Quotes from Masha Gessen

Russia finally lost its bona fides in the eyes of international business and media.

Everyone had their own turning point," he explained to me. "Mine was Beslan.

I could see that if the standoff continued for at least a few more hours, lives would be saved, all of them or most of them. There would be no attack and the children and their parents

It all became clear to me that day, September 3, 2004.

Illarionov resigned his position as sherpa—Putin's personal representative—to the Group of Eight; winning Russia's full membership in the G8 had been one of Illarionov's main accomplishments.

Trump's word piles fill public space with static, the way pollutants in an industrial city can saturate the air, making it toxic and creating a state of constant haze. The haze can be so dense that objects become visible only up close, but never in their entirety and never really in focus.

There is no national consensus on the nature of the events that defined the country, and this very lack of consensus is, arguably, modern Russia's greatest failing as a nation.

Like Browder, Illarionov became a tireless and vocal roaming critic of the Putin regime.

had been just over a year since Khodorkovsky's arrest, and it was now clear Russia had passed two milestones. With the country's former richest man behind bars indefinitely, no one, not even the rich and powerful, could afford free agency.

And with the assets of the country's largest private company hijacked in broad daylight, Putin had claimed his place as the godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country.

someone believed to have access to the Kremlin—estimated Putin's personal net worth at $40 billion.

Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.20

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which reports to the executive branch, rebuked Alabama forecasters for contradicting the president. The existence

The existence of alternative facts had become policy.

President Barack Obama's observation that the prime minister had "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new," Putin said, "We don't spread our legs.

Putin planned to dress him down, Putin said, "I understand that an illness is an illness, but I would recommend that Igor Vladimirovich [Zyuzin] get better as soon as possible. Or I'll just have to send a doctor to see him and take care of the problem altogether." In

The skeptical note in Roldugin's "He really thought he knew something …" is as clear and unmistakable in the original Russian as it is in the English translation, but it seems that both Roldugin and Putin, who certainly vetted the quote, missed it.)

activists who engaged in unsanctioned demonstrations (by this time, most opposition demonstrations were unsanctioned) should expect "to be hit over the head with a stick.

Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people.

Medvedev's term ran out in 2012.

The plan, ostensibly, was for Medvedev to sit out his four years doing nothing but talking pretty, and then to cede the throne to Putin, this time for two consecutive six-year terms.

The system's greatest vulnerability stemmed from Putin's and his inner circle's pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belonged to others, that was exerting ever greater pressure on the regime from inside.

Corruption Perceptions Index of the watchdog group Transparency International, reaching 154th out of 178 by 2011 (for the year 2010).

2011, human-rights activists estimated that fully 15 percent of the Russian prison population was made up of entrepreneurs who had been thrown behind bars by well-connected competitors who used the court system