Robert Dallek Quotes

I remember my time growing up. It was a little bit difficult because the Soviet Union was broken.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

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

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

In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed.

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.

If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

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.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

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

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.