Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I started like many young Russian people in the beginning of perestroika when it seemed that everything was possible.

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.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

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.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

I paid too heavy a price for perestroika.

Perestroika and glasnost mean more nationalism, more fascism.

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.

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

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

Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism.

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

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

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

Here we were, corrupting all those Russians toward communism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad.

We should applaud peristroika but not pay for it.

... the dynamic architect of Soviet reform.