I have always defended my convictions and what I believed to be the truth.

Opposition work is not without its dangers. But if you've chosen a job like that for yourself, you then subsequently shouldn't spend your time every second thinking, oh my God, what might happen to me? Oh my God, what might happen to me? Your colleagues include quite a large number of war correspondents. Their job is not the least dangerous in the world, either.

Every politician deep inside is authoritarian. If the person doesn't have ambition, that's not a politician. Society needs to put every ambitious, every effective politician into such a position that it helps - that this person helps improve society. That's why I'm always talking about need to change the system rather than should we go with Navalny or Gudkov or Yavlinsky or Khodorkovsky. We all have our ambitions. We're all ambitious people.

Putin has an obvious problem. His country's economy is in stagnation. He needs to constantly be pointing a figure at who is at fault. America is at fault. He needs to show those fronts - those directions in which he is defeating America. In Syria, for example, in Syria, he is defeating America; not ISIS, he's defeating America.

My parents were Muscovites. They worked at the Kaliber factory.

Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.

I established my bank in 1988.