Quotes About USSR

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

During his years in Los Angeles, Viktor Chernenko had learned that one similarity between life in the old USSR and life in Los Angeles—life under a command economy and a market economy—was that a tremendous amount of business was transacted by people in subcultures, people whom no one ever sees except the police.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.

I was born in Leningrad, U.S.S.R., before my father got an appointment at a university in Italy and we moved to Italy. I spend a few years there before my family returned to Russia.

the USSR, far from having engineered the April 1978 communist seizure of power in Kabul, and plotting then to send in troops as part of some broader drive to the Indian Ocean and the oilfields of the Gulf, was reacting in a cautious and often confused way to the growing instability inside Afghanistan.

This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all."47

Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote—in a book published in the West and widely distributed in samizdat in the USSR—"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

Why have the Soviets stood aside and allowed us to settle Berlin, Vietnam and the Middle East? One, because the United States is big, mean and tough as hell and they know it. Two, the obsession with peace in the USSR. Twenty million Russian people were killed during World War II. We must have the fear elements working, but also the hope element.

Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back.

During this communication, Höglund learned that world peace was threatened because the USA and the USSR supposedly planned a war against China, and that he should go to the Bahamas to act as

the Cold War has been dangerous and costly in its own right. It has bankrupted the USSR and very nearly the United States as well; led to a string of civil wars and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns in Eastern Europe; repeatedly threatened to spark a general nuclear war; and institutionalized a pattern of advanced weapons proliferation that has left most countries and peoples in a far more precarious position than they were when the conflict began.

The Chinese Communist Party learned the lesson from the USSR's disintegration well: no loosening of control similar to Gorbachev's attempt to reform an unreformable political regime but, in its scale, a truly unprecedented innovation-led economic expansion that resulted in rapid quality-of-life gains and left the party even more firmly in control.

By early 1942, the Nazis had wreaked destruction in the USSR that went well beyond the understanding of most people in the West. They killed millions of Soviets, looted everything from machines in factories to the gold from the mouths of the dead, and destroyed all that they could not cart away.

Harry S Truman, then a senator from Missouri, went a step further: The U.S. should extend aid to Europe, he contended shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, but give it to "whatever side seemed to be losing. If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.

The Indian intelligentsia was mesmerized by the apparent success of the USSR. It wanted big steel plants and not small factories which made clothes, shoes, toys, and bicycles—the sort of things that the masses could use. In those days, anyone in India who advocated greater investment in agriculture was branded an American agent.

The USSR model was never a serious threat to anyone's bottom line. People blow up over Germany because, for all its left-wing bent, it may be a more plausible form of capitalism than ours.

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

Still, 71.48 percent of those who voted in Ukraine did so for a renewed USSR and, although this was the lowest "yes" figure in the Soviet Union among all those who voted, it was still overwhelming. However, in Ukraine, people were asked some separate questions as well.

Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that "for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory." And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.

In the end, the number of people killed in the kulak operation was about the same as the number sent to the Gulag (378,326 and 389,070, respectively).

This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union - in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.

Russian President and "ex" KGB agent Vladimir Putin calls the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy," and he pours special blame-hatred for that calamity at George Soros.