Ksenia Sobchak Quotes

Putin needs strong moves to keep the country as one. There is some criticism that he is centralizing power, but in Russia, if you don't centralize power, you have the risk of losing the country.

The only successor to President Putin is President Putin himself and we could of course dream about President Putin stepping down voluntarily and picking out successor which would be probably as bad as him.

Let's not make out as though I will be the winner. I won't be. Putin will run and he will win.

I don't know why, but Putin has made a ritual out of humiliating Medvedev. Sometimes I even feel sorry for the prime minister.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.

If Putin decides to run, which we are assuming that he will, there really isn't anything that can stop him. He can manipulate the system so that he has not real opponents; he can manipulate the media so that nobody else gets any coverage. And then, if worse comes to worse, he can - as he has done in the past - just change the electoral results. So, it's not like it's going to be a very exciting election.

Democracy in China is like Viagra; no such thing as free elections.

In some countries that are darlings of the West, like Egypt, everyone knows the result of national elections years in advance: The man in power always wins. In others, like Saudi Arabia, the very idea of an election is unthinkable.

Putin is going to do what Putin is going to do.

It is very difficult for any dictator or any incumbent to falsify the results of an election and just get away with it.

All through the years of the Soviet empire, its Politburo held 'elections.' Of course, calling something an election and actually having it be an election are different things.

In the majority of African countries, the electoral bodies have been the personal choice of the imperial president….these bodies are not strong enough to withstand executive pressure to manipulate the results.

Russian elites believe that he [President Vladimir Putin] serves the same function as the Czars of old, keeping diverse political clans and their leaders (the boyars) in balance, preventing the civil war or chaos that a country of Russia’s vast size and relative emptiness would face if it were left open to competition by those who retain loyal militias.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into.

Putin has all the power under his control, all the security forces, all the billions of dollars he needs. It's mad to pretend otherwise.

The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime.

When elections are not democratic, even the most populist discussions become superficial, disconnected from real power; they are theatre.

Russia is so feudal in its system of patronage and reward that it is virtually impossible for a leader to hand over power without controlling his successor or at least receiving an exemption from prosecution - something Mr. Putin granted his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999.

No way Putin will let anyone take away his power. Even if all the people of Russia voted for me.

Vladimir Putin has to create foreign enemies, and he also has to justify... he has to claim... he can't acknowledge that there's a legitimate protest against his authoritarian rule, so he's got to blame it on Hilary Clinton.

I've learned over the years to hear what Putin is railing against in his own railing way.

He's my idol. Putin is a beauty.

I don't have a lot of hope for Russia when Putin goes, because I think that the kind of damage that has been done to that country hasn't been understood. We've never seen a country that has been this battered.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

There's nothing effective against Trump. Trump is Trump. Trump is going to lie. Trump is going to act the way he's acting. No amount of reason, no amount of criticism, no amount of anything is going to work to change Trump's behavior. Putin is exactly the same way.