David Satter - Danube Dialogues by Danube Institute

[Laughter] welcome to the latest podcast in the series danube dialogues my name is john o'sullivan i'm the president of the danube institute in budapest today i have with me my colleague mark hickey he's a senior fellow here but before that he was an australian ambassador to nato to the eu and to hungary our guest today is david satter a distinguished foreign correspondent who has covered the soviet union post totalitarian russia the communist world in general analyzing and reporting on events in those worlds over a long period of time he worked in moscow for the financial times the wall street journal and other newspapers and magazines including my own national review where we met i think david now you were often in trouble with the moscow authorities dealing with the foreign media in fact i believe you are also the first journalist to be expelled first western journal is to be expelled from the new um post-1991 russia um so i want to really ask you first just to tell us a little bit about yourself because you are you went to oxford univer you're american you went to oxford university you graduated um and then what how does a young man starting out on life become a criminologist over to you well i had studied the russian language and as a graduate student at oxford i wrote a thesis on the political philosophy of hannah aaron and my first inclination was to study uh nazism actually the uh but i didn't speak german so i would have had to learn german and uh at the same time nazism was a historical subject whereas the soviet union still existed it was having a huge influence on the world and it was close by because relatively close by by american standards because you could get out get on a train in uh in london and liverpool street station and you could and that train with a little break to take a ferry could to take you all the way to moscow and i began traveling there improving my russian and uh hoping that i would at some point become a moscow correspondent went back to chicago which is where i'm from worked for four years on the police beat and when i returned to to oxford to defend my thesis on hannah aaron i was introduced to jdf jones who was the foreign editor of the financial times and was building one of the really excellent uh foreign staffs of that period and he he offered me a job and he said that he asked me if i if i spoke any foreign language and i slightly exaggerating said i speak russian and he said fine we'll send you to moscow and that was uh that was the and of course once i got to moscow i made it my business to fully master the language which i did actually in a relatively brief period of time was there for six years and uh it was a great experience because this was the soviet union at the height of its world power and at that time the soviet union had influence in every country of the world and it was a formidable global challenge of for the united states and for the west and i i lived there what i wanted to ask you first really was exactly that about the soviet union internally first i mean for example um what was the the grip that the communist party and the soviet ideology had on the society at that point surely it was still a functioning communist state in a way that later on it ceased to be what was that like living there well it was like living in a giant theater of the absurd uh in which an entire population was organized to to act out a false version of reality and uh that false version of reality was so pervasive that people who grew up in it didn't realize its artificiality but i as a as as a foreign visitor was perfectly aware of it you had newspapers that didn't contain any truthful information you had a parliament which always voted yes you had trade unions which always supported management and the entire population was organized in collectives supposedly run by the communist party in which uh the line of the party was repeated mechanically uh word for word uh by by millions of people uh watching it was was was surrealistic and the fact is that the the the country and the society functioned that way so there was a lesson here which is that human beings are infinitely malleable and you can organize them to do almost anything it was not the or the or the the world as described by orwell in 1984 but it was very close minus a little bit of the terror because by the time brezhnev became the soviet leader terror was no longer necessary people were already regimented uh and uh mass conformity is is is all that's necessary the momentum of herd thinking uh was more than sufficient to keep the society organized and running along fictitious lines uh and in keeping with a with a mendacious ideology and i saw that i lived i was i was part of it now you wrote a book um the age of illusion it became a documentary the documentary won the best the prize for best documentary at the amsterdam festival and it described the later stages of the soviet union and the way it degenerated and degenerated extremely rapidly so i wonder if he could just tell us why it was you think that this extraordinary theater of the absurd eventually went along very very different lines to those that its directors and playwrights had to plan for it oh just just a just a note the the the title of the book is age of delirium uh decline and fall of the soviet union but the um it the the collapse of the soviet union was inevitable in 1980 during the olympic games i was traveling around with the correspondent of the daily telegraph and he he remembers this incident very well and i told him this country won't survive won't survive 10 years well i was off by one year because an artificial world you cannot forever resist the force of reality it can keep it out for a time but sooner or later a leak a leak appears in the dike and uh and it's immensely threatening because only constant effort can keep out uh you know real facts real information genuine human reactions what happened uh in the soviet union was that gorbachev uh engineered a massive leak in the dike and uh he he did the one thing that no soviet leader could afford to do he tolerated free information for the first time people began to be able to read the truth in a system that had been based entirely on lies and that opened up a contradiction in the system which was unresolvable between the fictitious reality which kept the communist party in power and the the empirical reality of the outside world which was capable of giving people the basis for individual self-expression and autonomy uh that conflict could only be resolved in one of two ways either through mass repression which for which would have doomed gorbachev as a reformer or with the destruction of the system and as we know the result was the destruction of the system the soviet systems was extremely stable as long as it was unchanged but with the moment it began to try to reform itself it's the the the hidden fault lines in the society were revealed and they became uh they they became fatal for the system what part if any did outsiders play in this collapse obviously uh reagan thatcher um helmut cole um the pope um the peoples of the uh of eastern and central europe and figures like um lek valencia played a part in this um but how important the part did they play was was this an assisted suicide um of the soviet union or was it some other form of death i think they played a very important part uh they were in him uh they were uh reagan in particular reagan margaret thatcher they they they were the decision to begin the star wars uh research and and to develop uh uh a new generation of high-tech weapons uh which the soviet union was not in a position to match all of that the the readiness to speak openly about the soviet ideology to challenge uh russia's imperial activities its aid for so-called wars of national liberation all over the world all of that was important because what it did was it changed the internal calculus in the soviet union uh the internal debate uh was always a question of uh the conflict between the need to reform on the one hand and the fear of reform on the other and uh what what reagan thatcher and the and the revolt in eastern europe and and in general resistance to communism did was it changed the calculus suddenly it became clear refusing to reform uh was basically accepting short-term and long-term stagnation of course changing the system represented a big risk but uh as the situation around them changed the communist party leaders made a fatal decision for them which was to accept that risk and and reagan in particular played an important part in pushing them in that direction there was the there was one just one thing to point out there was one very pivotal historical event which which people oftentimes don't don't uh refer to which was the destruction of the syrian air force over the uh in syria in 19 1981 or 82. the the israelis using new uh computer technology were able to destroy 81 syrian planes without losing a single aircraft this stunned the soviet leadership uh they blamed it on the incompetence of the syrian pilots but the those were the best syrian pilots in fact they understood perfectly well that the west was embarking on an a new round of technological innovation that for for which they did not have the means to compete well i'd like uh to come back to the question of the the transformation social and economic of uh soviet union into democratic russia and then into post-democratic russia later but for the moment let me ask mark to pick up some questioning uh pick your uh your brain on what is actually happening now in the in russia with the spread of riots across the country mark i think thank you john yes uh david you won't be surprised at us asking you uh for your take on the the pro-navalny uh protests uh i mean navalny is not the first uh serious opposition figure that has uh emerged in the putin period um but um the the the the obvious questions are how serious if at all is he a threat to uh to putin or is this just going to fizzle out uh alas as as as these things have happened so often before well we're we as as you you rightly point out the the the very serious protests in 2011 uh which were uh directed toward the falsification of of the parliamentary elections and then putin's return to office after uh dimitri medvedev stepped aside at putin's behest all of that did fizzle out and so there are uh you know there is a there is such a tendency will it happen this time uh we don't really know we don't really know uh these are protests concerning corruption uh corruption of course irritates people in russia but at the same time it is proven historically to be something that the regime can contain it's not a a full-blown demand for freedom and for the rule of law in russia now russia itself has changed even in the period since 2011 uh the the country's uh economy is stagnating and russia has become more sophisticated it has really for the first time a serious middle class it contains people who are worldly and have traveled uh who have access to means of information and navalny has proven himself a master of the use of the social media for all those reasons there is some basis for thinking that uh people will use this protest as an opportunity once once and for all to guarantee their future but uh it's unpredictable it's it's it's completely unpredictable uh the the um the issue here is uh that the regime tried to murder navalny but the focus so far the protest has been on the regime's corruption uh ultimately if there's going to be positive change in russia it's going to have to focus not so much on the symptom but on the cause and the cause is the fact that uh the the country is is is lawless human life has no value and uh the the polit the political system is is the proud product of successive acts of violence there were some very striking figures that came out the other day about the number of uh millions of people who'd watched uh navalny's video about uh putin's uh vulgar palazzo uh down on the black sea um uh you know which suggests that there's a lot of interest in in in in in all the corruption and uh navalny but um what what would be your your rough sense about uh i mean does does putin despite all the current noise have a majority of russians still more or less supporting his his his rule or is there a danger of that majority support i assume you're going to say it's majority support slipping away russia is a very difficult country to measure public opinion which by the way can change overnight uh the the the the palace in galanchek on the black sea its existence has been known for a long time uh and it is true that that tens of millions of people watch the videos but we don't have tens of millions of people on the street uh as i believe that the number of people who protested in moscow was forty thousand uh that's a big demonstration but it's not threatening to the regime just for re purposes of comparison when uh there were demonstrations against the sixth article of the russian of the soviet constitution that guaranteed a ruling role for the communist party there were practically a million people on the street uh when the uh massacre took place in lithuania in 1991 january 91 at the lithuanian television tower there were over a half a million people on the street so i mean by the standards of what is possible the the demonstrations are not overwhelming they do show a level of discontent what people watch out you know people will a bigger audience on the social media uh 90 million views it's impressive in a way but it doesn't translate necessarily into a political movement that's capable of changing the situation in russia i think that support for for putin uh is still considerable it's largely passive uh it's oftentimes based on fear of change which in russia is you know russians have the experience of change and it's not often been not very beneficial for people but at the same time there are a growing number of people in russia who understand that this stagnation under putin can't go on forever uh can they be mobilized behind this vanguard that has appeared on the streets uh can members of the rulings group a split from putin and offer this a popular movement their support those are questions we don't have the answer for right now we saw in ukraine that it is possible under the right circumstances to mobilize people whether the anti-corruption accusations in russia are sufficient to do that it's hard to say it's hard to say i mean time will tell there is certainly discontent but whether it will go beyond that uh uh we can't be sure the only thing we can be sure is that the regime will continue to degenerate uh as all regimes that aspire to rule forever do and that uh if this challenge is not sufficient uh to change things in russia a future challenge very well may be yeah we think of putin's regime as a pretty tough authoritarian police state and yet as we've just discussed social media is able to have a pretty big impact i mean essentially it seems as if there's a considerable degree of freedom when it comes to areas of media such as that is that is that a potential weakness for putin the fact that in fact his his regime does allow sort of chinks of freedom uh including what is obviously a significant degree of media freedom at least in social well first of all they can they can crack down on that on that freedom and they may and they may but the but putin the putin and his confederates have ruled not through terror uh by and large there's you know there's selective terror uh especially important to opponents are killed like boris nemtsov like anna politkovskaya like alexander litvinenko but that's not the rule uh the the the as a whole taken as a whole the regime maintains its hold on power through corruption and through manipulation uh the corruption is shared by a group by and and by a rather large group and the manipulation goes on all the time in the official in the official media the processing of the minds of the population and this is pop popul popular and possible because of the kind of psychological void that developed in russia after the fall of the soviet union now i can explain this a little bit with reference to to an incident that i was involved in once when in the soviet union i was waiting in the in line people were lining up for potatoes and someone in the queue started shouting how long can we tolerate these lines and a woman in the queue turned to him and said never you mind the whole world is afraid of us well soviet people russian people understood at some level that they lived worse than people in the west but they consoled themselves that they were part of a great state and that they made the whole world afraid and this was an important part of their self-esteem it was fundamental to people after the soviet union fell it was clear to russians that nobody was afraid of them anymore and uh one of the and and that desire to restore a sense of lost greatness of lost power that was a psychological resource that was available for any demagogue to exploit when putin came to power it was not that he was such an attractive figure and by the way we can get into the circumstances under which he came to power which in effect an act of terror against his own people but when he came to power this person who had no charisma who had no political career who had you know who he was not able uh to to uh really speak effectively uh became a national hero because uh people were able to see in him and he played to this someone who was going to restore russia's greatness and his strength now it can't be said that he's done that on a scale comparable to the soviet union but to a certain extent changes that have occurred under his watch have made russia more fearsome and more of a problem for the world than it was before and that has been a great source of strength for him politically and we saw the mechanism very clearly at the time of the maidan revolt in ukraine the ruling group in russia obviously feared that the maidan example could become contagious and that russians could duplicate in moscow what the ukrainians were doing in kiev but uh it was under those circumstances that they made the decision to seize crimea and launch a war in eastern ukraine with predictable results putin's popularity shot up uh to unheard of levels and the russian people completely turned their back on the the real lessons for them and their past and their possibility of freedom that were presented by the peaceful self-organizing maidan revolt which changed which you know removed a kleptocratic leader like putin well i think that that that uh that that might be a good point to hand back over to uh to john i think who's going to uh um follow up on uh how we got to this uh current state of affairs well well exactly because um david we were both um reporting on watching the events of 89 and 91 and it did seem for a while that a new democratic russia had emerged um it was establishing something like the rule of law in a civilized society people like vladimir bukovsky went over to russia and with some hope it seemed of their making this vision a reality and of course the west and the russian state had very friendly relations for a while under yeltsin um now uh how did we go from that to the current situation what went wrong i think you have an earlier date for that decay starting don't you that uh i think that the question what went wrong uh is uh is a question that needs to be asked in the west because it has it has relevance not just for russia but but but in general for the future of democratic society uh sad to say that uh the fundamental many of many of the fundamentals of communist thinking in communist ideology uh were carried over into the into post-soviet russia where their influence proved to be absolutely deadly uh the um communist ideology was based on what were called class values uh which lenin and the bolsheviks posed in opposition to the universal values of the west uh which they dismissed altogether as having no no social and political content class values were the values that could be used to build a new society therefore anything according to this interpretation that was beneficial for the working class was right anything that got in the way of the working class and its revolution was wrong there were no values that could be that could be applied to the actions of the working class because the working class was the source of values uh under these circumstances an entire population was inculcated with this uh it was taught it in the schools and their the entire way of life was organized on this basis ultimately of course it resulted in a totalitarian dictatorship because the party spoke for the class then the leadership of the party spoke for the party and then the leader of of of of the politburo or the leader of the organization spoke for the leadership but what did it mean to restore uni the authority of universal values after the fall of the soviet union it meant in the first instance the rule of law because the position of the individual uh the equality of the end of individuals of before the law in in in effect mirrors the the equality of of of human beings uh before a transcendent god that authority was destroyed by the communists i mean the communist regime was the first regime to be based explicitly on in history to be placed based explicitly on atheism and so the authority of higher values expressed in the rule of law was uh absolutely fundamental for the recover spiritual moral political economic recovery of russia after four generations five generations of communism but what happened instead instead the so-called young reformers under yeltsin uh and yeltsin as a former community was a former communist boss with a communist mentality uh the young reformers assumed that the only thing that was necessary was the transformation of economic structures rule of law was completely secondary and as a result they began became began a radical uh transformation of the economy in russia without the benefit of a commercial code without the benefit of any kind of regulation without any kind of ethical guidance with a a readiness to cooperate with criminals uh the important thing for them was to take property out of the hands of the state and put it into private hands and they thought that the market would resolve all contradictions but in fact the market result the market and adam smith made this clear in his writing actually actually functions within within the framework of a system of law uh and uh it cannot other otherwise it it cannot be a true market and there was no true market in russia what you got was gangster capitalism and gangster capitalism and then flawed democracy eventually led to dictatorship uh which is what we have now as soon as the the the the hold on power began to be challenged in the country by a parliament that did not uh agree with everything that the reformers uh uh undertook uh they they they attacked the apar the the the parliament building with tanks that is the event i think which you felt showed that we were not going to go in the right direction it wasn't clear but that's the way um it looked um at the time though the west supported that and the west supported it because they thought that the sub that the rule of yeltsin the democratic reformer was now being challenged by some of the people who had tried to launch the coup and um and they shelled the parliamentary building now um what did we get what did we get wrong in that analysis what did the western governments get wrong and what did it mean later that we had actually supported this essentially authoritarian action well to answer the the last question first we have to bear in mind that the shelling of the parliament was played out on russian television and those that those videos were repeated over and over again uh and so russians were witnesses as uh the leadership you know attacked attacked the parliament building which was full of representatives they had elected um that in itself was enough to break them whatever moral whatever whatever moral principles there were in the society and people said well if the president is going to break the law then why shouldn't i uh and uh and after that whatev whatever hesitation there was about turning capitalism or the transformation into into capitalism into simply you know a kind of gangster jamboree uh that was that that was lost so what is it that our people didn't know well you know i've dealt with and and i apologize in advance to anyone who's who's who's worked in uh the american government but um the the bureaucratic structure of of foreign policy is not in the u.s in any case and i believe in other places as well is simply not an intellectual match for a country as as complex as russia i mean russia is a country that you really have to study and you really have to know and people want to apply the same superficiality toward russia that they apply to every every place else and russia doesn't allow them to uh russia is a country that creates false appearances they they began doing this under catherine the great when uh villages were moved around to show the progress in the countryside uh to her minister potemkin they did it under the soviet union and they did it uh under yeltsin uh the the facade of democracy was concealed and obscured the criminal processes that were taking place and the west and the west and in particular the us which bought into that uh completely what i've see you know we we we have a very at least uh in the u.s government uh a habit of creating russia experts by giving them bureaucratic dossiers and saying well you master this dossier for example should russia enter the world trade organization should russia conclude this or that agreement on limitation of arms and some you know someone devotes time and comes up with something and he becomes an expert and then we lose sight of the fact the person is not an expert at all uh he's he's dealt with one bureaucratic problem well enough of those experts ex exposed to uh the the russian talent for misrepresentation and deception uh will will are capable of making catastrophic mistakes as they did in in in 1993 after that 1993 there was no longer separation of power in russia all power was concentrated in the kremlin and the degeneration that led ultimately to the 1999 apartment bombings uh the rise of putin and everything that we have now was was very much in place david you've been arguing that the one of the problems of post um communist russia is that the communists had vacuumed out of the people all of the moral principles that had sustained the population in previous times but haven't succeeded in implanting in them successfully a real belief in a new set of proletarian or marxist values in fact at the end of the period of uh communism there was a tremendous cynicism now is there also another explanation this is a regime in which intelligence officials have been unusually prominent what do you think of the theory that post-totalitarian societies unlike post-authoritarian ones find it difficult to operate because in the period of totalitarianism the elites in every other walk of life apart from national security have been more or less either got rid of unceremoniously or they've been forced um to run their own affairs whether it's agriculture or ballet along marxist lines which really offer no true guide to specific areas of life so that at the end of the day you don't have experts in elites of a real kind in the in the post-communist world what you have is um just simply an apparatus of power well yes this is this is this is this is true because i mean under the soviet system for example the uh uh it's i mean they did have cultural life they did have intellectual life they had universities and even even rather high level academic research but it all had to be carried out within the framework of the regime's ideology so people became accustomed to compromising themselves they became accustomed not to telling you know to what was often referred to in the soviet union as the maximum version of truth in other words uh the most that you could say without getting into trouble well that version of truth was of course an untruth people who who who who who grew up and who prospered in that situation were inevitably psychologically damaged and it was from this group that the young reformers appeared people like i mean geiger was an orthodox communist he was he where he was the economics editor of pravda before he became the leading capitalist in russia under these circumstances uh one of the big problems that russia faced was that the people in charge of guiding the transition to a new society were themselves psychologically and morally damaged by their experience in the old society and uh it would uh guide our switch from being uh uh an arden communists to being as he understood it an ardent capitalist but without really assimilating the spirit of capitalism and the the uh and it's its intimate dependency on the rule of law well before i hand back to mark to discuss this new russia in international relations um let me just ask this question do you see at this point um with this larger middle class you've talked about russia beginning to develop a new set of humane civilized values which will inevitably reflect elements in russia's past so that we don't any longer we won't any longer um feel that this is a mysterious society um which really has little to do with the rest of us it is after all it does after all emerge from european history the way um the other european states do well there are there are yeah i mean russia first of all russia has suffered from immigration uh a huge number millions of people who could have been vital to the to the to the to the kind of resurrection of russia are now living elsewhere uh and that is uh and they are not likely to return that's been a a very serious uh problem is is and was a very serious problem nonetheless nonetheless there are many people in russia who are capable definitely of leading such a development but they're the the there are there are problems enough and they are connected with post-soviet history i mean in the case of the soviet union there was the problem of of finally memorializing those who were the victims of that regime in the last years of the soviet union there was an immense movement led by the memorial society to commemorate and honor the memory of those who uh who who who had been murdered who had been tortured and enslaved and with unfortunately this movement was directed principally toward the removal of gorbachev removal of the regime once the regime was removed once once the soviet union fell the energy behind this this this effort disappeared and in fact many of the projects that were discussed were never completed uh and this remains a task for the future to fully commemorate and and and honor those innocent people who died as a result of what ha of of of of a really demented ideology but unfortunately now we have a whole new set of crimes which were committed by post-soviet russia and if the focus is how to make post-soviet russia a more normal state which has greater respect for its citizens the first priority has to be uh the crimes of the post-soviet issue era now that doesn't mean of course that the crimes of communism should be ignored but but history really is the issue in russia and and and both should be addressed first beginning with the post-soviet crimes because the the the gangster-ism that took over in russia was of a peculiar kind it wasn't latin american gangsterism it wasn't american gangsterism or or even european gangsterism it was gangsterism carried out by people with a communist mentality that means a a level of cynicism that even a western mafioso would not necessarily have uh it it's the you know it's the killing at random of uh of people simply to make a point i mean one one example of this was that when there was an economic dispute i mean the the the it was often often solved with being by russian businessmen with the help of contract killings uh and if uh as a warning it was sometimes the case that a a a wealthy russian businessman would order the killing of the head of security of his of his competitor even though the the person really was not involved in any decision-making just just to make a point uh the element of provocation uh is enormous as a device uh for holding on to power and that can mean killing your own people so all of this i mean the the the of course the classic example is the bombing of the apartment buildings in 1999 which brought putin to power but to get back to history uh for a social movement in russia not only to change the situation in russia but also to create the conditions for something better the first thing that has to be addressed is the history of what happened in russia after uh yeltsin came to power the 1993 uh shelling of the parliament the 1996 so-called election bombing of the apartment buildings absolutely in 1999 putin would not have come to power without that the terrorist acts nordost uh beslan the assassinations boris nemtsov annapolitoskaya uh the you know the attempted poisoning and of navalny because corruption is one thing you can protest corruption but but the real issue is is in in russia is murder uh and and the truth about the murders uh and on the basis of that the country really needs another constituent assembly like the one that was dispersed by the bolsheviks the my fear about about the present anti-corruption uh protests is that uh you know they might they might expand they might develop uh they might attract the the the support of elements in the leadership uh but would they establish a democratic and and an ethical system of government in russia without a thorough a thorough examination of the country's history and a dedication to creating a political system that that that that imposes limits on those in power i mean that's the question well perhaps i can turn to mark and ask him to raise some of the problems for the west and the rest of the world in dealing internationally with a regime and a country which is in a sense so psychologically disfigured by what you've described mark well in indeed john and and david as you're talking there well before before i get on to that just quickly um uh in terms of um the uh regime's attitude to to history you were talking about the earlier period when commemoration of the victims of the soviet period was uh was was allowed and we were very much struck of course when we had the the anniversary of the molotov ribbon trop packed how putin quite conspicuously came out rejecting uh some of the criticism that that yeltsin and gorbachev had made of that and uh and and basically we we had a reversion to a stalinist uh defense of of what happened there which uh uh which which uh spoke volumes i think about uh uh putin's view of uh certainly certainly the soviet heritage but uh um but uh but but but more generally so uh what is gonna um uh international perspective he he was famous for making that remark a while ago that uh that the great geostrategic disaster of the 20th century was the disintegration of the soviet union how big a threat do you think he is uh to the west these days well that statement of course reflects the russian mentality the idea that we should be powerful we should be feared and as a result of the fall of the soviet union uh we were no longer he didn't say that but we were no longer powerful no one was afraid of us anymore so it was a geopolitical catastrophe the idea that it was uh you know a moment of of supreme liberation for for for russian people is what's important uh not the fact that the state that was dismantled could no longer uh uh intimidate others but uh so that shows shows his values but values are one thing in potentialities are and and capabilities are something else now that russia has half the population less than half of the soviet union its economy is less than half of the the soviet union even today if the soviet union could not prevail uh over the western world russia for sure cannot what russia can do is it can create problems and it in and it's pretty good at that but it's uh you know it can be it can definitely be limited russia's the russian leadership is principally a threat uh to itself and its own people uh with the proper measures taken by the western countries i don't think that we're going to we we're going to face uh the kind of threat we faced from the soviet union in which at any moment tens of thousands of soviet tanks could have could could have burst through the um through the defenses of nato and and and driven toward the english channel uh the uh i don't even think that they have a strategic advantage vis-a-vis the baltic states i don't think they would even even uh uh attempt an invasion of the baltic states because first of all because there's no no gain in it for them and second of all because these their immense corruption is in a funny way if we look at it in terms of world affairs a kind of blessing uh they their their their priority is to stay in power and enjoy that corruption and if if if an act of external aggression is going to destabilize their situation sufficiently to threaten their ability to enjoy it they're not going to undertake it the the animating factor in the soviet union was the soviet ideology there's no ideology in post-soviet russia all despite the fact that they they try to masquerade as as defend defenders of russian culture or try uh russian influence what there is the animating factor is the desire of a small group to make sure that it continues to monopolize property and power and so that's that needs to be kept in mind every time we think about the possibility of russian aggression somewhere they will of course take advantage of situations in which they don't expect any resistance and they will surely try to take advantage of the psychological predisposition of the population to support anything that looks like an enhancement of the country's power but uh you know launching a war against real opposition i don't think that that they're likely to do that i think that the the the uh the danger is that they will create the kind of conditions inside russia that will lead to instability in russia a country with with an immense arsenal of high-tech weapons including nuclear bombs and missiles uh that it could that that an uncontrolled situation could threaten the outside world that's for sure or that massive repression could just shock the conscience of the outside world i mean those are dangers uh but that's what what what i think we ought to be uh to be focused on uh and not assume that uh uh that we face an imminent military threat although we although you know which we can just you as long as we uh as long as proper deterrent measures are adopted we should be able to contain that doesn't mean that the countries that are former soviet republics like ukraine and kazakhstan and belarus will not face aggression that's a different matter but uh they will and they can uh but uh but in terms of the threat to the west directly i i don't see it yeah well joe well you've mentioned the baltic states um and and those other um ex-soviet republics um i mean in obviously there are a number of cases ukraine moldova georgia which uh partially occupied by uh by putin's regime um uh and so have become uh you know uh failed states essentially i mean they they they that they would find it very difficult to join the eu or or nato indeed and you do you think putin's happy with that sort of uh result or you know if there were an opportunity to you know fully reintegrate those places into moscow's sphere would he would he would he grabbed that opportunity do you think there were the kind of statelets that exist um uh i think that you know absorbing them of course uh has international consequences and also economic consequences and they they serve the purpose of putting pressure on the respective countries without being absorbed so i i don't see the and also we're talking about fairly small areas um prednastrovia i think that they're that that their real purpose is to put pressure on and to destabilize and keep weak the former soviet republics you know that that that russia wants to dominate yeah i i what i meant more was if there was an opportunity for putin to ins install his own friendly regime in kiev you know would he would he would he uh would he actively pursue that objective or what would what would he consider that too hard well they are actively pursuing that objective just not doing it very well i mean the the the the uh the whole war effort in in in effect is uh an effort to control ukraine uh in an effort to neuter ukraine uh obviously the the the effect has been to turn the population against russia and massively but uh it's that's not necessarily how uh putin saw it when he embarked on this and uh you know it does make you know the the the war does make russia a kind of player in ukrainian politics because there will always be a par a group you know a group in ukraine that will be more sympathetic to russia's demands rather than less which gives them leverage that they should they shouldn't really have uh but uh you know yes i mean they would be happy to have someone uh in ukraine who they could control uh as and in fact in the other for former soviet republics as well it's never worked out but uh having these these statelets as points of pressure is a kind of substitute for that uh it it it means that russia cannot be ignored by these countries they cannot pursue a truly independent uh pro-western foreign policy the west will be cautious about establishing ties with them there will be opportunities for internal subversion all of these things putin has never liked um the expansion of nato um uh and uh you know we've got the regime got very angry about the you know when all that happened in the in the 2000s um and uh but it seems that its diplomatic and other efforts uh and and pressure has never succeeded uh and and i i i imagine that uh you know when the next ones come along which try to you know would try to join serbia northern macedonia etc again moscow will fail to prevent them from uh from from joining nato do you do you think there's a degree of fatalism about uh about the enthusiasm of all of these countries to be part of the western umbrella or do you see putin remaining determined to do whatever he can to try and stop them uh and uh you know if if if possible even peeling some of the way in due course well i'd like to to i think we need to point out that that putin was successful in preventing georgia and ukraine from becoming part of nato so and and he is continuing to be successful because of the you know the the the ukraine cannot become part of nato under conditions in which it there's a war going on and it has contested territory because it's a part of its uh territory has been annexed by another power so i wouldn't say so in terms of what they were we're really seeking to do and what were their most urgent priorities they achieved them as for you know serbia north northern macedonia other other other countries further away from russia uh they will make a lot of noise and they will undertake certain may take take certain steps but they i think they understand the limitations of what they can do they they um we shouldn't you know they puff themselves up uh but uh and there are there are certain ways in which they're dangerous but uh uh russia as i as i said um is a it's principally a threat to the it's a danger to the to the to the former soviet republics which are on its borders and it's a and it's a threat to itself uh but as for a worldwide threat on the scale of the soviet union it doesn't fit that description anymore which which leads us neatly into what you see as the prospects for the for us russia relations under the biden presidency we have we have a kind of prototype of this with the obama administration and it's interesting that one of of biden's first acts was to uh announce that he's ready uh to extend the start treaty the strategic arms reduction treaty for another five years without the verification measures that were being insisted upon by the trump administration so that indicates to me uh i mean we had with with trump we had a kind of paradoxical situation in that uh trump was actually fairly hard-headed when it came to specific issues uh you know he it was he who authorized uh the sale of arms the defense of arms to the ukrainians he responded to a chemical weapons attack in syria uh he imposed tough sanctions uh in cooperation with others in the case of the skripals compared to obama who did absolutely nothing after the murder of alexander litvinenko uh what what trump but trump continued to engage in the in this in this really stupid and unacceptable rhetoric and and uh much to his own detriment uh on the with the idea that he could somehow charm putin uh the the period of charm i think is over but it will be a good thing if under biden some of the same uh realistic approach that uh the trump administration did uh uh did did have uh will be preserved i mean time will tell uh david you've given us a lot of your time and we're grateful i i have two more questions for you however the first is um i think it's fair to describe as a pessimist but as we've just been listening uh to you it's clear also that your pessimism has been realism a great deal of the time so i'm not flattering you it's just that you the record is there so my next question is what about your new book what are you telling us in that book that we should be paying attention to well it means well what do we mean by my my new book is is a collection of the book that's out which is called called never speak to strangers is a collection of my writing over four decades beginning when i arrived uh in moscow as a young i was at that point i was the youngest i corresponded or one of them anyway uh up until the present day of his sort of russia from brezhnev to to putin and carter to trump carter to biden uh and i tried to show in you i mean that book is tries to show what it means to you what is what remained the same in russia you had four different russians you had brezhnev's russia office russia yeltsin's russia putin's russia and yet they were all the same in many respects and that's what i was trying to show with the way in which the articles are are organized i'm also writing a book at the present time but that's a little yeah a history of post-soviet russia but if we take both both both projects what is it we're trying to show here which is that a different way of thinking uh uh a different way of looking at the individual and his value i mean the the napoleon had said that there are two only two countries in europe russia and everyone else and uh understanding russia can help us understand ourselves uh understand the good things that we have here and how important it is that uh not to treat the individual as raw material for the realization of some crazy political scheme because that that's that is that's the story of russia that's the story of russian history uh the individual meant nothing and he continues to mean nothing and we if there's mass repression in russia as a result of these protests we're going to see that uh but but at the same time the challenge you know russia poses a challenge to the west the west has always been intrigued by russia uh and uh i mean even spasso house in moscow which is based on monticello was was was erected with the idea that we would implant jeffersonian democracy in the soil of russia in the in the russian capital uh or in a with that time it wasn't the russian capital but it was the leading city moscow or one of them and uh but in any case uh because russia challenges the west with its interpretation of what an individual is someone without rights who realizes himself through the activities and and and aspirations of the regime not his own aspirations well the west of course is based on completely different principles and it would be a good thing for the world and definitely for russia if our principles prevailed and they can't prevail but it will require more of an intellectual effort than than generally speaking we're willing to make but david i'm very i'm i agree with what you've just said but you're sitting at the moment in washington and as and i'm as you look at what's going on in the united states and i'm not talking here about either donald trump or the new biden administration i'm talking about what's happening in its universities in your corporate among your corporate elites and corporate boardrooms in the media one has the impression that there the other point of view the non-western point of view the contempt for the individual that you mentioned but also the desire to impose uh on everybody a conformity and a single proper view of how we should view both um communal life and politics and also personal life as is challenging and in a lot of time a lot of the times is actually defeating the set of values that that you value as being peculiarly essentially western that i feel the same way do you how do you um look at that movement how do you look at those developments um and how do you think they are going to play out well i mean we what we're seeing in the us and i've seen this in other countries as well in canada uh even in britain uh to my you know as a as a a graduate of oxford it distresses me always to see bad things in britain as well there is a real degeneration i mean the what what what the soviet union fell and created a a kind of vacuum an intellectual vacuum because you know ever since the french revolution or even before you know the question of socialism uh you know dominated the thinking of people it forced people to to at least reflect on this on on the source of the on the source of values the nature of an economic system the nature of social justice with that once that was removed and we entered the the period that was sometimes described as the end of history uh the important thing was not to go looking for another pseudo id and i another ideology or in the case of the uss pseudo ideology um but on the contrary to strengthen those institutions that are traditional and that are based on universal values well unfortunately hyperactivity the internet uh the the the desire of people uh to um the the tendency of people to turn inward and to make you know and and literally to make to make academic disciplines out of their personal neuroses all of this has had the effect of of of creating some kind of some kind of substitute for an ideology uh that uh supposedly based on tolerance but in fact based on a mishmash of misinformation uh and which is now with the help of of of an uncritic uncritical uh uh intellectual class and universities that have deteriorated begun to resemble in the way it operates in some respects the soviet ideology we have informers we have uh our own punishments and police corporations are serving as judges uh it you you don't need something as sophisticated as marxism leninism in order to function as an ideology you could just take any kind of hodgepodge of ideas uh no matter how unconvincing and once it becomes a mass phenomenon it can function as an ideology and uh we're seeing that in this in in the west in the u.s so it's going to take now fortunately it's not universal it's widespread but there are many people who reject it and have they have the common sense to reject it and it's going to be important now you would have thought that having resisted world communism and nazism we would finally usher in an era of common sense but we haven't done that and so now uh under you know in the in the in the what in the era of well-being the past efforts have created uh we now have to contend with the kind of mental contagion that is uh really uh maybe it won't lead i hope to you know to to a dictatorship or mass arrests and things such as such as mark the 20th century but it'll ruin lives and it will lead to social degeneration and and so this is really up to those who do have the intellectual wherewithal to do something about it and i i think that there is there are there is pushback there are people who are capable but it's a challenge we shouldn't have to have had we should not have had to have uh but but it exists and we can't we can't avoid it uh let's let i mean i think we can only hope that it can be dealt with relatively uh expeditiously it's going to depend on a lot on on the healthy uh forces in society and the and the and the readiness of people to allow themselves to be educated which in the internet age is uh not something we can take for granted david thank you very much indeed you've given very generously of your time you know it's astonishes me to realize that there are a couple of other questions we should have asked you because you seem to have gone around the world but we're going to um we're going to insist on inviting you back in the future so on behalf of mark and on behalf of the danube institute i'd like to thank you very much for coming here today and giving so generously of what is undoubtedly your wisdom thank you thank you john thank you thank you mark thank you david

Channel: Danube Institute

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Length: 76min 11sec (4571 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021