Soviet Quotes
Even when Russia was coming to grips with Stalin’s crimes against humanity, Hoxna was still an apologist for the Soviet Dictator, whose “mistakes” cost millions of lives.
This is an example of what made the Cold War so difficult. The Italian Communists had great misgivings about the Russian version of Communism that tended to abuse human rights and try and control other countries. However, when the Russian Communists were under world attacks by the West, as with their incursion into Hungary, he urged that all the Communists stick together and defend the Russians even for policies that they thought wrong. On the West side, the same thing occurred. The United States tolerated and supported a number of terribly oppressive dictatorships that were virulently anti-Communist. Polarization was the international norm.
Bush wanted to expand NATO to include Poland and Hungary. However the German and American governments had previously (before the collapse of the Soviet Union) given promises to the Russians that NATO would never be expanded Eastward from East Germany. See {32678}. Bush went ahead and violated those promises anyway using the excuse that the agreement had not been part of a treaty. That decision had implications for Russian attitudes towards the United States and Western Europe. The Russians repudiated their agreements in 2014 and invaded the Crimea and took it from Ukraine. The Russians however had broken promises many time whereas the United States reversals of promises, like this were few. Bush’s logic however was not in keeping with traditional American standards. We made a deal with Russia when they were a strong superpower who could easily damage many of our national interests. However, when they were weak, we no longer have to do anything we agreed to when they were strong. The great irony was that reacting against Westernization of Ukraine, Premier Putin, by seizing the Crimea and successfully supporting ethnic Russian separatists in Ukraine put Russia back on the map as a major power in the world who could act with impunity against the interests of the West, Europe, the United States and the NATO countries. Most Russians rejoiced that Russia was again an empire that could not be dictated to.
