Top 202 Soviet Quotes

If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

I never thought I’d see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public.

In the ’80s, we were living in the U.S.S.R., where anti-Semitism was a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Being a Jewish person in the Soviet Union was not easy. Not that I remember any of that – I was barely old enough to chew back then – but for my parents, both Uzbekistan-born Jews, life was a struggle.

Without a tutor to help me in the study of Marxism-Leninism, I was no more than a theorist and, of course, had total confidence in the Soviet Union.

Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that’s the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.

Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.

We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It’s within ourselves as well here in the West.

Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.

Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.

The Soviet State had never made radiation something that was publicized in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the Soviet Union had experienced a number of serious accidents involving radiation since the 1950s and had covered it up a number of times.

I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.

In the years just before… during the Carter years, the Soviets regularly violated, if you will, both the spirit and theletter of arms control agreements, I think, that they had negotiated during the period of detente.

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.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.

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

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn’t express yourself freely; you couldn’t admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That’s not a record to be proud of.

Black identity since the ’60s has been a totalitarian identity. It’s enforced. And if you don’t subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can’t get into them. That’s the point.

When I came to Congress in 1993, the traditional idea that all politics stopped at the water’s edge was alive and well. Americans had been unified for the previous four decades against the threat from the former Soviet Union and communism.

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 revolutions of my century, the 20th century – the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba – failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.

There’s an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it’s called ‘Come and See.’ Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.

Well, the Communists at that moment were very strong in Italy and the Italian Communist Party was the biggest Communist Party outside Soviet Union, there’s no doubt about that.

In the Soviet Union I was the head of all oil production. And you know in the Soviet Union, you didn’t get that job unless you were really worth it.

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

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

Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase ‘nothing about us without us.’ To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.

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.

I consider myself Russian-American because I’m American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.

It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?

Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we’d have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

Let’s learn from history and take a look at other infamous socialist central-planning experiments like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan. Like those two disasters, the Green New Deal would cripple our country and sacrifice Americans on the altar of environmental extremism.

After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen.

Membership of the United Nations gives every member the right to make a fool of himself, and that is a right of which the Soviet Union in this case has taken full advantage.

Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.

The number one foreign policy goal of Russia is control of the former Soviet space.

Americans think Soviets are so grim. I want them to see that they can smile.

With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn’t know that then.

Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers’ councils, people’s councils, call them what you want, popular committees.

Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he’s on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon’s presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.

Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America’s economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn’t be accomplished without laying the groundwork.

Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.

So you had to rev your engines, to beat the Russians and I think more than anything, if the Soviet team would win, or the Soviet athletes would win, you would see and hear and read about that. Quite frequently. So they would make a big issue of it.

I did a long concert tour in England and Denmark and Sweden, and I also sang for the Soviet people, one of the finest musical audiences in the world.

In the ’80s, before I was born, my dad played in the old Soviet Top League in our home country of Armenia. He was a small but very quick striker. ‘Soviet Soldier’ magazine actually honoured him with its ‘Knight of Attack’ award in 1984.

In Russia, the people have been brought up tough. It used to be the Soviet Union. The thing everybody thinks of when they think about Russia is how tough the people are.

The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace, not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our failures.

For years before my Navy enlistment, I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGB’s history of political intrigue in preparation for a career in intelligence.

Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women’s emancipation is only a slogan in – but also, I should say, in many places outside – the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers’ toil.

In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn’t get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn’t have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.

In the name of ‘mutual assistance,’ the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.

Dentists, doctors, surveyors from Latvia wanted to come to England, do anything to get away from the Soviet regime.

Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military.

In the first moments, the members of the Presidium who were with me at the Secretariat were taken to the Party Central Committee under the control of Soviet forces.

As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the ’50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

Bin Laden had come to the delusional conclusion that the United States was as weak as the Soviet Union had once been.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

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

Word spread about us in what was then the Soviet Union and we received an invite from President Brezhnev to perform there, which no other Western act had previously done.

I was a Ukrainian folk dancer in my teens, and I toured the country in 1991, shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

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.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

When I was 13, I read ‘Et la paix dans le monde, Docteur?’ a physician’s account of working with Medecins Sans Fontieres during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. It was this book that inspired me to work for MSF.

In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.

The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 – and the Kremlin has never accepted it.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don’t agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn’t.

If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans.

Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.

Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

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.

My mother was a doctor, and I grew up with her in a little apartment belonging to my grandmother, because the Soviet Union never saw fit to let our family have its own apartment.

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

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.

We’re going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There’s no question about that. Let’s face up to that. We’re going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

Nothing unites a group more than a common enemy, be it the Soviet Union or Nasty Nick from ‘Big Brother.’

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!’

History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

I am a Soviet man, and Yeltsin is a Soviet man – maybe our grandchildren will be different.

I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.

It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

Nellie Kim, an Olympic champion from the former Soviet Union, got a 10 right after me in ’76, but nobody talks about that.

Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan’s consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union – the only competing world empire at the time – was bound to collapse!

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.

Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It’s very obvious that he’s trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.

There’s a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, ‘Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don’t have to worry about these guys again.’ We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed.

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.

I think George H.W. Bush was confronted with some huge challenges – the invasion of Kuwait, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union – that he managed with great aplomb.

Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

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.

There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.

The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it.

I wanted to show something that Americans don’t usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.

Malicious attacks on the Soviet Union produce a natural feeling of indignation.

Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

I mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It’s a way of protesting.

After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia.

During the election in 1989, there was the first Soviet election with alternative candidates to local government. I myself arranged special training for them.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Growing up in the Soviet Union, ballroom dancing wasn’t the coolest thing to do. But that probably made me tougher, because it wasn’t an easy task to do ballroom dancing and not get bullied. And I never got bullied in my life, even though I changed to five secondary schools in three different countries.

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

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.

In the event of a victory over Germany by Soviet Russia and England, Bolshevism in Europe would inevitably follow. Under these circumstances I would prefer to see Germany win the war.

I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.

America has the best athletic programs. Even when the Soviet Union existed, that was Mickey Mouse compared to the U.S.

Following the missile crisis, detente started to gain ground between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the international political climate improved after that.

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.

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.

In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before.

Even in the former Soviet Union, they have good copies of my movies.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses.

My family fled the Soviet Union when I was three and a half years old. Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at night.

In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

I love ‘The Master And Margarita’ by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.

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.

The Army I grew up in was focused on high-intensity conflict against a peer competitor called the Soviet Union.

I remember starting to read about the Soviet Union when I was eight years old; I think I was reading my father’s ‘New York Times.’

There was no testimony of conspiracy – Oswald’s efforts to get in touch with the Soviets and with the Cuban Fair Play groups in New York were rebuffed, rebuffed at every step.

Historians don’t really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

If you ask anyone on any street corner in the world what the Soviet Union looks like, they would probably have very strong opinions. And they probably would be wrong.

People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims; they’re not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet victims.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

As for the United States’ future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors – the Soviets and, before them, the British.

The first ‘Red Dawn’ was made at a time when Hollywood didn’t stint in its use of Russian stereotypes. Cold war capitalist ideology construed the Soviets as different for two reasons – not only did they belong to another political-economic system, they didn’t seem to possess the same emotions that ‘we’ do.

I said in court a long time ago that I didn’t see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment.

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn’t compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.

The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I’ve seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the television businesses found it was easier to hire 16- or 18-year-olds and teach them everything from the beginning rather than re-teach the old-school folk.

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

I found that our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.

As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn’t get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.

Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn’t manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.

Was the Soviet Union reformable? I would say no. They said, ‘Okay, the Soviet Union isn’t working.’ They would say, ‘No, it’s great. We just need democracy, political pluralism, private property.’ And then there was no Soviet Union. The European Union is the same.

There was no race – but to the extent that there was an arms competition, it was almost entirely on the Soviet side, first to catch up and then to surpass the Americans.

What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.

All the politics of the post-war period was about the clash between the Soviet Union and America, and virtually all issues ended up being subordinated to that. Now, the question is, what is the most a socialist can achieve in a global economy?

The Soviet Union’s termination, which brought to an end the bipolar world, ushered in an era of U.S. hegemony. Hegemony, however, should not be confused with omnipotence. Hegemony is not omnipotence but is certainly preponderance.

If the Soviet empire still existed, I’d be terrified. The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.

There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan there would probably still be a Soviet Union.

During my childhood in the Cold War, my family saw America as a great ally in our common struggle to keep back Soviet communism.

The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don’t know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it’s not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one.

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say – that’s the main thing. Second, it’s a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

The collapse of the Soviet Union could not have been a source of national pride for many in Russia. The one person who has capitalized on this the most has been Vladimir Putin.

It doesn’t work the same way everywhere. The Americans are the most gullible, because they don’t like to deny co-workers’ requests. People in the former Soviet bloc countries are less trusting, perhaps because of their previous experiences with their countries’ secret services.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn’t funny anymore.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the ’70s and ’80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.

I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn’t that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.

In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before.

What compelled me about the story of Chernobyl more than anything else was something very universal. Yes, Chernobyl happened because in many ways, the Soviet system was deeply corrupt and evil, but the Soviet system did not arrive to us from some other planet. It was devised by humans.

And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It’s reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

It’s essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

America likes you only if you’re on the side she selects. If you don’t go along with her totally, you’re automatically considered to have entered the Soviet bloc.

I did Our Daily Bread for King and that made me popular in the Soviet Union; King was amused by that.

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.

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

The people who built the space program – both Soviet and U.S. – were readers of science fiction.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

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.

Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.

I think there, there also had been just before I got to Honduras a rather spectacular capture of an arms shipment that from Nicaragua across Honduran test, territory destined for El Salvador and I think that some of that equipment had been also to Cuba and the Soviet bloc.

Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It’s what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.

One must say bluntly that it is an unattractive sight when, with a view to smearing the Soviet people, leaders of such a country as the United States resort to what almost amounts to obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching about morals and humanism.

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

Escapees from Communist China and the Soviet Bloc have inoculated America from the evils of Marxism in the past, but it seems every generation needs a new lesson.

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken.

Too many countries of the former Soviet bloc remain under the control of authoritarian leaders, including some, like the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who have learned how to maintain a more convincing facade of elections than their communist predecessors.

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.

Equity means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. It is the very DNA of Marxism and everything bad flows from it, as we saw in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

As a result of half a century of Soviet rule people have been weaned from a belief in human kindness.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

The Soviet Union did not achieve victory over the West, so was my information inadequate to help them to victory, or did it play no particular role in their failure to achieve victory?

I remember as a child going to an exhibit about the Soviet Union, and every paper had this alien smell. The paper and the ink were all exported. It was like a piece of cheese from that country, you could touch it, feel it, smell it, and it was different.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition – the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War.

The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians’ mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.