Quotes About Russia

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle's domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.

my longing was for Russia...Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in God Sees the Truth But Waits. A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?

People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.

The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.

Before I left Russia in 1999, I was living in a very poor factory town with my family and friends, and nothing was ever going to change.

Russia! Russia... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?

Legal reform in Russia is a must. And I keep track of it daily.

If the oil price goes down, Russia will go down. You can track the Ruble, you can track the stock market, just off the price of oil.

As far as the Russians were concerned, I felt the reverse; they had adequate gold, if they wanted to buy, and they weren't dependent upon international trade. I felt they were more self-sufficient.

The leaders of the world's largest economies agreed during the November 2008 G20 summit not to create barriers hindering global trade and capital flows. Russia shares these principles.

Russia and China, when they were communist-like adversaries, they didn't participate. They're participating now in the world with us. They're trading monetary instruments. We're buying and selling goods back and forth, trading oil and so forth.

I was never involved in arms trading. In the Russian Federation, arms trading is the prerogative of the state.

One of the things that I heard for years and years, never drive Russia and China together. And Obama has done that.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

I would like to travel to my country again, to a country without a dictatorship, to a post-Putin Russia.

We had a very successful trip to Russia we got back.

We will work with any Administration and with any President in whom the American people have placed their trust. That is, of course, if they wish to cooperate with Russia.

it is curious that each of Russia's Times of Troubles – 1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991 –99 – ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia's place as a great power.

It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.

In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by strangulation," quipped the French woman of letters Madame de Staël. It was a dangerous job. Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered—two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous. I

In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In

Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was "waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross." On 28 March 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.f

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.

Simon Sebag Montefiore