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Quotes About Soviet

As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA's vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA's foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over.
~ Tim Weiner
Father Stalin, look at this Collective farming is just bliss The hut's in ruins, the barn's all sagged All the horses broken nags And on the hut a hammer and sickle And in the hut death and famine No cows left, no pigs at all Just your picture on the wall
~ Timothy Snyder
The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers
~ Timothy Snyder
In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.
~ Timothy Snyder
In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities
~ Timothy Snyder
A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take. But those who followed the symbolic logic became victims in their turn. Having turned the poorer peasants against the richer, Soviet power then seized everyone's land for the new collective farms.
~ Timothy Snyder
The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in "reprisals" (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles).
~ Timothy Snyder
The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1
~ Timothy Snyder
European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler. This, of course, was the shared binary logic of National Socialism and the Popular Front: Hitler called his enemies "Marxists," and Stalin called his "fascists."34 They agreed that there was no middle ground.
~ Timothy Snyder
Collectivization, when completed, brought starvation to much of the Soviet peasantry. Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths between 1930 and 1933. Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.
~ Timothy Snyder
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).
~ Timothy Snyder
Over a million lives were shortened by exhaustion and disease in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945—as distinct from the Soviet killing fields and the Soviet hunger regions, where some six million people died, about four million of them in the bloodlands. Ninety percent of those who entered the Gulag left it alive. Most of the people who entered German concentration camps (as opposed to the German gas chambers, death pits, and prisoner-of-war camps) also survived.
~ Timothy Snyder
Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream. Lithuanians
~ Timothy Snyder
Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev who proved to be Stalin's most important successor, because he redefined the Soviet attitude to time: he buried the Marxist politics of inevitability, and replaced it with a Soviet politics of eternity.
~ Timothy Snyder
Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Be??ec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Che?mno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign.
~ Timothy Snyder
To find his successor, Yeltsin's entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.
~ Timothy Snyder
I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.
~ Osip Mandelstam
By the end of 2018, Russian output reached 11.4 million barrels per day, as high as at the peak for Russia in Soviet days.
~ Daniel Yergin
Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.
~ William L. Shirer
Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of 'all power to the soviets' were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take. Those
~ China Mieville
It won a commitment from the Soviet leader to take no action that would influence the 1962 congressional elections. Both the White House and the Kremlin recognized that any instance of Soviet aggression could only play into the hands of the more hawkish Republicans.
~ Chris Matthews
Five long centuries of absolutism -from Ivan the Terrible to the Soviet seventies- had left the Russian massed submissive. In their personal lives, I found them ingenious in beating the numbing inefficiency of the state economy. Their black market was so vast that it operated as a countereconomy, even to the extent of producing underground millionaires. But in the sphere of political action, grass-roots initative was moribund.
~ Hedrick Smith
Soviet Russia was grudgingly admired by the Franco regime.
~ Helen Graham
called upon the Catholic faithful to join the war against "Soviet Jewish-Masonic laicism".
~ Helen Graham