[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Film--Live-action ]]


->''"How the fuck do you peddle an arms race when the only asshole you've got to race against is ''yourself!?''"''
-->--'''Agent Russell''', ''Film/TheRussiaHouse''

->''"Last few years have been very confusing for people in my line of work."''
-->-- '''Gregor "Greg" Ivanovich''', ''Film/{{Sneakers}}''

->''"I '''can't''' change sides, you silly old fart! There's no side to change sides '''to!'''"''
-->-- '''General Leland Zevo''', ''Film/{{Toys}}''

->'''Earl Bassett:''' So how you and Heather doing?\\
'''Burt Gummer:''' Well, she's.. still visiting her sister. You know, she actually blames our problems on the collapse of the Soviet Union!\\
'''Earl Bassett:''' Well, you did take that kinda hard, Burt...
-->-- ''Film/Tremors2Aftershocks''

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

->''For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neoevangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth.''
-->-- '''Creator/JacquesDerrida''', ''Specters of Marx''.

->''With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution did not sink gracefully into history. It was flung there - 'on to the dust-heap of history', to borrow [[UsefulNotes/LeonTrotsky Trotsky]]'s phrase - in a spirit of vehement national rejection. This repudiation, which amounted to a wish to forget not only the Russian Revolution but the whole Soviet era, left a strange emptiness in Russian historical consciousness. Soon, in the vein of Peter Chaadaev's jeremiad on the nonentity of Russia a century and a half earlier, a chorus of laments arose about Russia's fatal historical inferiority, backwardness, and exclusion from civilization. For late twentieth-century Russians, former Soviet citizens, it seemed that what had been lost with the discrediting of the myth of the Revolution was not so much belief in socialism as confidence in Russia's significance in the world. The Revolution gave Russia a meaning, a historical destiny. Through the Revolution, Russia became a trailblazer, an international leader, a model and inspiration for 'the progressive forces of the whole world.' Now, overnight as it seemed, all that was gone. The party was over; after seventy-four years, Russia had fallen out of 'the vanguard of history' into its old posture of recumbent backwardness. In a poignant moment for Russia and the Russian Revolution, it turned out that the 'future of progressive humanity' was really its past.''
-->-- '''Sheila Fitzpatrick''', ''The Russian Revolution'', final paragraphs.

->''Tatarsky, of course, hated most of the manifestations of Soviet power, but he still couldn't understand why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its bananas from Finland.''
-->-- '''Creator/VictorPelevin''', ''Literature/GenerationP''

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live-action TV ]]


->'''Cigarette Man:''' [[UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev Gorbachev]] has just resigned.\\
'''Matlock:''' ''(distraught)'' There's no more enemies!
-->--'''''Series/TheXFiles''''', "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man"

->'''Gen. Hammond''': Col. Checkov feels that as a symbol of our joint efforts, a Russian officer should be assigned to join SG-1.\\
'''Col. O'Neill''': Over my rotting corpse, Sir.\\
'''Hammond''': ''Colonel.''\\
'''O'Neill''': I'm sorry, {{did I say that out loud}}?\\
'''Hammond''': I said I would discuss it with you and that I was sure you would give it some careful thought.\\
'''O'Neill''': And that I will, General, but I'm still pretty sure I'll say, "Bite me."
-->--''Series/StargateSG1'', Redemption Part 1

->'''Pres. Frank Underwood''': Tell me, do you kiss the wife of every president?\\
'''Pres. Viktor Petrov''': Not every president's wife looks like yours.\\
'''Frank''': [laughs, turns to the audience] I'd push him down the stairs and light his broken body on fire just to watch it burn, [[PolitenessJudo if it wouldn't start a world war]].
-->--''Series/HouseOfCardsUS''

->'''Spudgun''': I think she's got a point, actually.\\
'''Richie''': Well why don't you just go and ''live'' in the Soviet Union?\\
'''Spudgun''': Because it doesn't exist.\\
'''Dave Hedgehog''': [[CrapsackWorld And it's horrible]].\\
'''Richie''': ''[Floundering]'' Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes... well, that was my point.\\
'''Spudgun''': Well, it was a bit of a stupid point then, wasn't it?
-->-- ''Series/{{Bottom}}''

->''"Look, point is, you getting burned wouldn't have happened back then. I mean, in the '80s, the rules were the rules. They had their guys, we had our guys. Wasn't so goddamn complicated. You could get your head around it. Now, today, it's all about religion and oil. It's no fun anymore. I tell you, I'm glad I got out when I did."''
-->-- '''Sam Axe''', "[[Recap/BurnNoticeS1E1Pilot Pilot]]", ''Series/BurnNotice''

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Music ]]

-> ''Oh man, I dunno like...health insurance\\
The homeless & world peace\\
& aids & education ... I' m tryin' to do right\\
But. ..hey\\
Life after Bush and Gorbachev\\
The wall is down but something is lost\\
Turn on the news it looks like a movie\\
It makes me wanna sing Louie Louie''
-->-- Music/IggyPop, covering "Louie Louie"

-> ''And now the Wall is down, the Marxists frown\\
There's foreign shops all over town\\
But in Red Square, well don't despair\\
There's Levi's and [=McDonald's=] there\\
The US gave us crystal meth and Yeltsin drank himself to death\\
But now that Putin's put the boot in, who gets in our way?''
-->-- Music/PigWithTheFaceOfABoy, ''A Complete History of the Soviet Union, Through the Eyes of a Humble Worker''

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video games ]]


->''"We live in a sad age: Imperialism, totalitarianism, perestroika... [=20th=] century Russia had its share of problems, but at least they had an ideology. Russia today has ''nothing!''"''
-->--'''Ocelot''', ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid''

->''"The Russians got bigger things to worry about than [[ElectricTorture your genitals]], believe me. The whole country went to shit. We tried hard to put a lid on it, but that idiot Gorbachev--with the little strawberry on his forehead--he gave away the crown jewels. Still, they got their, you know, [[BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy boy in the White House]]; that was nice."''
-->--'''Mike Toreno''', ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas''

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Web Original ]]


->''"This is the overriding image of [[TheNineties the 1990s]]. The lurking horror of something that is erased. The other shoe waiting to drop. A peace time borne not out of any victory, lacking any stability, bounded menacingly by [[TurnOfTheMillennium a leering trail of zeroes]] glaring eschatologically in the distance. The nineties are a soap bubble of calm always in the midst of bursting."''
-->--'''[[http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/before-light-and-time-and-space-and-matter-white-darkness/ El Sandifer]]'''

->''"The fall of the Soviet Union caused a lot of problems -- such as political and economic disarray, missing nuclear weapons, runaway crime, that sort of thing -- but probably the worst thing about it was that moviegoers lost maybe the best bad guy country we'd ever had, aside from [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi Germany]]. James Bond used to be a lone man taking on a massive evil empire with just his wits and lovemaking skills. Then one day in the 90s he finds himself [[Film/TomorrowNeverDies fighting newspaper owners.]]"''
-->--'''''{{Website/Cracked}}''''', [[http://www.cracked.com/article_19125_6-groups-who-dont-work-as-movie-bad-guys-anymore.html "6 Groups Who Don't Work As Movie Bad Guys Anymore"]]

->''"The first half of The Nineties largely reflected this realization that the world was no longer what we thought it'd be, from the decline of the military industrial complex, to who should be the default bad guys in fiction."''
-->-- '''Website/SFDebris''' reviewing ''Film/StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry''

-> COMMUNIST RUSSIA ACHIEVEMENTS: An old feudal country became an industrial power. Decisive contribution to victory against fascism. First artificial satellite. First in space.
-> CAPITALIST RUSSIA ACHIEVEMENTS: Russian car crash videos.
-->--''Webcomic/{{Polandball}}'', [[http://i.imgur.com/yCZtA6U.png?1 Russian Then and Now]].

->''"In truth, we have not thought nearly enough about the end of the cold war, and especially the intellectual vacuum that it left behind. If nothing else, the cold war focused the mind. The ideologies in conflict, whose lineages could be traced back two centuries, offered clear opposing views of political reality. Now that they are gone, one would expect things to be much clearer to us, but just the opposite seems true. Never since the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, and perhaps since the [[UsefulNotes/RomanovsAndRevolutions Russian Revolution]], has political thinking in the West been so [[WeHaveBecomeComplacent shallow and clueless]]. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in. The connection between words and things has snapped. The end of ideology has not meant the lifting of clouds. It has brought a fog so thick that we can no longer read what is right before us. We find ourselves in an illegible age."''
-->--'''[[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118043/our-libertarian-age-dogma-democracy-dogma-decline Mark Lilla]]''', ''The New Republic''

->''"Admittedly, besides its moral failure, communism failed in its crusade to convert the whole world...But communism's impact was and still is enormous. In addition to provoking significant changes in capitalist economies, such as vastly increased military spending and the growth of a military-industrial complex, the USSR's existence changed Western social development in fundamental ways.\\
Labor reform in the West in the past century came about under the threat of a radicalized international labor movement protected and supported by the USSR. President UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt's [[TheMoralSubstitute New Deal was in part meant to steal the thunder of radicals]] who looked to Moscow and therefore could not be ignored. Social goals that are commonplace today, including women's rights and racial integration, were planks of the Communist Party platform long before mainstream American parties took them seriously. It was Communists who first went to the American South and began organizing African-Americans and poor whites around issues of social justice. The more politically acceptable young people who followed them in TheSixties are heroes today. On the international scene the Soviet Union provided support for UsefulNotes/NelsonMandela and other reformers. Communism made life difficult for Western establishments, and it is doubtful that reforms would have come when they did if the USSR had not existed. Communists always rejected reform in favor of revolution. Ironically, however, the existence of the Soviet Union helped the capitalist West reform itself and avoid the bloody revolutions of the East. Twentieth-century communism was no passing illusion; its legacies are everywhere."''
-->-- '''J. Arch Getty''', [[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-future-did-not-work/378081/ The Future Did Not Work]].

->''If you look closely, you'll notice that dystopian sci-fi movies underwent a subtle conceptual shift around the turn of the 1990's. Throughout the preceding three decades, We Have Seen the Future, and It Sucks proceeded more often than not from an assumption of total civilizational collapse, whether because of nuclear war, ecological devastation, pandemic disease, or some combination thereof. In the 90's, however [[labelnote:footnote]]And rest assured that I'm well aware of the irony of everything I'm about to say, looking back on that era from the vantage point of 2022…[[/labelnote]], there was only one global military superpower left standing, making it harder to imagine plausible scenarios for nuclear Armageddon. Prompt and seemingly decisive governmental action against environmental menaces like leaded gasoline, DDT, and ozone-devouring chlorofluorocarbons gave reason to hope that we might eventually get a handle on deforestation, declining biodiversity, and global warming as well. And although diseases like AIDS and ebola remained as scary as ever, Pestilence had always run a distant third among the Horsemen of the B-Movie Apocalypse. So rather than imagining the end of civilization, the dystopias of the 90's increasingly turned their attention to its decadence and senility, contemplating what might go wrong as an ever more self-involved populace paid ever less attention to the power structures under which they lived, leaving the latter to run amok. In other words, the genre went back to its roots once the ultimate conceivable catastrophe ceased to be quite so readily conceivable.''
-->--'''Scott "El Santo" Ashlin''', [[http://1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/noescape1994.htm 1000 Misspent Hours]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]


->''"In June, [[UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy Jack]] had his unpleasant meeting with [[UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev Khrushchev]] at Vienna. Khrushchev wanted total disarmament, as opposed to Kennedy's meager ban on nuclear testing, so devised that each side could cheat. It seems clear now that the Russians wanted to settle their accounts with us and move from war to peace. But Jack was not about to let twilight turn to peaceful evening if it meant that, in the process, he would be reduced from potential warrior-god to mere UsefulNotes/ChesterAArthur."''
-->-- '''Creator/GoreVidal''', ''Palimpsest''

->''“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be [[WarForFunAndProfit an unacceptable shock to the American economy.]]”''
-->--'''George Kennan'''

->''"I'm running out of enemies...I'm down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro."''
-->--'''Colin Powell'''

->''"We all grew up in a very different era, when we were focused on the threat from the Soviet Union. What's happening now is we are seeing problems from a variety of places, some of it due to globalization, frankly, which has an opposite side that has created a lot of nationalism in those countries or places where people feel lost within the facelessness of globalization...to put it mildly, the world is a mess."''
-->--Former U.S Secretary of State '''Madeline Albright'''

->''"He who doesn't regret the collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't have a heart; he who wants to see it reborn doesn't have a brain."''
-->--'''Vladimir Putin''' paraphrasing the old adage, "A conservative at 20 has no heart, a liberal at 40 has no brain."

->''"The man's search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends! The Soviet Union's let him down! Albania's gone! The Red Army is out of Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia. The hunt persists!"''
-->--'''Christopher Hitchens''' on George Galloway

->''"World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century--that is, from [[UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror the unintended consequences]] of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world. U.S. administrations did what they thought they had to do in the Cold War years."''
-->--'''Chalmers Johnson''', ''Blowback''

->''"Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, [[CapitalismIsBad everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true]]."''
-->-- '''Russian joke from the 1990s'''

->''" The fall of the Eastern Bloc was the second worst thing to have happened to Eastern Europe, right after the creation of the Eastern Bloc "''
-->-- '''l.djouder2716''' commenting [[https://youtu.be/N5Z3cc03DSI?si=1tGgmODiAeXrjNpP this]] video.
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