Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

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.

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.

In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.

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

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

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

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

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken.

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.

We should applaud peristroika but not pay for it.

Perestroika is our last chance. If we stop, it will be our death.

Perestroika and glasnost mean more nationalism, more fascism.

Glasnost has given us all a headache.

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.

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.

I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There's a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.

There is no greater advocate of perestroika than the president of the United States.

Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

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

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

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

Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

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.