Roustam Tariko Quotes

Gorbachev's legacy is that he called time on communism, partially against his will, but in fact, he finished it off. Without violence. Without bloodshed. Beyond that, I am struggling to think of much else in terms of real legacy.

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

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.

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.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

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.

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.

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

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 essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.