John Sweeney

Quotes

1. The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the First Chechen War (1994–6), which [Boris] Yeltsin had started in a drunken rage. The Russian Army had fought the war with great brutality and greater incompetence. The Chechens fought them to a kind of stalemate, partly because Yeltsin, when he had sobered up, realized that he had been stupid and cruel.

   p. 60

2. 

   The Soviet Union could not afford to feed or house or care for its people, so it started to implode. Putin, the secret policeman in Dresden, never properly grasped the power of these three failures [the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the command economy]. His tragedy – our tragedy – was that he had no first-hand knowledge of the three catastrophes. He was too high up in the secret police food chain to be sent to Chernobyl; too pathetically low to be sent to the fag-end of the failing war in Afghanistan; let alone to the fleshpots of the West where he would have seen the stark evidence of how ordinary people in New Jersey or New Brighton in the Wirral lived so much better than in Moscow, let alone Omsk or Tomsk. He never saw the comparative evidence of Soviet economic failure with his own eyes or, if he did, he was too brainwashed to understand what he was looking at.

   Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country's collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose. It was a failed state, just like the Kaiser's Germany became a failed state after it launched its own stupid war in 1914. Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it 'had been stabbed in the back'. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.

   p. 43

3. 

   The received story of Putin's two decades plus in power was of his tolerance of a monstrously corrupt system. The trade-off with the oligarchs was they were allowed to keep much of their fortunes so long as they paid the master of the Kremlin homage and tithes. And they had to keep their snouts out of power. Or else. But that description masks what's really going on. Putin is stealing Russia's wealth, big time, personally, but he cannot be seen to be doing so – psychologically, he hates the idea of being caught out – so he employs proxies to do the stealing for him. True, the oligarchs emerged from the road-crash of the Soviet Union's implosion and Boris Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence. But with Yeltsin out of the way, a new president had an opportunity to strip the oligarchs of their ill-gotten and obscene wealth and start afresh. Instead, Putin cemented the oligarch system because it best suited his secret urge to take things that rightfully belonged to others.

   p. 146

4. 

   Putin says that the government of Ukraine is neo-Nazi. The president is Jewish; the Russians attacked Babi Yar. For the avoidance of any doubt, it's not the Ukrainians who are behaving like the Nazis in this war.

   p. 10

5. 

   Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the First Chechen War, Chechens are routinely singled out for harassment by Russian police, vehicles are stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its hands on arms or explosives in the city. In Russia, in the 1990s, you could bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo. The 'Chechen terrorists' would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow when they could have bought them at the back of a local flea market.

   p. 61

6. 

   I asked him what he thought was the single biggest terrorist attack against his country and he replied, thankfully, there hasn't been one. Then I mentioned MH17, where 193 Dutch citizens died. It wasn't Islamist extremists who killed those people. He didn't like that but then he is, as I told him to his face, a bit of a fascist.

   p. 154

7. 

   He wanted Ukraine like he had wanted all the other things that rightfully did not belong to him. Time and again, he had probed the West's steel and found jelly. But this time, Ukraine, its president, its people and its army had other ideas. This time Mr Pleonexia found people who said, 'No, that's not yours. It's ours. Give it back'. No wonder he seems so surprised that Ukraine played hardball. That was not supposed to happen.

   p. 145

8. 

   The deal between the Russian state and the oligarchs was pretty clear: keep your nosy beaks out of politics, out of power, and enjoy your money. But if you ask the wrong kind of questions, things will not go well for you. It was a recipe for the zombification of Russia.

   p. 89

9. 

   In Russia, Putin's enemies are not allowed to have a private life. We know all about what they do in the bedroom. But no one knows simple facts about Vladimir Putin. How many kids has he got? With whom? And are they by any chance extraordinarily rich?

   p. 127

10. 

    Russian soldiers eat the best possible nutritious rations of any military, so long as it's dog food.

    p. 11

11. 

    The evidence is compelling that the very thing which galvanized Vladimir Putin's career in Russian politics – his fightback against Chechen bomb outrages – was, in fact, a black operation by the secret police.

    That Vladimir Putin blew up Russia.

    p. 67

12. 

    Putin's understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal. He once declared the fall of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century'.

    What?

    Worse than the First and Second World Wars? Worse than the Holocaust? The Soviet Union was, in reality, a dark totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin that slowly morphed into a gloomy senility.

    p. 43