Daniel Fried Quotes

Russia right now is searching for its soul. It is trying to figure out what it is.

Not a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed.

Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

I am interested in the subject which is Russia.

Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.

You cannot understand Russia if you look at her through Western eyes.

I'm tired of Italian gangsters. Not that I don't watch 'The Godfather' every morning when I get up and 'Goodfellas' when I go to sleep at night. But I've just always been fascinated by Russia as a country, by the Russian personality. And now Russia is literally a gangster nation.

Not too many people out there are interested in Russia so much that they really want to watch things about Russia and only about Russia.

Putin has big plans for Russia...Hats off to the Russians. I think I would just get along very well with Vladimir Putin.

In my opinion, this vicious circle will be broken by history itself. Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of [Vladimir] Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

Reforms in Russia are very tragic, but they always end in a farce.

We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical.

Only in the Fall of 1924 did [Joseph] Stalin discover that it is especially Russia, as distinguished from other countries, which can by its own forces build up a socialist society.

If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.

The period of radical reform is finished.

Questions about who we are and who we want t be are increasingly prominent in our society. We have left behind Soviet ideology and there will be no return.

The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

For ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was wracked by poverty and social decay: the country suffered a demographic collapse on a scale never before witnessed in an industrial country outside of wartime as deaths outstripped births and the country’s population shrank by some 800,000 people each year.

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.

I know Russia well.

Revolutions in Russia are even worse than bad czars.

When I think about Sen. Collins, I think she might have been different from the other people in Washington when she was first elected but I have to ask is that still the case.

I am a conservative Republican, but I didn't start out that way. I was raised as a Democrat.

The effect of sanctions on the Russian economy are clear to everybody, first to the Russians and to the Russian leadership, and the surroundings of the Russian leadership, the circle that is close to the Russian political leadership.

There's Lindsey Graham 1.0 and then there's Lindsey Graham 2.0. I could not beat Lindsey Graham 1.0. That was the John McCain-Lindsey Graham.