The colonial power tended to be France or Britain, and the Soviets were proclaimed as anti-imperialists. So, if you align yourself with the Soviets, it fits nicely with that kind of rhetorical division, but in reality it does not get you anywhere.
During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.
What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.
I was used on a number of occasions by the United States and China as a conduit. For instance, I was up there talking with the Chinese leadership and they said to me that they were a bit concerned that the Americans had a misunderstanding about their relationship with the Soviets. There was some suggestion that there was a rapprochement developing between China and the Soviets, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
When Estonia reestablished its sovereignty after a half century of successive thuggish, totalitarian, foreign occupations by the Soviets, the Nazis, and then again the Soviets, we knew we wanted to create a democratic country characterized by rule of law and respect for human rights.
In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary!
Blaming the imperialists nowadays is obviously absurd, as is blaming the Americans, who obviously don't have the slightest desire to control anything in the Middle East. The American desire is to get out as quickly as possible and the general view is that now that the Cold War is over and the Soviets are no longer a problem, we have no reason to stay there, let's get out. They will have to confront their own problems. Israel provides a useful scapegoat but it's a limited one.
Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.
It was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology. And so it was against that backdrop that the early space flights took off.
I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.
Slobodan Miloševi?, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us - for weal or woe - for the new world.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.
In the old days, the Soviets were using space as a selling point for communism.
There was no testimony of conspiracy - Oswald's efforts to get in touch with the Soviets and with the Cuban Fair Play groups in New York were rebuffed, rebuffed at every step.
They've done away with those committees. That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country.
USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.