Quotes About Soviet

The rise of the Soviet school to the summit of world chess is a logical result of socialist cultural development.

Alexander Werth

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

Chechnya was part of that whole wave of entities of the Soviet Union that had a very separate sense of identity, of political and social history, that set them apart from the rest of Russia.

President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.

A document was drafted in the State Department in July 1946 by an official named Samuel Klaus. This indicated that there were then 20 alleged Soviet agents, 13 alleged Communists, about a dozen sympathizers, and about 75 suspects in the department, according to the FBI.

I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

This is about systemic, institutional corruption, not personality. To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain't going to happen.

Mao assured Forman of the CCP's democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. "We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia," he told him. "Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.

The Soviet state, like any other giant enterprise, is, above all, a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats do not, as a whole, like to make decisions. Decisions require a degree of courage and responsibility, qualities in short supply among public servants on both sides of the Great Divide.

Since Lenin died, every Soviet leader had been a liar. They had all glossed over what was wrong and declined to acknowledge reality. The most striking characteristic of Soviet leadership for the last sixty-five year was the refusal to face facts.(1075)

A veces la Unión Soviética parecía más un monasterio medieval donde todo el mundo había hecho voto de pobreza y obediencia.

La característica más asombrosa del liderazgo soviético de los anteriores sesenta y cinco años era la negativa a afrontar los hechos.

Allies had stood on the sidelines, fighting minor wars, joining in only for the last eleven months. All their casualties put together were only a fraction of those suffered by the Soviet people.

Volodya's happiness did not quite let him forget the horrors he had seen and the profound misgivings he had developed about Soviet Communism. The unspeakable brutality of the secret police, the blunders of Stalin that had cost millions of lives, and the propaganda that had encouraged the Red Army to behave like crazed beasts in Germany had all caused him to doubt the most fundamental things he had been brought up to believe. He

Bem no início de sua amizade, Dimka lhe perguntara: – O que você faz para... enfim, para evitar a gravidez? – Isso é problema da garota, não é? – retrucou Valentin com descaso. – Se o pior acontecer, fazer um aborto não é tão difícil assim. Ao conversar com outros amigos, Dimka descobriu que muitos rapazes soviéticos tinham a mesma atitude. Homens não engravidavam, então aquilo não era problema deles;

when he heard that the Soviet Western Army Group had been encircled by the Germans, he said: 'Everything's lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we've fucked it up.' Then

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

Peace, Land, and Bread! All power to the Soviet!

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

One Soviet general, looking at a map of the territory Russia had acquired on the Karelian Isthmus, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead

The Soviet propaganda apparatus continued to crank out shrill, contorted documents attempting to convince whoever was listening that Finland was the real aggressor, that the Kuusinen government was legitimate, and the Mannerheim/Tanner/Ryti regime was enslaving the workers, etc.

They had to pay taxes on fruit trees whether or not they bore fruit, Gorbachev remembered, "so peasants cut down their orchards.