16 quotes
How Putin must have hated him. Navalny was the tsar of charisma, courage and connecting with people; Putin the tsar of the knout, the cosh and the hypodermic syringe.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
Unlike Shoigu and Gerasimov and, don't even whisper it, Putin himself, Prigozhin would go to the front line and be seen taking risks.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
It's his [Dmitry Peskov's] standard patter: ironically raise the possibility that the killings had something to do with his boss, then deny it, leaving both versions to drift like tumbleweed in the wind.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
Life inside the Kremlin must be extraordinarily unpleasant. The riches to be stolen are off the scale, but the consequences of failure are horrible too. And all the time the others are watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
It is extremely hard to come to a settled judgement on the weight of Russian opinion polls. My take is that if you say what you really think in twenty-first-century Russia, you are likely to jump out of a window very soon afterwards.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
BBC Panorama sent me to the crash site [of MH17]. The Kremlin was furiously denying any involvement and its fog machine was working full-time. They were lying. I will never quite lose the memory of the smell of aeroplane fuel, human flesh and cornfield.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
Like Terminator 2, Navalny was an awkward sod but that comes with the territory if you have the balls to stand up to Putin. He was also charismatic, very; tall and blue-eyed, a natural leader whose love of the absurd saved him from turning into a full-blown messiah.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yavlinsky set out sober, sensible reforms which would lead to a properly policed free market. His ideas were passed over in favour of a plan roughly summarised as 'Let's Make the Oligarchs Get Rich Quick' which led to massive wealth inequality.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
One simple yardstick of someone's life, of the good or bad they have done, is how many people turn up for their funeral. In Navalny's case, there was an extra dimension knowing that the likely consequences of turning up to say a last goodbye could include getting sacked, arrested, a clubbing by the police or worse.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
Nothing official in Russia is true; or stays true for long. The poisoning of the well of information in the Western world through bots and counter-facts and internet rumours, dark fairy stories boosted on social media sites, is no accident but one of the most successful exports of the dark Russian state. Everything Putin does in the West, he's tried out back home before.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
Chernobyl scarred Navalny like Voldemort scarred Harry Potter, the scar so deep he could never root it out. From the age of ten, Navalny saw how a state that lied to its people was a thing of evil, that, in politics, in power, you must tell the truth to people. After seeing what moronic, lying power did to his childhood idyll, he spent the rest of his life not lying to people.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
He [Prigozhin] became the Kremlin's court jester, but beside the jokes he was, in essence, the psychopath's psychopath, Putin's personal cook and personal sadist, a killer, torturer and hot-dog salesman turned multi-billionaire, troll farm boss and mercenary warlord.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
What's so pathetic about Putin's world view is that anything that makes him look weak can only be the work of the CIA. The possibility that Russian citizens working with free-spirited Western journalists and a Bulgarian Sherlock Holmes could get the better of him and his goons is not allowed.
Murder in the Gulag (2024)
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)