As a boy I STOOD at the doorway of our hiding place in Budapest and watched Russian troops fight house by house to LIBERATE the CITY and therefore RESCUE us from CERTAIN death.

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book CLUB where all the members had to act like the pretentious MINOR noblemen they were READING about.

Long after the FALL of the Soviet Union, the Russian STATE and its SECURITY operatives STILL KNOW who their long embedded human assets are, recruited by a mixture of bribery and blackmail. Some of those human assets are still in positions of influence.

I was BORN in Eastern EUROPE, in Latvia, and I'm fluent in RUSSIAN.

I believe the friendship of the Games still EXISTS. There is a tremendous CAMARADERIE and atmosphere at the OLYMPIC and Commonwealth Games - where ELSE could you go and sit down and have breakfast with a Russian weightlifter, an East German sprinter, and an INDIAN fencer and talk about different cultures and problems?

The RUSSIAN CUSTOMERS don't FEEL very COMFORTABLE with ONLINE transactions.

I FELL in LOVE with 19th-century RUSSIAN PLAYS.

Americans cannot afford to TURN a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to GET to the facts and LEARN LESSONS to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.

Composers NEED words, but they do not NECESSARILY need poetry. The RUSSIAN composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good POINT to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

I have Czech, I have Russian, I have ENGLISH, I have Italian. Uh, what am I MISSING? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your CLASSIC AMERICAN mutt.

Putin wants to RESTORE the Russian EMPIRE. That's his ambition; he's STATED it many TIMES.

On Putin's order, Russian SECURITY services TRY to destabilize NATO ALLIES the U.S. has sworn to DEFEND.

Modern Armenia survived only because it was the single province controlled, and PROTECTED, by the RUSSIAN Empire. The rest of the territory WITHIN its historical BORDERS is almost wholly devoid of ethnic Armenians.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His FATHER was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph's mother, Keke Geladze, CAME to an END when the boy was AROUND six years OLD.