Communist Era Quotes

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.

I grew up eating quite well, even though the idea has got around that my family were terribly poor in Communist Georgia. I think it's partly because we had different standards then - it was tough, but we never truly struggled for food.

My mother was a doctor, and I grew up with her in a little apartment belonging to my grandmother, because the Soviet Union never saw fit to let our family have its own apartment.

In the name of 'mutual assistance,' the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.

Black market sounds negative, but, in fact, everybody loved the black markets during the communist era. It was the only place that officials and others could get shoes and consumer products. There were shortages everywhere. The black market during the Soviet era was essentially the only capitalism there was.

I am very familiar with Hungary, because I grew up in Romania, which borders it.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was a failure at the time, but it was a success in that it sowed the seeds of what we have today.

Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization' (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.'s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties.

In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.

During the entire communist era, communist ideology was imposed on children. That was Bolshevism.

It seems that probably Putin's father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

But how can you speed up the transformation of society in a country as large as Russia? Those sounding the moral outcry are the ones who are trying to dictate their standards from the outside. Of course, that isn't the right way to go either. One cannot impose democracy from the other side of national borders, which is something we ourselves experienced during the communist era. The West's policies toward Eastern Europe, the Helsinki process - none of that really helped us.

I worked with Dalton Trumbo, who served time for refusing to give up names of people that were accused of being Communists. I've always admired him.

There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.'

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

I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

People do forget there is still a lot of nostalgia in Russia for the Soviet Union.

My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.