Karen Dawisha Quotes

[W]hat they saw in... [Putin] was that he had protected Sobchak. And as they said, "He didn't give up Sobchak, and he's not going to give us up."

[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.

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

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...

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.

Putin... allegedly favored a takeover of the St. Petersburg port by the Tambov organized crime group.

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

Gref and Kudrin appeared... drawn to Putin... because of his... liberal economic policies and... ability to... get things done in St. Petersburg... when most... were paralyzed by the "alegal" political situation and the total eruption of criminal activity at all levels.

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].

They needed... situations in which, if they could postpone... elections entirely and make it more difficult for the opposition to focus on unimportant things, like the corruption of the Yeltsin family. ...So there was a real Yeltsin interest... also... a Putin interest because he wanted to be president. ...I think ...evidence that there was an FSB operation to place explosives in the apartment building in Ryazan is incontrovertible.

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

... "...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."

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.

[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.

Money started to flood... in such amounts that they virtually bankrupt the Gorbachev regime first, and then when Yeltsin failed to find the Communist gold, they also significantly handicapped the ability of the Yeltsin regime to succeed.