Gregory Feifer > Quotes

“stories are legion about people lying to their spouses for decades. It was a matter of survival; the Soviet regime forced them to deny their thoughts, identities and histories to the extent that they began to doubt themselves, a widespread psychological trauma that has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone dealt with. No wonder the culture of lying remains deep-seated today, when the daily denial of reality provides fertile ground for Russia’s staggering corruption.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“After Georgia’s humiliation in 2008, Yanukovych repudiated the Orange Revolution by winning the next Ukrainian presidential election in 2010, setting Moscow further at ease about its dominion over the former Soviet republics Medvedev once called part of Russia’s “special zone of influence.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Fear has also been used to carry out a redistribution of wealth—which is to say back under the control of the state, where Putin is chief among a collection of officials whose roles more closely resemble those of Mafia dons than public servants. An American investment banker in Moscow characterizes the newest rich as “thugs” who demand kickbacks of up to 70 percent in all their deals. “We now consider 40 percent average,” he told me under the condition I wouldn’t name him. “Everything’s being sucked out of the economy because they think only about what they can deposit into their offshore bank accounts before they lose their jobs, or worse.” When”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“Many young men's more immediate and important problems were abuse from their superior, on top of their material privations. Perhaps nothing more could have been expected of a political system founded on mass murder and preserved with oppression.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“because most people were oppressed more or less equitably, meaning that ordinary striving rarely got you anywhere (unless it was done according to the Party’s rules), Soviets seemed to value love and companionship, even if by default, more than most Westerners did.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways. Since Moscow's obligatory ideological treatment of war-most important, between socialist and capitalist forces-did not include explanations of a popular uprising against an (at least nominal) socialist state, the Kremlin failed to understand its new mujahadeen enemy.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“extravagance is partly a reaction to the decades of Soviet austerity, when wallets and purses were immediately emptied whenever their owners spied something worth buying in the knowledge that another chance would be unlikely to materialize”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“But the first casualty of the Afghanistan War wasn't truth. That had long before succumbed to the onslaught of Soviet lies about all aspects of life. The all-encompassing brainwashing makes the task of discerning what actually took place in Afghanistan especially difficult. The manufactured justifications that enabled many to close their eyes to the war's unspeakable abuses continue to influence perceptions-although the Soviets had no monopoly in that.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“The epidemic of HIV and AIDS, the largest in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is even more worrisome. Registered cases in 2012 numbered more than seven hundred thousand, up from fewer than half a million as recently as 2008, but no such figure can be trusted in a country that blamed the Pentagon for AIDS during the Cold War. Experts say the real rate is at least double the official number—and growing, thanks largely to the use of heroin, which is also rapidly spreading. Although AIDS is the third leading cause of premature death—compared to the twenty-third in the United States—Moscow no longer accepts funding from the United Nations UNAIDS program or other international organizations because it sees itself as a donor country, not a recipient of help. However, the government doesn’t finance programs that had been until recently supported by foreign agencies.10 Insufficient funding for known cases of AIDS virtually guarantees that patients receive generally inferior treatment, and poor people get by far the worst from the badly fraying social services and healthcare system. The United Nations places Russia seventy-first in the world in human development, after Albania and just above Macedonia. (Norway is first; the United States thirteenth.)”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences about using force, that [Najibullah's] regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“Russia has denied any involvement in either of the attacks. However, Irakli Porchkhidze, President Saakashvili’s deputy national security adviser at the time, told me the assault actually began a month before the conflict broke out and involved tens of thousands of botnets, mostly controlled by a St. Petersburg criminal group. Some of the attacks disseminated images of Saakashvili in Nazi uniform and other propaganda. The size, timing and complexity of the assault implicated the Kremlin, which Porchkhidze believes used the attacks as a weapon. “It was a new page in the history of cyberwarfare,” he said.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Vladimir Putin shot out of obscurity in 1999 by exploiting growing nostalgia for the USSR, fueled by the disappointment, uncertainty and crisis that brought Yeltsin’s reform era to a shuddering halt. Once in power the following year, Putin set about building an authoritarian regime whose control would expand for more than a decade, until soaring corruption on top of another economic downturn—a much smaller one, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2008—prompted another backlash.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Like most regimes not based on genuine popular support in an era of open access to information, Putin’s is inherently unstable and requires vigilant maintenance of the leader’s strong image, however antiquated that may now appear to foreigners.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“All that is very relevant to Afghanistan. To a startling degree, the Politburo’s 1979 deliberations about how to deal with it mirror the Bush administration’s close-minded and secretive decision-making that led to its invasion. The Bush White House might have modeled itself on the Soviet gerontocracy under Brezhnev that brushed aside warnings from military and regional experts who knew the situation in Afghanistan to be far more complicated than the Politburo stated.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“What is shared is silence, tone of voice, nuance of intonation. To say a full word is to say too much; communication on the level of words is already excessive, banal, almost kitschy. This peculiar form of communication “with half words” is the mark of belonging to an imagined community that exists on the margins of the official public sphere. Hence the American metaphors for being sincere and authentic—“saying what you mean,” “going public,” and “being straightforward”—do not translate properly into the Soviet and Russian contexts.10”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“(The operation didn’t take place entirely smoothly. Soviet soldiers disguised as technicians placed the explosives successfully, but were forced to return because they’d forgotten to start the timer.)”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“Even worse, however, was that the soldiers hardly knew whom they were fighting, and not only because distinguishing resistance fighters from the native civilians was next to impossible.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“Seeking to boost the number of young believers, the Church has successfully lobbied to make classes about Russian Orthodoxy mandatory in state schools.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“The poor are pawns in a political-economic system contrived to keep those in power powerful and rich. Although the stake most people have in the going scheme is tiny, it’s been enough to help isolate the majority of Russians from one another and keep them from acting in their common interests by joining forces against the country’s top-down corruption.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“Fear has also been used to carry out a redistribution of wealth—which is to say back under the control of the state, where Putin is chief among a collection of officials whose roles more closely resemble those of Mafia dons than public servants.”
― Gregory Feifer, Russians: The People behind the Power

“According to at least one general staff officer, no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, between December 10 and 30, various units were given some thirty various directives to prepare for action. Defense Minister Ustinov’s lack of combat experience helps explain the absence of centralized implementation. A career spent building the military-industrial complex gave him scant knowledge of how to command the invasion of a sovereign state. Since it was beneath the marshal to ask subordinates for advice, staff activity remained largely uncoordinated.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan