“The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.”

—  Leonid Brezhnev

This was quoted as an anonymous saying heard in Moscow around the time of the first Russian elections, in Voltaire, Goldberg & Others : A Compendium of the Witty, the Profound and the Absurd (2000), p. 201; it was later attributed to Brezhnev in Brewer's Famous Quotations: 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (2006) by Nigel Rees, p. 441, but without citations, and it is clearly derived from a statement widely attributed to Vyacheslav Molotov as early as the 1954 Berlin Conference, according to an eyewitness writing in International Affairs Vol. 36 (1960), p. 4 : "The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to to turn out."
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Leonid Brezhnev 32
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1906–1982

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