We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Russian Quotes from Simon Sebag Montefiore, Diana Quick, Ian Gomez, Masha Gessen, Alexandra Elbakyan. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.
I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father’s side – a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I’ve often been cast in exotic roles – Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.
My mom’s family is Russian Jewish, and my dad’s Puerto Rico Catholic, so it’s kind of a weird mix.
I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they’re disruption efforts. They’re troublemaking efforts. They’re also not illegal.
I think that whether I can be a Russian spy is being investigated by U.S. government since they learned about Sci-Hub, because that is very logical: a Russian project, that uses university accounts to access some information, of course that is suspicious. But in fact Sci-Hub has always been my personal enterprise.
I am president of Russian Standard Company, biggest luxury vodka in Russia. My bank, Russian Standard Bank, issues biggest number of credit cards in Russia. I want for Russian people to have their own best vodka, their own best bank, their own best credit card.
The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.
My dad’s Russian. My mother’s English. I would say my bottom half is Russian.
Russian strategy seems to center on maintaining Putin’s popularity at home; building a strong military capacity in special forces, nuclear weapons, and advanced submarines; pressuring nearby nations to join various defense and customs pacts dominated by Russia; and pushing back on the U.S. wherever convenient.
I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I’m such a slow writer.
I don’t hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people… I love Ukraine very much.
I know that Britain and the United States and others ship arms in the Middle East, 10 or maybe 100 times more than the Russian does.
I’m not a big fan of Russian airlines where you can tell the plane is about 50 years old.
Thank God, I have sort of a pan-European accent rather than Russian, which doesn’t sound very pleasantly to Americans. For them, we speak with a rather rude pitch, and that might be our actors’ problem there. Now I’ve begun working with language coaches in Los Angeles to get rid of the accent completely.
I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
I don’t really have a bucket list, but if I did, one entry would be to dust off my college Russian and spend a big chunk of a year reading, or trying to read, ‘War and Peace’ as it was meant to be read, in Russian, with all that rumbly rocks-on-rocks poetry inherent to the language.
Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul and that’s resignation.
I went to Briar Cliff College initially, and then I transferred to Georgetown University, because I was a Russian major, and I was one of two girls accepted that year. This was September 1969 – well, that would have been 1970 – into the School Of Languages And Linguistics in Georgetown.
I performed six concerts all over the U.S.S.R. during the time of Gorbachev. The entire audience was Russian. There were no Indians. Period. The audience turned out in large numbers and gave standing ovations to all my songs. They knew each song. That was an amazing experience.
I’m actually embarrassed to tell people I’m Russian these days, because it’s become such an awful place.
No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin’s freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian ‘controlled democracies’ – Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico – ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades.
Our part of Poland was under Russian occupation from 1939-1941.
I had English grammar book and started to teach myself. I read ‘Catcher in Rye,’ in Russian. I was amazed at freedom in ‘Catcher in Rye!’ Freedom to have those perceptions of life!
The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.
The relationship between a Russian and a bottle of vodka is almost mystical.
Russian women like to be feminine. Even if it’s minus-10 degrees and snowing, a Russian woman will still be in her stilettos.
The United States and Russian security services regularly exchange information.
I served as a Russian policy officer in the U.S. Navy and worked to implement our nuclear agreements with the Russian Federation.
I know a few expressions. I know what Hilary Clinton basically says in Russian when you translate her into Russian over and over and over is, ‘izvinite pozhaluista.’ That’s, ‘excuse me please, excuse me please.’ Let’s reset things. That’s not the way you deal with folks. You show strength if you made a mistake.
I’m half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I’ve very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.
I mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It’s a way of protesting.
I respond well to terribly beautiful, terribly brilliant Russian women.
Beslan, where the Russian authorities stopped live coverage of the school being stormed, was an illustration of the progress we still have to make.
There’s a view in Russian society that there are ‘male professions’ and ‘female professions.’ The women should be looking after the home and children. It makes me sad. But the only thing you can do is fight it.
Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
Another woman approached me while I was having lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York and told me that the reason she had become a lawyer was because she had read ‘Rage of Angels’. To me, that kind of feedback has more meaning than any sales figures.
Incomprehensible messaging is a very important part of Russian propaganda.
In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you’re the Russian media, whether you’re Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn’t true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.
Nabokov can be almost too delicate at times, but in ‘Lolita,’ he puts his aristocratic sensitivity to use in such a dark tale that it creates this great tension between the story being told and the style that it’s written in. And it’s just amazing that one of the best novels in English was written by a Russian.
People who can’t speak Russian will be less susceptible to Russian propaganda. But they will also be less susceptible to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
If Russia shuts off central Asia and the Caspian Sea from Europe, the European allies of the United States will be totally dependent on Russian gas and energy.
I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm. And the military of Sweden never got one up.
I made it very clear that the United States will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections, and the Russian side committed not to do so.
I think there’s tremendous power in the images we associate with Russian culture and history, these extremes of beauty and brutality that lend themselves to fantasy.
One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.
I definitely feel Russian. I feel Russian, but at the same time when I’m in the States I feel at home, too.
I’m not superstitious at all. I’m not a Russian.
I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.
Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew.
There is certainly this widespread anti-Americanism within the Russian elite, a feeling that the U.S. lost any moral high ground it could possibly have because of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and increasing concern of U.S. intentions locally.
I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition; I think it is hard to drop old habits.
And being forceful with the United States and not letting the United States have its way, is always good politics in the Russian domestic environment.
Although I don’t understand Russian, I like the sound.
I was used to Essex boys growing up. Russian boys are a lot more gentlemanly and thoughtful. They will express their emotions a bit more.
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor’s office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.
In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.
I was in Cairo, Egypt, where Sinai – ISIS conducted the Russian airliner downing. We’re concerned about safety and security at these last point-of-departure airports flying directly into the United States – in that case, JFK.
Putin offered to allow American investigators to interview the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for allowing Russians to have access to me and those close to me.
Putin wants to restore the Russian empire. That’s his ambition; he’s stated it many times.
The Russian male audience, they loved ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’ and they like my comedies, but the Russian male audience is action, action, action.
Russian work songs can make you suffer.
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.
I hadn’t planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.
The principle of evil in Europe is the enervating spirit of Russian absolutism.
To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‘You’re better than the Cassius of old.’
I’m not a Russian sympathizer, but after being in Russia for that long many years… like, look… they way they think isn’t wrong, it’s just different.
I’d love to go to Russia and silence that crowd and give the Russian fans something to cry about.
‘Daddy used to be a Georgian,’ Stalin’s son, Vasily, once said. Actually, the dictator didn’t truly become Russian; he remained Georgian culturally. Yet he embraced the imperial mission of the Russian people.
We must remember, too, that the Russian population of the Caucasus are to a large extent Muslims, and the areas such as Georgia which have aspirations of their own.
There’s a lot of skaters that I look up to, and I think my biggest skating role models were the two Russian competitors at the 2002 Olympic games in Salt Lake City. They really motivated me to follow my passion in skating, and it really blossomed from there.
I’ve actually, very rarely have I worked in my own voice. I’ve played, I think, Russian, American, Northern from the North of England. All sorts of different accents I’ve worked in.
I spent two great seasons playing in the Russian championship. I could have stayed there, but I went to the Premier League, which is much more competitive and requires much greater levels of fitness.
I’ve never been paid by or colluded with any Russian to hack the D.N.C., to create search-engine optimization tools to cause Trump’s positives up and Hillary’s negatives up. I’ve never been to Prague.
Some Russian ballet master woman said there’s no culture in America, but if you look you can find interesting stuff in this country, don’t you think?
I believe the friendship of the Games still exists. There is a tremendous camaraderie and atmosphere at the Olympic and Commonwealth Games – where else could you go and sit down and have breakfast with a Russian weightlifter, an East German sprinter, and an Indian fencer and talk about different cultures and problems?
I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won’t be bloody like the Russian Revolution.
If the Russian nuclear arsenal was fired at the United States and other targets, and we fired back at them with thousands of nuclear weapons, it would be the end of life on earth.
One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
English football is very different, and I had to adapt to it much more than I would have had if I had stayed in the Russian league. But after a season, I felt a lot better, a lot fitter.
I was raised Catholic primarily by my mom’s side of the family. But at 18, I found out there was an adoption in the family, and that I was of Russian Jewish descent on my mom’s side. After that, I started to look more into the philosophies and culture of Judaism.
I think as far as I’ve been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you’re coming out of the closet to your parents.
It is not polite for a Russian to interfere in British politics.
In spite of the fact that Russian is very tough, I think that I can find enough strength in myself to learn it.
Some anthems are great for sports. You’ve got the Russian national anthem… ‘O Canada,’ how wonderful is that for hockey… but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I saw the Italians play four times, and they won all four times – they won the championship.
I would not say that female cosmonauts are not welcomed in the Russian space program. I must say, however, that all spaceflight hardware, including spacesuits and spacecraft comfort assuring systems, were designed mostly by men and for men.
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian – yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
I suppose people hadn’t really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s – progressive and an atheist.
The Russian people, sober, are said to be a gentle people.
I’m playing an Amazon warrior princess in a new radio comedy series called ‘Elvenquest,’ and I’m playing a Russian genius in the comeback of ‘Red Dwarf.’
I played Pierre, a white Russian aristocrat, and my co-lead was Denee Benton. Two black leads playing not black people – it was an important moment for the Broadway community to say diversity is possible and it’s here.
As my Russian improves, I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in.
I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.
Instead of watching cartoons when I was little, I had Russian ballet videos from, like, the 1950s and 1940s.
The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was ‘Anna Karenina,’ which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.
I do love my Gucci slides. I wear them inside. I’m like an old Russian man who wears slides in his house.
I like American women. They do things sexually Russian girls never dream of doing – like showering.
I have always admired the Russian cinema, their incisive storytelling, sharp camera work and brilliant acting in them. Indian filmmakers can learn a lot from it.
I guess it’s the Russian side of me that takes me a long time to get close to people.
I’m so happy to be a part of Russian MMA history by headlining the first UFC event in Russia.
CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016.
I’m three-quarters Russian, so I’ve always felt an outsider. But I don’t think you can be in a play with John Of Gaunt’s ‘This sceptred isle’ speech and not feel proud to be British.
Ballet is certainly appreciated in New York, but it has been a part of the Russian culture, history and heritage for hundreds of years, so it’s much more instilled in the Russian blood.
There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.
I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.
China has created very good investment tools, including an entire network of very large funds. The Russian Private Investment Fund works with some of those funds, with China’s largest investment funds.
Who needs Russian gas if we could get all the heat we need from our own surplus? Who needs Middle Eastern oil, when we can integrate limitless renewable sources in our smart grids?
I think President Trump could pardon anyone he wanted and have it be an effective pardon. I think there would be a big price to pay if he started pardoning people in connection with the Russian investigation.
Roughly nine of every 10 Syrian war dead since 2011 are on the butcher’s bill accumulated by Assad and his friends in Iran’s Quds Force, the Iran-allied Hezbollah, and the Russian air force.
I’m very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.
In the Soyuz, the little Russian capsule, you can actually hear the banging of the big shield, the big heat shield on the bottom, as it slowly erodes away from the heat and pieces of it fly off like sparks across your window, and it’s an interesting thing to ride through, you know.
The democratic choice Russian people made in the early 90’s is final.
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don’t know what to do about it.
I think that it’s a vital moment now for Russian democracy to convince people that it’s only our actions, our joined actions and protests that could force Kremlin to reconsider its plans to abolish presidential elections.
Many people at different levels of the Russian government are open to crypto-currencies.
It was an overwhelming moment to perform in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. Dia Mirza and I were the celebrity ambassadors for India International Snow Leopard Conservation Forum. I even met the Russian president; all of us pledged to save snow leopards and other endangered species.
I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.
I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another.
We have been protecting the lives of the Russian peacekeepers who had been attacked by their Georgian comrades, because there was a joint peacekeeping force.
After Trump became president, it was really too late to investigate his dodgy investments in Azerbaijan or his links to Russian money laundering. Those stories should have eliminated him from business, and from public life, long before 2016.
The withdrawal of more than half a million Russian troops and dependents from Germany since 1991 is described by historians as ‘the biggest pullout ever by an army not defeated in battle.’
I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven’t focused so much on those parts of my identity. I’ve always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.
Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
When I was in high school, I liked to pretend that I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I would do things like go into a pizza restaurant and tell them I’d never had pizza before, and they’d bring me into the kitchen and show me how to make an American pizza. It’s really fun.
My father was a teacher of the Russian language and literature in high school.
Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara.
I collect robots. They’re mainly Japanese, American, and especially Russian – small robots, big robots, and old toy robots made between 1910 and the Fifties.
I’ve always considered myself to be Russian: my native language is Russian.
The Russian Vitaly Petrov I feel was the worst newcomer and the worst driver.
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories.
The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
I went to study in Spain for a year after school. It was either that or Russian, so I went for the easy option. I love Spain and go quite regularly. I’ve done a bit of Spanish theatre.
Refusal to engage with the Russian government is not a viable long-term foreign policy option for the U.K.
From my personal experience, because I’m in a relationship, on paper I would never have imagined – I’m an Essex girl, maths geek who likes football, and I’ve ended up with a Russian ballroom dancer, and I guess the things you think are important, especially when you’re younger, turn out not to be.
We are excited for the partnership between the Summa Group, the Russian government, and Hyperloop One to construct a Hyperloop in Moscow.
I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I’m your classic American mutt.
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
It’s sad to think right now, but probably the Russian and Chinese government know more about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server than do the members of the United States Congress. And – and that has put our national security at risk.
Yes, I can speak a bit and I can read and write in Russian. I learned it from my grandmother who raised me with all the Russian fairytales.
Russian hacking of the DNC is a problem, not a scandal.
Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.
The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.
I grew up under Communism so we could only learn Russian, and then when Communism fell in 1989 we could learn a few more things and have the freedom to travel and the freedom of speech – and the freedom of dreaming, really.
I grew up learning Russian and translating English songs when I became a teenager, we got to listen to West Germany radio stations, and learning lyrics with picture book. These are my first experiences with the English language.
Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there’s as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product.
The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.
In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not.
President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.
I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called ‘vegetarian,’ experience of migration. It involved planes and trains – the actual compartments of passenger trains – and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.
Russian subs are a bargain at $60,000. Unfortunately, none of the dials or instructions are in English.
When I see something like Russian intelligence services interfering with our electoral process, I find that incredibly offensive.
There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of ‘law,’ but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one’s neck of the woods.
I have some Russian friends. But probably only 10 percent. I don’t hang out usually in the big Russian communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.
Canada has the world’s largest Ukrainian population outside of Ukraine and Russia. As a senator from Minnesota, a state with a large Ukrainian-American community, I understand how important it is that Canada works with us to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Whether you speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, everybody can speak wrestling and it’s really cool to go to different cultures and societies and see how the littlest things we do as performers influence the biggest things.
The thing about Russia? Everyone is Russian. They’re just Russian. They’re Russian.
Russian humor is to adapt or make some sense or nonsense out of the insanity of their lives.
I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
I spent a lot of my time working in the American module, and he would stay in the Russian segment working on his things, and we’d meet up at meal times. So it actually worked out very well.
I think most people think of ballerinas as kind of either as a fairytale, far-away thing that’s really not attainable, something they can’t grasp, or they think of them as European or Russian and kind of their nose up in the air. So, it’s cool for me to, like, sit with them and for them to really see themselves as me.
We never worked in Russia. We never worked for Russia. I want to be careful, but I don’t think we have any Russian employees in our company whatsoever. We just don’t have business in Russia. We have no involvement with Russia, never have done.
On Putin’s order, Russian security services try to destabilize NATO allies the U.S. has sworn to defend.
I’m Russian: I’m into men, diamonds, and caviar.
The Russian cloud over the Trump administration never seems to disappear.
I’ve developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There’s a women’s detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.
To me, when – just like when you watch a movie or you watch a TV show, to me, you know, Nicole Kidman or Leonardo DiCaprio, you know that they are actors, but also, great actors find that extension of themselves. So, when I walk through that curtain, I find the extension of myself of being the Ravishing Russian in there.
I grew up in Chicago, but for the last 28 years I’ve lived in Moscow and London, and am now a British citizen. From 1996 to 2005, my firm, Hermitage Capital, was one of the largest investment advisers in Russia with more than $4 billion invested in Russian stocks.
For whatever reason, whenever I’m having a get-together, I’ll turn on my projector and play YouTube videos of ‘Russian driving fails.’ Russians all have dashboard cameras in their cars, so there are all these videos of crazy wrecks and people almost getting hit in the street. It’s a conversation starter, for sure.
Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.
The Russian government imposed my head on the body of Russian models in straight jackets.
If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
Every time I watch CNN, it feels like you’re assigning me homework. Is Trump a Russian spy? I don’t know. You tell me – I’m watching the news. It feels like I’m watching CNN watch the news. Just take an hour, figure out what you want to say, then go on the air.
In spite of all the skills that I do have, to relate to the normal world I have no applicable skills. I can speak Russian, I can speak French. I know about Chanel. Especially vintage Chanel. I know what Halston is. All of these things, but they can’t really be applied to a nine-to-five.
My impressions of the Russian Revolution can be divided into two periods. The first period was when I showed deep sympathy. My second period is one of disappointment. This change was the result of close observation on the spot.
The Russian people have their own cultural code, their own tradition.
I was never invited to the White House. They invited that Olympic Russian gymnast – that little Communist, Olga Korbut.
Russian citizens being attacked is an attack against the Russian Federation.
I can’t understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.
I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.
While writing ‘The Orientalist,’ I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
In school, I was playing old men and women, babies, Russian people, and all sorts of weird parts – a lot of comedy – and that’s sort of like home to me.
Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn’t know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.
I only started singing the Russian roles when I came west.
All of us who are flying on international space stations speak some Russian and speak some English. Both the languages are needed to fly in a Russian spacecraft and communicate with your colleagues.
Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That’s the Russian interest in this process.
The language is the hardest thing. My technical Russian is much better than my conversational Russian, and it has to be good enough to explain problems to them in their technical control center.
When I lived in New York, I discovered these Russian & Turkish Baths in East 10th Street. Great for a platza treatment – plus, you’ll run into the world and his wife there.
The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
People knew Trump had strange relationships with the Russians even before he was elected. Consequently, there is every reason to investigate whether Donald Trump is a Russian asset.
It was awesome and liberating to play a Russian spy.
No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.
When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I’ve failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.
In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh… We are finding our way out from under the debris of the ‘Red Empire’ slowly and tentatively.
The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia.
The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn’t affect me very much because my parents didn’t really talk about it.
Putin’s treatment of Chechnya became a cautionary tale of what would happen to rebels and terrorists – and indeed to entire groups of people – if they threatened the Russian state.
There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God.
The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family’s home life during the last years of Russian autocracy.
The original settlers of Alaska apparently were Russian.
The Russian economy is a one-trick pony. They’re totally focused on natural gas and oil.
The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree.
Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It’s an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.
The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay’s enemies include not just the U.S. government but also many European and the Russian one.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, provided ample evidence that the president should be investigated for obstruction of justice in his attempt to quell the Russia investigation by firing Comey and urging aides to lie.
I love going to see the theatre whether it’s a Broadway play or a Russian ballet company.
The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it.
Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.
I would love to play a crazy Russian spy, run with a gun. That’s something I would love to do.
Under the leaden sway of Alexander III’s government, the silence of the graveyard prevailed. Russian society, equally discouraged by the collapse of all hopes for peaceful reforms and by the apparent ineffectiveness of the revolutionary movement, was in the grip of a mood of depression and resignation.
I would watch San Antonio play and see plays I recognized from the Russian team, the Yugoslavian team.
In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He’s a Russian emperor.
There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act.
I love Russian culture. I don’t know the young Russia, I’m not at all familiar with young Russia, but the old school Russia is good enough for me for the moment.
For all the farcical invoking of Blitz spirit, Brexit isn’t merely an absurdist experiment in English nationalist nostalgia – it is the most audacious example yet of a futuristic Russian nationalism that seeks to divide and rule Europe.
The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battle field and person by person, and made to bleed to death .
Our job is to tell the world about Russia and to report world news from a Russian viewpoint.
The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.
The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.
In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers – ‘Russian’ came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.
The GRU is used for both tactical intelligence collection in the battlefield in support of Russian military operations and also strategic active measures or psychological warfare overseas.
I’m Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
I have a Russian heart.
I’m worried about privacy issues, I’m worried about Russian attacks. They literally, if you if you look at what their insidious aims are – to divide this country, is to make us hate each other, to make us not to trust media.
In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.
Scratch a Russian, and you’ll find a peasant.
First we attacked the Russian soldiers with our gases, and then when we saw the poor fellows lying there, dying slowly, we tried to make breathing easier for them by using our own life-saving devices on them.
I do not like the idea that a Russian company cannot be successful without Western experience. I think that, at the end of the day, it is a question of bringing benchmarks from other countries. So far, the golden benchmark has been the West.
I was with a Russian family, and I couldn’t believe that the grandparents in Russia, first of all I was shocked and delighted to find that the Russian family that I’d been told was so different from the American family, was exactly the same.
I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.
Chechens are not ethnically or culturally Russian, and have now been fighting for generations to free themselves from Russian rule.
The whole purpose of Russian propaganda is to show that the U.S. and U.S. politics is filled with hubris and hypocrisy and to show it is not better than anyone else.
Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.
If you poke the Russian bear with a stick ,he will respond.
The Russian government doesn’t like me; Vladimir Putin doesn’t like me.
I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?
The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.
Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix.
With Fancy Bear, we have medium-level confidence it’s GRU, which is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and with Cozy Bear, we have low-level confidence it’s FSB, the Russian federal security service.
When I was at the State Department, I was targeted by the Russian propaganda machine because I was one of the most visible faces of the United States opposition to Russia’s illegal intervention in Crimea. They made up quotes I never said.
Mr. Putin has to understand that if he does something against us Belarusians, it will seriously damage the relationship between the Russian and Belarusian people.
Many Russia experts note the deep and sad capacity of the Russian people for suffering.
Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to get to the facts and learn lessons to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.
The history of Chechnya is one of imperialism gone terribly wrong. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Chechens were among the few peoples to fend off Mongol conquerors, but at a terrible cost. Turks, Persians, and Russians sought to seize Chechnya, and it was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1859.
We are importing Russian natural gas which is not produced in an environmentally conscious manner. If the states that are blocking the pipelines were truly concerned about the environment, they would look to where the natural gas would be coming from.
By the winter of 1945-1946, the Russian peoples were being warned of the dangers from the West.
In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country’s fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!
When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.
The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary.
Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were ‘historically obsolete’ and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.
I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it’s the best possible combination.
I admire Tom Ades: he’s a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
I was 8 years old in the spring of 1945 when my family fled Silesia to escape the Russian army. On our way, we passed through Dresden. A few days later, it was firebombed. The fire was so bright that night that one could read a newspaper from the light, though we were many kilometers away.
Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.
We must make clear that the United States will not tolerate hostile Russian activities against us or our allies.
Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them.
When the Georgian army started this assault against the sleeping city of Tskhinvali, the Georgian peacekeepers, serving in one contingent with their Russian friends, joined the army and started killing the Russian comrades in arms.
I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent – it feels fake.
Russian is a really hard language – but I’ve got my own personal teacher. He’s been really patient.
There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.
I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years. But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.
My mother is Russian and father Nepalese, so we always had a chess board at home. Chess is part of the culture in both Russia and Nepal.
As I’m sure you may know, I’m planning to become a spaceflight participant and have been recently approved to begin my spaceflight training by the Russian space federation having passed the necessary medical and physical tests.
There’s definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent – especially Dostoevsky.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn’t speak any Russian. He didn’t care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
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.’
And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.
I managed to do some classes in Ukraine but people there didn’t really speak English. They spoke Russian so that’s what I learned there.
To give the personal details of Ukrainians to the Russian authorities would not only be against the law, but also a betrayal of those millions of people in Ukraine who trusted us.
I think I will only marry a Russian, well, I mean, a girl from Russia.
I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.
Russian women are now interested in clothes. But they will never attach supreme importance to fashions as do Europeans and American women, because they are too vitally interested in all the various projects going on in their country.
I think if German literature could survive the ’40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.
I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I’m not Russian.
In our community here in Boston, we have had a tremendous influx of Russian Jews and Haitians. We call these people immigrants. But they come for the same reasons that William Bradford and William Brewster and John Carver came.
I always wanted to play characters, and that was definitely one – a Russian spy.
In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the issues of foreign policy and defense are fully in the hands of the president.
I think what we’re learning with the Trump Jr. meeting is when you meet with any Russians, you’re meeting with Russian intelligence. And, therefore, President Putin.
I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.
The Irish and Russian communities are huge in New York, so this is truly one of the only places where I can fight in front of all of my fans.
I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It’s the people who had their past and future taken from them – they don’t get paid – many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.
Russia wants stability along its Western borders, neighbors who treat their Russian minorities with respect and prosperous trading partners. NATO enlargement promotes such developments.
Now I want to use money in a good way. I make foundations back home in Russia, I have sponsored vaccinations for more than one million children in my homeland and I have founded scholarships in the names of my great Russian compatriots – Oistrakh, Richter, Gilels, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Schnittke.
Any adjective you put before the noun ‘writer’ is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it’s feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.
I studied Russian history at school, and I absolutely loved St Petersburg. It was magnificent – the architecture is incredible and has quite a significant Dutch influence.
So I started to learn Russian and I was one of those probably way too eager, annoying young actor kids who was trying to change all my lines to Russian, much to the dismay of the director and Nic Cage.
I’ve been reading this little book. It’s called the Russian constitution. And it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don’t want to hear those who say we’re appealing to the authorities. Who’s the power here?
It is unclear how much money Trump has, but it is not enough to matter in Russia. If he keeps up his pose as the tough billionaire, he will be flattered by the Russian media, scorned by those who matter in Russia, and then easily crushed by men far richer and smarter than he.
The Russian people have unilaterally made their choice in direction of democracy in the early ’90s. They will not be led astray. Nobody should be having any doubts.
All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it’s particularly sharp.
I have sung in over 20 different languages and enjoyed it. I have even sung in foreign languages like Spanish and Russian.
The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.
For the Russian masses, the proletarians, knew for certain, and already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes, that the peasants would soon be on their side.
A great deal of energy is spent daily on pushing the Russian e-commerce boom along while managing all aspects of growth and development along the way.
Tolstoy didn’t know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In ‘Anna Karenina,’ nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.
When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood,’ his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think – that you can transmit something of what life is like now.
I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn’t speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother’s womb, though I’ve since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.
If I wanted to learn Arabic or Russian, I could. Or tie my shoes in a new way, I could. Why? Dedication.
When Russia’s intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency’s secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.
The Russian revolution is one of history’s car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.
I have part of Russian stuff inside me, fight and fierce that I have.
Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
The mentality of the Russian demands a lord, a czar, a president.
There is a threat of Russian energy domination, especially when Russia mentions that it’s going to build more pipelines – Nord Stream III, Nord Stream IV.
By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read ‘War and Peace.’
The first song is called ‘London.’ It’s about two Russian soldiers who desert the Russian army and escape to London, where they indulge in a life of crime.
The U.S. space program has mythologies attached to pioneering and conquering, but the Russian tradition is very different. In the Russian tradition, the ultimate goal of humanity was to resurrect all humans.
We’re taking up some science experiments, some crystal growth things, we have a refrigerator that carries up some samples, new samples that go into the station, we bring the old ones home; we have a lot of clothing, we have a lot of food-U.S. and Russian food.
Modern Armenia survived only because it was the single province controlled, and protected, by the Russian Empire. The rest of the territory within its historical borders is almost wholly devoid of ethnic Armenians.
A personality like Conor’s appeals to the Russian people a lot. He’s always ready to go, he knocks people out and he’s tough.
I’m interested in Russian language, culture, history… and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.
As my name might suggest, I’m Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn’t be talking now.
The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive ‘policies’ and ‘Plans’ of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word ‘socialism’, but what else can one call it?
I’m very inspired by the artfulness and soulfulness of the Russian people.
Chaga is significant in ethnomycology, forest ecology, and increasingly in pharmacognosy. Its long-term human use and cultural eastern European and Russian acceptance should awaken serious researchers to its potential as a reservoir of new medicines, and as a powerful preventive ally for protecting DNA.
British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: ‘Oh my God!’
‘The Gambler’ by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
When events like the Sony Hack or the news of the Russian hack of our election, we’re not shocked by such events, but they are troubling.
Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Very few people will roll the dice with their lives. I play Russian roulette.
It is a pity that my collection of trophies contains not a single Russian.
We certainly would not be here, living and working on the International Space Station without the commitment and dedication of all the folks who worked the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Programs as well as the Russian Space Program.
Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.
I think I was more or less, convinced of that by just the press, the US press. By people who were pressuring you, saying that you gotta beat the Russian’s, if you don’t win anything else, win the Russian meet and so forth.
I was a policy office in my final tour in the Navy, a Russian policy officer, and we were always thinking about our interactions and how they would affect the country 10, 20 years from now.
I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family – Russian exiles and the Canadians they married – is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.
We do not attract Russian money to Luxembourg with high interest rates.
Of all the games I’ve done, the only time I’ve ever lost my voice was on ‘Call Of Duty 2,’ playing a rasping Russian captain on the Stalingrad level.
We go to the banya, the Russian spa. And you go into the sauna, which is really hot, much hotter than a normal sauna, and then they beat you with branches.
I’m a product of Russian culture, but I never felt it was my country.
There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life.
If you play in this country, live in this country, and you grow up in the heartland – and you put on a Russian uniform – you are not a patriotic person.
People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
I’ve been to the Titanic in a yellow submarine and the North Pole in a Russian nuclear ice breaker.
It was funny on ’24’ because I’m a Scots-Canadian, and I was working with the great Scottish actor Tony Curran, and we were both playing Russian gangsters.
Reduced… to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
I’m most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
There are a lot of people who are trying hard to sell themselves as Russian vodkas.
Reflexive control is a ‘uniquely Russian’ technique of psychological manipulation through disinformation. The idea is to feed your adversary a set of assumptions that will produce a predictable response: That response, in turn, furthers a goal that advances your interests.
The malaise and military decline of the post-Vietnam years under President Jimmy Carter set the stage for Russian aggression abroad and uncertainty among our allies.
Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.
A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, ‘Everybody off.’ They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren’t in America, they didn’t have enough money to continue.
Quite frankly, Russian aggression in Ukraine and its illegal occupation of Crimea remind us that we still have a good deal more work to do to guarantee the strategic vision of a Europe whole, free and at peace.
Fortunately there is more wealth in the world than there was at the time of the global economic crisis of 1929 – Chinese, Indian, Arab and Russian.
I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.
The imputation to Brodsky of Russian nationalist views is, of course, paradoxical and worth considering.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.
If we are Russian citizens, treat us as Russian citizens. We want equality and justice.
Can we live without Russian gas in Europe? The answer is no. Are there any reasons to live without it? I think – and I’m not defending the interests of Total in Russia – it is a no.
U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration’s militancy and aggressiveness.
I don’t have many Russian friends. My childhood friends are dead – either from bad health, or they died in perestroika.
I mean whatever I do it’s important that I put my stamp on it and keep it in my world, whether I’m doing a dance track or something like the Russian album for example.
My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months.
Russian people are not stupid. They know that the system we are living in is undemocratic.
Russian membership in the World Trade Organization has the potential to strengthen the rule of law, combat corruption, and give Russia a stake in better relations with the outside world.
It would be sad if the expertise built up during the 40 years of the U.S. and Russian manned programmes were allowed to dissipate. But abandoning the shuttle, and committing to new launch vehicles and propulsion systems, is actually a prerequisite for a vibrant manned programme.
I had a really fantastic dialect coach that I worked very well with, and I was constantly surprised by the different intonations that the Russian dialect has.
People are making judgements about Russian people based on me. This is why I never allow myself any aggression towards my opponent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s traditionalist-nationalist rhetoric, which blames secularism, diversity and internationalism for the weakening of Western democracies, gives voice to the grievances that American hate groups have felt for so long.
We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.
I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others’ stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.
Well, the band name is just a stupid thing. We used to live in Russia and our friend there, a Russian lady just kind of described my sister as a clean bandit.
I don’t like the mentality that comes with rich Russian men. Because they have money, they think they can buy a woman – and they do.
Would most politicians have gone to a meeting with someone advertised as being an agent of the Russian government?
I was not only typecast as a Russian, but I was typecast as Yakov Smirnoff. This is understandable, and I was very happy to get the roles, but it would be nice to be in a movie where I could be someone else.
It’s a film called ‘Kursk’, which is a true story about a submarine disaster. There was an accident on board a Russian submarine in the year 2000, and it stranded a large number of sailors. That’s next.
I’m very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.
I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.
Trump is what the Russians call a useful idiot, someone in service to the Russian Federation, either unwitting or wittingly.
To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that’s the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.
The music we’re playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.
It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.
For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is… not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.
I’ve decided that the political context is such that the only way reform will finally come about in the Russian military is that the deterioration goes beyond the point to which these old generals can stand up there and resist it.
I think I tended toward the Russian training because my first teacher taught a version of Vaganova, and it was drilled into me that that was the best system, and also at the time there were a lot of great Russian stars.
Iran is part of the problem, not the solution. And the Russian government is ignoring reality.
I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate.
All of the people who work in the Russian government and Russian presidential administration, in this way or another, work for Vladimir Putin.
You can’t break Russian people, you know? ‘Cos we’re made in cold snow. We’re very resistant.
I worked the drive-through at McDonald’s and tried out different accents – Italian, Russian, Irish.
My daughter is exceptionally chatty. I’m not a braggy mother but she is gifted – with the personality of a Russian gymnastics coach.
I think often people know about Rasputin in Russian history – but know only a little bit. He’s an interesting man, who in general I think meant well.
Moreover, the accomplishment of Russia’s aims has been greatly simplified by the fact that we have heretofore offered the world no practical antidote for the Russian poison.
It’s very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.
The Russian Federation and the United States of America, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world, but apart from nuclear-wise, we have a lot in common. We have huge territories, natural resources, technologies, science, education, and of course human capital.
The disgusting truth is that some of the less-educated families in the Caucasus hate and despise Russians simply because they are Russian, just as some less-educated Russian families feel the same way about people from the Caucasus.
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory – these traders routinely asked about ivory ‘horns’ and teeth.
At that time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and I believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Russia and Germany to fight each other to the death.
What I do is good for Russian opposition. What I do is I speak freely on the things and items that were never discussed loudly with Russian public for years.
Germany, because of the fact and the perception of a special relationship with Russia, is the only one who can influence Russian debate. Russians also believe that Germans understand them best because they’ve been through a big war and know what humiliation means.
You can usually figure what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing and why by noting the actions and values he falsely projects onto others.
The Russian leadership doesn’t operate in the same way as ours does. Informal networks have a much more important role to play than formal networks.
I want my word to be up to the scale of the feat of arms performed by the Russian soldier.
At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.
I just love bikes. It’s not the safest passion to have, but I guess it’s better than Russian roulette.
I’d read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.
The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the ’60s counterculture – the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the ‘new man,’ and starting communes.
Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.
There are a lot of things about Russian culture, art, music, photography and literature that I’m love with.
NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?
Appointing special counsel Robert Mueller to probe Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and any possible ties to President Trump’s campaign) was the only choice the Justice Department had. This is the best way to deal with the conflicts and potential conflicts of interest these matters posed.
I haven’t shifted language. I’m writing in English because I like it. I’m a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I’m still writing in Russian.
Yes, I am Canadian, having sailed here from England on a Russian boat called the Alexander Pushkin when I was the ripe old age of 4.
I like reading… French, Russian classics – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We’re focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.
At this time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Germany and Russia to fight each other to death.
My mom is African-American, Native-American, Irish, and Creole, and my father is of Jewish, Russian, and Polish descent. It’s made me who I am. Because of my diverse background, I think I can relate to many different people, different stories, and different communities.
Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian – anything but a normal, mainstream American.
King Frederick I of Prussia conceived the Amber Chamber in 1701 as a magnificent gift to the Russian royal family that would seal the alliance between the two powers.
The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky – oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.
The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.
Amazingly, quite a few people, even some American conservatives, are taken in by Russian tactics.
I’m friends with Igor Yanovsky from when we played together at PSG and he suggested a few Russian dishes to me. I really love borsch!
Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I’ve gone through the medicals and the training and now I’m officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.
I’d love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.
