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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Corruption had always annoyed me, but I recognized that it was because of Putin and his system of governing that it had become so normalized in recent years. The whole country knew that, and I wanted to do something about it. To do so, though, I needed to become a fully qualified party in the battle against corruption. In one corner there would be Putin's corrupt oligarchs and bureaucrats and in the other there would be me. But what claim did I have to be the opposition? I wasn't a prosecutor, so how could I legally go after them? I had by then graduated from the Financial Academy with a degree in finance and credit and had a fair idea of how stock markets and exchanges worked. It dawned on me that there were state-owned companies where corruption was particularly blatant, and I could buy shares in them on the stock market. By making even a small investment, I would have the power as a shareholder to request documents from the company, file complaints, go to court, and attend annual meetings. For $5,000 or so I bought shares in several companies, including Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company; Gazprom, the largest gas company; and Transneft, which transports oil. These were gigantic, wealthy, state-controlled corporations it would be scary to tangle with. If you did you would probably get a visit from some toughs sent to beat you up for asking awkward questions. No one (including the companies) could imagine that some blogger without powerful friends would risk taking them on. If he did, he must surely have powerful forces backing him. Actually, I had no one backing me. I just knew my way around finance, and I also knew my rights. At that time newspapers regularly published articles about embezzlement in state-owned companies. Thanks to my shareholdings, I was now directly affected by this reporting. I wrote something like this in a letter: Dear Gazprom, I've been reading an article in such and such newspaper and wonder what's going on here. Could you kindly give me, as a shareholder, an explanation? Even though my shareholding was vanishingly small, they were obliged to report back to me. When the answer came, I would read it carefully, and if the company's actions were against the interests of its shareholders, I would take them to court. As soon as I became party to a lawsuit, I could demand to be sent documents and minutes of meetings. When ?I received them, I made them publicly available on my LiveJournal blog. My battles with state-owned companies eventually attracted tens of thousands of followers. However, I was looking for allies, not just followers. I invited my subscribers to send complaints and sue these companies with me. For instance, in Vedomosti, I read a report that the government had bought a building in Moscow city center from Viktor Veskelberg, an oligarch, for several times its real value. It was obviously a corrupt deal. I prepared templates for complaints, and thousands of people submitted them along with me to the Investigative Committee and President Medvedev, who at the time was pretending to be vigorously fighting corruption. I repeated this technique many times. It was easy enough to disregard one person, but much more difficult to ignore thousands, especially if you knew that all the documents were going to be published on the internet. I attended shareholder meetings, which were usually held in a theater or somewhere similar. Invariably there was a stage on which representatives of the company sat and read their reports. Those in the audience were mostly ordinary shareholders who were suitably impressed by all the ceremony. The senior management on the stage, security officers everywhere, the presence of journalists-all of it ensured the audience remained reverently silent, in the midst of which I would stand up and say, "I have a question.

Mikhailova anticipates they might detain me after I have passed through the turnstile, that is, after formally crossing the border. I would then be taken away quickly. So she will go through first, then I, then Yulia. these are important issues we need to discuss if we are to be prepared for every eventuality, but I do not actually believe I will face any threats on the day of arrival. I have long ago given up trying to analyze and predict the behavior of Putin and the Kremlin. There is just too much irrationality in it. Putin has been in power for more than twenty years, and like that of any other leader in history who has stuck around that long, his head is filled with messianic obsessions, all that "No Putin, No Russia" stuff, openly proclaimed from the rostrum of the State Duma. The real balance of power between the sundry groups in the Kremlin is also unknown, no matter what the political analysts choose to write. So it is futile to try calculating what "they" might do next, and we have to do what we think is right. We have, however, a general understanding of how the media and public opinion function. More or less all we know about Putin's technique for ruling is that he conducts endless opinion polls and takes account of the results in his planning. Arresting me at the airport would not be in his interests. Of all the scenarios for isolating me, this is the one most favorable for me. In the first place, the European Court has already ruled on the Yves Rocher case, recognizing that I am innocent. I make that point during our discussion: "Are you trying to tell me they will arrest me on a charge that has already been ruled against by the European Court of Human Rights? You must be joking." Arresting me for "failing to observe the conditions of a suspended sentence" would be too cynical, even by the standards of the Kremlin. First they try to poison me, and then, when I am in a coma and in intensive care, they announce, "Oh, look, he has failed to register with the police. Let's imprison him on that county." If they try it, they will immediately lose the battle for the first bastion of public opinion, the journalists who follow closely how the situation is developing. My period of probation in a case they brought in 2014 ended, after numerous extensions, on December 30, 2020, eighteen days ago. So it is no longer possible to revoke my suspended sentence. Obviously, no such trifling matter as the law will ever deter a Russian judge, for whom the only thing that matters is the telephone call in which his boss gives him his orders. But why make everything difficult, why attract attention, and, most important, why whip up sympathy for me with blatantly illegal harassment? At his most recent press conference Putin referred to me dismissively with a phrase that had clearly been though through and characterizes his latest tactic: "Who cares about him?" So would it not make the best sense to operate within that framework and ignore my return? Reduce a big deal to a puff of smoke? Instead of providing journalists with the anticipated great shots of me being arrested, let them have a video of me coming out of the airport with my luggage, unsure what to do with myself while waiting for a taxi? Then, after a couple of weeks, when the fuss is over, call me in for questioning on the latest fabricated criminal charge. A couple of months after that, impose house arrest. Three months or so after that, move me to a prison with a short sentence, then renew it. Then just keep me there. Everyone will have gotten used to it by then. Why would anyone protest when I'd been in prison for ages? No, Putin is nuts, but he's not going to be crazy enough to create a major incident by arresting me at the airport.

Now that we have tons of autobiographical testimony and interviews and archive documents and, most important, now that we can see with our own eyes the "reformers of the 190s" transmogrified into Putin's lickspittles, propagandists, oligarchs, and bureaucrats, and all of them extremely rich, we should be honest, repudiating hypocrisy and any attempt to justify ourselves for our wasted years. We should admit that there never were any democrats in power in Russia, in the sense of people with a genuinely liberal, democratic outlook. And the main narrative of our recent past, the confrontation between "democrats" and Soviet conservatives, never happened either. "What do you mean, never happened? I was part of it!" Even I want to protest in response to such a radical, or naive, or wicked assertion. But it is only too obvious that it never happened, at least not in the way those involved in the events portray it. There was an objective historical process. There was the U.S.S.R., ideologically, economically, and morally bankrupt. There was a conflict between elites, in which one faction, in order to sweep away senile dotards, tricked itself out in more popular colors, those of "democrats and supporters of a market economy." With that slogan it seized power. Well, isn't that just the way of the world? Are you going to accept that one section of the elite came up with new slogans and won, or are you going to go around with a liberalometer checking everybody's ideological purity to find out who most believed in what they were saying and who was less than sincere? Actually, a device of that description would have been very helpful, and the lack of one is exactly why nothing worked out "like in America" or, for that matter, in the Czech Republic. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, those opposing the conservatives, socialists, dodderers, idiots, and saboteurs had as their leaders (or just playing a crucial role) people of the stature of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. They had stood their ground in the face of oppression and persecution, and over many years had shown in action a genuine commitment to the words they proclaimed from the podium. In Russia everything was different. The chief "radical democrat" was Boris Yeltisn. I was born in 1976, at which time Yeltisn was the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the CPSU. That is, he was the governor of the largest industrial region in the Urals with powers that were far in excess of today's governors. There he behaved like a typical Soviet petty tyrant, and just as in the mid-1970s he would climb into his official black car, live in his officially provided apartment, and acquire his official elite dacha, so until his death that is the lifestyle he and his family took for granted. He belonged body and soul to the Soviet party establishment, and what little he knew about the life of the "common people" he gleaned from his chauffeurs and servants.