Karen Dawisha Quotes

The bank... united elites close to Putin... [and] became a vehicle for investment... [e.g. for] 51 percent control over SOGAZ... A report on corruption... claimed... Bank Rossiya... [paid] $58 million, despite... [a] value of $2 billion.

While we talked about the failure of the 1991 coup... the failure of the efforts by the conservatives to oust Gorbachev... it's a much more complex situation. ...[S]ome ...were quickly tried and put into jail, but for very short periods and very few people... even though this was a nation-wide conspiracy... 1991 failed as an incident, but the effort to return... preeminence... as a protector of the grand Russian idea... became part of the project of bringing Putin to power in 2000.

This group was seeking also to help themselves. They were a group of trained officers, very interested in economic liberalism, but with political control, and primarily liberalism for them[selves].

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

[Putin] was... in the 's active reserves until at least August 1991, and... initially... placed with Sobchak by the KGB... to monitor... emergence of democratic leaders... [F]oreigners who did business in Russia... universally reported... to get something done in the city, you worked through Putin, not Sobchak.

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."

In the book I detail the many cases that I investigated in Saint Petersburg of Putin's involvement with illicit activities, illicit groups.

Most of the academic world... have spent the last 20 years focusing on democracy in Russia... but not on authoritarianism succeeding, and the basic conclusion... in this book is that Russia is not a system under Putin, of accidental autocrats.

After his electoral loss in 1996, Sobchak... charged... with corruption... had to flee the country... widely reported as masterminded by Putin. ...[G]etting Sobchak out... protected those, like Putin, about whom there was a lot of incriminating information. ...Sal'ye ..."Before, Putin was under Sobchak’s protection [under his roof], and now Sobchak was under Putin’s protection [krysha]."

[T]he core of the book starts 1991... I regard it as the most conservative analysis possible, based on extensive interviews, of Putin's involvement in illicit activities in the 90s. His efforts to suppress legal cases... against him, and the rise to power of the group around him.

So 91 failed but 2000 succeeded...

Smirnov met Putin in 1990 in Germany... He... headed one of the companies... in the [early 1990s] food scandal... millions being stolen; [beginning in 1994] he and Putin sat... on the board of the... SPAG... accused of laundering money for Russian and Columbian organized crime; and he signed over a monopoly position to the Petersburg Fuel Company, which he co-owned with Barsukov-Kumarin. ...Putin ...appointed Smirnov head of Tekhsnabeksport, one of the world’s largest suppliers of nuclear goods and services to foreign governments...

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

Some... gambling companies were controlled by ex-KGB, and as such ...pushed hard to get the to submit to their authority. ...Several reputed members of the Tambov and Malyshev gangs became acquainted with Putin at this time. ...Reputed crime bosses who might not have easily received visas to Western countries now arrived as members of official cultural delegations and did their business abroad under ...protection of ...delegations.

The pattern we see now of the redistribution of to the inner core, has been in place since the beginning, and even before . This is not a system in which robber barons create the industrial basis of a robust emerging capitalist economy. This is a system in which barons are robbed by value-detracting state raiding elites whose sole position is determined by their relationship to the current president. Value-detraction is an extremely important part of this picture.