Vladimir Putin Quotes

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

The Soviet Union was designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 - and the Kremlin has never accepted it.

Today's Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.

The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.

I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.

Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.

Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

NATO was built to counteract the Soviet Union in its day and time. At this point there is no threat coming from the Soviet Union, because there is no Soviet Union anymore. And where there was the Soviet Union once, there is now a number of countries, among them the new and democratic Russia.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

For ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was wracked by poverty and social decay: the country suffered a demographic collapse on a scale never before witnessed in an industrial country outside of wartime as deaths outstripped births and the country’s population shrank by some 800,000 people each year.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military rotted away. In one of the most dramatic campaigns in world history, from 1988-1994, Moscow's armed forces shrank from 5 million to 1 million personnel.

When it comes to its role in the world, Russia is in the throes of an identity crisis. It has neither fully integrated into the liberal order nor built its own viabile alternative,

The problem is not so much that they are Communists as it is that they are Russians.

I've travelled to some of the places where Russian language and Russian culture were made part of the fabric of life long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station - and where Russian is now being rolled back, post-1991.

When the Soviet Union broke down, Georgia suffered a huge deal. Pretty much the whole of the 90's was known as 'the black decade... because we had a lot of electricity blackouts.

It is true that the U.S. could and should have been more generous as Russia made its painful transition to a market economy in the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union could not have been a source of national pride for many in Russia. The one person who has capitalized on this the most has been Vladimir Putin.

I'm proud of Russia, that's true. And we have something to be proud of, but we do not have any obsession with being a superpower in the international arena.

25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?

We had in the West a very romantic vision of Russia back in 1991, when the Soviet Union died and whatever is Russia began to emerge. And we began to think of it as a democracy. We're going to bring it into the West. All is going to be wonderful. That was never in the cards.

People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain.

The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale only the elites and nationalists of the republics gained.

I want to try to become friends with Russia.

This is cooperation [with Hezbollah, Iran , from Russia], I don't know what you mean by support. We have cooperation with countries for decades. Why talk about this cooperation now ?