Quotes & Sayings About The Fall Of The Soviet Union

The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture. — Leon Trotsky

I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11. — Sibel Edmonds

All the Baltic countries have been steadfast in support of allies of the United States since they gained their independence following the fall of the Soviet Union and have continued to be supportive in the ongoing war on terror. — John Shimkus

After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts. — Leon Panetta

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. — Fareed Zakaria

Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep. — Mikhail Gorbachev

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. — Daniel Silva

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire — Thomas L. Friedman

The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and 'an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it'. — Richard J. Evans

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history. — Tariq Ali

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

If the Soviet Union and its allies were allowed to continue subverting democracy with terrorism and fomenting so-called "wars of national liberation" in Central America, it wouldn't stop there: It would spread into the continent of South America and north to Mexico. Then, as I was told that Lenin once said: "Once we have Latin America, we won't have to take the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit ... — Ronald Reagan

The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure. — Milton Friedman

When I looked into the story of Soviet hockey and its players, I realized that it has nothing to do with hockey. It was a larger story using hockey as a window into the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people, with friendships and betrayals, paranoia and oppression, and the meaning of sports to people and nations around the world, and how sports was used as a political tool. — Gabe Polsky

Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

When the Soviet Union was dissolved, most of us didn't even have the feeling that the country was falling apart. We thought we would continue with our lives as in the past, but as good neighbors. — Vladislav Surkov

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture. — Brian Shactman

When I was starting out in 1988, I was doing cartoons on President George H. W. Bush, Iraq and the fall of Soviet Union. — Steve Breen

When Putin was preparing to take back the presidency in Moscow, he published an essay in the fall of 2011 in a Russian newspaper announcing plans to regain lost influence among former Soviet republics and create "a powerful supra-national union capable of becoming a pole in the modern world." Putin said that this new Eurasian Union would "change the geopolitical and geo-economic configuration of the entire continent." Some dismissed these words as campaign bluster, but I thought they revealed Putin's true agenda, which was effectively to "re-Sovietize" Russia's periphery. — Hillary Rodham Clinton