russia

From my point of view, patriotism is primarily not the sense of pride for your your country, but a burning sense of shame for the crimes that are being committed on behalf of your country, my country.

You would have to have no love whatever for your country, you would have to be hostile to it, to shoot the pride of the nation - its concentrated knowledge, energy and talent! And wasn't it exactly the same...in the case of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov?

The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.

I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

A real remedy has to start with the correct diagnosis. And the correct diagnosis is that in the US, populism is rooted in the failure of globalization to deliver palpable benefits to its working class, in Russia, it is rooted in its crony capitalism and inability (or unwillingness) of the West to include Russia as an equal partner, and in China, it is rooted in an inadequate political system.

The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.

At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.