50 quotes
Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did.
Killer in the Kremlin (2022)
Red Horizons is no better than Bucharest secret policeman's gossip: sordid, dully pornographic, intrusive, morally repugnant, incoherent yet endlessly fascinating. Ceausescu is seen as a power-mad, deeply dishonest paranoiac, as well as someone who cheats at chess. Elena comes of worse, if that is possible, as a sluttish, bad-tempered moron.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
To understand the extraordinary fact of Ceausescu's monolithic power, and the otherwise incomprehensible lack of resistance to it, one must try to experience the sheer dead weight the Romanians bore day in, day out. During the twenty-four years of his reign, their thoughts were blunted and restricted by what George Orwell might have called 'Homagespeak'.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
The Ceausescu cult was fed by a job lot of Westerners keen to do business with the one Eastern European leader who could, it appeared, stand up to the Russians and survive. At first, there was a trickle, then a torrent of Western visitors all singing Ceausescu's tune, none of them too choosy about the reality of the man they met – the myth was too much to their liking.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)
Zhirinovsky was a fool's bladder on a fascist stick, using his cruel wit to malign opponents of Vladimir Putin, further the Kremlin's far-right agenda and consign his immortal soul to darkness. I met him once and reader, do not be surprised, we ended up shouting at each other.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
The whole point of Putin sending Navalny to Yamal was to break his spirit and within a month of arrival, he was cracking jokes about keeping warm in minus 32 degrees C inside the carcass of a hot, fried elephant. Once again, one is left thinking how much Putin must have hated him.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
The chances of civil war are high because, after the Prigozhin fireball, everybody knows that any deal, any promise backed by the word of Vladimir Putin has no value. In the long run, Navalny's prophecy from his dog kennel, of civil war, of a catastrophic failure of the Russian state, are more likely to come true than not.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
In the flesh Vladimir Putin is nattily-dressed, very short and a dead ringer for an Auton, the ultra-creepy monsters in Doctor Who that morph into wheelie-bins and gobble you up and spit you out as plastic. His cosmetic surgery is not a great advert for Botox but if you get to be the master of the Kremlin no one's going to tell you your skin-job sucks.
Killer in the Kremlin (2022)
Putin said that Anna was a woman whose influence was 'extremely insignificant'. The truth was that she was extremely significant, very dangerous to his hold on power. No one else was asking the questions she was.
And then her voice was silenced.
Killer in the Kremlin (2022)
The effect of Pacepa's defection on Ceausescu's mental state was to destabilise him even more. He became quite crazy for a time and suffered a further, permanent loss of proportion. What talent there remained in his circle was removed in the whitch-hunt that followed the defection.
The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu (1991)