Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

I left Russia in 1993 optimistic that democracy had taken hold despite the obstacles.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

I grew up with communism, and if you live through communism you don't love it.

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.

Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.

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

Only enemies of the Soviet Union can think of the KGB as some kind of secret police.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

Generalissimo of the Forces for the Suppression of Communism

[Describing glasnost:] A media management policy.

Russia is now a horrible picture with its revolutionary double nature. It lies there like a huge wreck on the shore, broken up by its revolution.

The Cold War is Over

If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

In 1917, with the Bolsheviks, you had intra-elite conversations about what the country should be doing. You had arguments. Under Stalin, you didn’t really. But then after Stalin, you started having those arguments again.

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.