Karen Dawisha Quotes

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

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

[Saint] Petersburg... was known as the "bandit's capital," and Putin was regarded by many as the link between organized crime and the mayor's office. ...[H]is activity was investigated by city and federal officials. All... squashed when he came to power.

[Putin] doesn't back down.

[T]wo numbers is all we need. The median... wealth for the average Russian is $871, according to ... Median wealth in India, over a thousand dollars. The other number is 110... individuals own 35 percent of the wealth of Russia.... the most unequal country by far in the world.

[T]he system is... mutual support and tribute. It's a system. If you are on a list of possible people who might be approached to be a member of the ... you have to pay for your seat. Once you’re in... you can... charge businessmen to have line items in the budget. Same thing all across all sectors.

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.

[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."

[F]ly-by-night companies were set up. Many of his friends... still around today, were behind those companies. The goods went out, and incomplete or no shipment came back. So millions... were made just in that episode alone.

He was the linchpin. He controlled which foreign companies could register their offices and receive offices. ...[A]ll this property was Soviet property. The Soviet Union hadn't fallen yet. So how was a company... to get access to property to set up... in St. Petersburg? Putin would... assign it.

[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.

[I]t was a detailed account of the criminal activities that [Andrey Zykov] feels Putin was involved in—abuse of power... of his official position... relations with organized crime, knowledge about money laundering... a whole range of economic crimes.

The book contains major sections on Bank Rossiya, on the food scandel in Saint Petersburg in the early 90s, on Putin's involvement in the control and emergence of the gambling industry in Saint Petersburg, Putin's involvement as a member of the board of the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company [St. Peterburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG]... registered in Germany... investigated by and B&D for its involvement in the laundering of money from the Cali Cartel, ...giving ...a monopoly position to the Tambov gang in the , ...creating and using... money from the mayor's contingency fund through... Twentieth Trust... and the unauthorized use of funds from the mayor's contingency fund in getting an apartment for himself in Saint Petersburg...

What we know about this episode... It's there in the written source material. We just need to do the work of... bringing it to light. ...[T]he book is dedicated to free Russian journalism because it was Russian journalists who followed this story, first and foremost! ...[T]hey wrote this story when there was free journalism. They covered it extensively. They were on Putin's tale from the very beginning. They couldn't write this now, but they were writing it in the 1990s.

[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.