Karen Dawisha Quotes

The and its supporters use the courts to scare off researchers who want to expose the corruption at the core of this regime.

Putin’s relationship with his friends was... of reciprocity: ...supporting their raids on private businesses, providing ...no-bid state contracts ...allowing the courts to legalize their activities and criminalize those of ...opponents. In return ...they became the bulwark of his base ...helped finance and secure his electoral victories ... removed ...enemies... and... paid him . All... began in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, when he started to promote ...s from ...Leningrad and ...

Yevgeniy Gontmakher... deputy director of Moscow’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations... "[T]here is no state in Russia. ...millions of ...bureaucrats work," but they do not perform the [state] function... "Instead of... implementing the course of a developing country, we have a ...private structure ...diverting profits...[T]here isn't even a pale copy of ...the formation of the state." The Parliament had become "...another department of ...Presidential Administration" ...with the ...legal system, and bureaucrats who thought they worked for the state ... [but] serve only the interests of ...[a] "monopolistic business structure which can do anything it likes" and ...controls "...50 percent of the economy."

[A] trillion [dollars] has been subject to capital flight from Russia since 2005... primarily to Western banks.

So they laundered money. They kept it abroad, first for the CPSU and then for themselves.

[D]ocuments and newspaper articles that were once on Russian [websites] were scrubbed.

Baltik-Eskort operated openly as a private security service to protect Putin, Sobchak, and other[s]... It... allegedly acted as a liaison with the criminal underworld in St. Petersburg, including... Aleksandr Malyshev, reputed head of the Malyshev criminal organization, and , the reputed head of the Tambov crime organization. Some... employees were members of criminal groups and... accused of being involved in the assassinations of political figures...

Russians seeking to move money to the West... can establish an LLC and purchase... [real estate] property without revealing... the actual owner...

[Putin] doesn't back down.

I had published six books already with Cambridge.

So 91 failed but 2000 succeeded...

[I]nstead of seeing Russia as a democracy... failing, we need to see it as an authoritarian system... succeeding... [and] incapable of being democratic. They don’t want to be democrats. ...And if that’s correct, when did that start? And that... took me to the '90s... [T]hey were stealing from the... beginning.

... "...Putin’s political philosophy and favorite concepts—managed democracy, administrative vertical, dictatorship of law, a 'control' shot to the back of the head, etc.—are close to this group."

A lot is written now about the system now is 2.0. I yearn for the Politburo in trying to figure out what is going on in Russia. ...We don't know when decisions are made. There is no Alexandrov column in Pravda with... the criminological way of talking that allows... us... to understand what... direction the regime is going... There's huge lack of certainty... in the west and in the elite... about what is Putin's view on anything on any given day.

International, with Timchenko as co-owner... grew out of and benefited from the Russian state's dismantling of in 2003... gained control of... 5 percent of Russia’s total economic output and revenues of over $70 billion annually.