Soviet Quotes - Page 20

• According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Army, Sea, Mujahideen

  "The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan". "Le Nouvel Observateur" Interview, www.globalresearch.ca. 15-21 January 1998.

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

  Alex North

  Country, Years, Two

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• Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  Lance Morrow

  Hero, Ukraine, Eggs

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• I remain convinced that for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is Genocide in the classic sense of the word.

  James Mace

  Country, Simple, Ukraine

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• Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.

  Henri Lefebvre

  Life Changing, Lessons To Be Learned, Ideas

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• 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.

  Andrzej Wajda

  Military, Support, Magnitude

  "'Why Not Have Our Own World?' Interview with Andrzej Wajda". Interview with Renata Murawska, sensesofcinema.com. July 2005.

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• The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police.

  Kevin Myers

  War, People, Political

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• Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  War, Self, Cold

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• When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States' policies of one hundred years ago, but then they always blame America first.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  War, Years, America

  "Kirkpatrick Hit Liberals for Blaming America First". www.washingtontimes.com. May 15, 2006.

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• The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

  David Frum

  War, Islamic, Names

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• Carter's hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.

  Walter Russell Mead

  Military, War, Issues

  "Seven questions for Walter Russell Mead". The Economist Interview, www.economist.com. January 16, 2010.

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• 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

  War, Character, Hands

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• Peter Beinart excoriates the doughface liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off.

  Rich Lowry

  Country, Real, War

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• Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.

  Mark Steyn

  Integrity, Agency, Government

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• Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

  Winston Churchill

  Russia, Rights, Political Opinions

  Winston Churchill's speech to the Scottish Unionist Association in Edinburgh, Scotland (September 25, 1924), later published in "Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963" edited by Robert Rhodes James (Volume 4, p. 3472), 1974.

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• 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.

  Xi Jinping

  Party, Important, Unions

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• Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

  Boris Johnson

  War, Order, Russia

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• 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?

  Ken Livingstone

  War, America, Issues

  "I would have loved to be PM" by John Harris, www.theguardian.com. March 5, 2008.

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• What would you do if you were President, and, on the first day of May, the Russian Ambassador presented you with a beautiful cake which emitted a curious ticking noise? Would you plunge it into a pail of water - thus insulting Soviet cuisine in general?

  W. C. Fields

  Funny, Beautiful, Humorous

  W.C. Fields (2016). “Fields for President”, p.63, Rowman & Littlefield

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• There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Funny, Art, Humorous

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• A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.

  George Mikes

  Funny, Sports, Humorous

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• Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

  Frank Zappa

  Funny, Humorous, Russia

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.330, Simon and Schuster

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• The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas")

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Running, Humorous

  Dave Barry (1997). “Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States”

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• Our attainments [in space] are a major element in the competition between the Soviet system and our own . . . . in this sense, [they] are part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.

  James E. Webb

  War, Moon, Space

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• 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

  Wall, Firsts, Hammers

  Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1994). “The View from the Kremlin”, HarperCollins

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