Without a tutor to help me in the study of Marxism-Leninism, I was no more than a theorist and, of course, had total confidence in the Soviet Union.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In the Cold War, a lot of Soviet actions could be explained as extensions of Czarist imperial ambitions, but that didn't stop us from studying Marxism in theory and Communism in practice to better understand that adversary.
Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.
In Georgia, people had already understood that communism couldn't survive, and I came to the institute in Moscow, and people still believed in it. They were completely different people, and I found it very difficult psychologically.
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.
To begin to know the philosophy of socialism, in backward countries where the class differences are great, very great, and terribly exaggerated over the conditions we know in this country, to overcome this, the theory of revolution, of force and violence, was necessary within those political conditions. It couldn't be anything else.
I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.
Even now we feel that Stalin was devoted to Communism, he was a Marxist, this cannot and should not be denied.
My father was convinced, I think rightly, that if he stayed in Russia, he would have trouble with Lenin.