Lemmy Quotes

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

The difference between eastern Europe and the United States is that the United States still has a Communist party.

… 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.

The Ukraine has a long history of either being part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere.

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore's 'The Taste of Ashes' is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.

Stalin is a strong, ruthless revolutionist and therefore a very potential threat to future world conditions.

We face a hostile ideology [Communism]—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.

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

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.

I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.

The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.

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.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.

When we were in school, we were told that Stalin was a madman who got control of Europe, which teaches you nothing.

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

I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.

Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if 'the Russians love their children too.'

Poland is different from the other so-called socialist countries. We have a different background. Poland belongs to the West, not the East. We belong to the Mediterranean, Latin culture, not to the Byzantine, which is very different and which you find in Bulgaria and even parts of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Romania.