About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come and see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.

The line is associated with Nikita Khrushchev’s confrontational rhetoric during the early Cold War, when the Soviet leadership framed the USSR’s rivalry with the West as a historical struggle in which socialism would inevitably outlast capitalism. Khrushchev used such language in the mid-1950s amid heightened East–West tensions and propaganda battles over “peaceful coexistence,” decolonization, and competing economic systems. The remark became famous in Western media as a threat of Soviet military destruction, though it was also tied to Marxist-Leninist claims that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions and be “buried” by history rather than by direct attack.

On its face, “We will bury you” sounds like a blunt promise of annihilation. In Khrushchev’s ideological register, however, it also functions as a deterministic claim: capitalism is doomed by historical forces, and socialism will survive to preside over its funeral. The surrounding language (“history is on our side”) underscores a Marxist view of history as moving through stages toward communism. The quote’s notoriety stems from the gap between Soviet ideological idiom and Western reception: what could be intended as triumphalist historical prophecy was widely heard as a direct geopolitical threat, intensifying fears about Soviet intentions.