Vladimir Putin Quotes

Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.

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

Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

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

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.

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

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

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn't funny anymore.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?

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.

Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it's still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.

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

The opportunities that Gorbachev created for international relations have also been missed, perhaps even lost - here, however, primarily because of the United States.

I don't put any dates on these things. I don't say what is going to happen in one year, five years, ten years, but I am confident that the trend toward freedom in the Communist world is a basic truth.

The culture and values of many former Soviet republics really do differ from what prevails in the West.

Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.

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

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

I remember my time growing up. It was a little bit difficult because the Soviet Union was broken.