Soviet Legacy Quotes

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

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.

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future.

Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

Take, for example, Lithuania. Do you know, what was its population in the Soviet times? It was 3.4 mln people. It was a small country, a small republic. And what is it now? I have looked though the recent statistics, today the population of this country is 1.4 mln people. Where are the people? More than half of the citizens have left the country.

Much of my journey in Kazakhstan was about understanding the legacy of the Soviet times and finding out what remained of nomadic.

Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.

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.

In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.

The Russian people chose democracy at the beginning of the 1990s and this was their final choice.

A likely source for terrorists seeking to buy or steal nuclear materials is the former Soviet Union.

In the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin invaded the Republic of Georgia. Let's call it for what it is. Here is Vladimir Putin with a failing Soviet franchise. And when he can't win the hearts and minds of his neighboring nations, he uses energy extortion, masked gunmen and barbed wire.

The number one foreign policy goal of Russia is control of the former Soviet space.

In this part of the world, due to our historical experiences with the Soviet Union and later with Russia, we are used to a situation where Moscow tends to put the blame on the people whenever a tragedy occurs, rather than on the authorities.

The Baltic republics have invented something totally new. Do you know what? They use the word 'non-citizens' for people who have been living for decades in the territory of Baltic states and have been deprived of a number of political rights. They cannot participate in the election campaigns; they have limited political and social rights. Everybody keeps quiet about it, as if this is the way it should be. Of course, this cannot but cause a certain reaction.

In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively.

Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they would want it back.

I look at Obama, a young man, a good-looking person. That is my first impression, I feel sorry for him. He looks 100 percent like Lukashenko, when I came to power after the breakup of the Soviet Union

I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.

Most inhabitants of these post-Soviet states also resent that people in the West consider their outlook backward and reactionary.