Margarita Simonyan Quotes

For the first time in human history, there are no elders anymore who know what young people know.

The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 - and the Kremlin has never accepted it.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought the last Soviet generation was going to be the great hope for democracy. When that failed, their hopes shifted to the first post-Soviet generation, and then the second one.

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

The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.

I started working on a TV show in Australia, straight out of high school, so I missed the whole university experience.

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.

We have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early '90s, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is - you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

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

Technology is changing so fast that knowledge about specifics can quickly become obsolete. That's why so much of what technicians learn is on the job.

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.

NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

I've travelled to some of the places where Russian language and Russian culture were made part of the fabric of life long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station - and where Russian is now being rolled back, post-1991.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.

The breakup of the former Soviet Union has caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recover economically, they could produce vast amounts of food.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.

When the Soviet Union broke down, Georgia suffered a huge deal. Pretty much the whole of the 90's was known as 'the black decade... because we had a lot of electricity blackouts.

It was a very difficult time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Jobs were difficult, and you had to fight to have anything nice.

I trained at RADA, then went into the theatre, but TV is like starting at the bottom again. I have just been learning.

The collapse of the Soviet Union could not have been a source of national pride for many in Russia. The one person who has capitalized on this the most has been Vladimir Putin.

I see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy of the XX century.