Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

No one has murdered more communists than the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

… 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.

Russia has never recognized the crime of the Soviet regime. The crimes of the Stalin regime and the millions who died—There was no repentance.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

Not counting the 26.5 million Russians who died in WWII, 20 million Russians were killed by the Stalinist regimes….the Stalinist regeme is still an open wound that the country can’t close.

Stalin was an equal opportunity murderer. He killed his own family—he killed his real enemies

Stalin's methods did not help.

Nothing can excuse the cruelties of Communist Russia, though in the East torture does not provoke revolt as it would in the West.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed.

...instantly introduce mass terror, shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted...You must act at full stretch: mass searches. Executions for possession of weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and unreliable elements.

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn't exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn't possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.

Since he took power over half a century ago, Fidel Castro proved to be a brutal dictator who must always be remembered by his gross abuses of human rights, systemic exploitation of Cubans, unrelenting repression, and stifling censorship upon his own people.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

What this man did, Fidel Castro, is he oppressed his people for nearly six decades. That legacy is firing squads. It's poverty. It's denying human rights.

We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

We've been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn't care about the law.