The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin QUOTES

1 " It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

2 " One evening, we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, ‘Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, “I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

3 " No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

4 " Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

5 " In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

6 " The only active enemies were the dissidents, a handful of brave souls who drew a disproportionate amount of KGB force. A new law, Article 190 of the Penal Code, made it a crime to “spread rumors or information detrimental to the Soviet societal and governmental structure,” giving the KGB virtually unlimited power in hunting down and fighting those who dared to think differently. Dissidents, suspected dissidents, and those leaning toward activity that might be considered dissident were the objects of constant surveillance and harassment. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

7 " named Galina Starovoitova—the one whose murder I would be covering ten years later—became the nation’s most visible spokesperson for Armenian issues. On December 10, 1988, most members of the pro-secession "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

8 " In the fall of 2000, a group of Russian Olympic athletes met with Putin and complained that the lack of a singable anthem demoralized them in competitions and made their victories feel hollow. The old Soviet anthem had been so much better this way, they said. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

9 " Finally, there is every indication that Putin’s government worked neither to prevent terrorist attacks nor to resolve crises peacefully when they occurred; moreover, the president consistently and increasingly staked his reputation not only on his own determination to “rub them out” whatever the circumstances but also on the terrorists’ perceived ruthlessness. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

10 " One thing is certain: Once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11, was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

11 " In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

12 " It is expected that all decisions taken by the coordinating council or by the general meeting shall be recommendations: members who are in the minority should not be obligated to participate in a decision with which they disagree but neither shall they have the right to counteract the actions of the majority in any way other than through the power of conviction. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

13 " [following the Kursk disaster].. "Putin appeared on CNN's Larry King Live. When King asked "What happened?", Putin shrugged, smiled - impishly, it seemed - and said "It sank". "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

14 " Still, KGB staff in Dresden had to scrimp and save to ensure that at the end of their posting they would have something to show for it. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

15 " To that end, he said, the city formed a holding company that acquired 51 percent of the stock of all the casinos in the city, in the hopes of collecting dividends. “But it was a mistake: the casinos funneled the money out in cash and reported losses every time,” Putin complained. “Later, our political opponents tried to accuse us of corruption because we owned stock in the casinos. That was just ridiculous…. Sure, it may not have been the best idea from an economic standpoint. Judging from the fact that the setup turned out to be inefficient and we did not attain our goals, I have to admit it was not sufficiently thought through. But if I had stayed in Petersburg, I would have finished choking those casinos. I would have made them share. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

16 " Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

17 " Once the institutions of democracy had been dismantled. It was impossible, it was too late to organize to defend them. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

18 " They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

19 " After the December 2003 parliamentary election, in which Putin’s United Russia took nearly half the seats and the rest were divided among the Communist Party, the absurdist-nationalist and outrageously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, and a new ultranationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) while all remaining liberals and democrats lost their seats, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported: “The … elections … failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

20 " In the fall of 2000, when Putin was nationalizing television, American media were fully focused on the hung Bush–Gore election. I joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report then, and I idled through my first few months on the job: the magazine had no room for Russia. "

― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin