adenauer pulls down his pants and you look at him from behind you can see Germany is divided. If you look at him from the front, you can see Germany will not stand.

We cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists or internationalists, or as the Soviet state. We would have capitalists on the frontier of the Soviet Union.

By now Khrushchev was throwing his weight around in higher circles too. The NKVD sent two agents to western Ukraine (one of them, William Fisher, aka Colonel Rudolf Abel, was arrested by the FBI in 1957 and called the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in the United States) to recruit German residents allowed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact's secret protocol to return to German-occupied territory.