Soviet Quotes

I got a cable from New York saying that what I'd written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn't make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me.

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.

It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.

Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.

Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.

I believe that detente was having almost the opposite effect of what was intended. What was intended was to sort of end the contest for power and to stop Soviet expansion, especially by military means and the military build-up, the military contest.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples' democracies.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

The Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy, and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden.

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

In the 1980s America reacted to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. We supported a war that left a nation torn to pieces. And as the last Soviet tank left the country, so did we.

I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

Then I was lucky I met with my future husband, and I started new life with my husband, and I was happy again. He was a musician. I start to travel with him through Europe also and around the former Soviet Union.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

I've been to China and Russia, and I don't know anything about Chinese or Soviet relations.

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - no ideals.

I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.

Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.

The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.