Culture Quote by Stefan Heym

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

— David Remnick

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

Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naïve, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration…

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Frank Zappa

The opportunities that Gorbachev created for international relations have also been missed, perhaps even lost - here, however, primarily because of the United States.

— 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

It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.

— Anatoly Chubais

I decided to go into politics because of our Soviet-style government.

— Bidzina Ivanishvili

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement…

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

“We is still banned in the USSR.”

— Gerard K. O'Neill

Dad's astute knowledge of foreign policy impressed Gorbachev during the time of the Berlin Wall when Dad refused to gloat during the reunification of…

— Dorothy Bush Koch

In 1980 I was a red kid and no one could have said anything bad about the Soviet Union. At least this is how…

— Lubos Motl