Masha Gessen Quotes

Only enemies of the Soviet Union can think of the KGB as some kind of secret police.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

The thing about the Russian secret police and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man.

Putin, I believe, was actually born to be a KGB agent. And I say born because I think that his father was also an agent of the secret police in Russia.

It's bleak behind the Iron Curtain, although they do have the strongest vodka I've ever had in my life.

I've met enough KGB colonels in my life.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

We were behind the iron curtain at last.

Putin has demonstrated his fondness for the Cold War…. Once a KBG agent, always a KGB agent.

… the unfortunate but inevitable connection between the word “socialism” and the unmitigated crucifixion of Civil Liberties in the East [Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Communist Party.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.'

I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

The Soviet state builds bodies—mounds of them.

The Russian Leadership Came to the conclusian that Western Expansion could only be reversed with an "iron fist".

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.