Ambitious Quote by Alexander Zinoviev

The essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and…

— Stephen Cohen

Gorbachev was acutely aware of the [USSR] economic problems, and it was central to all he did. He wanted to change the system in…

— David Hoffman

Gorbachev's legacy is that he called time on communism, partially against his will, but in fact, he finished it off. Without violence. Without bloodshed.…

— Helmut Kohl

Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt…

— David Hoffman

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

— Frank Zappa

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

— David Remnick

The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an…

— John Dos Passos

Gorbachev gave us freedom of worship and freedom of speech and freedom to see what was going on and freedom to vote, but that…

— Boris Yeltsin

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

— Ronald Reagan

“In a “secret speech” to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev made a sensational revelation of the…

— Stephen R.C. Hicks

“When reason, common sense, and decency are assaulted often enough, then personality is crippled, and human intelligence disintegrates or is warped. The barrier between…

— Frank Ellis

Its [Communism's] unfortunate association with violence encourages a certain evil tendency in human beings.

— Jawaharlal Nehru