Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements – and accelerated their ruin. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
President Trump is, some ways, the personification of a new Bolshevism of the Right, where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears and the exploitation of what Lenin called ‘useful idiots.’ Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
President Yeltsin’s instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open – even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don’t see their kind returning anytime soon. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
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. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors – Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
Moses Montefiore loved Jerusalem, lived for Jerusalem, and even made it our family motto. A Zionist before the word was invented, he believed in the sacred idea of Jewish return as a religious Jew’s duty, and in Jewish statehood. Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Quote
