Quotes About Soviet

And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.

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.

In this part of the world, due to our historical experiences with the Soviet Union and later with Russia, we are used to a situation where Moscow tends to put the blame on the people whenever a tragedy occurs, rather than on the authorities.

There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

There are widely cited accounts of famous but unnamed Soviet boot and nail factories. The boot factories produced only size-7-left boots but never missed a production quota; the nail factories made a large number of small nails in response to numerical targets but switched skillfully to a small number of very large nails when targets were set by weight.

Russia, after all, has existed for a thousand years; the Soviet era lasted only seventy-four. The Romanov dynasty, which included such towering figures as Peter and Catherine the Great, had ruled for more than three centuries. It came to an end in brutal murders in a Siberian cellar, but many Russians never knew this had happened. Or how. Or why.

It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when détente was abandoned and American policy grew more confrontational again, that Soviet leaders finally came to fear that that they might not be able to keep up the geopolitical competition, and not just with the United States but with the liberal order more generally.

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

Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go.

While the Germans were unleashing a race war in the west of Poland, the Soviets imported class war to the east in the Red Army's baggage train.

John O'Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

I've seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big mustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women.

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It knows who is to get something and who has to wait.

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.

Why don't we like them?" Katalin asked. "Because they don't treat us right." After Zoltán said it, he marveled at the realization that in trying to clarify years of abuses and lists of grievances, that in trying to make oppression understandable for a child, he had reduced the horror of Soviet domination to one simple, honest statement of fact: The Russians didn't treat the Hungarians right.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.

But private individuals do not exist in the Soviet Union or in China where the claims of the state are total and even art and literature must be subservient to the interests of the state….

Bijušais ASV prezidenta padomnieks nacion?l?s droš?bas jaut?jumos Zbig?evs Bžežinskis : " Par hiteriešu paveiktajiem noziegumiem joproj?m taisn?gi soda, ta?u Padomju Savien?b? dz?vo t?kstošiem bijušo slepkavu, kuriem ir ofici?las pensijas, kuru kr?tis ir apkarin?tas ar meda??m un kuri piedal?s daž?d?s revol?cijai velt?t?s svin?b?s.

The official Soviet line on the dispute emphasised harmony, homogeneity, Brotherhood. Kievan Rus was inhabited by a single monolithic 'ancient Rus' nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians all descended; for them to argue over Volodymyr and Yaroslav made no more sense than for the English and French to squabble over Charlemagne. The languages of all three nations descend from the ancient Slavs', and all three inherited Orthodoxy.

UKRAINA is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland', and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost