Friday, February 19, 2010

Quote of the day: Brzezinski

Here's how Zbigniew Brzezinski, in 1968, explained the likely fate of the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union is at the "beginning of a sterile bureaucratic phase" which was likely to lead eventually to disintegration followed by a new political order characterized by "assertive ideological-nationalist reaction, resting on a coalition of secret police, the military, and the heavy industrial-ideological complex." (Quoted in Engerman, Know Your Enemy, p. 224.)

An uncannily apt description of Putin's Russia today, no?