Quotes About Soviet

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

The word 'soviet' means 'council' in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).

And many, if not all of those transactions, must be viewed not just as dubious financial deals with formerly Soviet entities, but as part of a long, ongoing Russian intelligence operation.

Then the individual, especially the personal man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the great thing, the Soviet-social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, and equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate… hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.

every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different. Such a man was Churchill. After having single-handedly saved Western civilization from Nazi barbarism--Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary--he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.

Primeiro, uma noite passada no meio de gente armada a beber vodka e, agora, pelos vistos, eu era a primeira pessoa a entrar na antiga União Soviética a fazer acrobacias numa mota. Viva a Rússia!

after all, in 1957 the Soviet Union put the first ever man in space)

Every Soviet citizen committed at least three felonies a day, because the criminal statutes were written so broadly as to cover ordinary day-to-day activities. The Communist Party decided whom to prosecute from among the millions of possible criminals. They picked dissidents, refuseniks, and others who posed political dangers to the system. This began under Stalin when his KGB head, Lavrenti Beria, infamously said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime.

Nothing did more during these years to excite such emotions than the successful launching by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 of Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite. Sputnik was small—about 184 pounds and the size of a beach ball.

Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.

The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don't know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it's not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one.

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if 'the Russians love their children too.'

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky's girlfriend.

For this reason much of Ukraine's threadbare army was positioned in ways which reflected its old Cold War Soviet background, i.e., prepared, albeit barely, to fight a war on its western flanks—not its eastern ones.

Far away, in Ukraine's east, tourists once came to the monument of Savur-Mogila, an hour and a half's drive from Donetsk. This was also the site of an annual pilgrimage to commemorate the crucial battle fought here in 1943 in which thousands of Red Army soldiers died. Now the ruins of this vast Soviet memorial are a tragic sight.

Ukrainians should be grateful to Stalin, she declared, because he had fashioned the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this was now the state they had.

Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.

With the return of Yanukovych, first as prime minister in 2007 and then as president in 2010, the Holodomor began to fall back again in terms of public remembrance. Because of this political shift and because this was a taboo topic in Soviet times, the Holodomor has not entered into the DNA or soul of Ukrainian politics, or worldview, as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide have in Israel and Armenia.

The story of the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Second World War and the struggle against Nazism has been detached from the years 1939 to 1941, which saw the conquest and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland; from Romania, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed.

One of the greatest Soviet writers was Vasily Grossman. He was born in 1905 in Berdychiv, then one of the main centers of Jewish life in Ukraine, and died in Moscow in 1964. Grossman is rightly best known for Life and Fate, his extraordinary novel of Stalingrad. Far less well known is Everything Flows, a book on which he was still working when he died.

I need not point out that this affair represents an appalling setback," he wrote on New Year's Eve 1952. He pointed out that, in Poland and elsewhere in the Soviet orbit, the "perfection of totalitarian police state techniques is approaching '1984' efficiency to a degree where 'resistance' can probably exist only in the minds of the enslaved peoples.