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The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia.

In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder, and a foolish incursion by the Red Army, which helped to produce the ultra-nationalist military dictatorship of General Pilsudski.

The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

I've decided that the political context is such that the only way reform will finally come about in the Russian military is that the deterioration goes beyond the point to which these old generals can stand up there and resist it.

Red is a benevolent dictatorship.