In Putin's Footsteps Quotes

“China’s huge landmass should straddle five different time zones, yet operates according to just one. Inhabitants of western China, if they follow their clocks, have dark mornings and light evenings, but nobody doubts that only the Beijing time matters.”
― Nina Khrushcheva, In Putin's Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones

“The murderous Holodomor accompanying the industrialization, the devastating political purges, and the Gulag camps merit only brief mentions and are explained away by raisons d’état: to make a country great one needs to take tough—even brutal—measures.”
― Nina Khrushcheva, In Putin's Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones

“Some cars—especially BMWs, Audis, or Volkswagens, bore bumper stickers that read as an exhortation to attack: ON TO BERLIN, AGAIN! That militancy—Russians had defeated Nazi Germany and now use their automobiles to relive the victory—also displayed deep insecurity and evoked a sad, telling irony: they prize German automobiles above their own.”
― Nina Khrushcheva, In Putin's Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones

“The keys to understanding Russia’s geopolitics, its people and its leaders, have been the nation’s faith—the stress on the communal rather than the individual in either Christian Orthodoxy or communist brotherhood—and its giant territory and what it holds.”
― Nina Khrushcheva, In Putin's Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones