Michael Bloomberg Quotes

My entire life was dedicated to defeating communism. I felt really great when Ronald Reagan helped us establish peace and the elimination of communism from Russia. We are now dealing with a national power, and, you know, it is a big power in the world. It's no longer being motivated by communist ideology that has it trying to overthrow democratic governments and replace them with atheistic communist dictatorships.

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

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.

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

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

I was very anti-Soviet and very pro-Russian..

Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

Only in the Fall of 1924 did [Joseph] Stalin discover that it is especially Russia, as distinguished from other countries, which can by its own forces build up a socialist society.

Perestroika and glasnost mean more nationalism, more fascism.

Glasnost has given us all a headache.

We are witnessing the collapse of Bolshevism.

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

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

We were appreciating as early as 1978 that the Soviet economy was in serious trouble. We didn’t make the leap that we should have made – I could have made, that the economic trouble would lead to political trouble. We thought that they would tighten their belt under a Stalin-like regime and continue marching on.

The problem is not so much that they are Communists as it is that they are Russians.

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.

I am fully aware of the concept of political revolutions. After all, that is what we hoped might happen in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, but what actually happened was capitalist restoration.

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

I'm tired of Italian gangsters. Not that I don't watch 'The Godfather' every morning when I get up and 'Goodfellas' when I go to sleep at night. But I've just always been fascinated by Russia as a country, by the Russian personality. And now Russia is literally a gangster nation.

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

My generation was the tail end of the Cold War.

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.

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.