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Russia Quotes

“The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.”

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Book:The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election
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“Many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire. While the empire is enjoying its High Noon of prosperity, all these people are proud and glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence. Some day this phenomenon will doubtless appear in the now apparently monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire. It is amazing for how long such provincial sentiments can survive.”

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Book:The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
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“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

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Book:The Sinews of Peace
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“In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves. You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.”

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Book:Warning to the West
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“Vladimir Putin pledges no allegiance to to the democratic articles of faith, but he does not explicitly renounce democracy. He disdains Western values while professing to identify with the West. He doesn’t care what the State Department puts in next year’s human rights report, because he has yet to pay a political price in his own country for the sins reported in prior years. He tells bald lies with a straight face, and when guilty of aggression, blames the victim. He has convinced many, apparently including the American president, that he is a master strategist, a man of strength and will. Confined to Russia, these facts would be sobering, but Putin, like Mussolini nine decades ago, is watched carefully in other regions by leaders who are tempted to follow in his footsteps. Some already are.”

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Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“It should by now be clear to Americans that any Power, whether Napoleonic France or Hitlerian Germany or some other madly ambitious power of the future, which goes on the warpath in Europe and attempts to dominate that Continent, automatically endangers the peace and security of the rest of the world and is sure, sooner or later, to involve the United States in a horribly costly overseas conflict.”

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Book:Wartime Mission In Spain 1942-1945
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“I finish writing the emails and send them. I check that Yulia has access to the banking apps-a fairly pointless exercise because all my accounts have been frozen for months by lawsuits filed by "Putin's chef," Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man who, in the days of the U.S.S.R., was convicted of aggravated robbery but has now become, thanks to his friendship with Putin, "a successful entrepreneur" with a monopoly on the food supply to the day cares and schools of Moscow. We are running out of time. One more meeting is scheduled. I call Leonid Volkov, our chief of staff, Maria, and Kira. Yulia joins us. We briefly discuss the plan of action for each possible scenario: we get home without hindrance; I am arrested at the airport and jailed; I am detained, then released, and the Kremlin waits for the indignation to subside and then has me arrested; nothing happens, but I am arrested in a couple of weeks on a different charge, and so on. These scenarios are approaches the Kremlin has already used on us. In the twenty-first century you are confronted not just by the machinery of a repressive state but by the PR machinery of that state. Public opinion is what matters to all the players. The same action performed in subtly different ways can either leave people unmoved or enrage them and bring them out onto the streets to demonstrate. Everything has to be taken into account, including what day of the week it is and the weather.”

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Book:Patriot: A Memoir
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“In 1999 Putin was not a public figure accustomed to journalists and the free exchange of information. In the perestroika years Putin had been stationed in Germany as a KGB officer, and he missed everything that happened, including Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost—or openness—when newspapers were competing to expose Stalinist crimes; Soviet apparatchiks argued with dissidents like Andrei Sakharov at Congress of People’s Deputies, broadcast in real-time on television; and the pages of democratic Moskovskie Novosti were read aloud by Muscovites on Pushkin Square. Putin had little idea of how the West functioned from his posting in East Germany, which was under total control of the secret services. He missed even the fall of the Berlin Wall, because he was serving in Dresden, 125 miles south of Berlin.”

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Book:The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries
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“Russian military is a quintessential reflection of the state that created it. Autocratic, security-obsessed, and teeming with hyper centralized decision making, dysfunctional relations between civilian and military authorities, inefficiency, corruption and brutality. [Professor Zoltan Barany, January 2023]”

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Book:Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder – The Former Ambassador's Bold Vision for Confronting Authoritarian Threats
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“Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base. The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous. Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin. Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority. The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.”

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Book:No: No
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“The Russian oligarchic system is the quintessence of statist depravity, where all industry is controlled by a small number of men ruthless enough to rise to the top of a corrupt patronage system, where government serves the interests of elites, money and privilege flow to the top, the people are exploited through a venomous cocktail of brutality and graft, and truth is the enemy of the state. Russian oligarchy is economic survival of the fittest, the ultimate, balls-out Darwinian experiment in wealth consolidation by the most wicked, immoral and dishonest ― government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich at the expense and misery of everyone else.”

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Book:No: No
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“If you interpret events in Russia as a crime wave, which is the way the West looks at the rise of Putin, where organized crime supposedly came to power through the KGB, you have a problem. This explanation is not workable if you look at the larger picture and consider all the facts, because this version of history cannot account for the ongoing attempt to socialize key countries, and to spread certain political doctrines, and to build up military forces. A mafia is mainly interested in money. They are not interested in global transformation. Gangsters are not political philosophers engaged in a planetary revolution. They do not build up weapons and coordinate with revolutionary parties. Such a course is destructive of those relationships that most promise a profitable return, and long-term benefits for the business. Something less sane, less rational than mere criminal enterprise is indicated. The buildup of new classes of weapons is hardly required to maintain a global criminal enterprise. Why would mere criminals work toward nuclear superiority? It is very expensive to do this, and involves serious risks.”

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Author:J.R.Nyquist
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“Indeed, Putin would like nothing more than to see the complete collapse of NATO so he can reconstitute Russia’s lost empire without the meddlesome West standing in his way. Under his leadership, Russia is once again quietly funneling money to extreme political parties in Western Europe on both the left and the right. It seems Putin doesn’t care much about his friends’ politics, so long as they are opposed to the United States and see the world roughly as he does. Besides, Putin has no real politics of his own. He is a kleptocrat and has no philosophy other than the cynical exercise of power.”

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Book:The English Spy
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“In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. ... Those deploying this model to explain Russia’s behavior today...offer several prescriptions for how to defuse the current Russia-Ukraine crisis: Freeze NATO expansion and Russia will be content. Offer face-saving concessions that give Russia tangible gains and the threat of war will subside. Don’t arm Ukraine because that will fuel escalation and trigger a Russian invasion. If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology — only some of which comport with Western rational realism.”

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Author:Michael McFaul
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“Racism will continue to thrive until we see and threat ourselves as humans. Black people stuck in Ukraine are being subjected to racism even as they attempt to flee to safety in Poland during a time of war. Black people are treated with complete and utter contempt by white supremacists all over the world. We should all be condemning this barbaric act.”

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Author:Olawale Daniel
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“Принято считать, что все решения в России принимает только один человек — Владимир Путин. Это правдиво лишь отчасти. Все решения действительно принимает Путин, но Путин — не один человек. Это огромный коллективный разум. Десятки, даже сотни людей ежедневно угадывают, какие решения должен принять Владимир Путин. Сам Владимир Путин все время угадывает, какие решения он должен принять, чтобы быть популярным, чтобы быть понятым и одобренным огромным коллективным Владимиром Путиным. Это коллективный Владимир Путин все годы конструировал свои воспоминания, чтобы доказать себе, что он прав. Чтобы убедить себя, что его действия логичны и у него есть план и стратегия, что он не совершал ошибок, а был вынужден так поступить, поскольку боролся с врагами, вел тяжелую и непрерывную войну.”

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Book:Вся кремлевская рать: Краткая история современной России
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“По словам очевидцев, на закрытой встрече [в апреле 2008 г.] Путин вспылил, когда речь зашла об Украине. «Украина — это вообще не государство! — заявил он Джорджу Бушу. — Часть ее территорий — это Восточная Европа, а часть, и значительная, подарена нами!» Закончил свою небольшую речь Путин фразой «Если Украина уйдет в НАТО, то уйдет без Крыма и Востока — она просто распадется». На эту угрозу Путина тогда мало кто обратил внимание, потому что все следили за тлеющими противоречиями между Москвой и Тбилиси. О том, что реальный конфликт может вспыхнуть между Россией и Украиной, никто всерьез не верил.”

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Book:Вся кремлевская рать: Краткая история современной России
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“During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].”

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Book:Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
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“«Представьте себе, вот вы сидите в Кремле, — говорил он [Путин] Ангеле Меркель. — И у вас есть избиратели, которые живут в Калининграде, а есть те, кто живут в Петропавловске-Камчатском. И вам на всю эту территорию, разную по языкам, взглядам, быту, как-то надо объединить. Надо нечто такое этим людям сказать, чтобы их склеило. Одна ваша соотечественница, великая соотечественница, была нашей императрицей. Екатериной II. Она поначалу хотела быстро отменить крепостное право. Но потом изучила, как устроена Россия, и знаете, что она сделала? Она усилила права дворянства и уничтожила права крестьянства. У нас нельзя иначе: шаг вправо, шаг влево — и все, ты теряешь власть».”

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Book:Вся кремлевская рать: Краткая история современной России
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“У Виктора Януковича и Владимира Путина была длинная совместная история: еще в 2004 году Путин был уверен, что сделает Януковича президентом Украины. Близко знавший Януковича чиновник говорит, что еще тогда Янукович попросил у Путина российский паспорт. На случай, если придется экстренно убегать из страны. Что ответил Путин, неизвестно.”

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Book:Вся кремлевская рать: Краткая история современной России
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“Putin coined a slogan for his vision of a new, rule-abiding Russia that was secure and prosperous. It embodied the internal contradictions of his ideology, of his background as a lawyer and intelligence officer, and of his temperament. He felt it so deeply he used it twice in one letter. Russia, he declared, would be “a dictatorship of the law.”

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Book:The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
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“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t a staring contest. It’s a land grab, the first of this scale since World War II. But when asked about it, instead of walking up to the plate and swinging at the softball (crack! more sanctions!), Drumpf put down his bat, walked down the third-base line, and kissed the opposing team’s head coach.”

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Book:Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History
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“The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces — those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB — who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, [...] the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”

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Author:Сергей Ковалев
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“Да, часть людей понимают, что это Путин, и что это путь в никуда и катастрофическое падение нравов и каких-то зачатков демократии, которые у нас были при Ельцине, который тоже был фигурой противоречивой — но народ тогда говорил. А теперь я иду в какой-нибудь магазин — непременно кто-нибудь подходит: "Ой, Аня, мы вас так поддерживаем, так понимаем, что ты делаешь" — но говорят обязательно очень тихо, почти на ухо. Рассуждать о том, почему так случилось, можно очень долго. Но я думаю, что это оттого, что на ключевых позициях расставлены КГБшники. А генетическая память людей такова, что ЭТОМУ сопротивляться нельзя.”

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Author:Анна Политковская
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“Vladimir Putin [...] was convinced the US was set on a unilateralist course, not for a good practical purpose but as a matter of principle. Time and again, he would say, ‘Suppose we act against Georgia, which is a base for terrorism against Russia ― what would you say if we took Georgia out? Yet the Americans think they can do whatever they like to whomever they like.’ [447]”

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Book:A Journey: My Political Life
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“[С]вобода попервах здається хорошим обмінним товаром. Спершу її міняють на харчі, потім на те, щоб завжди було не гірше, ніж тепер (стабільність), потім на безпеку, і тільки потім-потім виявляється, що немає ні харчів, ні безпеки, ні стабільності, ні свободи [91].”

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Book:Малиновый пеликан
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“When Putin or any wealthy corrupted dictator can decide who is the US President, while Obama or the regular democratic authorities don't have the same power to decide who is the Russian or Chinese president, then the problem is not about Donald Trump, not about The Person,rather it is structural gap related to the Democracy and Dictatorship in deep substance and concept, and should be discussed, reflected, thought, spoke and solved from this very respect, not from drawing daily cartoons for Trump's hairstyle!”

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Author:Waseem Kanjo
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