Communist Legacy Quotes

Chairman Mao was after all a principal founder of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China. In evaluating his merits and mistakes, we hold that his mistakes were only secondary. What he did for the Chinese people can never be erased. In our hearts we Chinese will always cherish him as a founder of our Party and our state.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back.

Hungary was the only Central European country that was not able to create a new constitution after the collapse of the communist regime.

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

A Soviet man is a product of invisible changes, degradation and progressive deformation. Breaking the chain of those changes is hard. Perhaps they are irreversible.

Leon Trotsky, Stalin's worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward.

The connection between the Soviet Union and Czech people - or Czech politicians - was very big. It was like a model country for us. But it wasn't the best model, so a lot of Czechs don't like to speak about Russia or the Soviet Union.

People in Tel Aviv can not imagine, but in 1990, here in Leipzig or Dresden, whoever wanted to buy a car had to wait 14 years. The East Germans worked like people in the West, but the fruits of their labor were harvested by a criminal regime.

In the struggle to defend the legacy of Leninism . . . [Stalin] proved himself to be an outstanding Marxist-Leninist fighter. . . . Stalin's works should, as before, be seriously studied . . . [to] see what is correct and what is not.

After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

I am a Soviet man, and Yeltsin is a Soviet man - maybe our grandchildren will be different.

Bulgaria is fascinating. Because it had been a Communist country until the mid-80s, so it had just recently transitioned. And there were still the police towers on the street corners, where they look down - they were still there, although no one was in them.

If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!

If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

I think it's hypocritical to complain about the rise of China. For 50 years, we were telling everybody in the world that the big threat was Communism, so now the countries that were Communists are now rampant capitalists - and they're doing very well, in some ways much better than the UK. Well, we asked for it. We told them that's what you have to do, and they're doing it, buying up your biggest hotels in New York. You have to laugh.

In post-communist countries, some temporary winners of the reform are found to be an important force in resisting further reforms.

People have actually figured out that Estonia is one of the few post-Communist countries that has a genuine image in people's minds as being something.

In seventy years, Russia’s Communists had not succeeded in dealing markets such a telling blow as did its deadbeat capitalists.

Never, since the fall of communism, has it been so abundantly clear that an ethos exists, which is loath to accept the freedoms and prosperity we hold sacred in this nation.