Olga Kerziouk

“There is a spate of prime-time documentaries about "psychological weapons." One is The Call of the Void. It features secret service men who inform the audience about the psychic weapons they have developed. The Russian military has "sleepers," psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world's collective uncounscious, its deeper soul, and from thence penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One has entered the mind of the US president and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the US had hatched has failed to come off. The message is clear: if the secret services can see into the US president's mind, they could definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“Anna wrote to her father that she found her new land “a barbarous country where the houses are gloomy, the churches ugly, and the customs revolting.” Paris under Henry I was clearly not Constantinople, but more importantly, in Anna’s eyes, it did not rank even with Kyiv.”
― Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

“Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“The Kremlin idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside its walls.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia