Putin Recent Quotes

If the Putin regime faces a democratic revolt, it will seek to defend itself by claiming it is under attack by foreign agents. The apartment bombings demonstrate that it is the Putin regime itself that is the enemy of the population, and that the regime will not hesitate to use any means at its disposal to stay in power. At the same time, the apartment bombings, more dramatically than any other episode in recent Russian history, demonstrate the inherent criminality of the Russian authorities’ view that individuals exist for the benefit of the state.

The United States and NATO took advantage of Russian weakness and, despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to Eastern Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

MANY STUDIES POINT TO recent historical events to explain today’s turn away from democracy, like the 2008 recession and increases in global migration that heightened racist sentiments. Other works go back to the collapse of Communism in 1989–1990. Unleashing nationalist and tribalist sentiments in Eastern Europe, it encouraged the resurgence of the far right in Western Europe as well. Putin, the former Communist functionary who is now a leader of the global right, successfully rode that tide of political upheaval and ideological transformation

Because historians in Putin's Russia no longer adhered to the standards of objective scholarship, instead producing works consistent with the party line—as during the Soviet era—the new study would likely produce a narrative “proving” that Novorossiya was linked historically to the “new Russia” and therefore belonged to the “new Russia.” U.S. think tank experts had recently left meetings in Moscow disappointed by the

Jaws dropped this week when Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who until recently was NATO’s civilian head, stated that it is highly likely that Russia will soon stage a violent provocation against a Baltic state, which being NATO countries, will cause a crisis over the Alliance’s Article 5 provision for collective self-defense. Rasmussen merely said what all defense experts who understand Putin already know, but this was not the sort of reality-based assessment that Western politicians are used to hearing.

Conspiracy theories have been the rhetoric of choice for leaders in states moving toward (or already with) authoritarian control. Recent examples include Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and Duerte in the Philippines.

But you don't have to my word for it that Russia and Putin are being unfairly scapegoated. Even Nadezhda Tolokonnikova- the founder of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, whose members were imprisoned in Russia in response to their anti-government protest at an Orthodox Church- recently expressed such an opinion. As Tolokonnikova explained in an interview with David Sirota in the International Business Times, "I'm not terrified of him {Putin} at all. I don't think you have to be terrified of him. He's just a guy who claims that he has power, but I claim to have power too and you have power....If you talk here about mainstream liberal media in America, which speak a lot about Putin, I think it's just a trick....They don't really want to talk about internal American problems....They're just looking for a scapegoat and, you know, for Trump it's Muslims and Mexican workers. And for liberal media in America it is Putin.

Similarly, in 2014, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and former senator John Breaux (D-LA) became the main lobbyists for Gazprombank, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest supplier of natural gas. More recently, in 2016, millions of dollars in Russian money was funneled to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell3 and other high-profile Republicans to finance GOP senatorial candidates.

At the same time, Trump began his own effort to condition the Republican party to accept and even adopt his fawning view of Russia and Putin. Trump converted his pro-authoritarian sentiments into a weapon with which to bully any dissenters in the GOP into submission. In schooling the Republican faithful, Trump took a large swath of the party back in time. Throughout the campaign, Trump returned repeatedly to the theme that Russia was misunderstood by the West. In December 2015, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, Trump made his veneration of Putin, who had recently termed him “brilliant,” plain. Trump dismissed host Joe Scarborough’s warning that Putin murdered journalists and political opponents without compunction as so much piffle. “I’ve always felt fine about Putin,

In his Hillsdale address, Caldwell began by explaining that he wasn’t intent on telling anyone what to think about the Russian dictator (a term, incidentally, he never used to describe Putin) but how to think about him. He went out of his way to deride Western “globalist leaders” for pretending that sovereignty was passé. Putin didn’t. “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Caldwell affirmed, “is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled.