A Quote by Svetlana Alexievich
Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.
Related Quotes
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!
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.
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.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, a traumatic shock to me, ended any ambivalence I had about the Soviet Union, and all cooperation with Communists in united fronts.
Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women's emancipation is only a slogan in - but also, I should say, in many places outside - the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers' toil.
You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union, but we made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it.
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.
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.
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.
I see the collapse of the Soviet Union as a great tragedy of the XX century.
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.
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.
Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
Back in 1956, we signed a treaty and surprisingly it was ratified both by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and the Japanese Parliament. But then Japan refused to implement it and after that the Soviet Union also, so to say, nullified all the agreements reached within the framework of the treaty.
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.
Related Authors
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
American
Journalist
Andy Rooney Quotes
American
Journalist
Ann Coulter Quotes
American
Journalist
Anna Quindlen Quotes
American
Journalist
Bill Vaughan Quotes
American
Journalist
Dave Barry Quotes
American
Journalist
Dennis Prager Quotes
American
Journalist
Erma Bombeck Quotes
American
Journalist
Fran Lebowitz Quotes
American
Journalist
George Will Quotes
American
Journalist
Glenn Beck Quotes
American
Journalist
Hunter S. Thompson Quotes
American
Journalist
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
American
Journalist
Molly Ivins Quotes
American
Journalist
Rachel Maddow Quotes
American
Journalist
Walter Lippmann Quotes
American
Journalist