Quotes About Post-Soviet

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.

During the post-Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time between 1992 and 1996 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb of as many as 50,000 corpses.

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?

Anatoly Chubais, who was Yeltsin's campaign manager at the time, said that "of course" there were violations in the campaign, but if the 1996 vote were to be dismissed as a fraud, "then we automatically have to deem both of President Putin's terms illegitimate along with the presidency of Medvedev. … There would be nothing left of Russia's post-Soviet history.

During two decades, on and off, reporting in Russia and the post-Soviet states - in the turbulent '90s, the wealthy but depressing aughts and, finally, during the eruption of violence in Ukraine - I occasionally heard people talk about how 'the Americans' wanted this or that political outcome.

The explosion of HIV was triggered by the sharp rise in heroin use in the post-Soviet 1990s.

I understand reform to mean the perfection of what previous generations have already done. I'm not an advocate of destroying, 'kroshat,' and then selling like they do in Russia. That's how we can prevent the wild corruption in our state like they have in the other post-Soviet states.

From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery.

The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation. Simultaneously across Asia and Latin America, similar experiments were being launched. Unfortunately, the grotesque virus that resulted did not stay sealed inside the post-Soviet laboratory.

The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example—was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity.

We put a lot of money into Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trying to support it economically, trying to support democratic institutions.

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.

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected

the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.

there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3

In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively.

A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.

Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul like Lawrence Sheets. Whether it is his hair-raising stories of the region's myriad armed conflicts or the black humor with which he captures the moral and physical impoverishment of a collapsing empire, Sheets brilliantly condenses twenty tumultuous years into an eminently readable tale.