Democracy Quote by Masha Gessen

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going…

— Andrzej Wajda

I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee…

— Eskinder Nega

The Soviet transition to a new political structure shows that the Soviet strategists are thinking, planning and acting in broad terms, way beyond the…

— Anatoliy Golitsyn

Even today, a majority of people surveyed say that they regret the fact that the USSR collapsed. But only 9 percent say that they…

— Mikhail Gorbachev

When the Soviet Union was dissolved, most of us didn't even have the feeling that the country was falling apart. We thought we would…

— Vladislav Surkov

Communism destroyed so many generations. I look at my grandparents and their generation, and it's as if their lives were taken from them. It's…

— Anton Yelchin

The Russian people chose democracy at the beginning of the 1990s and this was their final choice.

— Vladimir Putin

“History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade…

— Timothy Snyder

What happened to the Soviet Union happened mainly for domestic reasons. It was a failure of the model based on a command economy and…

— Mikhail Gorbachev

We did really well for a generation after 1989 and the fall of communism. Our liberal values expanded in the world, our prosperity expanded.

— Daniel Fried

The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean…

— Leon Trotsky

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical…

— Victor Serge