If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.
It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.
And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?
If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.
If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, if you start the clock, then 47 journalists, reporters, cameramen, photographers have been killed in Russia since the fall of communism. That makes it the third most deadly country on Earth to practice journalism. That's not a record to be proud of.
Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.
Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.
When superpower countries like the United States and the former Soviet Union contemplated moving their conflicts to outer space, there was justifiable fear and dread.
The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don't know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it's not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one.
If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn't manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.
When I was 13, I read 'Et la paix dans le monde, Docteur?' a physician's account of working with Medecins Sans Fontieres during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. It was this book that inspired me to work for MSF.
The one great exception to the apathy on reunification is, naturally enough, Berlin. Encircled by the hostile Soviet Zone for ten years, at times blockaded and constantly at the Russians' mercy, Berliners are committed to this one goal with a unique urgency.
For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
The most noticeable thing about the Soviet collapse was that it followed a natural course.
One must say bluntly that it is an unattractive sight when, with a view to smearing the Soviet people, leaders of such a country as the United States resort to what almost amounts to obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching about morals and humanism.
So seven new countries, three of them formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, will become full members of NATO next year.
Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.
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.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.
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.
For many years prior to the 1990s, European integration was embraced and supported by a large majority of citizens. A united Europe, bound by commonly-held democratic values, was perceived as an essential and effective buffer against the Soviet empire. A united Europe made a repeat of the First and Second World Wars almost unthinkable.
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.
Putin himself made his original fortune in the early 1990s, when he stole the funds that had been entrusted to him to buy food in Europe to relieve the starvation in Leningrad that occurred during the economic collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
Honduras is strongly anti-Communist, maintains no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and has provided vital support for United States-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
At present, England, America, France, Italy, and Japan constitute the so-called 'Big Five.' Even with the rise of Germany and Soviet Russia, the world has only seven Powers. When China becomes strong, she can easily win first place in the Council of Nations.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
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.
If you're so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you're a Republican. If you're kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you're a Democrat.
I have a Ph.D. in philosophy and sports science. At 14, I went through this really tough Soviet training system. A lot of my roommates got psychologically broken or physically injured. Either you came through, or you were out. I made my Ph.D. work in the field of young athletes aged 14-19 because at this age any human is changing.
