The Americans have gone through 150 years of ups and downs, to pull themselves up out of the mud. After only 15 years, Russia is already in the process of liberating itself from the same thing.

40 million Russians are convinced that I am a scoundrel, a thief, a criminal or a CIA agent, who deserves to be shot, hanged or drawn and quartered.

You're never able to please everybody, especially when you're transforming a country like Russia.

I'm communicating with the directors of the Soviet companies, and I see that it is wrong, but when I go to the official discussions, they discuss we should change the color of the walls.

Private property is a very fundamental and very long-term institution.

I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

For the producers, there was no reason to produce. You get money, but you couldn't use this money. For consumers, you could have money, but you have no way to use it because you go to the shop and see nothing.