Quotes & Sayings About Ussr

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At — Masha Gessen

I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness. — Vasily Grossman

Gorbachev was acutely aware of the [USSR] economic problems, and it was central to all he did. He wanted to change the system in hopes of saving it. In the end he could not. — David Hoffman

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey — Jean-Paul Sartre

Now the opportunity to destroy the USSR has arrived. — Sadao Araki

I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Truth and justice are commonly found in the personality of the paranoid delusional — Russian, Unknown

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. — Eric Hobsbawm

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached. — Edward Abbey

Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back. — Mikhail Gorbachev

Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy! — C. Wright Mills

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Aparteid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state - and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffed cannibal. p 500 — David Mitchell

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA. — Jorge Luis Borges

Of late, attempts have been made in the USA - at a high level and in a rather cynical form - to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy. — Leonid Brezhnev

(on visiting the USSR after Stalin regime installed)
All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours? — Panait Istrati

She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love. — David Remnick

I try to help developing junior chess. When I lived in USSR, I got a lot of free help from very good coaches - now I am trying to repay that debt. — Boris Spassky

The abbreviations (e.g. NATO, UN, USSR - E.W.) denote that and only that which is institutionalized in such a way that the transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. — Herbert Marcuse

Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, "The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I'm still not going public. — Lee Child

To a Soviet person, used to the nationality policy of the USSR, all the mistakes of the American government's Indian policy are evident from the first glance. The mistakes are, of course, intentional. The fact of the matter is that in Indian schools, class is conducted exclusively in English. There is no written form of any Indian language at all. It's true that every Indian tribe has its own language, but this doesn't change anything. If there were any desire to do so, the many American specialists who have fallen in love with Indian culture could create Indian written languages in a short time. But imperialism remains imperialism. — Ilya Ilf

The fact is that the buildings here were not made to speak to the world as we know it, but to the citizens of the USSR. Visible from afar and unfailingly spectacular, they are effectively monuments, ideological markers endowed with an almost mystical aura by their positioning in space and expressive power. "By its incongruity, by its inhuman stature" writes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, "the monumental dimension serves to emphasize the non-representable nature of the very concept that it evokes." This concept, whether in Grodno, Kiev or Dushanbe, is might. The might of power. A power that would soon become illusory and whose crumbling is indeed manifested by the growing stylistic diversity of this architecture. — Frederic Chaubin

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking. — Elliott Liu

It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: "If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people." Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, "the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east. — Timothy Snyder

Stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it's like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it's not democracy. It's not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they're mostly symbolic. — Noam Chomsky

It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists." [519] — George F. Kennan

To the USSR on Stalin's death: Regardless of the identity of government personalities, the prayer of us Americans continues to be that the Almighty will watch over the people of that vast country and bring them in His wisdom opportunity to live their lives in a world where all men, and women, and children, dwell in peace and comradeship. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The USA and USSR will only agree when shrimps learn to fly. — Nikita Khrushchev

The Soviet Union has long been proposing to outlaw chemical weapons, to remove them from the arsenals of states. We are prepared for resolution of this problem either on a global basis or piece by piece. As one of the first steps the USSR and the other socialist countries proposed in January 1984 that agreement be reached on ridding Europe of all types of chemical weapons. — Konstantin Chernenko

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense. — Boris Spassky

The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different. — Vasily Grossman

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires; — Svetlana Alexievich

If Berlin fell, the US would lose Europe, and if Europe fell into the hands of the Soviet Union and thus added its great industrial plant to the USSR's already great industrial plant, the United States would be reduced to the character of a garrison state if it were to survive at all. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I offered them Utopia, but they fought for the right to live in Hell. — Mark Millar

The infected wound in the world's heel is the Israeli-Palestinian question that is only going to get worse, since nothing can stop the protagonists of this inextricable situation, which opposes Judaism to Arab Islamism, from moving to extremes. By invading nearby Iraq, Washington and the 'neo-conservatives' followed an absurd perception of geopolitics and have only succeeded in making the infected wound a bit worse. Since the fall of the USSR, unilateral American imperialism has not stopped destabilising the world's equilibrium, especially in the Near East. This region will soon catch fire, with an intensity that we cannot yet imagine. — Guillaume Faye

LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"
American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness. — A.E. Samaan

Sergei, what are you checking for?" I asked. At first I thought it was funny. He moved quickly and efficiently, making a clean sweep of each room with me trailing behind him.

"I am checking to make sure we are alone," he informed me. "You could be spy."

"Sergei, I'm not a spy. There is no one here in my apartment besides you and me. You know where I work." I tried to assure him, but I didn't know what else I could do to convince him otherwise. — K. Kidd

Vladimir Putin shot out of obscurity in 1999 by exploiting growing nostalgia for the USSR, fueled by the disappointment, uncertainty and crisis that brought Yeltsin's reform era to a shuddering halt. Once in power the following year, Putin set about building an authoritarian regime whose control would expand for more than a decade, until soaring corruption on top of another economic downturn - a much smaller one, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008 - prompted another backlash. — Gregory Feifer

The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them. Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime. — Ken Follett

Americans don't like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And really, why strain yourself when so many wonderful names already exist in the world?
The entrance to the town of Moscow is shown in the photograph. That's right, an absolutely authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province.
There's another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow. — Ilya Ilf

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images. — Lynne Viola

This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible. — Natan Sharansky

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? — Norman Cousins

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience - the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR's own espionage that led to the success of Hitler's 1941 surprise attack - was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions. — Pete Seeger

The similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored. Both groups are driven by a totalitarian vision. The followers of Karl Marx envisioned a world transformed into a workers' paradise in which all other classes had been destroyed and only one party, the Communist Party, was in control. Today's jihadists also have a universal vision. They look forward to a global caliphate in which all have submitted to the will of Allah and live as Muslims, the infidels and apostates having been slain. Both visions are exclusive, absolutist, and totalitarian. They are predicated on a 'them or us' vision of how the world must be. There is no possibility for peaceful coexistence with the 'other'. — Sebastian Gorka

Let's not forget that one poll after another clearly demonstrates that well over 50% of Russian citizens still wants both socialism and the USSR back. And the Russian government is listening. — Andre Vltchek

Even under Stalin, Soviet state power, acting through law and the courts, confronted serious limits in its efforts to govern, much less transform, its colonial Central Asian periphery. — Douglas Northrop

Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject 'nations' to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence - in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier - of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or 'capital. — Tony Judt

I cannot see that any rational American ... could conceivably try to fulfill the major national purposes of the United States through the United Nations. It would be comparable to the United States seeking to pass its legislation through the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. — Charles Lichenstein

The world would be better off with multiple superpowers. When Communist USSR was a superpower, the world was better off. — Janeane Garofalo

Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has ... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I like Russian trains. Not for comfort, of which there is none, nor speed, of which there is barely any to be spoken about, particularly when you relate it to the size of the country that must be crossed. Not even, particularly, for the view, which is inevitably repetitive, as Mother Nature decrees that her works of wonder can only occur so frequently across such a vast and cultivated space. I like Russian trains, or at least those I travelled on in the early spring of 1956, so many centuries after I gunned Lisle down in cold blood; I like the trains for the sense of unity that all these hardships create in its passengers. I suspect the experience is relative. — Claire North

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed. — Natan Sharansky

In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. — Anna Funder

The Soviet Union could not exist without the image of the empire. The image of the empire could not exist without the image of force. The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall. — Boris Yeltsin

Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops. 'Will you,' the asked, 'promise to divide the estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?'

'Only over my dead body,' responded Kaledin. A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains. And the Cossack movement was no more... — John Reed

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them. — Martin Amis

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 "terrorists acts" aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders. — Lynne Viola

Pope Pius XI called for a world-wide day of prayer, to be held on 16 March 1930, on behalf of the persecuted believers in Russia. This action led Stalin to suspend temporarily the antireligious campaign, according to Roy Medvedev — Lynne Viola

This radical transformation of world power relationships reflects primarily in the case of both the USA and the USSR the growth of the productive forces. — Earl Browder

When agents of the Turkmen secret police came up short in arrests of counterrevolutionaries in 1937-38, they filled their quota by going to the Ashgabat marketplace and rounding up all men who wore beards, on theory that they were likely to be mullahs. — Douglas Northrop

There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother ... — Vasily Grossman

I am truly happy that I am able to travel from time to time to the USSR the country I love above all. I always have been, I am now and will always be a loyal friend of the Soviet Union. — Paul Robeson

Still other rumors held that the ultimate aim of Bolshevik policy, seen in the combination of unveiling and collectivization, was to have all women held in common. In the kolkhoz, peasants ware warned, men and women slept together under giant blanket, and wives became common property. — Douglas Northrop

The general economic growth of the quarter of a century that followed World War II not surprisingly created many illusions. In the West, people thought that they had found in Keynesianism the definitive solution to the problem of crises and unemployment. It was thus thought that the world had entered into an era of perpetual prosperity and definitive mastery of the business cycle. In the socialist world, it was also thought that the model formula for even higher growth had been discovered which enabled Khruschev to announce victoriously that by 1980 the USSR would have overtaken the united States "in every domain." In the third world of Africa and Asia, the national liberation movements which had seized political independence, also had a battery of prescriptions which, in a mix of capitalist and socialist recipes, in doses that varied from case to case, would enable these movements to overcome "underdevelopment" in "interdependence. — Samir Amin

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. — Natan Sharansky

He alone knew the USSR was populated by many total enemies of socialism, egotists and vipers of the future world, and he secretly consoled himself by the thought that one day soon he would exterminate the whole mass of them, leaving alive only proletarian infants and pure orphans. — Andrei Platonov

Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin's Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror. — Freda Utley

The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve at
about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so
much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,
that's what must have happened in this case) — Victor Pelevin

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. — Daron Acemoglu

In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants. — Lynne Viola

When the history of the 20th century is finally written, one of its key features will be the wanton slaughter of more than 170 million people, not in war, but by their own government. The governments that led in this slaughter are the former USSR (65 million) and the Peoples Republic of China (35-40 million). The point to remember is that these governments were the idols of America's leftists. Part of the reason for these and other tyrannical successes was because the people were first disarmed. — Walter E. Williams

What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal [ sic - and throughout as typescript] writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. — George Orwell