Helmut Kohl Quotes

I started like many young Russian people in the beginning of perestroika when it seemed that everything was possible.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

I didn't believe that the Soviet Union would ever break down.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

Perestroika is our last chance. If we stop, it will be our death.

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There's a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.

There is no greater advocate of perestroika than the president of the United States.

Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed.

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.

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.

On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.

Glasnost has given us all a headache.

Democratization was not a slogan, but the essence of Perestroika.

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.

The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.

When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.

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

He [Mikhail Gorbachev] has, as many great leaders have, impressive eyes....There's a kind of laser-beam stare, a forced quality, you get from Gorbachev that does not come across as something peaceful within himself. It's the look of a kind of human volcano, or he'd probably like to describe it as a human nuclear energy plant.

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.

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