In Crises The Most Daring Course Is

The China Of The 1970s Was A Communist Dictatorship. The China Of The Twenty-first Century Is A One-party State Without A Firm Ideological Foundation, More Similar To Mexico Under The Pri Than Russia Under Stalin. But The Measurement Of The Political And The Economic Evolution Has Not Yet Been Completed, And Is One Of The Weak Points Of The System.

Intellectuals Are Cynical And Cynics Have Never Built A Cathedral.

To Have Striven So Hard, To Have Molded A Public Personality Out Of So Amorphous An Identity, To Have Sustained That Superhuman Effort Only To End With Every Weakness Disclosed And Every Error Compounding The Downfall--that Was A Fate Of Biblical Proportions. Evidently The Deity Would Not Tolerate The Presumption That All Can Be Manipulated; An Object Lesson Of The Limits Of Human Presumption Was Necessary.

The Idea Of Abstract Power Only Exists For Academics, Not In Real Life.

The Gorbachev Period Is Conceived As An Abandonment Of Historic Russian Positions. So This Is The Framework, In My View, In Which Putin Operates.