On the Internet you can often find a quote from one of the most famous American diplomats, in which he regrets the disappearance of the Soviet Union. We checked to see if Kissinger said this.

Here's what the popular text says: “The famous diplomat Henry Kissinger said that at the age of 96 he became disillusioned with the ideas of capitalism and considers the greatest sin of the United States to be the “planned destruction of the only fair world state - the Soviet Union.” According to Kissinger, this idea was prompted by the behavior of his own grandchildren.

“Modern people have everything and at the same time have nothing. Nothing makes us happy, we are not truly happy. Soviet people could sincerely rejoice in such simple things as jeans, toilet paper or raw smoked sausage, and therefore lived fully, breathed deeply. We corrupted him, opened the door for him to a world where the bestial laws of capitalism were hidden behind the bright lure of abundance,” he said.

The diplomat emphasized that it took him many years to understand that happiness does not lie in everyday well-being. “We only had sex, and they had love. We only had money, and they had sincere human gratitude. And so in everything. It’s hard to call me a fan of socialism, I’m a Westerner with Western thinking, but I believe that in the Soviet Union a new person was really born, one might say - Homo soveticus. This person was a step above us, and I’m sorry that we destroyed this reserve. Perhaps this is our greatest crime,” he concluded.”

This quote is very popular on social media. For example, publication with her in the official support group for socialist Nikolai Platoshkin on Facebook caused more than 500 reposts. On the official website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation you can see and response to this statement from Doctor of Historical Sciences Juozas Jermalavičius, who took the opportunity to criticize capitalism. On February 10, 2021, the next episode of Nikita Mikhalkov’s program was released "Besogon TV", in which he prefaced the quote with the words: “And this is what the subtlest, smartest enemy of the socialist communist system, former Secretary of State of the United States of America Henry Kissinger says,” and cited it as an argument in favor of the Soviet system of governance.

Indeed, the influential diplomat Henry Kissinger is known for his consistent criticism of the socialist system. At the same time, for many years he was one of the main characters in the dialogue between the two countries, and in modern times he has retained personal connections with the top officials of the Russian state. Natalia Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova and Andrey Kolesnikov in their book “First person. Conversations with Vladimir Putin" with reference to the words of the Russian president, they claim that Kissinger in a personal conversation once told him, then still the right hand of the mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak: “You know, I am now very much criticized for my position at that time regarding the USSR. I believed that the Soviet Union should not leave Eastern Europe so quickly. We are changing the balance of the world very quickly, and this can lead to undesirable consequences. And now they blame me for this. They say: the Soviet Union has left, and everything is fine, but you thought that this was impossible. And I really thought that this was impossible. To be honest, I still don’t understand why Gorbachev did this.”

It is impossible to verify the authenticity of the last quote - it was said (or not said) in a personal conversation. But in any case, it is obvious that it has nothing in common with the statement that interests us - neither in meaning nor in formal content. As for the quote you are looking for, it first appeared on October 15, 2018 in publications... the Panorama news agency, a satirical resource that once again became the root cause of the appearance of unreliable news in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, and then false knowledge in the heads of tens, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.