Quotes About Soviet

In the fall of 2000, a group of Russian Olympic athletes met with Putin and complained that the lack of a singable anthem demoralized them in competitions and made their victories feel hollow. The old Soviet anthem had been so much better this way, they said.

If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal.

The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.

Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.20

Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people.

Did it ever occur to you that I have a life to live - in my spare time? The Soviet State recognizes no life but that of a social class.

As the enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned, the idealistic and dissenting energies of intellectuals and the young embraced other cult figures and myths of salvation and purification: Mao, Fidel, Che, and even Pol Pot.

One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.

As a CIA deputy director in the 1980s, Gates had helped oversee the arming of the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. The experience of watching that loosely organized insurgency bleed the mighty Red Army into retreat—only to have elements of that same insurgency later evolve into al-Qaeda—had made Gates mindful of the unintended consequences that could result from rash actions.

Havel, as much as anyone, had given moral voice to the grassroots democracy movements that had brought the Soviet era to an end. Along with Nelson Mandela and a handful of other living statesmen, he'd also been a distant role model for me.

En la Unión Soviética, igual que en los países del Este y en Corea del Norte, los censores exigían que el arte, la literatura y el cine estuvieran llenos de alegría, que los héroes fueran felices, que la trama hablara de lograr las cuotas de producción y que el final feliz pasara por un glorioso futuro revolucionario.

The time was 08.27. Up on his platform Ivanovsky patted the Vostok one last time for luck. We loved our Vostok, he wrote later. We loved it with that love that comes with an inevitable parting. Then he descended to the ground.

When Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to oppression rivalling that still operative in North Korea,

Y'know what happened in the Soviet Union, was that it actually became illegal to suffer. And I'm really serious about that, because, y'know, if the system is working, then everything's ok with you... and if everything is not okay with you.. well, is that your fault, or the systems fault? Well it's not the goddamn systems fault. Then it's your fault. Then you don't get to suffer. And that's what happened in the Soviet Union.

One of the major contributions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, was his analysis of the direct causal relationship between the pathology of the Soviet prison-work-camp dependent state (where millions suffered and died) and the almost universal proclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience, deny his own state-induced suffering, and thereby prop up the dictates of the rational, ideology-possessed communist system.

The Soviet authorities didn't outlaw climbing completely; they just shifted it from an individual experience, which they categorized as a "relic of bourgeois alpinism," to a collective endeavour that could be manipulated by the propaganda machine.

Prior to the days of the Soviets, a woman could be repudiated for any reason. Her jewels, inherited from her mother, were therefore her only worldly possessions and her sole safety net and source of independence, should she need it. So she always kept them on her person. Although repudiation is now a thing of the past, brides continue the tradition by donning all their jewelry for the wedding.

Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"!

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.

Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million "unnatural deaths" during Stalin's time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that "death solves all problems" and "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic" murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

In Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearing that Kennedy's popularity would lead to an erosion of support in East Berlin, quickly flew to that divided city to reassert his nation's claims. He and Kennedy did not meet. In fact, crowds a fraction of the size that greeted Kennedy even noticed that Khrushchev was in town, underscoring JFK's amazing popularity and sending a clear message that Khrushchev's power was on the wane.

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

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.

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.