Quotes About Soviet

We desire to give the Soviet people absolute liberty of voting for those they desire to elect, those whom they trust to ensure their interests.

By the time Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history. It was at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.

Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world's greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

Stalin personally controlled a 'Soviet Hollywood' through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs.

The workers love Khrushchev very much. He hasn't got an enemy in the entire country. Quite a few under it.

Intelligence is impeded by any creed, no matter what, and kindness is inhibited by the belief in sin and punishment (this belief, by the way, is the only one that the Soviet Government has taken over from orthodox Christianity)

In the Soviet Union, it's takes more courage to retreat than advance.

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

The only thing anyone inherits by right of birth in the Soviet Union is congenital idiocy.

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

I got a cable from New York saying that what I'd written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn't make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little... Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.

My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink.

During the election in 1989, there was the first Soviet election with alternative candidates to local government. I myself arranged special training for them.

Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.

I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

None of the Western-oriented armies wanted to standardize their arsenals with Soviet arms, and nobody wanted to take orders from Egyptian generals. Except in Egypt, Shuqayri was universally despised and the PLO in constant arrears, as the Arab states uniformly defaulted on their pledges.42

The soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. We had this system for seventy years said Constantine. People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people qho know how to work around the system, the more people you will have qho know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who skilled at working around the system

During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights.

There soon were storm signals. Nikitchenko and Trainin, in line with the Soviet conception of law as the servant of the political leadership, had a very limited idea of the trial's purpose. In the Russians' view, the Nazi organizations had already been condemned as criminal by the Big Three at Yalta, and it was "unthinkable" that the international tribunal—an organ of much less authority—could come to any other conclusion.

MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.