480 Quotes About Russia

The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.

I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.

The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

It is notable that nearly every Russian officer wears a ring in which a turquoise is set by way of a talisman against violent death.

The Russians are a people in the highest degree polarized: they are a conglomeration of contradictions

You and the Germans, you have your super- soldiers, your secret weapons... but we Russians, we have nothing but our winter.

This formidable officine dates from Peter the Great, who formed it in 1697...its historic origins must, however, be looked for much earlier; one finds them in the byzantine traditions and in the operations of the Tartar domination...espionage, delation, torture, and secret executions were the normal and regulating instruments of the |||||||| police.

The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared.

That Putin himself could not afford the cost of treatment abroad seemed to refute the claims of his critics that he, too, was personally enriching himself in Sobchak’s administration. Still, he had a quintessentially Russian understanding that assistance, in crisis or not, came through connections, the exchange of favors. He always remembered acts of loyalty like Warnig’s, just as he never forgave betrayals.