This group was seeking also to help themselves. They were a group of trained officers, very interested in economic liberalism, but with political con… - Karen Dawisha

[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.

[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.