Anne Applebaum Quotes

I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a "K," a "G," and a "B."

When [Vladimir] Putin, a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, became Russia's president on December 31, 1999 - eight years after the failed coup attempt against (then Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator.

In Soviet Russia, party always finds you!

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

Stalin's policies pushed the world into the Cold War. Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

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

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

Stalin was an equal opportunity murderer. He killed his own family—he killed his real enemies

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny

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

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

Vladimir Putin is not our friend and never has been.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

Vladimir Putin is a person from a different generation.

Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as 'Eurasianism.'

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

I ALWAYS LIKED MR STALIN.

Putin is very - not the smartest guy in the world.

The big insight that I have, not so much from writing 'Red Notice' but from living as the main character of 'Red Notice', is that Russia was and is a criminal state unlike any other sovereign country.

I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.

He's my idol. Putin is a beauty.

If Marx was alive during the Stalinist period, he'd be first to be in the gulag.

I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.