Quotes About Eastern Europe

Growing up in Eastern Europe you learn very youg that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people's everyday lives.

Ukraine might be an economic joke, a place to make cracks about, but it is also a vital buffer-state. With Ukraine independent, the Russian border stays 600 miles to the east and Poland can convincingly call itself part of Central, not Eastern, Europe. Were Ukraine – or more likely Belarus – to lose its independence, Russia would be back glowering over the frontier wire, and Europe's centre of gravity would shift away westwards.

Poland was the first country to give Ukraine diplomatic recognition, the day after the independence referendum of 1 December 1991.

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people's houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice...When eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere? (from Anathemas and Admirations)

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

In the West, the art of rock climbing is growing because it has to do with less risk, good muscles. But the people seeking high goals in high places are in Eastern Europe, and they reach their goals because they are willing to suffer more.

My dad was born in 1930 in Lithuania, located in Eastern Europe. He was 9 years old when the war started, and his family was sent to the Kovno ghetto. They were soon separated and sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Socialism is undoubtedly in the throes of a crisis greater than at any time since 1917. The last half of 1989 saw the dramatic collapse of most of the communist party governments of Eastern Europe.

And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist - why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer.

The door to the secrets of Eastern Europe was shut against us.

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

Imagine if, in the Cold War, the West had lent its support not to the dissidents in Eastern Europe—to the likes of Václav Havel and Lech WaÅ'Ä™sa—but to the Soviet Union, as the representative of "moderate Communists," in the hope that the Kremlin would give us a hand against terrorists such as the Red Army Faction.

Contrary to Eastern Europe, where the border was more porous and you could exchange information more easily, Cuba is an island. Thus, it is more isolated, and it's easier for the government to have great control over its citizens.

Today, anti-Semitism remains a distinctive feature of the nationalisms of eastern Europe, where Islam is almost non-existent and the turn of 1989 gave new life to the old demons (still present, even where there are no Jews), but it has almost disappeared from the discourse of the west European far right (which often proclaims its sympathies for Israel).

I am fully aware of the concept of political revolutions. After all, that is what we hoped might happen in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, but what actually happened was capitalist restoration.

Because my name is Hungarian, everyone assumed I knew about Hungary. I didn't. They also assumed that if you knew about Hungary, you also knew about the rest of Eastern Europe.

Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.

As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase 'nothing about us without us.' To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

I definitely think my ancestry has something to do with my politics. And I think being deeply suspicious of government and communists is implicit in a lot of first-generation immigrants, particularly from Eastern Europe. My mom came over from Romania when she was a kid and they fled the commies who took their family hemp farm.

We have a Conservative leader that believes in green taxes, that won't bring back grammar schools, that believes in continuing with total open-door migration from eastern Europe and refuses to give us a referendum on the EU.

NATO is in fact going to crumble if we don't beat Trump. NATO is in real trouble. We need NATO for more reasons than just physical security. We need NATO to make sure that we do not allow Russia to continue to have its influence in Eastern Europe in ways that it had before. It wasn't just to stop the Soviet Union from coming into the United States, coming into Europe. It was to make sure that we did not have a kleptocracy taking over that part of the world, to unite Europe in our behalf.

Thus begins a sideshow to the war itself: the undercover battle led by William Donovan and the OSS to ensure that Eastern Europe fall into the hands of Soviet Russia.

We had the whole population against us," Jews hidden by Christian families could "be counted on the fingers of one hand," perhaps five or six out of a total of thirteen thousand—but on the whole the situation had, surprisingly, been better in Poland than in any other Eastern European country.