The Afghans did not have sophisticated weapons like the Soviets did, but with their faith they defeated a superpower.
Abu Bakar Bashir
Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.
Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.
Adam Curtis
Putin probably, almost certainly, thinks that one of the great disasters of the 20th century was the demise of the Soviet Union. It's very obvious that he's trying to work its way back and maintain something similar to that sort of institution.
Alan Greenspan
I am a Soviet man, and Yeltsin is a Soviet man - maybe our grandchildren will be different.
Aleksandr Lebed
When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.
Alex North
In the first moments, the members of the Presidium who were with me at the Secretariat were taken to the Party Central Committee under the control of Soviet forces.
Alexander Dubcek
In the first day of the Soviet Army's arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything... I can only conjecture what could have happened.
As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.
Alexander Haig
I understand reform to mean the perfection of what previous generations have already done. I'm not an advocate of destroying, 'kroshat,' and then selling like they do in Russia. That's how we can prevent the wild corruption in our state like they have in the other post-Soviet states.
Alexander Lukashenko
My family fled the Soviet Union when I was three and a half years old. Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at night.
Alexander Vindman
When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.
Alice Walker
Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.
Alistair Horne
In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.
I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.
Amity Gaige
My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.
In the name of 'mutual assistance,' the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.
I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.
Amor Towles
After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen.
Anand Gopal
The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.
I'm communicating with the directors of the Soviet companies, and I see that it is wrong, but when I go to the official discussions, they discuss we should change the color of the walls.
During the election in 1989, there was the first Soviet election with alternative candidates to local government. I myself arranged special training for them.
It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy.
For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.
If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn't express yourself freely; you couldn't admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.
Our country vanished from the map of Europe after the attack of the Soviet Union against Poland. That is our history. It is a very difficult one.
In this part of the world, due to our historical experiences with the Soviet Union and later with Russia, we are used to a situation where Moscow tends to put the blame on the people whenever a tragedy occurs, rather than on the authorities.
Also a great part of Polish industry proved to have existed only to support the Soviet military industry, and it became superfluous and incapable of being transformed into anything else. We did not foresee that or the magnitude of these phenomena.
We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.
If we look at where relations between the Soviet Union and Germany were in 1945 and where we stand now, then we have achieved so much.
Today's Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.
I grew up a little girl in the Soviet Union playing at a small sports club. Tennis gave me my life.
Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union - accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.
Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone - it had been cleared of all people after the accident - together with some local environmental activists.
We don't live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union's; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.
One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.
One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.
The majority of soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army and the allied armies treated the local population humanely.
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.
Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries: the Soviet Union, for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country.
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.
The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.
Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.
The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.
Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.
By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.
