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"It used to be argued that 1914 was a classic instance of a war begun through accident and error: that no statesmen wanted it but all were overborne by events. This view is now untenable. Certainly in late July the frantic telegram traffic became overwhelming, but governments were clear enough about what they were doing. A general conflict was the optimal outcome for none of them, but they preferred it to what seemed worse alternatives. Although Berlin and St Petersburg indeed miscalculated, all sides were willing to risk war rather than back down. The war developed from a Balkan confrontation in which neither Austria-Hungary nor Russia would yield and neither Germany nor France would restrain them. Once conflict spread from eastern to western Europe, Britain too was willing to intervene rather than see Belgium invaded and France beaten. In Vienna, Conrad had long urged war against Serbia, but Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Tisza moved to military action only gradually, believing alternative choices were bankrupt, and only after considering how force would be used. In contrast they were recklessly insouciant about war with Russia, accepting it was likely but assuming that with German aid they could win. The Germans risked war against Russia and Britain with little idea of how to defeat either (and with what their general staff knew was a defective plan against France)." David Stevenson   "In the years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, Russia was spending between $61 billion and $65 billion a year for its defense. Is it fair to say that Germany's euros were paying to help Russia prepare for the invasion of Ukraine? It sure is. It's also fair to say that if Germany hadn't been so hung up on the supposed evils of nuclear power, it might have been willing to see the real risk—dependence on Russia—more clearly." Joe Nocera   "After 1890 the Russians took up a well-paying French alliance, and Germany faced a two-front war. One solution, adopted in 1897, was to knock out France by invading her through neutral Belgium. Then, to make matters much worse, the Germans announced plans for a great battle-fleet, designed to fight the Royal Navy in the North Sea. This started an arms race with Great Britain. It also meant much less money for the two-front army, and hence loss of the campaign of 1914. By 1914 the military leaders were obsessed by the rise of Russia, and wanted an attack on her before, by 1917 and the acceleration of Russian mobilisation plans, it was too late. Berlin used a Balkan terrorist episode as an excuse to challenge Russia, and when she mobilised, the atmosphere in the Prussian war ministry was of utter glee." Norman Stone   "According to the journal Demoscope Weekly, the figures for all categories of violent death in Russia far exceed their Western equivalents. A comparison of Russia and England, for example, shows that a Russian is five times more likely to die in a traffic accident than an Englishman, 25 times more likely to accidentally poison himself (usually with alcohol), three times as likely to die in an accidental fall, 31 times as likely to drown, seven times as likely to commit suicide and 54 times as likely to be murdered." David Satter   "The intelligentsia constituted one Russian intellectual tradition, the great writers another. 'It is remarkable,' Struve commented, 'how our national literature remains a preserve the intelligentsia cannot capture.' Gershenzon famously remarked that 'in Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist's genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia.' Russia's greatest contribution to world culture—the literary tradition of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov—could not have existed had these writers written to political formula. On the contrary, the Russian novel of ideas critically examined everything the intelligentsia stood for—the simplicity of human psychology, the easy division of people into good and evil, the supposition that life's meaning is already known, and the reduction of ethics to politics—and showed how mistaken and dangerous such ideologies are." Gary Saul Morson   "Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, in his notorious war aims memorandum of 9 September 1914, which he had begun to draft as early as the middle of August, defined the 'general aim of the war' as 'security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.' To this end, the document spelled out, 'France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany's eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.' France was to lose her army, her coal and iron fields, her colonies and a 'coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne,' Belgium to become a German vassal state with her ports in the hands of the German navy, and Poland and other satellite states under German control were to be established at Russia's expense in east-central Europe. The whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals and from Finland to Malta, would come under German economic domination, and in Africa a German colonial empire would stretch continuously from the west coast to the east to include the Belgian Congo." John Röhl   "The common assumption today is that everybody wants peace if it can be had on acceptable terms. What Europe did not understand at the time was that, exceptionally, it was not true of two governments in 1914. Vienna did not merely want to get its way with Serbia; it wanted to provoke a war with Serbia. Berlin did not want to get its way with Russia; it wanted to provoke a war with Russia. In each case it was war itself that the government wanted—or, put more precisely, it wanted to crush its adversary to an extent that only a successful war makes possible." David Fromkin   "The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost and human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements. I am thinking in part of the determination, the dedication, the organization, the sheer hard work which in the last sixty years have transformed Russia into a major industrial country and one of the super-powers. Who before 1917 could have predicted or imagined this? But, far more than this, I am thinking of the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty per cent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population of more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture. Most of the members of this new society are the grand-children of peasants; some of them are great-grand-children of serfs. They cannot help being conscious of what the Revolution has done for them. And these things have been brought about by rejecting the main criteria of capitalist production—profits and the law of the market—and substituting a comprehensive economic plan aimed at promoting the common welfare." Edward Hallett Carr   "Let us take it that there are about fifteen million peasant families in Russia, taking Russia as she was before the robbers deprived her of the Ukraine and other territories. Of these fifteen million, probably ten million are poor peasants who live by selling their labour power, or who are in bondage to the rich, or who lack grain surpluses and have been most impoverished by the burdens of war. About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved." Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov   "Kriege was a conscientious official, an excellent jurist, but without political insight consonant with his knowledge of the law. From time to time the agitated Bethmann would ask him, 'Is that declaration of war on Russia ready yet? I must have my declaration at once!' Kriege, who looked a nervous wreck, was going through all the law books for a model—from Grotius' celebrated 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis' to the well-known works of Bluntschli, Heffter, and Martens. Ballin allowed himself the question: 'Why such haste to declare war on Russia, Your Excellency?' And Bethmann answered: 'If I don't, we shan't get the Socialists to fight.'" Bernhard Bülow   "While Europe was buying solar panels, banning fracking, and shuttering nuclear plants, Russia was drilling wells and building nuclear plants. It's a funny thing: In the West, the smart set will tell you that nuclear-power plants are too expensive and take too long to build. They also claim that wind and solar have made nuclear obsolete. And yet in Russia—a country awash in dirt-cheap gas, oil, and coal—Putin found it worth his while to double the country's nuclear capacity in just a couple of decades. Having more nuclear power at home meant he could send more fossil fuels to his increasingly needy European customers. He didn't do that out of generosity." James Meigs   "He avoided the fate of so many of his fellows because he saw that what they really worshipped was history, and he saw, too, that history is a moral cretin, besotted with winners. Today, in retrospect, we marvel how the left-wing intellectuals of Britain could have so misconceived the European situation in the 1930s. With few exceptions they assumed, in the most decisive, fallacious antithesis of modern times, that the choice was either Fascism or Communism. Liberal, parliamentary democracy they rejected as a sham, incapable of preventing a Nazi future, and so they bound  themselves to Moscow as the sole alternative. They were, moreover, athirst to testify to the new faith by jettisoning the morality of the Christian-humanist tradition, now stigmatised as a mask for bourgeois rapacity. Why, for example, should they not spy for Russia, given that democracy was bankrupt and Nazism its residual legatee, for were not the Soviets the one barrier to this frightful succession? These intellectuals (it is Orwell's reiterated theme) were profoundly wrong in their assessment of Bolshevism, mistakenly believing, in Koestler's formulation, that Moscow was to the Left when it is really to the east. For Orwell it is essentially a moral failure, a trahison des clercs: wanting Russia to be the hope of mankind, they refused, in the best devotee tradition, to see the abundant disconfirmations." Patrick Reilly   "The repression which for better or worse turn out to be Leninism in action after 1917 was very much worse than anything which had gone on in Tsarist Russia. I mean, in purely mundane boring statistical terms, which sometimes can contain the essence of a situation, it is simply true that in the ten years after 1917 fifty times more people were done to death than in the fifty years before 1917. The boot, in other words, was on the other foot, and how, but the point is not to compare one ruthless regime against another—it is to set each one up against a moral standard, a consistent idea of what constitutes good and bad in the way human beings treat each other regardless of class, colour or ideology, and at least my poor professor in Jumpers got that right. Even before I read Lenin it always seemed to me, well, curious, that while he was in a Tsarist prison, and in Tsarist exile, he managed to research and write his book on the development of capitalism in Russia, and receive books and magazines, and write to friends, all that, whereas, well, compare Solzhenitsyn." Tom Stoppard   "In industry and in agriculture the successes are undeniable. Let them, each and every medieval fossil, caterwaul there in Europe, at the tops of their voices, about the 'downfall' of the USSR. They aren't going to change our plans or our affairs one iota that way. The USSR is going to be a first-rate country with the biggest technically equipped industrial and agricultural production. Socialism is invincible. There's not going to be any more 'beggarly' Russia. That's over! There's going to be a mighty and plentiful vanguard Russia." Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili   "Oblonsky never chose his tendencies and opinions any more than he chose the style of his hat or coat. He always wore those which happened to be in fashion. Moving in a certain circle where a desire for some form of mental activity was part of maturity, he was obliged to hold views in the same way he was obliged to wear a hat. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered the liberal outlook more rational but because it corresponded better with his mode of life. The Liberal Party maintained that everything in Russia was bad; and in truth Oblonsky had many debts and decidedly too little money. The Liberal Party said that marriage was an obsolete institution which ought to be reformed; and indeed family life gave Oblonsky very little pleasure, forcing him to tell lies and dissemble, which was quite contrary to his nature. The Liberal Party said, or rather assumed, that religion was only a curb on the illiterate; and indeed Oblonsky could not stand through even the shortest church service without aching feet, or understand the point of all that dreadful, high-flown talk about the other world, when life in this world was really very pleasant." Leo Tolstoy   "In Germany and Russia, it is true, a parliament in form is retained as part of the state apparatus. These parliaments occasionally meet and even pass a few motions. But even juridically these parliaments are no longer regarded as possessing the attribute of sovereignty. The laws do not issue from them. Their meetings are simply propaganda devices, like a parade or a radio or press campaign. Even in the United States the claims of Congress (together with the Supreme Court) to sovereignty are not undisputed. Most laws are not being made by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management, and the other leading 'executive agencies.' Lawyers know only too well that this is the case; to keep up with contemporary law, it is the rulings and records of these agencies that they have chiefly to study. Very little control over the state is actually today possessed by Congress. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some more of its sovereign powers to one or another agency largely outside of its control." Thomas Byrne   "The chance of getting rid of an uncomfortable competitor in the world market, of stepping in where there was a prospect of squashing Germany together with Russia and France by superior power; the long-term policy of insidious agitation to encircle Germany initiated by King Edward VII, the hope of destroying the feared German fleet and thereby achieving sole rulership over the world oceans, of attaining world rule—all of this made it likely from the start that England would range herself among our enemies." Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke   "As late as 2018, a staggering two-thirds of Democrats told YouGov pollsters that Trump's legitimacy was questionable because Russia 'tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the president' in 2016—a theory for which there is precisely no evidence, but which was bolstered by the likes of Biden's staff secretary, Neera Tanden. Americans, she argued, 'have intuitive sense Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states.' No doubt, had Trump won re-election, a healthy number of Democrats would confess to their belief that his victory was a result of the full flowering of a conspiracy to weaponize the U.S. Postal Service—an allegation that was lent credence by Senate Democrats who actually held hearings on the issue." Noah Rothman   "In making sense of Trump's victory, Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader in 2016, insists that the full scope of Russia's operation remains unknown. With the CIA, the KGB, and the Stasi, the extent of their Cold War-era covert operations became clear only decades after they took place. The GRU archives have not been opened, and Putin's closest advisers have not started talking. Once they do, Reid is convinced that the United States will learn that an Election Day cyberattack did take place. There is 'no question,' Reid said, that Russian hackers covertly altered the vote count. 'I think one reason the elections weren't what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It's that simple,' Reid advanced, his only evidence being the concerns expressed by Jeh Johnson and others prior to the election about the exposure of America's voting systems. 'It doesn't take a math expert to understand that by just changing a few votes, the outcome will be different. So, I have no doubt.'" David Shimer   "You have a war and obviously you're going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly you're going to lose people's focus, you're going to lose certainly big country attention because they will be diverted and I think it could have a damaging impact. So, you know, I think hopefully President Putin would realize that in the northern part of his country, they used to live on 66 percent of the nation that was over frozen land. Now it's thawing, and his infrastructure is at risk. And the people of Russia are at risk. And so I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate." John Kerry