Brezhnev Quotes

The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century.

Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.

I'm part of nobody's world except Brezhnev's.

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.

The only law we broke was the Brezhnev doctrine that once a country is in the Soviet bloc it cannot be overthrown.

The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist.

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.

Leonid Brezhnev did not understand the enormous political importance of the decision to produce and afterwards deploy the SS-20s.

I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.

It’s irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. What they think of me after I’m dead and gone in one generation will be determined by researchers who do PhDs on me, right? So there will be a lot of revisionism. As people revised Stalin, Brezhnev and one day now Yeltsin, and later on Putin. I’ve lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you’re dead.

If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.

The Russians love Brooke Shields because her eyebrows remind them of Leonid Brezhnev.

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

When the Soviet Union came to be run by a valetudinarian mafioso like Brezhnev, the thing itself had fallen into self-contempt.

Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.

The man who occupies the first place in an undemocratic state can give himself any award that takes his fancy, but it does not increase his authority - rather, the contrary. This was something Brezhnev and Chernenko did not understand. In all, Stalin had about as many decorations as, say, Mekhlis, and four or five times fewer than Brezhnev

One of the surprising things that Brezhnev said when we were in our talks, was - when I proposed that we make these changes in nuclear weaponry, he said, "God will never forgive us if we don't succeed." And, you know, coming from the leader of an atheistic communist country, this surprised everyone.

Brezhnev wasn't a minus for the history of our country, he was a huge plus, He laid a foundation for the country's economics and agriculture.

In retrospect, I can see that President Brezhnev was quite proud of the limited agreement that he had concluded in Vladivostok; and to have a new American president come in and say, "That is not good enough - let's do much more, and do it quite rapidly," took him by surprise.