Quotes About Soviet Russia

#1. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

#2. I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Ayn Rand

#3. In Soviet Russia, party always finds you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#4. In America, you can always find a party.
In Soviet Russia, Party always find you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#5. The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.

Stacy Schiff

#6. There is no such thing as "the right to enslave".A nation can do it , just as a man can become a criminal - but neither can do it by right.
It doesn't matter in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force (like soviet Russia), or by vote (like Nazi Germany).

Ayn Rand

#7. By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes.

Joseph Stalin

#8. 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.

John Amery

#9. In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you! In America, you watch Big Brother. In Soviet Russia, Big Brother watch you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#10. In America, your job determines your marks. In Soviet Russia, Marx determine your job!

Yakov Smirnoff

#11. He's got more red flags than Soviet Russia.

Kresley Cole

#12. When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#13. Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

Joseph Stalin

#14. Japan cannot conquer China with America in her rear, Soviet Russia on her right and England on her left - her most powerful enemies in the South Sea all flanking her. It is this international situation that constitutes one of Japan's great weaknesses.

Chiang Kai-shek

#15. The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub.

Adolf Hitler

#16. In America, you assassinate president. In Soviet Russia, president assassinate you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#17. In America, you drive car. In Soviet Russia, car drive you!

Yakov Smirnoff

#18. The constitution of Soviet Russia must insure equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.

Vladimir Lenin

#19. At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone

George Orwell

#20. 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.

Pierre Laval

#21. If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.

Joseph Grew

#22. In Soviet-Russia the Jew is forging the tool with which he wants to enslave Europe.

Julius Streicher

#23. To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

Grigory Zinoviev

#24. Czechoslovakia provided Soviet Russia with landing fields for aircraft, thereby increasing the threat against Germany.

Adolf Hitler

#25. The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not then have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers

Timothy Snyder

#26. This isn't Soviet Russia. This is America we're talking about. For God's sake, this is New York City.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#27. 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

#28. 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.

Evgeny Morozov

#29. No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179)

Vasily Grossman

#30. Russia is actively using gas diplomacy for its expansion over the ex-Soviet space in a bid to become a regional superpower.

Lilia Shevtsova

#31. 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

#32. Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.

Garry Kasparov

#33. ... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.

Martha Gellhorn

#34. In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

Anthony Marra

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

Frank Zappa

#36. Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

Martin Cruz Smith

#37. The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.

Arthur Miller

#38. Russia's fundamental problem is not that it is a poor country struggling to modernize, but rather that it is a rich country struggling to modernize. Schoolchildren in the Soviet era were taught that they lived in the richest country in the world. In this case communist propaganda was true

Fareed Zakaria

#39. Geography and history demonstrate that we can never discount Russia. Russia's partial resurgence in our own age following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story. Russia

Robert D. Kaplan

#40. I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.

Vagit Alekperov

#41. 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.

Jeffrey Sachs

#42. Today's Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.

Angela Merkel

#43. The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.

Anatoly Chubais

#44. The Soviet response was silence, followed by bellicose denial, followed by efforts to derail the international investigation. It was eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Russia acknowledged the truth.

Anonymous

#45. I wouldn't even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.

Sergei Lavrov

#46. Thirteen years after the end of the Soviet Union, the American press establishment seemed eager to turn Ukraine's protested presidential election on November 21 into a new cold war with Russia.

Stephen Cohen

#47. 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

#48. One Soviet general, looking at a map of the territory Russia had acquired on the Karelian Isthmus, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead

William R. Trotter

#49. We had in the West a very romantic vision of Russia back in 1991, when the Soviet Union died and whatever is Russia began to emerge. And we began to think of it as a democracy. We're going to bring it into the West. All is going to be wonderful. That was never in the cards.

Marvin Kalb

#50. In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#51. It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.

P. J. O'Rourke

#52. It seems that Russia today - dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror - is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#53. And this man, who during three long decades had not once remembered that the world contains lilac bushes - and pansies, sandy garden paths, little carts with containers of fizzy water - this man gave a deep sigh, convinced now that life had gone on in his absence, that life had continued. (pg8)

Vasily Grossman

#54. When I turn on the TV in Russia I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It's a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward.

Vladimir Sorokin

#55. Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

Richard Lugar

#56. I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

P. J. O'Rourke

#57. People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain.

Vladimir Putin

#58. 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.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#59. He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.

Oliver Bullough

#60. The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

Mal Peet

#61. Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.

Frank Chodorov

#62. She was, after all, a mattress owner and understood the subtleties of life.

Ilya Ilf

#63. 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.

Boris Yeltsin

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

Matt Stone

#65. In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.

Timothy Snyder

#66. In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#67. I don't worry about superpower confrontation. You know, I lived through the Cold War days, and where everybody was worried about a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. I think we're going to get along fine with Russia, and I don't see them as internationally ambitious.

George H. W. Bush

#68. [The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.

Allen W. Dulles

#69. The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.

Jeffrey Sachs

#70. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world. He and I had always had a cordial

Robert M. Gates

#71. 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.

Gary Shteyngart

#72. 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

#73. Having lived in a collapsed empire before - I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed - you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out.

Matt Taibbi

#74. NATO was built to counteract the Soviet Union in its day and time. At this point there is no threat coming from the Soviet Union, because there is no Soviet Union anymore. And where there was the Soviet Union once, there is now a number of countries, among them the new and democratic Russia.

Vladimir Putin

#75. 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