Putin's People Quotes

“You in the West, you think you’re playing chess with us. But you’re never going to win, because we’re not following any rules.’ A Russian mobster to his lawyer”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“One time, a Soviet agent was sent to the UK and he ran out of money. He was introduced into a poker-playing circle and he decided to play to save his situation. He noticed that when you play poker in the UK, your cards are not normally checked or shown. Everyone takes you at your word as a gentleman. He began to win, because no one was checking his cards. He was winning big money. It’s the same situation here.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“What we’ve discussed is how the darkest forces never give up. The French Revolution, the Soviet one, all the others, appear first as a liberating struggle. But they soon morph into military dictatorship. The early heroes look like idiots, the thugs show their true faces, and the cycle (which isn’t what revolution means) is complete.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“The system Putin’s men created was a hybrid KGB capitalism that sought to accumulate cash to buy off and corrupt officials in the West, whose politicians, complacent after the end of the Cold War, had long forgotten about the Soviet tactics of the not too distant past.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“We believed in Western values … But it turned out everything depended on money, and all these values were pure hypocrisy.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“This book is the story of that system – the rise to power of Putin’s KGB cohort, and how they mutated to enrich themselves in the new capitalism. It is the story of the hurried handover of power between Yeltsin and Putin, and of how it enabled the rise of a ‘deep state’ of KGB security men that had always lurked in the background during the Yeltsin years, but now emerged to monopolise power for at least twenty years – and eventually to endanger the West.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“Such a class of oligarchs will cease to exist … Unless we ensure equal conditions for all, we won’t be able to pull the country out of its current state.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“Pugachev claimed that he was trying to bring an end to the era when the oligarchs of the Yeltsin years believed they controlled the Kremlin by giving ‘donations’ to Kremlin officials – not realising, perhaps, that essentially he was doing exactly the same.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“Pugachev told Putin he should prostrate himself in front of the priest, as was the custom, and ask for forgiveness. ‘He looked at me in astonishment. “Why should I?” he said. “I am the president of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?”’65”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“The KGB playbook of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union deployed ‘active measures’ to sow division and discord in the West, to fund allied political parties and undermine its ‘imperial’ foe, has now been fully reactivated. What’s different now is that these tactics are funded by a much deeper well of cash, by a Kremlin that has become adept in the ways of the markets and has sunk its tentacles deep into the institutions of the West.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can show you how the SVR is trying to destroy the US even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.’ Sergei Tretyakov, former colonel in Russian Foreign Intelligence, the SVR, stationed in New York”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“Instead of seeking to strengthen institutions in order to erase the abuses of the past, Putin’s allies simply took them over, giving themselves the monopoly on abusing power. They were assisted by the fact that many Russian laws were full of loopholes, making it easy for anyone to be accused of transgressing them. In such an environment, laws were open to interpretation, and meant far less than a system of mafia-type ‘understandings’, or agreements between friends, under which you had to stay on the right side of the Kremlin if you wanted to survive.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“On one occasion, when Putin and Pugachev attended a service together on Forgiveness Sunday, the last Sunday before Orthodox Lent, Pugachev told Putin he should prostrate himself in front of the priest, as was the custom, and ask for forgiveness. ‘He looked at me in astonishment. “Why should I?” he said. “I am the president of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?”’[”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“According to one oligarch who viewed the surge in religious belief with scepticism, it was conveniently designed to make serfs out of Russians again, and keep them in the Middle Ages, so that Putin the tsar could rule with absolute power: ‘The twentieth century in Russia – and now the twenty-first – has been a continuation of the sixteenth century: the tsar is above all else, and this is a sacred and heavenly role … This sacred power creates around itself an absolutely impenetrable cordon of guiltlessness. The authorities cannot be guilty of anything. They serve by absolute right.’[”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“For a long time, Putin has been portrayed as Russia’s ‘accidental president’. But neither his rise through the Kremlin nor his vault to the presidency seem to have had much to do with chance.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“In the eyes of Putin’s KGB allies, the alliances they forged then were necessary as the only way to restore some degree of control in the chaos of the Soviet collapse. The organised-crime groups were the infantrymen they needed to help control the masses, the men on the street – as well as in the prisons, according to one of Putin’s associates then.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“What emerged out of the chaos and collapse – and Sobchak’s ineffectiveness – was an alliance between Putin, his KGB allies and organised crime that sought to run much of the city’s economy for their own benefit.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“They have stolen so much to fill their pockets. All their families live somewhere in London. But when they say they need to crush someone in the name of patriotism, they say this sincerely. It’s just that if it’s London they’re targeting, they will get their families out first.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“Putin and the KGB men who ran the economy through a network of loyal allies now monopolised power, and had introduced a new system in which state positions were used as vehicles for self-enrichment. It was a far cry from the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois principles of the Soviet state they had once served.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“ST PETERSBURG – It’s early February 1992, and an official car from the city administration is slowly driving down the main street of the city.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“Under the export deals, the friendly firms would buy the raw materials at the Soviet internal price, which was fixed low under the rules of the planned economy, enabling them to reap vast profits when they sold them on at world market prices: the global oil price, for example, was almost ten times higher than the internal Soviet price in those days.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“What emerged as a result of the KGB takeover of the economy – and the country’s political and legal system – was a regime in which the billions of dollars at Putin’s cronies’ disposal were to be actively used to undermine and corrupt the institutions and democracies of the West.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“All the achievements of the Putin era so far – the economic growth, the increase in incomes, the riches of the billionaires that had turned Moscow into a gleaming metropolis where sleek foreign cars filled the streets and cosy cafés opened on street corners – boiled down to the sharp increase in the oil price during the Putin years, they agree.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

“Yevgeny Dvoskin – Brighton Beach mobster who became one of Russia’s most notorious ‘shadow bankers’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle, Ivankov, joining forces with the Russian security services to funnel tens of billions of dollars in ‘black cash’ into the West. Felix Sater – Dvoskin’s best friend since childhood. Became a key business partner of the Trump Organization, developing a string of properties for Trump, all the while retaining high-level contacts in Russian intelligence.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

“Sergei Mikhailov – Alleged head of the Solntsevskaya organised-crime group, Moscow’s most powerful, with close ties to many of the KGB-connected businessmen who later cultivated connections with New York property mogul Donald Trump.”
― Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West