A Quote by Mikhail Gorbachev
If the Russian word "perestroika" has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, i.e. progressive development, a fundamental change.
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This much I would say: Socialism has failed all over the world. In the eighties, I would hear every day that there is no inflation in the Soviet Union, there is no poverty in the Soviet Union, there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union. And now we find that, due to Socialism, there is no Soviet Union!
Mr. Gorbachev initiated Glasnost, Perestroika, so he was already, you know, way disenchanted with the rigid Communist ideology, and he was looking to become an international leader. He was more accepted actually outside of the Communist Soviet Union than inside.
The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.
My nation faces a fundamental challenge - survival. The regime is more threatened than ever before. My forefathers had it easy. The Great Leader, my grandfather, ruled with the support of the world's other superpower at the time, the Soviet Union, as well as our China. But today, the Soviet Union is history and China has become more integrated with the Western system. And the United States seeks regime change in my country. And yet, we have survived with our ideology and system intact. How? Because we have built a protection for ourselves in the form of nuclear weapons.
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.
25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe, being under the control of the USSR, would call their states "people's republics." The sham that is currently going on in the states of the former Soviet Union is due to the fact that the politicians in power are eager to polish up their image abroad.
I campaigned for [Barack] Obama for more than a year. I was in Iowa, Minnesota, California, Arizona - just traveling around to help get the word out. It was such a huge, spirited campaign, and so positive. But you travel around to cities in the U.S. now and there's just this hopelessness that has set in. It makes it hard to understand why it seems so impossible to make any kind of progressive change with an administration that is seemingly progressive, or why we keep encountering such political roadblocks to change.
In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.
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.
For the United States, supporting international development is more than just an expression of our compassion. It is a vital investment in the free, prosperous, and peaceful international order that fundamentally serves our national interest.
Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are.
The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police.
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.
...the world needs to face up to the challenge of climate change, and to do so now. It is clear that climate change poses an urgent challenge, not only a challenge that threatens the environment but also international peace and security, prosperity and development. And as the Stern report showed, the economic effects of climate change on this scale cannot be ignored, but the costs can be limited if we act early
There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?
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