Soviet Union Breakup, Soviet Breakup, Collapse of the Soviet Union Quotes

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken.

For ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was wracked by poverty and social decay: the country suffered a demographic collapse on a scale never before witnessed in an industrial country outside of wartime as deaths outstripped births and the country’s population shrank by some 800,000 people each year.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

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.

Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

An uncontrollable situation, in which there are no clearly defined spheres of authority, has come about in the country. Under these conditions, normal life is impossible.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military rotted away. In one of the most dramatic campaigns in world history, from 1988-1994, Moscow's armed forces shrank from 5 million to 1 million personnel.

A major geopolitical disaster

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the "death of socialism." They never say "the death of democracy." But it makes about the same sense.

The problem is not so much that they are Communists as it is that they are Russians.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyone in America assumed that there would be wars to follow - wars over the reunification of Germany, over the nations within the sphere of Soviet influence, and more. There weren't, because George H. W. Bush's policies and diplomacy prevented that.

The Soviet Union could not exist without the image of the empire. The image of the empire could not exist without the image of force. The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

The Cold War didn't end. It was won.

Today the Soviet Union is a friend and an ally. We need this friendship. However, no one can know what will happen tomorrow. Just like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, it may tear itself apart or shrink in size. Those peoples that it holds so tightly in its grip may one day slip away. The world may see a new balance of power.

I didn't know what country I represented anymore.

I will take the best from each system and introduce it in Russia..

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Marxists are coming around to seeing my views on the economy with greater perspective. I was the one who propounded that there should be a 'level-playing field' among nations on the economic front, that they cannot have low-interest rates in their countries and argue against cheap labour in India.

Neoconservatism in all its pomp conceived - in the Project for a New American Century - that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world could be remade in the American image, that the previous bipolar world could be replaced by a unipolar one in which the U.S. was the dominant arbiter of global and regional affairs.

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

The average CIA agent was far more comfortable in the refinement of an embassy, a presidential palace, or sitting at the bar in a five-star hotel, than in the marketplace or a peasant hut--a preference that equipped them poorly, to say the least, for the task of gathering real grass-roots information or assessing levels of popular feeling. Time and again, in the Middle East, in Indochina, and in Central America, the CIA agents made disastrous miscalculations that repeatedly left the US utterly unprepared for various violent upheavals. The CIA failed completely to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, and didn't see the collapse of the Soviet Union until it was right on top of them. To put it bluntly, frequently the CIA had too high an opinion of itself to get down with the mass of the people and find out what was really going on.

The West’s lopsided support for pro-Western nationalists in the former Soviet republics has encouraged those states to oppress their Russian-speaking populations—a problem to which Russia could not remain indifferent.

The fall of the Berlin Wall really demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was a bad system, and what subsequently happened in the Soviet Union, that that system was a failure.

Now the opportunity to destroy the USSR has arrived.