Quotes About Soviet

Unlike Churchill, FDR showed little concern about a pro-Soviet government taking control in Poland after the war. Indeed, in the spring of 1944, he told Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, that he "didn't care whether the countries bordering Russia became communized.

October 5, 1957, local time, an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile lifted off from the Soviet Union's top-secret launch complex at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, and arced eastward into the predawn darkness over central Asia.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich's life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

As historian Max Hastings wrote, "Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

Except we don't know if Shostakovich actually meant what he said in this article. We don't even know if it was by him. Especially later in his life, the regime would send Shostakovich articles already written and tell him just to sign his name at the bottom.

Horror stories like this — and the issue of Leningrad cannibalism as a whole — could not be talked about openly during the Soviet period. Such an admission of the breakdown of society was considered demoralizing. Only in 2002 were NKVD files opened so academics could discover the gruesome statistical realities of person-eating.

Reconstructing a Soviet life is often difficult. Many of the details of Shostakovich's youth we know only because his aunt Nadejda Galli-Shohat collaborated on a biography years later, against his wishes. She is not an entirely reliable source; an American interviewer called her "one of those wonderfully frank Russians who can drop into fantasy as easily as most of us find our way into the subway.

A whole generation has been born and come of age since the Communist bloc disintegrated. What does this mean? It means that we no longer judge established democracies by comparing them with the Soviet alternative; and that we don't evaluate emerging democracies by looking at their totalitarian predecessors. We have tossed the measuring-sticks we used in the past into the waste bin.

If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.

Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was "both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people."2

Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.

With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin's own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it.

From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States, he insisted, that he could wipe out any American or European city. He would even specify how many missiles and warheads each target might require.

The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.

Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.

The United States made no secret of its desire to have the House of Saud bankroll Osama bin Laden's Afghan war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, and Riyadh and Washington together contributed an estimated $3.5 billion to the mujahideen.5 However, U.S. and Saudi participation went far beyond this.

The Jews will become socialist colonisers with strong fists and sharp teeth, a strong national group within the Soviet family of nations.

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.

Nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.

In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, The Party can always find you!

What happened in war? People died -- that's what happened.' He fixed me with that stubborn clenched-jaw look. 'Those who were bravest perished first. Those who believed in something died for belief. Those who survived...' He starts to cough. 'You know that more than twenty million Soviet citizens perished in this war.

Those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those who do regret it have no brain.

Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.