Simon Sebag Montefiore

“It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet.”

“A revolution resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy.”

“There is a view of Russian exceptionalism, that they are a unique civilisation, a view right since Ivan the Terrible that Russia is a special civilisation with a special culture. Putin is pushing that now.”

“I don't like sports. I'm not interested in sports. I hate sports.”

“There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of 'law,' but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one's neck of the woods.”

“I am ashamed to say that both my children knew Stalin before they knew Thomas the Tank Engine.”

“A crenelated wall of books encircles my bed, its tottering towers looming ever taller, always on the verge of collapsing onto oblivious sleepers.”

“Believe it or not, some Western analysts in the 1930s insisted that Stalin was a 'moderate,' controlled by extremists like the secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov.”

“Colonel Qaddafi's tyranny was absolutist, monarchical, and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes.”

“I'm the sort of person who, if I arrive in a city under siege, in the middle of nowhere, I'll always find my way to the leader of the rebels. I just don't know how.”

“I enjoy tequila, which has a strange effect on people and makes parties more fun than warm white wine.”

“Russia's first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean.”

“The vanishing of David Tang is like the unthinkable diappearance of a magnificent palace on a mythical mountaintop. He was a dreammaker, pianist, adventurer, writer, entrepreneur, scholar, connoisseur, and a great friend.”

“It was always presumptuous to expect Russia, an ancient nation-state and proud empire of distinct culture with a tradition of autocracy, to become an Anglo-American democracy overnight - just as it is naive to expect it in other parts of the world.”

“I'd like to write a biography of Ivan the Terrible.”

“The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.”

“The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia.”

“Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.”

“Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.”

“After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.”