Home/Recent kwiples > Issues >

Soviet Union

Saturday 24th of October 2026

Cold War 2.0 A big difference between today’s cold war and the original one is that China is not exporting revolution.  From Cuba to Angola and Korea to Ethiopia, the Soviet Union underwrote leftwing insurgencies worldwide. Edward Luce, Financial Times, March 8, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Communism Communism in Russia simply burned itself out.  It had demanded too much and delivered too little, creating an atmosphere of apathy in which the only pleasures were little ones and the future held no prospects. By the 1980s, even the Soviet elite had lost faith in Communism, as it watched the outside world overtake the country in everything except military expenditures and alcohol consumption. Its self-confidence gone, it put up feeble resistance and, seizing for its own benefit a great deal of state property, accepted the regime's demise with equanimity. Richard Pipes, Communism © 2022 Kwiple.com
Communism  Communism thus did not come to Russia as a result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans. This salient fact was to determine its course. Richard Pipes, Communism © 2022 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c America is behaving like the Soviet Union, and China is behaving like the United States. Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? © 2021 Kwiple.com
Power Although they have amassed immense power and wealth, Putin and his immediate circle remain intensely resentful of the way in which the Soviet Union, Russia and their own service [the KGB] collapsed in the 1990s — and  great power mixed with great resentment is one of the most dangerous mixtures in both domestic and international politics. Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, March 11, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Power Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas  hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational force. Even if the United State was not aggressively  expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly  not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and it democratic allies. Robert Kagan, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia  In Soviet days most of us were really quite  happy with a  dacha, a colour TV and access  to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of  the population, not with the western elites. … It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society. A “senior former Soviet official” quoted by Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, Nov. 30, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia Now, with the Kremlin once more bleeding men and resources in a foreign war, and again sagging under a torpid economy, western policymakers risk being caught out a second time.  Just as a failure of imagination blinded the  west to the Soviet Union's imminent demise, so the same failure — and an inability or reluctance to understand Russia as the colonial empire it remains — is blinding western policymakers to the potential for the Russian Federation’s dissolution. Casey Michel, Financial Times, Januaryt 10, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Russia Russia's problem was ultimately not just about its military weakness. Its problem was, and remains, its weakness in all relevant forms of power, including the power of attraction. At least during the Cold War a communist Soviet Union could claim to offer the path to paradise on earth. Yet afterward, Moscow could provide  neither ideology, nor security, nor prosperity, nor independence to it neighbors. It could offer only Russian nationalism and ambition, and eastern Europeans understandably had no interest in sacrificing themselves on that altar. Robert Kagan, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Soviet Union Soviet totalitarianism thus grew out of Marxist seeds planted on the soil of tsarist patrimonialism. Richard Pipes, Communism © 2022 Kwiple.com
Soviet Union There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration. Gerald Ford, October 6, 1976, in a debate with Jimmy Carter © 2023 Kwiple.com
Soviet Union Throughout its existence, the Soviet state destroyed people and destroyed any memory of the destruction. Sergei Lebedev, quoted in Financial Times, April 10, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Spies As early as the 1920s, Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, had more than 100,000 agents at home and a dedicated unit to co-ordinate operations abroad. In contrast, MI5’s counter-espionage unit had five officers. The US was little better. In 1929, secretary of state Henry Stimson  had closed the government’s code-breaking department because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times, September 8, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
 
Ukraine Putin did not thrust into Ukraine to reconquer this fabled “breadbasket.” The quest was for a certified sphere of predominance from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea. Unopposed for years, he did it because he could, and he could because the West had cashed in its peace dividends after the suicide of the Soviet Union in 1991. The American military in Europe, once at 300,000, had dwindled into 65,000 before Putin pounced.  Germany's 3,000 panzers had shrunk into 360. Opportunity, not acreage, beckoned. Josef Joffe, New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2022, review of Blood and Ruins  by Richard Overy  © 2022 Kwiple.com