The Romanov Prophecy

Russia-a country in which things that just don't happen happen.

- PETER THE GREAT

A year shall come of Russia's blackest dread;

Then will the crown fall from the royal head,

The throne of tsars will perish in the mud,

The food of many will be death and blood.

- MIKHAIL LERMONTOV (1830)

Russia: mysterious dark continent, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" in Winston Churchill's phrase, remote, inaccessible to foreigners, inexplicable even to natives. That is the myth, encouraged by Russians themselves, who would prefer that no one discover who they really are and how they really live.

- ROBERT KAISER, Russia: The People and the Power (1984)

For all its trials, for all its mistakes, the story of Russia at the end of the [twentieth] century must be counted as a kind of revival, a resurrection.

- DAVID REMNICK, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (1997)