"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Part 1, Chapter 6
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/East_Germany
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a statelet that existed from 1949 to 1990 in middle Germany as part of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by East Germany →
Related Quotes
"East Germany, apparently the most successful Communist regime, although with its economy wrecked by ideological misma…"
"A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth-…"
"An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of Occupied Germ…"
"The creation of two German states, an event unforeseen at Tehran, Yalta, or even at Potsdam, was a signal Cold War ph…"
"It seems to me that certain definite patterns are emerging from the situation in East Germany and the Eastern Europea…"
"I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Repub…"
"During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communis…"
"The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The…"
"East Germany ranked higher among the world’s economies than South Korea does today, and was able to make some claim t…"
"The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between …"