Best 33 quotes in «soviet quotes» category

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best.

Here I wake up because the pregnant woman is touching my face with her fingers. "Pane,"* she says to me, "you're calling out in your sleep and tossing about. I'll arrange a bed for you in another corner because you're pushing my father." She raises her thin legs and rounded abdomen and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. Lying on his back is an old man, dead. His glottis has been torn out and his face split in two; his beard is clotted with blue blood resembling a piece of lead. "Pane," says the Jewess, shaking the mattress, "the Poles killed him, and he begged them: 'Kill me in the back yard so that my daughter doesn't see how I die.' But they did as it was most convenient to them. He died in this room, thinking of me. And now I'd like to know," cried the woman with sudden terrible violence, "I'd like to know where you'd find in the whole world another father like my father!

Utterly absorbing.... If you did not have the opportunity to witness the Soviet empire in its death throes, Lenin's Tomb will take you there.

Dig your nails deep enough into the back of a Soviet, and eventually you'll find a Russian.

A veces oigo una música... O una canción... Una voz de mujer... Y allí encuentro lo que he sentido. Algo semejante... En cambio, veo una película de guerra y sabe a mentira, leo un libro y lo mismo, mentira. No es... No es correcto. Comienzo a hablar y tampoco me sale. No es tan espantoso, ni tan bonito. ¿Sabe lo preciosos que resultan los amaneceres en la guerra? Antes de un combate... Los observas y estás segura: ese podría ser el último. La tierra es tan bella... Y el aire... Y el sol...

Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own

Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

I left the door open for Aliyev. I thought, he won't let Russia back in. Remember, Soviet Russia had crushed him and thrown him out.

Her hair was totally Indian Woolworth perfume clerk. You know - sweet but dumb - she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess - you know - that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral appliqué earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness - she was the hippest person there. Totally.' TRACEY, 27

From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past

Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I — we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?

The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk

Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories

I've played Romeo for Juliet (But in depth) It's vignettes of silhouettes (And then read) And watched Russian roulette, yeah red Soviet Yet doing it simultaneously While dropping down shed oubliettes Turned around and took truth to the head that Love is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death

Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!

There was no such thing as Kazakhstan. It was just a chunk of Soviet Union. I had to build a country, to establish an army, our own police, our internal life, everything from roads to the constitution. I had to change the minds of the people 180 degrees, from totalitarian regime to freedom, from state property to private property. Nobody wanted to understand that. My comrades from the communist party were against me. I had to train myself too... I wasn't raised with democracy and freedom of speech.

In America, you assassinate president. In Soviet Russia, president assassinate you!

I am also one of those persons who were transformed, who grew out of the Soviet system and transformed myself into the new Russia.

In America, you drive car. In Soviet Russia, car drive you!

[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. [...] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn't funny anymore.

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.

My mom grew up in the Soviet Bloc, and she was a Tiger Mom. We didn't get away with much.

In Soviet Russia, party always finds you!

Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia.

One of the successes of the cause of the friends of peace is the ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance.

Soviet propaganda is remarkably effective and the Americans are even more remarkably stupid.

Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.

Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.