Top 15 Karen Dawisha Quotes

My basic argument is... Putin, as deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg worked with the mafia to make their activities legal. He was in a position within the government to provide license and registrations... for items going out... and coming into the country. He sent, over his signature, Tambov mafia leaders as members of cultural delegations to Germany. ...[I]n Saint Petersburg ...White Nights was a mafia front ...[F]rom the very beginning there were people involved with cultural exchanges... gambling [etc.,]... very close to Putin who were using their position for [cross-border exchanges of] goods and services... [E]ven in 1991-92 that border wasn't open for people who had a criminal record. So he verified for their applications for visas that they had no criminal record.

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

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

[T]his older generation of KGB generals... who were not in prison, put people in and got them prepared, and Putin was the one who rose to the top... That's my argument.

So 91 failed but 2000 succeeded...

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.

[I]n... 89-91... the and the conservatives within the Central Committee saw what was happening in Poland, Hungary and... East Germany and became extremely frightened about the unreliability of Gorbachev to... secure their future. They worried that... the communists would have to run as one of many parties, and... be wiped out in the elections, as happened in Poland and Hungary... [T]hey started to move money abroad along established KGB channels... kept safe for the communist party in the event that it became an unfunded legally bound party... [I]nstead... after the 1991 coup the communist party was... outlawed. So... conflict and contention started amongst... KGB groups as to who had knowledge of where the money was.

is very important... It's a from the bottom to the absolute top... [L]oyalty and silence are demanded in return.

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.

I'm talking about a system in which risk is nationalized and reward is privatized. Only those loyal to Putin enjoy the benefits of this rule. ...It ...is not the case for many hundreds of thousands of small or medium-sized business owners in Russia who are subject to this... raiding by those above them... Property rights are secured by loyalty and not by law. They could take their claims to court, but those court decisions are political... and so the market... is hugely distorted by political considerations. There's no transparency.

I also got a few reviews from people who said, "ok, so they're corrupt, but it's not a ." So... what do I mean by saying that... a political system is a kleptocracy?

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

I had published six books already with Cambridge.

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

Putin... believes ...[the West] can easily be manipulated through appealing to investors' and bankers' interests.