Russia

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Russia has only two allies; its army and navy. ~ Alexander III of Russia

Russia (Russian: Росси́йская Федера́ция), also known as the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world by area, and encompasses more than one-eighth of Earth's inhabited land area. Russia extends across eleven time zones, and has the most borders of any country in the world, adjoining sixteen sovereign nations. It has a population of 146.2 million; and is the most populous country in Europe, and the ninth-most populous country in the world. Moscow, the capital, is the largest city in Europe, while Saint Petersburg is the nation's second-largest city and cultural centre. Russians are the largest Slavic and European nation; they speak Russian, the most spoken Slavic language, and the most spoken native language in Europe.

The country originated from the Kievan' Rus formed in the 9th century, which converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988. The Grand Duchy of Moscow formed during the Middle Ages gradually expanded into the Russian Empire by the 18th century. Russia remained an absolute monarchy until World War I, when its government was overthrown in a revolution that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, a Communist government founded by Vladimir Lenin. Despite mass death and totalitarianism under Lenin and his successor Joseph Stalin, the USSR rapidly industrialized in the 1930s, defeated an invasion by Nazi Germany during World War II, and occupied Eastern and Central Europe. The USSR became a global superpower during the Cold War competing for influence against the United States. The USSR and its sphere of influence collapsed between 1985 and 1991, and it was replaced by a federal semi-presidential republic and capitalist economy in the 1990s. However, it experienced democratic backsliding in the 21st century, and has bad relations with the United States, the European Union, and NATO, due to its authoritarianism and its invasion of Ukraine.

Despite the fall of the USSR, Russia remains powerful. It is a major producer of oil and natural gas, has the largest nuclear weapons stockpile in the world, and is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. It also is a founding member of the CIS, the CSTO, the EEU, the SCO, BRICS, and the G20. Its current head of state is President Vladimir Putin, and its current head of government is Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

There are things in Russia which are not as they seem.
~ Georgy Zhukov
The Russians are a queer mixture of strength and weakness. They have got a passion in their intellect, say, a passionate intellect. They have a distracted and restless emotional being, but there is something behind it which is very fine and psychic, though their soul is not very healthy. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Quotes[edit]

  • I’ve been taught to hate the Russians/All through my whole life/If another war comes/It’s them we must fight/To hate them and fear them/To run and to hide/And accept it all bravely/With God on my side
  • Russians may be unique, just like all peoples are, but this does not mean that they are uniquely bad. Or, to put it differently, being good is hard if you live under an authoritarian regime. As the war rages on and anti-Russian sentiment grows, the temptation to see the Russian people as perpetrators rather than victims also grows. But to view them this way obscures something more fundamental: They too are victims, because they have been gradually stripped of their status as free moral agents. This is by design. Authoritarian leaders aim to implicate their own people in their crimes, which in turn allows them to both spread and dilute political responsibility. If responsibility is spread across the population, then so is guilt. To repudiate Putin would mean repudiating themselves.
I think many Russians, but also a lot of Westerners, make a very serious mistake in trying to look for… a better person to become president. They are searching for such a person in Navalny, in myself, but that’s a mistake. Anyone who replaces Putin is going to take Russia along the same imperialist route.
[...] It is a very large and very diverse country, and if you want to manage it from one central spot, you need to have a very strong bureaucratic apparatus. To have such a huge apparatus at the centre has to be explained by having to protect the country from an outside enemy – there is no other explanation that people will accept.
~ Mikhail Khodorkovsky
  • A lot of Russian Jews are determined to stay in Russia and want to develop their Jewish identity. Their heritage in Russia is Yiddish-based.
    • Irena Klepfisz 1997 interview in Meaning and Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets by Gary Pacernick (2001)
  • International law. We see that our colleagues from the NATO countries are pursuing a policy of containing Russia, increasing their military activity on our borders, creating a military infrastructure on the “eastern front”, as they say, and resorting to unsubstantiated accusations instead of diplomatic methods... It is also alarming that our Western colleagues use the term “international law” less and less often. Instead, they talk more about a rules-based order... something they can invent themselves... We urge our colleagues to comply with the agreements reached within the framework of international law.
  • Unfounded accusations. Several years ago, the United States started accusing Russia of violating the INF Treaty, without providing any evidence. We basically had to pry the information from the US, information that would help us understand... what they meant. The US eventually mentioned the 9M729 missile, claiming that it had been tested on certain days at a certain testing site, and that the range violated the treaty’s provisions. Our data concerning these tests showed the opposite. The missile’s range is allowed under the treaty.
  • NATO foreign ministers met several days ago to support the US position. According to media reports, they did this after Washington presented certain irrefutable documents confirming that the treaty was violated. If this is so, we have not received any such documents from the US side. This is what we have been asking the US to do for a long time. We are still ready for a serious and professional discussion. Instead, the Americans resort to unfounded accusations, and again and again, from high rostrums, make allegations for the entire international community to hear about things that should first be clarified with the other party to the treaty. This would be a more appropriate, polite and correct approach.
  • When we are accused...Every time a problem occurs, we ask very specific questions. For example, the crash of the Malaysian Boeing in Ukrainian airspace in July 2014. Where is the data from the Ukrainian radars? We provided our data. Where are the records of what the Ukrainian dispatchers said? No answer. Where is the data from American satellites that surely exists? No answer again. The questions are very specific. So in the case of Salisbury, where are the Skripals? There is no room for “highly likely” here. There can only be two answers here: yes or no, alive or not. Therefore, it is very difficult...
We are concerned about what the US and its closest allies are doing with respect to Venezuela, brazenly violating all imaginable norms of international law and actually openly pursuing the policy aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government in that Latin American country... ~Sergey Lavrov(Foreign Minister of Russia) (29 January 2019)
  • We are concerned about what the US and its closest allies are doing with respect to Venezuela, brazenly violating all imaginable norms of international law and actually openly pursuing the policy aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government in that Latin American country... According to our sources, the leaders of the opposition movement who have declared ‘dual power’ are in fact receiving instructions from Washington not to make any concessions until the authorities agree to abdicate in some way. Together with other responsible members of the international community, we will do everything to support President Maduro’s legitimate government in upholding the Venezuelan constitution and employing methods to resolve the crisis that are within the constitutional framework...
    Given signals coming from the EU and... Caribbean countries, as well as...China and India... we would like to figure out what the international community could do to prevent another blatant violation of international law and violent regime change... This is what I discussed yesterday with the Iranian foreign minister, who - just like us - wants to find an opportunity for external players to prove themselves useful to the Venezuelan people.
  • Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national program that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.
    • Vladimir Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination", reported in Vladimir Lenin; Doug Lorimer (2002). Marxism & Nationalism. Resistance Books, p. 125. ISBN 1876646136.
  • Russia has made its choice in favor of democracy. Fourteen years ago, independently, without any pressure from outside, it made that decision in the interests of itself and interests of its people — of its citizens. This is our final choice, and we have no way back. There can be no return to what we used to have before. And the guarantee for this is the choice of the Russian people, themselves. No, guarantees from outside cannot be provided. This is impossible. It would be impossible for Russia today. Any kind of turn towards totalitarianism for Russia would be impossible, due to the condition of the Russian society.
  • People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain. We do not regret this, we simply state the fact and know that we need to look ahead, not backwards. We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead. We understand where we should move. But we must act based on a clear understanding of what happened..
  • There are things in Russia which are not as they seem.
    • Georgy Zhukov, as quoted in "Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years" - Page 518 - by Dwight David Eisenhower - 1963
[To the] ...Ukrainian Armed Forces. Comrade officers, Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.... I urge you to immediately lay down arms and go home.
I've killed my son! I've killed my son! ~ Ivan the Terrible[1]
With NATO’s eastward expansion... We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us. ~ Vladimir Putin
[Vladislav] Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.
~ Peter Pomerantsev
It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.
~ Aleksandr Dugin, Foundations of Geopolitics.
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.
~ Yuri Bezmenov



I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order. ~Mikhail Gorbachev
Has not the political thinking in the world changed substantially? Does not most of the world community already regard weapons of mass destruction as unacceptable for achieving political objectives? ~ Mikhail Gorbachev
File:Cropped Barack Obama and Vladmir Putin shake hands at G8 summit, 2013.jpg
Barack Obama and Vladmir Putin shake hands at G8 summit, 2013
The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Russia... Where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
~ Abraham Lincoln


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes about[edit]

A[edit]

  • Russia has only two allies; its army and navy.
  • If Russia is to be a great power, it will be, not because of its nuclear potential, faith in God or the president, or Western investment, but thanks to the labor of the nation, faith in knowledge and science and the maintenance and development of scientific potential and education.
  • You don't fight Russia and America. You get Russia and America to fight each other, and destroy each other.
  • The Russians are a queer mixture of strength and weakness. They have got a passion in their intellect, say, a passionate intellect. They have a distracted and restless emotional being, but there is something behind it which is very fine and psychic, though their soul is not very healthy. And therefore I am not right in saying that Gandhi is a Russian Christian, because he is so very dry. He has got the intellectual passion and a great moral will-force, but he is more dry than the Russians. The gospel of suffering that he is preaching has its root in Russia as nowhere else in Europe... other Christian nations don't believe in it. At the most they have it in the mind, but the Russians have got it in their very blood. They commit a mistake in preaching the gospel of suffering, but we also commit in India a mistake in preaching the idea of vairagya [disgust with the world].
    • Sri Aurobindo, June 22, 1926 quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). [1]
  • Russia is a geriatric maritime giant surrounded by much more energetic rivals.

B[edit]

You know, I never planned to leave. I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. You know, I played their game, pretending, of course.
~ Mikhail Baryshnikov
He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . .
Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there — the stronger you are the worse it is.
~ Joseph Brodsky on what would have become of his friend
Mikhail Baryshnikov, had he stayed in Russia
I hate to say it [...] but, after the novelty wore off, I had this cliché moment of a Russian émigré abroad: I really missed black bread. I know it’s stupid, but I really missed it.
~ Alexei Navalny, about when he lived in the US.
Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body.
~ Timothy D. Snyder
​Little soldiers, brave little guys,
And who is your esteemed?
– Our esteemed, the invincible Tsar
That's who our esteemed is.
Little soldiers, brave little guys,
Do you have a darling?
– There's a darling, our dear mother,
Our Holy Rus'.

Little soldiers, brave little guys,
Where is your glory?
– Our glory is the Russian state – That's where our glory is.

Soldiers, brave little guys,
Where are your grandfathers?
– Our grandfathers are [the] glorious victories,

That's where our grandfathers are.
~ Soldatushki, marching song popular in the 19th century.[2]
Here is the pace. (Starts at 0:30)
We can only pity the Poles. We are too powerful to hate them, the war that will break out will be a war of extermination – or at least it should be.
~ Alexander Pushkin on the November Uprising, 1830
Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Land of slaves, land of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, people, devoted to them.
Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus,
I will hide from your pashas,
From their all-seeing eye,
From their all-hearing ears.
– Mikhail Lermontov
Your Great Russian dream is to sit up to the neck in shit, and drag everyone else down there. That's what Russism is. ~ Shamil Basayev
You know what impresses me more about Russia than its T-80 tanks and MiG-31 fighters? The writing of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoyevsky. The music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky. The scientific achievements of Lomonosov and the engineering genius of Tsiolkovsky. What these brilliant Russians achieved will still be spoken of long after...
~ Jeffrey Evan Brooks
Western European humanity moves by will and reason. A Russian person lives first of all with his heart and imagination, and only then with his will and mind. Therefore, the average European is ashamed of sincerity, conscience and kindness [regarding it] as "stupidity"...
...a Russian person, on the contrary, expects from a person, first of all, kindness, conscience and sincerity.
~ Ivan Ilyin
  • The February meeting of NATO... defense ministers... revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China... NATO seems oblivious to the changing dynamics of today's world, as if it were living on a different planet. Its one-sided Reflection Group report cites Russia's violation of international law in Crimea as a principal cause of deteriorating relations with the West, and insists that Russia must "return to full compliance with international law." But it ignores the U.S. and NATO's far more numerous violations of international law and leading role in the tensions fueling the renewed Cold War: Illegal invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq... broken agreement over NATO expansion into Eastern Europe... U.S. withdrawals from important arms control treaties... More than 300,000 bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the U.S. and its allies since 2001... U.S. proxy wars in Libya and Syria, which plunged both countries into chaos, revived Al Qaeda and spawned the Islamic State.. U.S. management of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led to economic collapse, Russian annexation of Crimea and civil war in Eastern Ukraine... The stark reality of the U.S. record as a serial aggressor whose offensive war machine dwarfs Russia's defense spending by 11 to 1 and China's by 2.8 to 1, even without counting other NATO countries' military spending.
  • In the 21st century, nations cannot; and we cannot allow them to redraw borders by force. These are the ground rules. And if we fail to uphold them, we will rue the day. Russia has violated these ground rules and continues to violate them. Today Russia is occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory. Let me be crystal clear: The United States does not, will not, never will recognize Russia’s attempt to annex the Crimea. It’s that saying -- that simple. There is no justification.
  • In this interview, former National Security Agency Technical Director Bill Binney demonstrates that the most important premise for Russiagate, that Russian military intelligence conducted an internet hack of the DNC and then provided the purloined files to WikiLeaks for publication, is a fraud.
  • If the Russians hacked the DNC, the NSA would be able to provide specific and detailed information tracing that attack as to times, dates, places, but no such proof has been provided. Binney created or supervised the NSA programs that provide this capability. Binney has now conducted two independent forensic studies of the DNC files: those released by Guccifer 2.0 and those published by WikiLeaks. Both studies, based on insights gleaned from file metadata and internet transfer speeds, point to the files' having been downloaded to a thumb drive or a storage device rather than transmitted over the internet in a Russian cyber attack.
  • Binney’s findings support the WikiLeaks account of how the files were delivered to them. Former British Ambassador Craig Murray has stated that he met with someone who was not a Russian state actor at American University in Washington, D.C. and received a thumb drive of files.
  • The Russians are fascinating, ingenious, creative, sentimental, warm-hearted, generous, obstinately courageous, endlessly tough, often devious, brutal and ruthless. Ordinary Russians firmly believe that they are warmer-hearted than others, more loyal to their friends, more willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good, more devoted to the fundamental truths of life. They give the credit to the Russian soul, as broad and all-embracing as the Russian land itself. Their passionate sense of Russia’s greatness is paradoxically undermined by an underlying and corrosive pessimism. And it is tempered by resentment that their country is insufficiently understood and respected by foreigners.
  • Russia's only real geostrategic option - the option that would give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself - is Europe.
  • The key point to bear in mind is that Russia cannot be in Europe without Ukraine also being in Europe, whereas Ukraine can be in Europe without Russia being in Europe.

C[edit]

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. ~ Winston Churchill
Russia’s long authoritarian traditions condition it to view its relations with other countries in terms of pure power.
Russia does not have friends. It has competitors and it has vassals.
~ Christian Caryl
  • The Russians have sometimes said one thing and done another... The Russians have been way off track since the very beginning. They have not done what they said they were going to do and they are not doing what is in their interest to do in terms of fighting... Thinking of Russia as a competitor was not something that we had to do, and now... We are going to have a competitor in Russia... Sadly, Russian conduct in Europe makes that necessary... But, I don't think that's in the long-term interest of the Russian people... Russia's a country I've worked with a lot over the years.
  • This faith in the power of schmoozing has deep roots in American politics, where a lot depends on negotiation, dialogue and dealmaking. But Moscow doesn’t work that way. Russia’s long authoritarian traditions condition it to view its relations with other countries in terms of pure power. Russia does not have friends. It has competitors and it has vassals. Vassals are countries that pay rhetorical tribute to Moscow and follow its lead on everything that matters — usually because they are deeply dependent on Russia for security, economic support or energy supplies. It’s no coincidence that its current vassal states — such as Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan — are themselves corrupt autocracies, which makes it easier for the Kremlin to work with them.
  • "Never mind," he repeated. "Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is mother Russia," he said, and looked round on each side of him. "I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went as a delegate from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the Amur River and the Altai Mountains and I settled in Siberia; I worked the land there, then I was homesick for mother Russia and I came back to my native village. […]"
  • Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies—what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to—calling on them to reverse U.S. policy, without even informing the president?
  • [President Trump] is]... perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish... Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd.
    We have to move towards better—right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that... First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama... The fate of... organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something?
  • I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
    • Winston Churchill, BBC radio address “The Russian Enigma” (October 1, 1939) (partial text); in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 vol. 6 (1974), p. 6161.
  • Across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engles and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country; that Russia had been too far backward to make those wonderful ideas work.
  • The Soviet Union is dead and gone and replaced by the Russian Federation, which is a country we can be friends with now, thank God; and we want the Russians to prosper, and should help the Russians prosper in every way we can within reason... Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us... they're not there anymore. That's a good thing.
  • The new US-Russian Cold War is more dangerous than was its 40-year predecessor that the world survived. The chances are even greater that this one could result, inadvertently or intentionally, in actual war between the two nuclear superpowers... For most mainstream-media outlets, Russiagate... [has become]...a kind of cult journalism that no counterevidence or analysis could dent and thus itself increasingly a major contributing factor to the new Cold War. ...no convincing evidence—nor any precedent in American history.

D[edit]

  • For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia.
  • My God, how much truth in the eyes of government whores!
    My God, how much faith in the hands of retired executioners!
    Don't you let them roll up their sleeves again, don't you let them roll up their sleeves again on fidgety nights.
    Original:
    Боже, сколько правды в глазах государственных шлюх!
    Боже, сколько веры в руках отставных палачей!
    Ты не дай им опять закатать рукава, ты не дай им опять закатать рукава суетливых ночей.
  • Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.
    • Fyodor Dostoevsky, reported in Dominic Livien (April 1999). "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity". Journal of Contemporary History 34 (2): p. 180.
  • Russism is a special form of misanthropic ideology based on great-power chauvinism, complete lack of spirituality, and immorality. It differs from the well-known forms of fascism, racism, nationalism, in its particular cruelty, both to man and to nature ... Possessing a slave psychology, it parasitizes using false history, on occupied territories and oppressed peoples.
  • There is not a single misanthropic ideology in the world, even in theory, acting more cruelly and cynically than Russism ... There are no moral principles - they are all like animals. I don't want this war to stop. I need this war, its continuation. This war will go to the territory of Russia - whether Russia wants it or not ... And the Western countries, the world community will not let it stop, in order to completely isolate Russia and destroy it as a state, so that this predatory beast on earth no longer exists.
  • Freedom and independence are life or death for us. Because it would be possible to live with people, among people, with a neighbor, in a state where some of your rights are protected. Where the state fulfills its duty to you. It doesn't. Russia does not fulfill any obligations to the people, to the state. So, they simply offer us: They put a wild bear, caught in a forest, in a cage and say : "Go into the cage and live with him, be friends. Give him a paw. Live with this beast and play nice." That's what Russia is.
Arise, Russia, from thy prison of slavery,
Victory's spirit calls: time for battle!
Rise thy battle flags
For Faith, Love, and Good.
~ Popular lyrics for the march Farewell of Slavianka, written in 1997.
The Russian leadership, throughout its history, when it got difficult, fled to sign agreements that it has never respected and will never respect, and does not think [of respecting]. As soon as it gets stronger, it starts again.
It isolates the weakest and tortures them. ~ Dzhokhar Dudayev
Pictured: Signing of the Latvian-Soviet Peace Treaty, in which the USSR pledged to recognize the inviolability of Latvia's borders – which they did for less than 20 years.
  • Russia gathers all kinds of criminal gangs [in Russia]. They're given the nickname "opposition". They arm them heavily, pay them big money. Countless funds are spent on this. It's unthinkable to a normal person's imagination. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, planes, Grads, Smerches, Uragans. Their training happens outside the republic, on Russian territory, at special bases. Russian military specialists, Russian special services. Plus a few criminals of Chechen ethnicity – and they call this whole mixture "opposition". Opposition in the Russian way. In fact, Russism. Typical Russism. Worse than fascism, Nazism, racism, all individual-hating ideologies. Raised to the rank of Russian state policy. Russism is worse than fascism.
    Throughout the history of Russia, it chooses the most helpless victim. To a complete physical destruction, and realistic intimidation of the world – saying: "here is how strong, powerful we are, what we can do, how insidious, evil, predatory."
    Nagorno-Karabakhisolated and completely destroyed. It's the training.
    They went further: Abkhazia - isolated from the Caucasus, from Georgia. Destroyed all potential.
    War with Georgia. Armenia with Azerbaijan – in fact [the conflict involves] Russian special services, Russian troops, Russian weapons, Russian equipment.
    South Ossetia - isolated, destroyed. North Ossetia, Ingushetiaisolated.
    And the physical destruction of entire nations. Violence, death, blood. Destruction of nation's potential.
    The Russian leadership, throughout its history, when it got difficult, fled to sign agreements that it has never respected and will never respect, and does not think [of respecting]. As soon as it gets stronger, it starts again. It isolates the weakest and tortures them.
    That's what Russia is – empire of evil.[3] As it was, is, and remains. Its rapacity... greed, ruthlessness, lack of spirituality, immorality it has demonstrated in Chechnya. 250 000 armed forces. 5600 units of armored vehicles on the territory. An unheard number in history against [a handful of] mountain people. Against a territory for which you need a microscope to look for it on a map. They reassured the world community, they made a statement from the Russian President that there will be no forceful solution. There will be only a peaceful solution [they said]. And when on the New Year's Eve... on the New Year's Eve, they mixed sand, earth, sky, human blood and flesh. Mixed and made a bloody mess. And they are not going to move from this policy, they are not going to move from it. That's what Russia is.
    If the world, I declare responsibly, if the whole world does not stop this plague, or do not – at least – make it follow rule of law (there will never be democracy, and never was) If – at least in legal terms – they do not comply with the norms of international law, the world will be subject to severe shock.

E[edit]

  • It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Dantzic or perhaps Stettin to Trieste.
    • Friedrich Engels, "The Real Issue in Turkey", Karl Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 16 (1979). This article was originally published in The New York Daily Tribune, April 12, 1853, p. 4, and since that paper's European correspondent was at that time Karl Marx, it has generally been assumed the author was Marx. Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 639, note 17, makes it clear that Engels was the author.

F[edit]

In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies, too. But they die happy. ~ Barry Farber
  • In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies. In a Russian comedy, everybody dies, too. But they die happy.
    • Barry Farber, radio talk-show host in New York City, during a program on radio station WMCA; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Russian leaders and regular citizens have felt increasingly insecure... They have a sense that Russia is under siege from without and has been robbed of its rightful status as a world power... Europeans at least have recourse at the ballot box; they can angrily vote in or out whoever they like. Russians do not enjoy the luxury of democracy. Russians do not enjoy the luxury of democracy... The U.S. is many times more powerful and influential than Russia.
  • I think the idea people had after 1991 that there would be a quick transition is clearly wrong... A lot of it has to do with relationships with economic growth because I think in really high-growth countries with a large middle class, with lots of educated people, there is a tendency to demand greater political participation... I think what you are seeing with the rise of Putinism in Russia and in parts of Eastern Europe is in a way the failure of that kind of modernization to produce a really broad middle-class society... His model is based on a narrow energy-dependent economic model which right now is falling apart... I think what is happening in Russia right now as global commodity prices have fallen is the exposure of the hollowness of this and we will see after another decade of economic failure whether Russians really think this is such a great alternative to the kind of both freedom and prosperity that is seen in Western Europe.

G[edit]

The less you know, the better you sleep.
Russian proverb
Pictured: the 1999 apartment bombings.
My God, how much truth in the eyes of government whores!
My God, how much faith in the hands of retired executioners!
~ "Родина" (Homeland), by the rock band DDT.
Listen to it here.
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit. ~ Anna Politkovskaya, 2004
Russia has become an assassination-happy state.
~ Reuel Gerecht
Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed.
~ Osip Mandelstam
A German-Russian partnership is a key element in any serious pan-European integration process. It is my ardent wish that Russia and Germany may manage to preserve all the positive achievements of the late 1980s and early 1990s in today's difficult times. - Mikhail Gorbachev
  • Russia is a new phenomenon in Europe: a state defined and dominated by former and active-duty security and intelligence officers. Not even fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union – all undoubtedly much worse creations than Russia; were as top-heavy with intelligence talent... There is no historical precedent for a society so dominated by former and active-duty internal-security and intelligence officials; men who rose up in a professional culture in which murder could be an acceptable, even obligatory, business practice... Those who operated within the Soviet sphere were the most malevolent in their practices. These men mentored and shaped Putin and his closest friends and allies. It is therefore unsurprising that Putin's Russia has become an assassination-happy state where detention, interrogation, and torture; all tried and true methods of the Soviet KGB; are used to silence the voices of untoward journalists and businessmen who annoy or threaten Putin's FSB state.
  • One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs. Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country’s infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.  
  • Soros particularly hates President Vladimir Putin and Russia. He revealed that he is far from a benevolent figure fighting for justice in his March Financial Times op-ed (behind a pay wall) entitled “Europe Must Stand With Turkey Over Putin’s War Crimes in Syria.” The op-ed is full of errors of fact and is basically a call for aggression against a Russia that he describes as engaged in bombing schools and hospitals. It starts with, “Since the beginning of its intervention in Syria in September 2015, Russia has not only sought to keep in place its most faithful Arab ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It has also wanted to regain the regional and global influence that it lost since the fall of the Soviet Union.” First of all, Russia did not “intervene” in Syria. It was invited there by the country’s legitimate government to provide assistance against various groups, some of which were linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State, that were seeking to overthrow President al-Assad. And apart from Soros, few actual experts on Russia would claim that it is seeking to recreate the “influence” of the Soviet Union. Moscow does not have the resources to do so and has evinced no desire to pursue the sort of global agenda that was characteristic of the Soviet state... Note that none of Soros’s assertions are supported by fact.
  • There is particular danger at the moment that powerful political alignments in the United States are pushing strongly to exacerbate the developing crisis with Russia. The New York Times, which broke the story that the Kremlin had been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers, has been particularly assiduous in promoting the tale of perfidious Moscow. Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by delusional nonsense from former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks “Why does Trump put Russia first?” before calling for a “swift and significant U.S. response.” Rice, who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice President, certainly knows about swift and significant as she was one of the architects of the destruction of Libya and the escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations directed against a non-threatening Syria
  • Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
  • If the Russian word "perestroika" has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, i.e. progressive development, a fundamental change.
  • Preparing for my address I found in an old Russian encyclopedia a definition of "peace" as a "commune" — the traditional cell of Russian peasant life. I saw in that definition the people's profound understanding of peace as harmony, concord, mutual help, and cooperation. This understanding is embodied in the canons of world religions and in the works of philosophers from antiquity to our time.
  • I began my book about perestroika and the new thinking with the following words: "We want to be understood". After a while I felt that it was already happening. But now I would like once again to repeat those words here, from this world rostrum. Because to understand us really — to understand so as to believe us — proved to be not at all easy, owing to the immensity of the changes under way in our country. Their magnitude and character are such as to require in-depth analysis. Applying conventional wisdom to perestroika is unproductive. It is also futile and dangerous to set conditions, to say: We'll understand and believe you, as soon as you, the Soviet Union, come completely to resemble "us", the West.
    No one is in a position to describe in detail what perestroika will finally produce. But it would certainly be a self-delusion to expect that perestroika will produce "a copy" of anything... Our democracy is being born in pain. A political culture is emerging — one that presupposes debate and pluralism, but also legal order and, if democracy is to work, strong government authority based on one law for all. This process is gaining strength.
  • The mutual trust that emerged with the end of the Cold War was severely shaken a few years later by NATO's decision to expand to the east. Russia had no option but to draw its own conclusions from that.

H[edit]

  • It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment...has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that, whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU, the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements. And whereas the Russian deal had no military clauses, that of the EU required that Ukraine affiliate with NATO. Insofar as the MSM dealt with this set of offers, they not only suppressed the exclusionary and militarized character of the EU offer, they tended to view the Russian deal as an improper use of economic leverage, “bludgeoning,” but the EU proposal was “constructive and reasonable” (Ed., NYT, November 20, 2014). Double standards seem to be fully internalized within the U.S. establishment. The protests that ensued in Ukraine were surely based in part on real grievances against a corrupt government, but they were also pushed along by right-wing groups and by U.S. and allied encouragement and support that increasingly had an anti-Russian and pro-accelerated regime change flavor.
  • The sniper killings of police and protesters in Maidan [Ukraine] on February 21, 2014 brought the crisis to a new head. This violence overlapped with, and eventually terminated, a negotiated settlement of the struggle brokered by EU members that would have ended the violence, created an interim government, and required elections by December. The accelerated violence ended this transitional plan, which was replaced by a coup takeover along with the forced flight of Victor Yanukovich. There is credible evidence that the sniper shootings of both protesters and police were carried out by a segment of the protesters in a false-flag operation that worked exceedingly well, “government” violence serving as one ground for the ouster of Yanukovich. Most telling was the intercepted phone message between Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paet, and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Upton, in which Paet regretfully reported compelling evidence that the shots killing both police and protesters came from a segment of the protesters. This account was almost entirely suppressed in the MSM... There is also every reason to believe that the coup and establishment of a right-wing and anti-Russian government were encouraged and actively supported by U.S. officials.
  • Our attitude towards Europe and Europeans is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capital: we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them, and confess our inferiority by imitation. The fact is that we are intimidated: we have never got over the sneers of Peter the Great and his coadjutors, or the superior airs of French tutors and Germans in our Civil Service. Western nations talk of our duplicity and cunning: they believe we want to deceive them, when we are only trying to make a creditable appearance and pass muster. A Russian will express quite different political views in talking to different persons, without any ulterior object, and merely from a wish to please: the bump of complaisance is highly developed in our skulls.
  • As sons and daughters of the Russian Orthodox Church, we are all citizens of Holy Russia. When we speak of Holy Russia, we are not talking about the Russian Federation or any civil society on earth; rather, it is a way of life that has been passed down to us through the centuries by such great saints of the Russian Land as the Holy Great Prince Vladimir and Great Princess Olga, Venerable Sergius of Radonezh, Job of Pochaev, Seraphim of Sarov, and more recently, the countless New Martyrs and Confessors of the 20th century. These saints are our ancestors, and we must look to them for instruction on how to bravely confess the Faith, even when facing persecution. There is no achievement in simply calling oneself "Russian:" in order to be a genuine Russian, one must first become Orthodox and live a life in the Church, as did our forebears, the founders of Holy Russia!
  • It’s a tectonic shift [the decline of the American empire and the rise of another one]. Let’s look at this from Russia’s point of view. This is everything that Russia has been aiming at and insisting upon for the last five years. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have been leading the understanding that the world needs to be de-dollarized, that the United States has declared an economic war against Russia, China and their allies, really against Eurasia. So, in effect, by drawing the sanctions — not only the sanctions — but the most important thing is by seizing Russia’s foreign holdings in the United States, its treasury bond holdings and the bank deposits. What the United States has done itself is exactly what both Lavrov and President Xi of China have been saying the world must move towards. They’ve been saying we must have a multinational world, multipolar world. We must be de-dollarized. We must cut free of the dollar and isolate, protect ourselves from the United States’ ability to use sanctions, to interrupt our economic activity, to use oil to threaten any country that doesn’t follow U.S. policy from having their energy reserves cut off, to protect countries that don’t produce their own food from being able to buy food and feed themselves... So everybody thought for the last five years: How will Russia and China and their allies, India, Iran, create this new world order? Well, the United States... has destroyed itself.
  • So they get it, the game is over. And it’s not over because Russia and China and India and Iran defeated America. It was the self-defeating policies of this blindly arrogant, greedy, Republican, Democratic, deep state philosophy.
  • Our role in Russia will be analogous to that of England in India... The Russian space is our India. Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.
    • Adolf Hitler, attributed and quoted in Michael Burleigh, Nazi Europe: what if, in Niall Ferguson, Virtual History, 1998, p. 330, also in Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". I.525

I[edit]

  • Western European humanity moves by will and reason. A Russian person lives first of all with his heart and imagination, and only then with his will and mind. Therefore, the average European is ashamed of sincerity, conscience and kindness [regarding it] as "stupidity"; A Russian person, on the contrary, expects from a person, first of all, kindness, conscience and sincerity.
    Original: Западноевропейское человечество движется волею и рассудком. Русский человек живет прежде всего сердцем и воображением и лишь потом волею и умом. Поэтому средний европеец стыдится искренности, совести и доброты как «глупости»; русский человек, наоборот, ждет от человека прежде всего доброты, совести и искренности.
  • Ukraine is recognized as the most threatened part of Russia in terms of secession and conquest. Ukrainian separatism is an artificial phenomenon, devoid of real grounds. It arose from the ambition of the leaders and the international intrigue of conquest.
    Little Russians are a branch of a single, Slavic-Russian people. This branch has no reason to be at enmity with other branches of the same people and to separate into a separate state.
    Having seceded, this state betrays itself to be conquered and plundered by foreigners.
    Little Russia and Great Russia are bound together by faith, tribe, historical fate, geographical location, economy, culture and politics.
    The foreigners who are preparing the dismemberment must remember that they are declaring by this to the whole of Russia a centuries-old struggle. There will be no peace and no economic prosperity under such a dismemberment.
    Russia will turn into a source of civil and international wars for centuries. The dismembering power will become the most hated of the enemies of national Russia.
    In the struggle against it, all alliances and all means will be used. Russia will shift its center to the Urals, gather all its huge forces, develop its technology, find powerful allies for itself and fight until it completely and forever undermines the power of the dismembering power.
    National Russia is not looking for anyone's death, but it will be able to respond in time to any attempt at dismemberment and will fight to the end. It is more profitable for any power to have Russia as a friend, not an enemy. History hasn't said its last word yet...

J[edit]

  • Ever since Gorbachev naïvely ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an “evil enemy” make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up.
    As is so often the case, Hillary doesn’t say what is true, but grabs the chance to show how anti-Putin she is. She is ready to push every adversary as far as possible, apparently certain that the “bad guy” will back down—even if it happens to be nuclear-armed Russia.

K[edit]

Russia’s economic, information, and diplomatic powers are highly contextual and often geographically limited. ~ Michael Kofman
  • I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention. It's probably the most affordable mechanism to solve problems inside the country, inside the society because Putin proved to all of us that democracy has a world of alternatives, security forces and police and power abuse and that's why I think eventually the people of Russia will embrace democracy as the least costly institution to help them to solve their daily problems.
    • Garry Kasparov, statement in interview: Monica Attard (April 3, 2005). "Gary Kasparov", Sunday Profile, Australian Broadcasting Company.
  • I think many Russians, but also a lot of Westerners, make a very serious mistake in trying to look for… a better person to become president. They are searching for such a person in [Alexei] Navalny, in myself, but that’s a mistake. Anyone who replaces Putin is going to take Russia along the same imperialist route.
    [...] It is a very large and very diverse country, and if you want to manage it from one central spot, you have to have a very strong bureaucratic apparatus.
    To have such a huge apparatus at the centre has to be explained by having to protect the country from an outside enemy – there is no other explanation that people will accept.
  • The existence of Russia is of a great spiritual and cultural value – not only for you and me, but for all humanity. And we are calling for the preservation of the people of Russia, for the birth of our new compatriots, not only and not so much because these people are needed by the country, but also to a great extent because this country is needed by people. Russia must exist and play its irreplaceable role in our destiny with you, in the destiny of our descendants and throughout world history.

    The special value of Russia, its special vocation is to be a stronghold of Orthodox Christianity. To preserve the Orthodox faith, Orthodox tradition and culture, Christian moral principles intact. Maybe that is why the powers that be are so ganged up on the Russian Orthodox Church, wanting to tear away the Greek Orthodox world from the Russian Church, wanting to destroy the unity of the Orthodox Church. We possess reliable information that everything that is happening now in world Orthodoxy is not an accident, not just the whim of a religious figure whose mind has become clouded. This is the implementation of a very specific plan that aims to tear the Greek world away from Russia. According to the perpetrators — I cannot describe these strategists in any other way — the Russian Church appears to be some kind of “soft power”, through which Russia influences the world around it. But why can’t Russia share its spiritual gifts? Is it criminal? This can be criminal only in the view of those who seek to weaken, and if possible to destroy the influence of Russia. In this whole story related to the problem of recognition or non-recognition of Ukrainian schismatics by the Local Orthodox Churches, there is something that is not declared, but which is the main goal of the forces behind the scenes that unleashed this schismatic activity. We in the Russian Church understand this clearly, but today our brothers in Greece and other Orthodox Churches also understand this. We are being asked to resist, not to flinch, to continue the struggle to maintain the spiritual independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from all these centres of world influence, and most importantly – to maintain the unity of Universal Orthodoxy. This is not a simple task. The Church has no army. The Church has no material means. So it is not easy without material means to build the spiritual defense.
...I am simply baffled by what appears to be the prevailing view in this country... that Russia is somehow a threat to the United States....While I certainly understand it is in the interest of the military-industrial complex... to continue to vilify Russia in order to justify our already-bloated military spending... Russia was our ally in WWII in defeating the Nazis. And, contrary to what most Americans are taught, it was Russia that truly won that war in Europe, having lost over 20 million people to the war... 80 percent of the... Nazi['s] kills... [USA lost ~400,000]... certainly since 1960 and up to the present time, the U.S. has been much more brutal and blood-thirsty than Russia. It is not even a close call... ~ Daniel Kovalik
Russism is a special form of misanthropic ideology based on great-power chauvinism, complete lack of spirituality, and immorality. It differs from the well-known forms of fascism, racism, nationalism, in its particular cruelty, both to man and to nature ... Possessing a slave psychology, it parasitizes using false history, on occupied territories and oppressed peoples.
~ Dzhokhar Dudayev
  • It is these U.S. wars, along with the U.S.’s over 800 military bases in more than 70 countries (Russia has bases in only one country (Syria) outside the former Soviet Union) which has led to the U.S. rightly being viewed in a poll of people in 65 countries as by far the greatest threat to world peace... President Trump’s expressed desire to stop antagonizing Russia and to work with it... should be welcomed as eminently reasonable and indeed necessary to avoid a possible nuclear confrontation. This should also be welcome by an American public whose resources have been drained by the greatest military-spending spree by far on the planet....Certainly, liberals, who at least once stood for peace and for greater social spending, should be in the lead in cheering such overtures instead of drumming up anti-Russian hatred which can only lead to more war and more impoverishment of our society.
  • The predominance of the intelligence services and mentality is a core feature of Putin’s Russia that marks a major and critical discontinuity from not only the 1990s but all of Soviet and Russian history. During the Soviet period, the Communist Party provided the glue holding the system together. During the 1990s, there was no central organizing institution or ideology. Now, with Putin, it is “former” KGB professionals who dominate the Russian ruling elite. This is a special kind of brotherhood, a mafia-like culture in which only a few can be trusted. The working culture is secretive and nontransparent.

L[edit]

  • In case you’ve been living in a cave the last few weeks, here’s latest news scoop riling the United States: Russia has been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties for American scalps. How do we know? Because the New York Times tells us so, and the Times is not the kind of paper to make stuff up. But how does the Times know it’s true? Because sources say so, sources so super-sensitive and high up that it can’t reveal their names. All it can say according to in a front-page exposé that ran on June 26 is that they consist of “officials briefed on the matter” and “officials [who] spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations.” ..It’s all true even though the Times can’t say who its sources are because … because … well, just because it can’t... Still, the Times wants us to believe since the effect is to discredit two of its top bêtes noires, Trump and Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, not only has U.S. intelligence compiled a record of accuracy over the last two decades that couldn’t be more dismal, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA for fifteen months in 2017-18, actually bragged about the agency’s skill in misleading the public. As he put it, “We lied, we cheated, we stole … we had entire training courses.”
  • So after lying about everything from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to “golden showers” in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, why should we believe the “intelligence community” now when it says it’s telling the truth?... In any case, why not play along...? But we can’t for one simple reason: the chances of the story being true... are somewhere between zero and one percent. Why? Let’s start with the most obvious. An assertion by some spook or other is not the same thing as evidence... Rather, it’s an opinion... the report doesn’t even make sense. Not only have the Taliban been at war with the United States since 2001, they’re winning. So why should Russia pay them to do what they’ve been happily doing on their own for close to two decades? Contrary to what the Times wants us to believe, there’s no evidence that Russia backs the Taliban or wants the U.S. to leave with its tail between its legs. Quite the opposite as a quick glance at a map will attest.
  • If Russia and NATO cooperate, who are they going to be against? There used to be two systems, two military blocs. One system collapsed. Its military bloc collapsed. And the other part remains in perfect operating order. That beautiful NATO bloc was first aimed at the Soviet Union, and it would be a pity to abandon it. So, now it is re-aimed at Russia.
  • The existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities.
    In the case of Ukraine, NATO membership for that country implied the expulsion of Russia from the naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea (a city of immense importance to Russia, both strategic and emotional), and the creation of a hard international frontier between Russia and the Russian and Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, making up more than a third of the Ukrainian population.
    The Yeltsin government protested strongly against the start of NATO expansion in the 1990s and Russia accustomed itself without too much trouble to NATO membership for the former Soviet satellites in Central Europe. But from the very beginning of NATO expansion in the mid-1990s, Russian officials and commentators—including liberal reformists—warned that an offer of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine would bring confrontation with the West and an acute danger of war. These warnings were echoed by George Kennan, the original architect of the strategy to contain the USSR and the State Department’s greatest ever Russia expert, as well as by Henry Kissinger and other leading American statesmen.
  • These Russian policies have been linked to a specific set of post-Soviet issues and Russian regional goals. They are not part of some grand malign design to destroy international order, or to act as a willful “disruptor.” Insofar as Russia has set out deliberately to damage Western interests...it has been as a way to put pressure on the West in pursuit of those goals. It may also be pointed out that in the Middle East, it is the U.S. that has frequently acted as a disruptor as with the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of the Libyan state, and Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear agreement with Iran, while Russia has often defended the status quo—partly due to a fear of Islamist terrorism that it shares with the U.S. In other words, while the terms of any compromise with Russia over Ukraine would involve some tough negotiation, we can seek such a compromise without fearing that this will open the way for further Russian moves to destroy NATO and subjugate eastern Europe—a ridiculous idea for anyone who knows either the goals of the Russian establishment or the character of Poles and Estonians.
    • Anatol Lieven, Russia Has Been Warning About Ukraine for Decades. The West Should Have Listened Time,  January 25, 2022
  • Failing at least initial moves towards such a compromise, it does indeed look likely that there will be some form of new Russian attack on Ukraine, though by no means necessarily a large-scale invasion. In the event of war, however far the Russian army marches will be followed by a new Russian proposal for a deal in return for Russian withdrawal. The only difference between then and now will be that NATO will have been humiliated by its inability to fight, the West and Ukraine will be in a much weaker position to negotiate a favorable deal—and that in the meantime, thousands of people will have died.
    • Anatol Lieven, Russia Has Been Warning About Ukraine for Decades. The West Should Have Listened Time,  January 25, 2022
  • If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.
    • Curtis LeMay, conversation with presidential commissioner Robert Sprague (September 1957), quoted in Kaplan, F. (1991). The Wizards of Armageddon. Stanford University Press, p. 134.
  • Farewell, unwashed Russia,
    Land of slaves, land of masters,
    And you, blue uniforms,
    And you, people, devoted to them.
    Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus,
    I will hide from your pashas,
    From their all-seeing eye,
    From their all-hearing ears.
    • Mikhail Lermontov, in his final exile in the Caucasus, 1841. Published by Russky Arkhiv. Historical and literary collection (1890) Translation by Anatoly Liberman.
      • Original:
        Прощай, немытая Россiя,
        Страна рабовъ, страна господъ,
        И вы, мундиры голубые,
        И ты, имъ преданный народъ.
        Быть можетъ, за стѣной Кавказа
        Сокроюсь отъ твоихъ пашей,
        Отъ ихъ всевидящаго глаза,
        Отъ ихъ всеслышащихъ ушей.
  • As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.


...Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO?...The demonization of Russia is, I believe, one of the most dangerous things that is happening in our world today... It is time for political leaders and each individual to move us back from the brink of catastrophe to begin to build relationships with our Russian brothers and sisters. Too long has the elite financially gained from war while millions are moved into poverty and desperation. ~Mairead Maguire
In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.
~ George Orwell

M[edit]

Putin’s major address [March 2018]... was really something. Not only did he advertise a whole new generation of strategic weaponry, which...no one has disproved, would render the billions of dollars that we have wasted on antiballistic missile defenses useless... he also said, Now, we tried to get you to listen to us. You wouldn’t listen to us. Now, hopefully, you will listen to us. Let’s get together at the appropriate time with experts and figure out how we address these problems, in other words, talks on arms control...[In the USA] All we get is rhetoric about how bad the Russians are, just as if they were the old Soviet Union, ideologically determined to bury us...Ray McGovern
[The U.S. Democrat's] accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016...could not withstand close scrutiny... two... former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. ~ Ray McGovern
From the southern seas to the polar lands. Spread are our forests and fields. You are unique in the world, one of a kind. This native land protected by God!
~ National anthem of the Russian Federation
  • Through my travels in Russia during the height of the Cold War with a peace delegation, we were shocked by the poverty of the country, and questioned how we ever were led to believe that Russia was a force to be afraid of. We talked to the Russian students who were dismayed by their absolute poverty and showed anger against NATO for leading their country into an arms race that they could not win. Many years later, when speaking to young Americans in the US, I was in disbelief about the fear the students had of Russia and their talk of invasion. This is a good example of how the unknown can cause a deep rooted paranoia when manipulated by the right powers.
  • Firstly, I must say, that I personally believe that Russia is not by any means without faults. But the amount of anti-Russian propaganda in our media today is a throwback to the Cold War era. We must ask the question: Is this leading to more arms, a bigger NATO? Possibly to challenge large powers in the Middle East and Asia, as we see the US approaching the South China seas, and NATO Naval games taking place in the Black Sea. Missile compounds are being erected in Romania, Poland and other ex-Soviet countries, while military games are set up in Scandinavia close to the Russian border to practice for a cold climate war scenario. At the same time, we see the US President arriving in Europe asking for increased military spending. At the same time the USA has increased its budget by 300 billion in one year.
  • How did it happen? We saw it come about in front of our very eyes. All intermediate social links, such as the family, one's circle of friends, class, society itself-each abruptly disappeared, leaving every one of us to stand alone before the mysterious force embodied in the State, with its powers of life and death. In ordinary parlance, this was summed up in the word "Lubianka." If what we have seen in this country is only a process taking place throughout Europe, then it must be said that we have demonstrated the sickness of the age in a form so acute and unadulterated as to merit special study in any search for the prevention and cure of it. In an age when the main cry is "Every man for himself," the personality is doomed.
    • Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned (1974) chapter 1, Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward
  • Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
  • The problems with Russia are not just NATO expansion. There were also a process that began with the second Bush administration of withdrawing from all of the arms control — almost all of the arms control agreements that we had concluded with the Soviet Union, the very agreements that had brought the first Cold War to an end.... In effect, what the United States did after the end of the Cold War was they reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the “new world order,” but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the U.N. Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any U.N. approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported.
  • Let me just start with Putin’s major address [1 March 2018]... It was really something. Not only did he advertise a whole new generation of strategic weaponry, which he claimed, and no one has disproved, would render the billions of dollars that we have wasted on antiballistic missile defenses useless. They’re useless to begin with, most scientists and engineers say, but these new weapons that he advertised, and some of which he said are operational, would upend that... he also said, Now, we tried to get you to listen to us. You wouldn’t listen to us. Now, hopefully, you will listen to us. Let’s get together at the appropriate time with experts and figure out how we address these problems, in other words, talks on arms control...
    • Ray McGovern: Russia and U.S. Senators Want Disarmament, U.S. Media Does Not, Foreign Policy Journal (2 May 2018) Full text online (2 May 2018)
  • Now, a couple days later he’s talking about the strategic relationship and somebody says, Now, Mr. Putin — this is in an interview... six days later—somebody says, Hey, listen, Mr. Putin...would you destroy the whole world? If there were a first strike on Russia, would you really respond? It would be too late to save Russia.... Look, He says, yes, this would be a global catastrophe, but “as a citizen of Russia and as the head of the Russian state, I ask, What need will we have for a world if there was no Russia?” So he’s saying, Look, you’ve got to take this stuff seriously. Yes, we would retaliate, even if it meant that the rest of the world would be blown up as well as Russia.
    • Ray McGovern: Russia and U.S. Senators Want Disarmament, U.S. Media Does Not, Foreign Policy Journal (2 May 2018) Full text online (2 May 2018)
  • Two days later, four senior senators, okay, three Democrats—let’s see if I can remember them — Feinstein, Wyden, the fellow up there in Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders—they issue a call, a letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Look, this is really getting out of hand. We don’t like the fact that Putin is brandishing these weapons that we really haven’t ever heard of before, but he’s calling for arms control talks, so let’s talk. Let’s talk. Guess what? That appeal appeared on all those four senators’ websites but was totally—totally — ignored by what passes for the mainstream media. So one suspects that this is an unwelcome subject, and there is proof positive... we're talking about four senior senators appealing for arms control talks on their websites but it never getting past their websites, no publicity for it. I’m thinking that Chuck Schumer said, No, no. Arms control, no, no... Don’t mention arms control talks. So that’s the reality in the mainstream media.
    • Ray McGovern: Russia and U.S. Senators Want Disarmament, U.S. Media Does Not, Foreign Policy Journal (2 May 2018) Full text online (2 May 2018)
  • ...Putin’s looking at all this. He knows who “the crazies” are and he knows that Bolton has a lot of influence. So this is a very destabilizing thing, because when the Russians keep telling us, Look, we’ve got these new weapons, well, you know, the press says, Ah, they’re faking it, they’re probably faking it. You know, I don’t know if they’re faking it or not. But, my God, if we knew about all this, why is it not in the annual intelligence briefing that is given to both the House and to the Senate early each year? It’s missing. All we get is rhetoric about how bad the Russians are, just as if they were the old Soviet Union, ideologically determined to bury us...
    • Ray McGovern: Russia and U.S. Senators Want Disarmament, U.S. Media Does Not, Foreign Policy Journal (2 May 2018) Full text online (2 May 2018)
  • Trump had been calling for better relations with Russia during his presidential campaign... Stooping to a new low, Friday’s (New York) Times headline screamed: “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia.” For those interested in evidence — or the lack of it— regarding collusion between Russia and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, we can thank the usual Russia-gate promoters at The New York Times and CNN for inadvertently filling in some gaps in recent days....NYT readers had to get down to paragraph 9 to read: “No evidence has emerged...”
  • If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of [The Democrat's] accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate...
  • Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — including two “alumni” who were former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama. Clinton’s PR chief... later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions “to get the press to focus on... the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.” The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves.
  • It's the principle of... freedom is better than non-freedom. These words are the quintessence of the human experience.
    Original: Это принцип "свобода лучше, чем несвобода". Эти слова - квинтэссенция человеческого опыта.

N[edit]

  • I hate to say it [...] but, after the novelty wore off, I had this cliché moment of a Russian émigré abroad: I really missed black bread. I know it’s stupid, but I really missed it.
  • A cocktail of patriotism, chauvinism, imperialism could for some time replace many essential nutrients for Russians. Like how for alcoholics vodka replaces everything, including toothpaste.
    Original: Коктейль из патриотизма, шовинизма, империализма на какое-то время может заменить россиянам многие необходимые питательные вещества. Как алкоголикам водка заменяет все, включая зубную пасту.
  • It is clear that if Putin converts to Buddhism tomorrow, they will fill wastebaskets in their luxurious offices with all these icons, draw a scarlet spot between their eyebrows and sing “Om mani padme hum”.
    Original: Понятно, что если завтра Путин примет буддизм, то они всеми этими иконками набьют мусорные корзины в своих роскошных кабинетах, нарисуют себе алое пятно между бровями и будут петь «Ом мани падме хум».
  • If a person wants to be the king of the Papuans, then he is doomed to stick large feathers into his head, wear necklaces from the largest shells and dance certain dances the fastest of all.
    Original: Если человек хочет быть королём папуасов, то он обречён втыкать себе в голову большие перья, одевать ожерелья из самых больших ракушек и резвее всех танцевать определённые танцы.

O[edit]

  • In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.
  • Last spring the hoopla about Russia invading Ukraine died an ignominious death when nothing happened. This autumn, the latest Russia-will-invade boogeyman was already on life-support when the pro-western Ukrainian president decided to goose it November 26 with the breathless proclamation that Moscow intended to overthrow him “next week.” When that didn’t happen, on December 4, the Washington Post hyperventilated about Russia igniting a war, like, any day, in an anonymously sourced piece of exemplary CIA stenography, worthy of the fantasies published in the run-up to the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq.... So Russia hesitates and the U.S. screams. What else is new? Don’t get me wrong: NATO and the U.S.’s idiotic brinksmanship on Russia’s borders could yet cause real damage. But wild-eyed speculation about the Kremlin’s intentions has so far run aground on Russia’s apparent reluctance to engage in a shooting war that could spiral into a full-on nuclear holocaust.... In early November CIA chief William Burns trekked to the Kremlin amid worries about a Russian troop buildup. As if Russia can’t move its military around WITHIN ITS OWN BORDERS without catapulting the west to high alert.
NATO and the U.S.’s idiotic brinksmanship on Russia’s borders could yet cause real damage. But wild-eyed speculation about the Kremlin’s intentions has so far run aground on Russia’s apparent reluctance to engage in a shooting war that could spiral into a full-on nuclear holocaust [...] As if Russia can’t move its military around WITHIN ITS OWN BORDERS without catapulting the west to high alert.
~ "Eve Ottenberg", CounterPunch
We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.
The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer. ~ Timothy D. Snyder
  • How likely is doomsday? Well back to Ukraine, regarding which, on December 1, Russian President Putin asked the west for legal guarantees that it would cease eastward expansion. This request, made because Washington’s word is worthless (vide just for starters, the Iran nuclear pact, and President George H.W. Bush’s promise that NATO would never, ho, ho, expand to Russia’s borders) and met with scoffs by the white house, comes amid complicated tensions. The Kiev military recently claimed it used Turkish attack drones “in combat against ethnic Russian rebels,” Finian Cunningham reported October 28 in Information Clearing House. This is not good. Turkey is in NATO. If Turkey gets tangled up in the Ukraine imbroglio, that substantially escalates things. According to Anatol Lieven in Responsible Statecraft on November 24, “Moscow is especially alarmed by Ukraine’s acquisition of Turkish Bayraktar combat drones,” used to such deadly effect by Azerbaijan in its 2020 conquest of Armenian territory. Unlike the F-35, these things actually work.

P[edit]

Russia is not corrupt. Corruption is what happens in all countries when businessmen offer officials large bribes for favors. Today’s Russia is unique. The businessmen, the politicians, and the bureaucrats are the same people. They have privatized the country’s wealth and taken control of its financial flows. ~ Andrei Piontkovsky
Russia is in favor of a multipolar world, a democratic world order, strengthening the system of international law, and for developing a legal system in which any small country, even a very small country, can feel itself secure, as if behind a stone wall. ~Vladimir Putin[citation needed]
There is not a single misanthropic ideology in the world, even in theory, acting more cruelly and cynically than Russism ... There are no moral principles - they are all like animals. I don't want this war to stop. I need this war, its continuation. This war will go to the territory of Russia - whether Russia wants it or not ... And the Western countries, the world community will not let it stop, in order to completely isolate Russia and destroy it as a state, so that this predatory beast on earth no longer exists. ~ Dzhokhar Dudayev
  • Russian is very dear to me because it’s a family language, but I am Jewish-Russian, which is a little different from Russian-Russian. My family ran away in 1905 from the Russian-Russians.
  • They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
    • Sarah Palin, to Charles Gibson, ABC News, September 11, 2008.
      • This was parodied as "I can see Russia from my house", on "Saturday Night Live", a comedy television show, two days later, by Tina Fey. Fey resembled Palin in appearance, and was portraying Palin, and so the latter quote is often misattributed to Palin.
  • Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil. The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine - except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
  • Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government. There is almost the joie d'esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
  • In sum, the advance of education and industrialization necessary to meet Russia’s global ambitions weakened tsarism’s hold on the country. Such factors help explain why the Communist revolution that, according to Marx, was bound to break out in the industrialized West in fact broke out in the agrarian East. Russia lacked the deterrents to social revolution present in the West: respect for law and property, along with a sense of allegiance to a state that protected liberty and provided social services. The Russian radical intelligentsia, permeated with utopian idealism, on the one hand, and a peasantry bent on seizing private land, on the other, created a state of permanent tension liable to explode any time the central government found itself in trouble. None of the economic imperatives posited by Marx and Engels played here any role.
  • The factors that made Russia prone to erupt in revolution also determined the shape of its Communist regime. As it turned out, socialism introduced into a country lacking the traditions that would make for the ideally self-fulfilling life that Marx had envisioned in no time and quite spontaneously assumed the worst features of the defunct tsarist regime. Socialist slogans, which in the West would be steadily watered down until they became indistinguishable from liberal ones, in Russia and other non-Western countries were reinterpreted in accustomed terms to mean the unlimited power of the state over citizens and their assets. Soviet totalitarianism thus grew out of Marxist seeds planted on the soil of tsarist patrimonialism.
  • Russia is not corrupt. Corruption is what happens in all countries when businessmen offer officials large bribes for favors. Today’s Russia is unique. The businessmen, the politicians, and the bureaucrats are the same people. They have privatized the country’s wealth and taken control of its financial flows.
  • In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.
  • The Russian people will suffer a blow, it will leave the cities for fields, forests ... It will pick mushrooms, berries, nuts - the Russian people is ready in a moment of great sorrow to turn into a chipmunk people, a hamster people, it will store up for the winter all sorts of roots, all sorts of onions.
    Original: Русский народ перебьётся, он уйдёт из городов в поля, в леса... Будет собирать грибы, ягоды, орехи — русский народ готов в минуту больших печалей превратиться в народ-бурундук, народ-хомяк, он будет запасать на зиму всякие корешки, всякие луковки.
  • We can only pity the Poles. We are too powerful to hate them, the war that will break out will be a war of extermination – or at least it should be.
    Original: Nous ne pouvons que plaindre les Polonais. Nous sommes trop puissants pour les haïr, la guerre qui va s’ouvrir sera une guerre d’extermination — ou du moins devrait l’être.

President Vladimir Putin's Speech on Ukraine and US Foreign Policy and NATO - 24 February 2022[edit]

(Full text)

  • I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border. It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe.
    In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine... is approaching our very border. Why is this happening? Where did this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? What is the explanation for this contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our interests and absolutely legitimate demands.
    Entreaties and requests do not help. Anything that does not suit the dominant state, the powers that be, is denounced as archaic, obsolete and useless. At the same time, everything it regards as useful is presented as the ultimate truth and forced on others regardless of the cost, abusively and by any means available. Those who refuse to comply are subjected to strong-arm tactics.
  • Russia is not the only country that is worried about this. This has to do with the entire system of international relations, and sometimes even US allies. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a redivision of the world, and the norms of international law that developed by that time – and the most important of them, the fundamental norms that were adopted following WWII and largely formalised its outcome – came in the way of those who declared themselves the winners of the Cold War.
    ...we saw a state of euphoria created by the feeling of absolute superiority, a kind of modern absolutism, coupled with the low cultural standards and arrogance of those who formulated and pushed through decisions that suited only themselves. The situation took a different turn.
    There are many examples of this. First a bloody military operation was waged against Belgrade, without the UN Security Council’s sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe. The bombing of peaceful cities and vital infrastructure went on for several weeks. I have to recall these facts, because some Western colleagues prefer to forget them, and when we mentioned the event, they prefer to avoid speaking about international law...
    Then came the turn of Iraq, Libya and Syria. The illegal use of military power against Libya and the distortion of all the UN Security Council decisions on Libya ruined the state, created a huge seat of international terrorism, and pushed the country towards a humanitarian catastrophe, into the vortex of a civil war, which has continued there for years.... A similar fate was also prepared for Syria. The combat operations conducted by the Western coalition in that country without the Syrian government’s approval or UN Security Council’s sanction can only be defined as aggression and intervention... But the example that stands apart from the above events is, of course, the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.
  • Overall, it appears that nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, non-healing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism. I have only mentioned the most glaring but far from only examples of disregard for international law.
    This array includes promises not to expand NATO eastwards even by an inch. To reiterate: they have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us... This type of con-artist behaviour is contrary not only to the principles of international relations but also and above all to the generally accepted norms of morality and ethics. Where is justice and truth here? Just lies and hypocrisy all around.
  • Incidentally, US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable "empire of lies" has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this – it is really so. But one should not be modest about it: the United States is still a great country and a system-forming power. All its satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behaviour and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them. Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same "empire of lies".
  • Properly speaking, the attempts to use us in their own interests never ceased until quite recently: they sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature. This is not going to happen. No one has ever succeeded in doing this, nor will they succeed now.
  • With NATO’s eastward expansion the situation for Russia has been becoming worse and more dangerous by the year. Moreover, these past days NATO leadership has been blunt in its statements that they need to accelerate and step up efforts to bring the alliance’s infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders. In other words, they have been toughening their position. We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us.
  • For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.
  • We can see that the forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014 have seized power, are keeping it with the help of ornamental election procedures and have abandoned the path of a peaceful conflict settlement. For eight years, for eight endless years we have been doing everything possible to settle the situation by peaceful political means.
  • I would also like to address the military personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Comrade officers, Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people’s adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people. I urge you to refuse to carry out their criminal orders. I urge you to immediately lay down arms and go home. The military personnel of the Ukrainian army who do this will be able to freely leave the zone of hostilities and return to their families...
  • I want to emphasize again that all responsibility for the possible bloodshed will lie fully and wholly with the ruling Ukrainian regime.
  • At the end of the day, the future of Russia is in the hands of its multi-ethnic people, as has always been the case in our history. This means that the decisions that I made will be executed, that we will achieve the goals we have set, and reliably guarantee the security of our Motherland.
  • I believe in your support and the invincible force rooted in the love for our Fatherland.

R[edit]

Look at Russia. They keep trying help each other out, extend a hand to a neighbor, and guess what? Every ten years, some one is invading, burning down their homes and taking their toilet paper.
~ Pastor Richards, GTA: Vice City
  • Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.
    • Ayn Rand, as quoted in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971).
  • History shows that the process of modernization leads societies to form liberal democracies with market systems. Yet some leaders insist on trying to create alternative models, even though those models are unstable and retrograde. Putin's authoritarian effort to create a managed democracy in Russia offers a good example... After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 many people expected Russia to make a rapid transition from communism to democracy... However, what followed in Russia was a period of experimentation with relatively greater liberalism under President Boris Yeltsin that led not to democracy, but the rise of Putin and an authoritarian system... Putin's authoritarian system does not mean that he has built a successful alternative to liberal democracy. Instead, the system owes its existence in part to the slow development of a middle class in Russia that normally would demand a share of power. That slow development, in turn, is largely thanks to the state's monopolization of the country's most lucrative business activities: the export of energy and other natural resources.
  • Look at Russia. They keep trying help each other out, extend a hand to a neighbor, and guess what? Every ten years, some one is invading, burning down their homes and taking their toilet paper. Napoleon, Stalin, Attila the Hun, all of them. After you read my book you will understand. I may have been born in the see, but I'm no dummy!
  • We had a moment in history, between 1988 and 1991, where we could have worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to make his vision of perestroika succeed. Instead, we allowed him to fail, without any real plan on how we would live with what emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Save for a short period of time during the Second World War where we needed the Soviet Union to defeat Germany and Japan, we have been in a continual state of political conflict with the Soviet Union. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, we viewed the Russian Federation more as a defeated enemy that we needed to keep down, than a friend in need of a helping hand up. Yeltsin’s Russia was useful to the US and NATO only to the extent that we could exploit it economically while controlling its domestic politics in a manner that kept Russia in a perpetual state of weakness. The Obama “reset” was simply a ploy to remove Vladimir Putin, who rejected the vision of Russia projected by the west, and replace him with Dmitri Medvedev, whom Obama believed could be remade in the figure of Yeltsin. The fact that Putin believes in a strong Russia has upset the plans of the US, NATO, and Europe for post-Cold War hegemony, predicated as they were on a weak, compliant Russian state.
  • The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to [[w:Chapter_VII_of_the_United_Nations_Charter#Article_51| (Charter of the United Nations) Article 51]] which is predicated on fact, not fiction. While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.


  • ...Go back and actually read the amendments put by the United States House of Representatives on Department of Defense Appropriations legislation from 2015 up until just this year. They continuously forbid funds, US taxpayer funds, being used to train the Azov battalion, which is listed by the US Congress as a white supremacist neo-Nazi organization. So anybody who wants to pretend that there isn’t a Nazi problem in Ukraine, simply I refer you to Congress and its own legislation. The Russians believe that this is a big problem and they want it eradicated. Now, why did I bring this up? Because Russia hasn’t shifted gears at all. Russia’s still saying, we want a European security framework out of this and we are adhering to our original objectives. Russia hasn’t altered course at all. Ukraine, on the other hand, is saying that victory can only be achieved when Russia is evicted from all territory, including Crimea.... Russia has realistic objectives that can be attained. Ukraine doesn’t. I mean, there’s just literally no one on this planet besides maybe… I don’t even think the Ukrainians believe it, that they’re going to recapture the Donbas, that they’re going to recapture Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, that they’re going to recapture Crimea. This is fantasy. So you have one side that their objectives are fantasy based, you have another side whose objectives are, while difficult to achieve, are very realistic...
  • Let’s look at the Russian strategic objectives... First and foremost, Russia is seeking to get Europe and the United States to buy into the notion of a negotiated new European security framework. It’s something that Russia put on the table prior to invading Ukraine... Dec. 17, I believe, of last year, Russia submitted two draft treaties, one to NATO, one to the United States, which articulated Russia’s stance on what its vision of a new European security framework... They invited the West to read it and have a serious discussion... and they were ignored.
    Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and Russia has two objectives. One is the demilitarization of Ukraine, the other is the deNazification of Ukraine. Demilitarization means the elimination of all NATO influence on the Ukrainian military, and deNazification means just that...
    I’d advise people to go back and actually read the amendments put by the United States House of Representatives on Department of Defense Appropriations legislation from 2015 up until just this year. They continuously forbid funds, US taxpayer funds, being used to train the Azov battalion, which is listed by the US Congress as a white supremacist neo-Nazi organization... The Russians believe that this is a big problem and they want it eradicated... Russia has realistic objectives that can be attained. Ukraine doesn’t.
  • Ukraine’s going to have to accept reality. It has permanently lost Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, the Donbas, and Crimea. You will never get it back, Ukraine. Never, ever, ever in a million years. And if you continue this fight, very soon you’re going to lose Odessa. You’re going to lose Kharkiv, and you will never get them back. You will lose Mykolaiv, you’ll lose Dnipro­petrovsk, you’ll lose your very existence. You’ll never get it back, ever. Russia’s reached a point where it is not in a mood to negotiate. What the Ukrainians would have to offer the Russians is a lot, which is recognition of all territory, a guarantee that they will never join NATO, and a concerted effort to eliminate the ideology of Stepan Bandera from mainstream Ukrainian politics. He’s no longer a national hero, Nazi symbology and parades will no longer be tolerated, things of that nature.


  • The [U.S.] military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy. The Democrats have an interest in the villification of Russia as “Russiagate” explains Hillary’s loss of the 2016 Presidential election and gives Democrats hope of removing President Trump from office. The media lacks independence, knowledge, and integrity and is the tool used by the military/security complex to control explanations... As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby.


  • All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security.
  • The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome. What they see now is the West preparing its populations for war. It is this perception for which the West is solely responsible that makes the situation today far more dangerous than it ever was during the long Cold War.

S[edit]

  • Солдатушки​, бравы ребятушки, А кто вашъ родимый?
    – Нашъ родимый – Царь непобѣдимый, Вотъ кто нашъ родимый.
    Солдатушки​, бравы ребятушки, ​Есть​ у васъ родная?
    ​– Есть​ родная, мать намъ дорогая, Наша Русь святая.
    ​Солдатушки​, бравы ребятушки, Гдѣ же ваша слава?
    – Наша слава — Русская держава, Вотъ гдѣ наша слава.
    ​Солдатушки​, бравы ребятушки, Гдѣ же ваши дѣды?
    – Наши дѣды — ​славные​ побѣды, Вотъ гдѣ наши дѣды.

    Translation:
    ​Little soldiers, brave little guys,
    And who is your esteemed?
    – Our esteemed, the invincible Tsar
    That's who our esteemed is.
    Little soldiers, brave little guys,
    Do you have a darling?
    – There's a darling, our dear mother,
    Our Holy Rus'.

    Little soldiers, brave little guys,
    Where is your glory?
    – Our glory is the Russian state – That's where our glory is.

    Soldiers, brave little guys,
    Where are your grandfathers?
    – Our grandfathers are [the] glorious victories,
    That's where our grandfathers are.''

    * Soldatushki (little soldiers), Imperial army song popular in the 19th century. Note that many different versions exist, although always with similar format and pace.
We have now seen the weakness of Russia's democratic institutions, the ease with which a Russian leader can stoke nationalist hysteria. ~ Stephen Sestanovich
Russian society as a whole does not care if its leading scholars and scientists have a way to publish their research and discoveries and that nobody has the power to prevent abuses and torture by the police. ~ Ivan Sukhov
Freedom is better than non-freedom.
These words are the quintessence of the human experience. ~ Dmitry Medvedev
  • Regarding China...you have both the Democrats and Republicans taking an increasingly hostile posture... if you look at the recent comments of Xi Jinping, particularly after his virtual summit with Joe Biden, he has been really hitting the talking point that what is happening is that the United States is taking this neo-Cold War posture. I think he is entirely right. But I sort of see it in the same vein as you. China, the United States and Russia in particular are engaged in a classic capitalist battle for control of natural resources all throughout the world.
    What I think is happening as a result of NATO expansion, of Biden being a tremendously hawkish figure on Ukraine and basically daring Vladimir Putin to stand up to NATO expansion, is that you run the risk of what is ultimately the elite business class of the world having their battles spilling over into overt military conflict. I think China in particular is very concerned about the aggressive U.S. stance because I think China would be very happy to find a way to just sort of divvy up the world for domination in various regions. The United States is not going to accept that. The U.S. posture is pushing China and Russia into an even closer alliance akin to the relationship during the Cold War.
  • In Russia we only had two T.V. channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
    • Yakov Smirnoff, reported in Bob Fenster (2005). Laugh Off: The Comedy Showdown Between Real Life And The Pros. Andrews McMeel Publishing, p. 101. ISBN 0740754688.
  • Perhaps because of its proximity to Western Europe (China is much further away), its size (the biggest country in the world) and its out-of-focus familiarity (no country is simultaneously so exotic and ever-present) Russia has sometimes seemed a unique menace in Western eyes. This feeling, usually based on error and even more often on prejudice, has come and gone for at least five centuries. We might call it the Russia Anxiety. At its worst, it creates a preposterous bogeyman and is itself a threat to world peace, most catastrophically so in July 1914.
    • Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It (2019)
  • Although Ilyin dressed up his idea of contemplation in several books, it really was no more than that: he saw his own nation as righteous, and the purity of that vision was more important than anything Russians actually did. The nation, “pure and objective,” was what the philosopher saw when he blinded himself.
    Innocence took a specific biological form. What Ilyin saw was a virginal Russian body. Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine.
  • The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.
  • In 1944, investigator, proud of his faultless logic [...] told Babitsh: "Investigation and the process are merely juridical figaration, that can't change your destiny, which has been determined before. If it is necessary to shoot you, you'll be shot, even if you're completely innocent."
  • We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
  • Already for quite a few years we have been trying to crawl out from under the rubble of communism. But through the mistakes of our governments and of the people itself, we are crawling out by way of the most burdensome, crooked and inefficient path and with the most possible victims. Such are also our chosen methods of economic reform. And such is the filth of our spiritual atmosphere! For not a single one of the former oppressors and even the executioners has been brought to justice. They haven't even repented. The whole communist elite has had time to simply change masks--some became "democrats," some became businessmen--but they have successfully held on to all the commanding positions, both in Moscow and in the provinces. The government structure that we have today is pseudo-democracy, since the people do not control the actions of the authorities, do not decide their own fate and have already lost hope in deciding it. The main problem in Russia today is the lack of initiative and stubborn self-reliance at the grass roots. Only from here, and not from above, can real power of the people be established.
  • The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.
  • Listen, there's been a campaign, a war against Russia going on for a long time. It started again in the United States around 2006, '07, when he made that speech in Munich, but I think there's no evidence really of the aggressiveness of Russia. The aggressiveness is truly coming from the NATO forces that have encircled Russia and that are also, by the way, encircling China. You know, this is a big policy point, huge, of huge importance... If you look at the reporting from all of our major networks, it's very hostile when it comes to people who we deem to be enemies, whether it's Chávez or whether it's Castro or Putin. I've never seen an interview done from the American perspective where they allow the subject to express himself in what he was seeking to do, what his purpose was.
  • Castro was very articulate, and so was Chavez, and so was Putin in his way, and I think I gave them a chance to talk and also in their native language. We never hear Putin speak in his native Russian, and we had a very good translator, interpreter working with him. I think it's crucial to understand Putin's point of view as it was Castro's, Chávez's. And also, Yasser Arafat, too.. It's not necessary to be their enemy. It's necessary to get them to express themselves. That's my point of view, and I guess you could say I'm a dramatist. And I think they're great stories. I'm very proud of those movies. I took a lot of heat, flack for the last one for Putin, but frankly, I'm very proud of it. It's a record for all time of a man who very few people have gotten to. Even the Russians tell me they've never seen their president so frank as he was on that interview.
    • Oliver Stone, Transcript: A Conversation with Oliver Stone, (streamed live on youtube) The Washington Post (12 May 2021)
  • In the West today, supporting engagement with Moscow cannot be discussed openly without inspiring immediate hysteria. But we should try to understand the historical background to the tensions between Russia and the West before they spiral out of control... Once we do that, and start treating Russia with the respect and dignity it deserves, we may reach the real peace that we have failed to achieve since the end of the first Cold War.
  • Russian society as a whole does not care if its leading scholars and scientists have a way to publish their research and discoveries and that nobody has the power to prevent abuses and torture by the police... Russians have been more united during these last 18 difficult months than during the whole of the post-Soviet period. As they say, the person who holds the flag determines what is written on it.

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)[edit]

by Paul Klebnikov, in the (9 May 1994), issue of Forbes magazine

  • Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, [historian] Richard Pipes and many other American politicians... are frozen... with unchanging blindness and stubbornness they keep repeating... this theory about the supposed age-old aggressiveness of Russia, without taking into consideration today's reality.
  • Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S.... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance... Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of... (their) rights. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.
  • In 24 hours she lost eight to 10 purely Russian provinces, 25 million ethnic Russians who have ended up in this very way--as "undesirable aliens." In places where their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers have lived since way back--even from the 17th century--they face persecution in their jobs and the suppression of their culture, education and language...
  • Russia today is terribly sick... But even so, have a conscience and don’t demand that – just to please America – Russia throw away the last vestiges of her concern for her security and her unprecedented collapse. After all, this concern in no way threatens the United States....
  • Why does the (U.S.) State Department decide who should get Sevastopol?...
  • As a result of the sudden and crude fragmentation of the intermingled Slavic peoples, the borders have torn apart millions of ties of family and friendship. Is this acceptable? The recent elections in Ukraine, for instance, clearly show the [Russian] sympathies of the Crimean and Donets populations. And a democracy must respect this....
  • I myself am nearly half Ukrainian. I grew up with the sounds of Ukrainian speech. I love her culture and genuinely wish all kinds of success for Ukraine--but only within her real ethnic boundaries, without grabbing Russian provinces. ...
  • And not in the form of a "great power," the concept on which Ukrainian nationalists have placed their bets. They are acting out and trumpeting a cult of force, persistently inflating Russia into the image of an "enemy." Militant slogans are proclaimed. And the Ukrainian army is being indoctrinated with the propaganda that war with Russia is inevitable.
  • For every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character. I have never wished great power status for Russia, and do not wish it for the United States. I don't wish it for Ukraine. She would not be able to perform even the cultural task required to achieve great power status: In her current borders, 63% of the population consider Russian to be their native language... And all these people will have to be re-educated in the Ukrainian language...
  • Before the Russian revolution, they [U.S. and Russia] were natural allies. You know that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the Confederacy]. Then, we were effectively allies in the First World War. But beginning with communism, Russia ceased to exist. ...
  • Yet an official U.S. document from 1959, the Law 86-90, does not include Russia in the list of nations oppressed by communism. On the contrary, "Russian imperialism," not communism, is held responsible for the conquest of some 20 countries--even China, Tibet and some made-up place called "Kazakia." One is amazed that this silly law is still on the books, even today....This was not Russian imperialism, which in the past only expanded its borders somewhat. This was communist imperialism, which aimed to take over the whole world... This is complete delirium! When was Russia ever in Africa? When did Russia ever want to snatch Angola or Cuba? When was she ever in Latin America? The historical Russia has never tried to take over the world, whereas the communists had precisely this aim...
  • If one recalls the tactless declaration of President Bush about supporting Ukrainian sovereignty even before the referendum on that matter, one must conclude that all this stems from a common aim: to use all means possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia....
  • If one looks far into the future, one can foresee in the 21st century such a time when the U.S. together with Europe will be in dire need of Russia as an ally. ...It is puzzling only for those who don't look into the future and do not see what kind of new powers are arising in the world...

T[edit]

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain — at least in a poor country like Russia — and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. ~ Leon Trotsky
  • After weeks of dancing around the issue, the Obama administration has expressed concern about “heightened military activity” by Russia in Syria. But what if we are facing something more than “heightened military activity?” What if Moscow is preparing to give Syria the full Putin treatment? For years, Russia has been helping Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad cling to a diminishing power structure in a shrinking territorial base without trying to impose an overall strategy. Now, however, there are signs that Russia isn't content to just support Assad. It wants to control Syria. The Putin treatment is reserved for countries in Russia’s “near neighborhood” that try to break out of Moscow’s orbit and deprive it of strategic assets held for decades. In such cases, unable to restore its past position, Russia tries to create a new situation in which it keeps a sword dangling above the head of the recalcitrant nation. Russia’s military intervenes directly and indirectly, always with help from a segment of the local population concerned. Russia starts by casting itself as protector of an ethnic, linguistic or religious minority that demands its military intervention against a central power vilified with labels such as “fascist” and “terrorist.”
  • Get ready for Russia to cast itself as the protector, not only of the Alawites but also of other minorities such as Turcoman, Armenians and, more interestingly for Moscow, Orthodox Christians who have fled Islamist terror groups such as ISIS. Russia has always seen itself as the “Third Rome” and the last standard-bearer of Christianity against both Catholic “deviation” and Islamist menace. By controlling a new mini-state, as a “safe haven for minorities,” Russia could insist that if Syria returns to some normality it be reconstituted as a highly decentralized state. This is what Putin is also demanding in Georgia and Ukraine. The Syrian coast will become another Crimea, if not completely annexed, at least occupied. Unless stopped, the Putin treatment will not end in Syria. The two next candidates could be Moldova and Latvia, both of which have large Russian-speaking minorities.
  • Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth--science--which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
    • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, (1865-1869). Book 9, Chapter 10.
  • Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain — at least in a poor country like Russia — and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
    • Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (1930). See edition: Leon Trotsky; Max Eastman (1957). The History of the Russian Revolution. University of Michigan Press, p. 213.
  • The Russians are like us... They are fine people. They got along with our soldiers in Berlin very well. As far as I am concerned, they can have whatever they want just so they don't try to impose their system on others.
    • Harry S. Truman, statement to a group of four congress freshmen (2 July 1947), as quoted in The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 44
  • The Russians are liars; you can't trust them. At Potsdam they agreed to everything and broke their word. It's too bad the second world power is like this, but that's the way it is, and we must keep our strength.
  • Liberal Russophobia has become a powerful force responsible for deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations. The coalition of liberal Russophobes include those in Congress, media and think tanks who believe that Russia aims to destroy the U.S.-centered “liberal” international order and that President Donald Trump’s attempts to negotiate with the Kremlin do more harm than good. Those sharing these views also... want to take away from the president the prerogative of conducting relations with Russia.

T[edit]

V[edit]

  • Dear President Biden, We last communicated with you on December 20, 2020... we alerted you to the dangers inherent in formulating a policy toward Russia built on a foundation of Russia-bashing. While we continue to support the analysis contained in that memorandum... We wish to draw your attention to the dangerous situation that exists in Ukraine today, where there is growing risk of war unless you take steps to forestall such a conflict... 1. It must be made clear to Ukrainian President Zelensky that there will be no military assistance from either the US or NATO if he does not restrain Ukrainian hawks itching to give Russia a bloody nose — hawks who may well expect the West to come to Ukraine’s aid in any conflict with Russia.... . We recommend that you quickly get back in touch with Zelensky and insist that Kiev halt its current military buildup in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been lining up at the border ready to react if Zelensky’s loose talk of war becomes more than bravado.... 3. It is equally imperative that the U.S. engage in high-level diplomatic talks with Russia to reduce tensions in the region and de-escalate the current rush toward military conflict. Untangling the complex web of issues that currently burden U.S.-Russia relations is a formidable task that will not be accomplished overnight. This would be an opportune time to work toward a joint goal of preventing armed hostilities in Ukraine and wider war.

W[edit]

  • After the fall of the Soviet Union there was – for a time – a commonly held view that Russia had been a normal European state before the Communist experiment (and that it would return to being one after the end of Communism). The first part of that judgment is certainly untrue. The Russian empire, until the very end of its development, had very little in common with the other main European powers in terms of ideology or state structure. The prerevolutionary Russian elite of the nineteenth century was intent on overcoming what they saw as an age-old exclusion of Russia from the continent through recreating European culture under new and better circumstances. What the Europeans saw as backwardness was in reality, it was argued by many, a virgin opportunity to create a more genuine and unpolluted Christian civilization in the east, which, in time, would become the redeemer of a decadent and declining continent. Meanwhile, Russia remained an autocratic state, in which much of the elite’s legitimacy was built on continuous continental territorial expansion, especially, in the nineteenth century, towards the east and the south.
    • Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Intervention and the Making of Our Times (2012), p. 23
  • Russia has always been an important center for Yiddish poetry, both before the purges (Peretz Markish, Leyb Kvitko, and Itzik Fefer were among the important poets liquidated by Stalin) and after.
    • Ruth Whitman and Robert Szulkin Introduction to An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry

Y[edit]

Classical and Foreign Quotations[edit]

L’ordre régne à Varsovie
Order reigns in Warsaw
Quotes reported in: W. F. H. King, ed., Classical and Foreign Quotations, 3rd ed. (1904), nos. 291, 1321, 1439, 856, 1932
  • C’est du Nord aujourd’hui que nous vient la lumiére.
  • It is from the North nowadays that we get our light.
    • Voltaire, Épitre a l’Impératrice de Russie, Catherine II (1771) ver. 8.
  • Le despotisme temperé par l’assassinat, c’est notre Magna Charta.
  • Absolutism tempered by assassination is our Magna Carta.
    • The words of a Russian noble addressed to Count Ernst Friedrich Münster, Hanoverian Minister at Petersburg, a propos of the murder of the Emperor Paul on 23 March 1801.
    • Compare: Le gouvernement de France est une monarchie absolue, tempérée par des chansons.—“The French government is an absolute monarchy, qualified by epigrams.” (S. B. N. Chamfort, Caractéres, vol. i. p. 74). See also: Georg Büchmann, Geflügelte Worte, 19th ed. (1898), p. 483; Roger Alexandre, Musée de la Conversation, 3rd ed. (1897), p. 319, and the parallels and variants there cited.
  • L’ordre régne à Varsovie.
  • Order reigns at Warsaw.
    • On 7 and 8 September 1831, Poland made its last determined struggle for freedom, which was crushed in a few days, with tremendous losses on the Polish side, by the Russian general Paskiewitch; and Sebastiani, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, was able to announce in the Chamber of Deputies, on 16 September, the occupation of Warsaw by the Tsar’s forces. In the Moniteur of 17 September (p. 1601, col. 2) he is reported to have said, Le gouvernement a communiqué tous les renseignements qui lui étaient parvenus sur les événements de la Pologne ... au moment où l’on écrivait, la tranquillité régnait à Varsovie. The word l’ordre (“order”), with which the saying is proverbially connected, is probably due to the Moniteur of the day before, which reported that L’ordre et la tranquillité sont entièrement rétablis dans la capitale. In the Caricature of the day a cartoon appeared (by Grandville and Eugene Forest), of a Russian soldier surrounded by a mound of Polish corpses, and entitled L’ordre règne a Varsovie, which accounted in no small measure for the perpetuation of the epigram.
  • Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Cosaque (ou le Tartare).
  • Scratch the Russian and you will find the Cossack (or the Tartar).
    • Prince de Ligne, quoted in Hertslet’s Treppenwitz, etc. 4th ed. (Berlin, 1895), p. 360.
  • On lui trouve de la bonté, de l’amabilité; mais, en frottant un peu, cela sent le cosaque.
  • A kind and amiable man enough; but rub a little more closely, and you become aware of the Cossack within.
    • Napoleon, said of Alexander I of Russia, in Mémoires, Correspondance, etc. du Général Lafayette (Paris, 1838), vol. 5, p. 403.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

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Notes[edit]

  1. This painting, by Ilya Repin, is one of the most famous Russian paintings. After killing his son in a fit of rage, Tsar Ivan had no competent heir left, which ended up culminating in the Time of Troubles and the end of his dynasty.
  2. Note that many different versions exist, although always with similar format and pace.
  3. "Империя зла" can be translated as "an empire of evil" or "the empire of evil".