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" Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" The political lives of tyrants play out human affairs with a special intensity: the death of a democratic leader long after his retirement is a private matter, but the death of a tyrant is always a political act that reflects the character of his power. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" A book's title is vital. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" As colonial puppeteer and successful restorer of Russia as imperial superpower, Mr. Putin is Stalin's consummate heir. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" As a youth, I was much more of a Zionist. But Israel was very different then. Israel's changed, and so have I. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" In Georgia, where I spend much time, the democratically elected pro-western President Mikhail Saakashvili has been beleaguered by a riotous opposition which proposes creating a constitutional monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty, with a Spanish racing driver, Prince 'Jorge' Bagrationi, as king. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I always find that the more Jewish you are, the more people respect you. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" All tyrannies are virtuoso displays, over many years, of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Around us, we do see attempts to delegitimize Israel, a sort of secret, hidden anti-Semitism growing in many countries, often on the right but also on the left. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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

" 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. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Most history books are about power. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" A reforming liberal leader in Russia is the Holy Grail of Kremlinology, but the search for one is as misguided and hopeless as that for the relic of the Last Supper. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" Saddam Hussein admired, studied, and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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

" Mugabe's resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" 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. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" In 1918, a police chief of Jerusalem was a Montefiore. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore

" I don't feel that Jewish people have a class. "

Simon Sebag Montefiore