Quote by Gary Shteyngart

“[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities,” one Soviet official explained in 1973.”

— John Lewis Gaddis

“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

“There was bread enough for us in the army, on the front line. We were fed by the Russian people. And no one had…

— Vasily Grossman

“It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For years before my Navy enlistment, I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGB's history of political intrigue in preparation for a career…

— Malcolm Nance

“The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been…

— Masha Gessen

“Every time this happened, some arbitrarily chosen scapegoats were punished for overzealousness in carrying out the old policy. These were circumstances that encouraged fatalism…

— Sheila Fitzpatrick

“* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the…

— George Orwell

“One incident preserved by General Ismay in an apocryphal and somewhat lively form may be allowed to lighten the narrative. His orderly, a Royal…

— Winston Churchill

“[The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for…

— Allen W. Dulles

“I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he…

— Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov

“As and old (and clandestine) Soviet joke used to express it, the problem with the past...is that it is always so unpredictable.”

— Francis X. Blouin Jr