Masha Gessen, "The Future Is History"

Russia of course is back it's back in the news back in our concerns and fears back as a subject that we're trying anew to understand and we're very fortunate to have with us this evening a journalist who has distinguished herself over several decades as one of the best chronic chroniclers and explainers of Russia its leaders and its people Masha Gessen is the daughter of Soviet dissidents and was born in Moscow she moved to the United States with her family as a teenager in 1981 then returned a decade later to work there as a journalist they moved back to the United States several years ago throughout her career which has included not only many many articles but eight previous books Masha has time and again shown herself to be as courageous as she is eloquent an unrelenting thorn in the side of the Russian authorities in particular Vladimir Putin and a determined advocate for democracy and LGBT rights in her new book the future is history Masha sets out to capture what it has felt like to live in Russia over the past three decades of considerable change and what Russia has become today she does this by focusing on the lives of several people for younger ones who grew up during the 1990s when Russia was opening up then came of age when the country started shutting down again and three older individuals a sociologist a psychoanalyst and a philosopher who not only are old enough to have experienced the Soviet Union but are in a position because of their intellectual training to reflect on what's happened in Russia the result is a book that a reviewer in the New York Times called quote fascinating and deeply felt a book that was just named a finalist for this year's National Book Award in nonfiction Masha will be in conversation here this evening with Susan Glasser politico's chief international affairs columnist and host of a new weekly podcast the global Politico over Susan's long and distinguished journalism career she also has reported for or edited roll call the Washington Post and foreign policy magazine particularly relevant for this evening's discussion Susan while at the Washington Post spent four years traveling the former Soviet Union as co-chief of the Moscow Bureau and if you haven't seen it already she's also written a review applause this book that is for The Washington Post that just went online today so laser did gentlemen please join me in welcoming masha gessen at suzanne glasses well thank you so much Brad and Lissa and all of you especially for sharing your busy evening with us I'm impressed that so many of you managed to make it through our Washington gridlock and come tonight and very grateful because I think this should be a great conversation I've been looking forward to it just because I'm looking forward to talking with Masha and hearing what she has to think there's been you know it's another busy week here in in trumps Washington so we have a lot of questions that I have and we'll get to that questions from the audience as well but it's a great honor to see masha here and this this big ambitious book as Brad I think I heard you say as you mentioned I did review this book for the post and so you can see what I think of it there but you know I'll sneak preview I it was a very positive it would otherwise be a little bit of an awkward conversation well now we go just actually I told my editor I was doing this and I said you know just wash and I have met each other a few times but we're not old friends or anything and I said you know what do you plan to publish this and actually they didn't tell me it was all done and finished and signed off on and I guess this is what they mean when there is an absolute you know blind wall here so there's no connection between the this event and you but thank you the book has gotten I think rightly a lot of acclaim it was just announced that it's a finalist this week and my observation would be and I'm curious if you can start out tonight by telling us a little bit you know it's it's one of the most ambitious books that I've read about the Putin era in particular right there are a lot of very ambitious books about the Cold War there are a lot of ambitious books about Russian history I really can't think of anything that aims to tell in such big detail the story of what's happened in last 17 years and I start out the piece by saying you might not have noticed it but a few weeks ago a landmark was quietly passed and Vladimir Putin became the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin he out pastes even brashness record who we associate as having been the leader of the Soviet Union forever so since Stalin how did you decide now is the time that I'm gonna write this this big cinematic ambitious book about Putin's Russia I wasn't actually timing it for for the record and I wasn't timing it for his as you point out in your review assured reelection next year the timing was a little bit of a personal matter I left Russia and I thought I should write one last book about Russia and you know every couple of years somebody writes to Russia book to end all Russia books so I thought this is my turn and you're right I mean it's it's more ambitious than other books I've written because for me you know in the sort of the solipsistic way that that writers have I think that what's my story for me marks an end of an era so I think it's the end of an era and for me the end of the era was was the era of hoping for a democracy in Russia I went back to Russia in the early 1990s having emigrated here as a teenager I went back ten years later in the early 90s as a reporter because it was so exciting to report on the transformation of the Soviet Union into a democratic Russia or so we thought well I mean that's the thing reading it now you know the two parts of the book that are really the strongest in many ways are that period in the 1980s when there's this incredible ferment at least in this sort of Moscow intelligentsia circles you know new ideas are opening up you have a wonderful character in the book who basically brings psychoanalysis to a country who that you know if ever a country needed therapy right but you know II so you experience this this awakening this opening this you know glass Phyllis and perestroika and then the last few years are sort of like the bookend right to the beginning of that did you struggle much with what the opening point of the book should be like how far back to go or was it meant to be your own kind of lived experience um well it's not really my own lived experience although you're you're right it's a it's a very personal book but there the word eye is never in the book the book begins in the mid 80s when Russia started changing right and sort of in the traditional narrative that was the beginning of the end I think in my narrative it's it has turned out to be not the beginning of the end it turned out to be a little bit of a false start right but but it's only thirty years later that we realize that it was a false start but that's that's how I chose the mid eighties and of course I also chose the mid eighties because the four characters around whom the book is built were all born in the mid 80s I look for people who were born then not for the symbolic not for the symbolism of of looking at people who are as old as the story but because I really was interested for a long time in writing about people who were children in the 1990s because I think it's such it's such an interesting moment and I wanted to get inside the heads of people who are children in the 1990s and try to figure out what happened there well and how would you say there's something that binds those four very disparate characters together I mean dude they grew up in very different places in a provincial city in Moscow as a member of sort of a very elite family do they do they strike you as having something that is generational in in nature to their experience so I actually had some criteria when I looked for people who would be at the center of the book I knew that I figured out at one point that I wanted four people and I wanted people who had been children in the 90s they had to remember 1991 it's not every person who was a child the 90s members the moment that we think of as the end of the Soviet Union and another almost formal criterion was that their lives had to have changed drastically as a result of the crackdown of the last five years so that's probably the thing that really binds them together that obviously means that they are all in some way or another in opposition to Putin which for that brief moment in 2011 2012 and for their generation made them part of a majority so you know I wasn't looking for truly exceptional people but I wanted people who represented that particular phenomenon the the protests of the 2011-2012 and the crackdown that dashed their hopes and in these cases really profoundly changed their lives so one thing I've been thinking about all day it's not sort of the text of the book but it's certainly the one of the major questions that's raised by it was that crackdown inevitable and was this particular trajectory inevitable for Russia well I'm I mean in hindsight everything is inevitable right because it happened I remember very well what I thought at the time and unfortunately I will never be able to forget what I thought at the time because my Putin book that came out the biography that came out in 2012 had as its epilogue a very hopeful piece on the purchase because at that moment and I learned my lesson once and for all never put in a book something that that you just wrote about something that just happens it has to sit but but you know I was inside those protests they felt amazing I also fell victim to two heuristic which is that I had covered revolutions right I several of them and I knew what it felt like to be inside a successful revolution so it didn't occur to me to ask myself what does it feel like to be inside an unsuccessful revolution as it turns out it feels exactly the same except at the fails but so you know obviously five years ago I didn't think it was inevitable now I think that I should have been smarter I think that knowing what I knew about Putin's absolute drive to absolute power to imagine that he would that he would be motivated by the protest she weakened the system in ways that it would eventually lead to his downfall was naive right and that really was the expectation because he already had all the levers of power in his hands so so the the imagination was that he would negotiate with the protesters he would try to appease them and that would have eventually bring him down well he's not a very smart man but he's smart enough to understand that that would eventually have brought him down and that for a dictator cracking down is actually a more effective strategy of survival you know it's interesting you say that to me that was one of the early lessons that I learned never really understanding where Putin exactly would take this but I remember I'm not sure if you were you were still in Moscow and then probably at the time but when in Azerbaijan one of the former Soviet republics the Soviet era leader Illya Haydar Iliev died and he saw to pass his country on to his son which in fact he succeeded at doing and I went down for the election and you know his son was not popular at all he was sort of seen as a playboy he was Western educated he was you know a sort of a worldly sort but not at all seen as you know fit to lead a country and so there was unhappiness that was genuine and that even you know the reading people would tell you went to this election it was a totally rigged election and there was protesting the streets you know people's heads were cracked right in front of me but with the the lesson that I took away from it was on the plane going back and there were some Western election observers and some Russian election observers on the plane back to Moscow and the Europeans said we don't understand I mean you know why were they so greedy why did Elliot have to give himself 85 for some of the vote nobody thinks that he really kind of 85 percent you know couldn't may have done 55 and he said this to the Russian he said you don't understand the 85 percent was the point the the fact that people knew he wasn't very popular and that this had to be you know an orchestrated result the higher the percentage the better I'm amazed they didn't go for 90% and it was this very revealing moment to me where I realized that you know the things that are necessary to dictate the survival of an authoritarian government are very different than you know certainly that product of the United States is is used to thinking and and Putin has already struck me as playing more by alliums law than then we realize so based on this book I know every single person here is gonna stand up and ask you this question so I'll just ask you for you anyways you know why why do you think Putin has taken what appears to be such an aggressive outward turn you know not just focusing on cracking down inside Russia and you know making sure no more below Tenaya protests break out but focusing on the United States to a degree that clearly has shocked many people here in Washington this Saturday it will be the one-year anniversary not only of the Access Hollywood tape which I'm sure everyone here remembers but it will also be the one-year anniversary of when the US government said Russia had done the packing of the dnc the one-year anniversary of the week of Tom Podesta's emails and it's a lot of effort since birthday and the 11th anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya so I think that actually in it echoing what you were just saying about I leaves election the outward turn was the point right I believe and and I discussed this at length in the book I believe that the nature of the regime changed after the crackdown it went from being an authoritarian regime to a kind of totalitarian regime right when I say kind of totalitarian I don't mean that he was establishing a new totalitarian regime right that would involve terror and just all sorts of unimaginable horror but he was calling forth the habits and customs of Soviet totalitarian society and one of the differences between an authoritarian and totalitarian regime that I think is key here is mobilization and in in an authoritarian regime nothing is political the authoritarian leader wants people to stay home tend to their private lives and not pay attention while he ponders the country consolidate spur or whatever it is history at two teletraan leader wants the exact opposite everything is political there is no private realm and the totalitarian leader wants people out in the public square rallying for a victory right the to tell the population has to be mobilized and there are lots of reasons why it has two immobilized but the question is how does it get mobilized and it only can get mobilized against an enemy and they only Menna me that is big enough and glorious enough to be mobilized against is the United States and I think that's something that the foreign policy establishment in this country really failed to understand was that was the nature of the war in Ukraine the Russians believe that they were fighting a proxy war with the United States in Ukraine and in Syria and so in that sense the intense interest and participation in the American election he's just completely logical it's not you know it's not a break with the narrative it's part of the narrative especially because Russia believes that the United States has meddled in its own politics has organized that Hillary Clinton personally organized protests in the streets in 2011-2012 and so why shouldn't Russia do the same here okay so you brought up the t word as in totalitarianism which is the subtitle of your book how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia you know you had to have done that recognizing that some people would would get in an argument over definitions with you and that no Lattimore printed as many things you described them well in your previous book but he has not killed millions of people but so um that's why I wrote a whole chapter on the definition of totalitarianism chapter 14 but so here's my theory of the case I I think that Putin certainly did not set out to be a totalitarian leader in fact the regime that he was trying to build as a mafia state and this is I think this is the best definition again there have been many oligarchy kleptocracy crony capitalism the liberal democracy I think that they're all flawed and the best one is mafia state and this is a definition put forward by a Hungarian political scientist named Balan major who describes it as a clan a family run by patriarch the patriarch distributes money and power and you know the amazing thing since the people are going to ask about this as well I'll just go ahead and say it the amazing thing of course is when I was writing the book in writing about mafia States the whole the concept of family was a metaphor right I was talking about the other T word I wasn't thinking that you know would be observing the formation of a mafia State with a literal family at the home but so he he was building office T his goal continues to be to to retain power in perpetuity and to continue in the chisa but because to do that he had to crack down in 2012 and because he cracked down on the ruins of a totalitarian society the response he got was the survival response of a totalitarian society it's very much like you know a person who has been in an abusive situation developed survival skills that are suited to that situation and those are the skills that that person is going to use throughout their life unless something extraordinary like really great therapy happens to this person but as Susan over dimensioned Russia didn't really Russia need a lot of therapy didn't get a lot of therapy the survival skills of a totalitarian society were perfectly suited for the period of state terror and the thing that that I think we have discovered in the last 20 years is that they have been made and in response to put subscribe down that's what came forward so I know we are gonna want to turn back to the other t word in a second but let's stick with the book for right now you have these sort of four main characters these young people but you you also these sort of three intellectual protagonists and one of them is Alexander Dugan who has become in innocence the chief ideologist behind putinism even though it's he wasn't like personally close to Putin as far as we understand it tell us what you think about this debate and there is a debate about whether there really is an ideology of putinism beyond just maintaining power for Putin you know this is one of the big arguments in our sort of world of Russia Watchers and the reason I think it's particularly relevant right now is this question of what kind of a conflict are we facing between Russia and the West between Russia and the United States it actually depends a little bit on how you assess their ideology whether they have an ideology and if so you know how it plays out so tell us a little bit about your study of Alexander Dugan he didn't cooperate unlike the other characters in this book well he cooperated in a very peculiar way he sent me stuff and he sent me his right right-hand person to talk to me so I talked to I interviewed him by proxy but he also has a vast written record that and actually I want to just give a shout out to unconscious cops of who's here who knows so much more about Alexandra Dugan than I ever will and he was a new book out on Russia and the European far-right so the ideology question actually I'm not sure is the right question and I'll explain ideology is also something that looks coherent usually in hindsight when you read contemporary accounts of say Hitler's Germany which we imagine to have had a very clear idea gee victor klemper talks about how they are opportunists and they just pick up whatever whatever is handy to make a particular argument erich fromm writes that they have no ideology whatsoever and the very idea that Hitler has an ideology is misguided Hannah Arendt writes later than from that that one of the reasons that the West was that that the the other Western countries were so slow to understand what was going on in Germany and in the Soviet Union was that the ideology on the face of it seemed preposterous that if you tell somebody that they're going to kill millions of people because they are because of their ethnicity it sounds preposterous if you told them somebody that their ideology is to eliminate eradicate entire classes of people to the tune of millions of people it sounds preposterous only once it's happened does it become believable even if it's still unimaginable and then it starts to add up to coherent ideology so I think that you know once you've immersed herself in those accounts you actually think this guy doesn't have less of an ideology than any of those he is um I think he has struck a couple of themes that are consistent and one has a lot of traction and that's traditional values right it began in part with queerbaiting the protesters and because that turned out to be so effective it's it's turned into this full-fledged sort of idea of a traditional value civilization that's Duggan's idea and a russian world and russia as the center of a civilization based on traditional values um that's that's just a heron does it get well I know the audience has a lot of questions and I'm gonna look for our microphone so that you can raise your hands and do it while you're getting your questions ready I'll throw a coin on when - Masha before turning it over to you the audience back to the other T word you know you've written in sure many people here are familiar with your very powerful essay in the New York Review books suggesting that you know the threat of Trump has to really do with the question of the kind of society we have here in the United States so now that it's 250 days 230 days in to the Trump presidency what is your own progress report on the state of American democracy under Trump do you fear do you feel that your predictions are coming true I do unfortunately I think that and if you recall or you don't have to recall I recall that I actually in the in that essay but also later this was more vividly when Samantha bee asked me what my greatest fear was and I said nuclear holocaust and you know back in January it seemed like a kind of nutty thing to say we're in September in October now and we've been living with the specter of a nuclear holocaust for a month you know that's that's how fast it has advanced and I think that he is Trump's attack on American institutions and even more significantly to my mind on American political culture has been as unceasing as it could possibly have been I didn't actually imagine that it would be this cacophonous but I think the cacophony makes it that much more effective you mean cacophonous from inside the Trump administration which clearly is not yet singing with one voice I mean that but I also mean you know the the just endless barrage of news I mean I'm boots hidden when he came to power in the you know all of us have again our own heuristics right my Putin came to power he set in motion a kind of authoritarian crawl right he was very methodical about taking over power but every step was was measured and I think that that's part of what made it so effective in his case was that every single thing he did it on its face wasn't that awful you know until 2004 when he cancelled the Burnet or election but basically up until that point everything he did was kind of horrible but not not it was difficult actually to make the argument in the Western media I know I tried that he was establishing an authoritarian regime and you know Trump has been acting like a bull in the china shop from day one there has been no crawl there's like this constant artillery attack and on that note who wants to be the first to jump in with Suzanne um can you talk about food as well and how he came by that and the oligarchs and Russia and how did the people feel about the failed attempt at you know an actual kind of democracy thank you that's at least three questions so I'm going to focus on the last of those three questions because it actually has to do with what's what's in this book as opposed to a much earlier book about Putin so how do people feel about the failed attempt at democracy well we no longer know that's how profound the transformation of Russian society has been there's there's a moment in the book that's very important to me when they have good coffee the sociologist he has taken a piece of paper and he has graft his superimposed two graphs the graph of Putin's popularity which skyrocketed after the invasion of Ukraine and held at 86% so it looks like a vertical line up from 50 something to 86 and then it just holds it plateaus and the graph of consumer confidence which is a actually sort of more broadly a sense of economic well-being which plummeted around the same time just as the Russian economy tanked and stayed and plateaued at the bottom and so it looks like this and he held us up and said this can't happen this is impossible right these two lines have to meet either this goes up where this goes down most likely both of them one goes up and the other one goes down the fact that it hasn't means that it's no longer a society in which you can meaningfully measure public opinion because there's no public and there's no opinion since we're also coming up on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution I was wondering how much you feel that Putin the KGB agent is influenced by the Soviet political culture and structure and how much he represents a break from that oh I think his he is a KGB agent through the truth that's uh that's the nature of the beast and what I think is it is important and what you know what this book is about is is how much he has been able to tap into a nostalgia for an imaginary Soviet Union and recreate aspects of that culture okay my name is Ruth and given the different histories and different political cultures of Russia and the US and given what you've termed the assault on American political culture by Trump how successful do you think he will be in establishing a clause like totalitarian regime here if at all and what would be the best resistance that you would suggest for the American population so I mean I don't think that there's a danger of totalitarianism in this country to Talat arianism does require state terror the reason that Putin has been able to tap into totalitarian culture is that there was state terror in the Soviet Union for at least three decades and the memory of that terror has shaped the society that Russia has today I think that Trump is an aspiring autocrat he wants to he wants to rule like a tyrant and that's a real risk and it's a real risk you know not in the sense that that Americans will forfeit as many liberties as Russian supported but it certainly it will I think there's a real risk to institutions in there there's a real risk to two political culture and I think the way to resist it I mean obviously I'm in a great position to give advice on this because I had to flee my own country that's one way yeah I mean New Zealand seems like a nice place but but I think that in this country we have to be really aware of what we have right I mean there have been aspiring tyrants aspiring autocrats as long as there have been democracies right there have been people who wanted to destroy them and never actually have they confronted a civil society this strong and a public sphere this healthy and that's an strange thing to say because you know we've all been bemoaning but good reason sort of the the the the polarization in this country and the crisis of trust in in the media all that is true and still I think a majority of people in this country are routinely exposed to opinions that they don't share a majority of people get their news from different sources that don't speak with one voice we have an absolutely extraordinarily wealthy and broad civil society and we saw how it can act when the travel ban happened and how a civil society motivates institutions to act we have to be really aware of that and importantly we have to be aware of it because we we need to know that institutions don't actually function without civil society institutions will absolutely not save us only civil society puts pressure on them and supports them well we have some hope of of protecting what we have but we all see you know we also have to understand that what we have is very much worth protecting hi my name is Jason and my question relates to how Russia sort of interacts with the broader world I've sort of noticed a pattern kind of in Russian history where you don't like some sort of catastrophic war for example will happen like Napoleon attacks and as a response there's a push back to the West so Alexander then sees as much of Poland or after World War two yo you see Stalin setting up this network of various satellite states in Central Europe do you see Putin as kind of actively following in that that's sort of pattern um I actually would disagree with your narrative a bit you've just told a story that that actually Russia really loves to tell of how Russia is always under attack and encounter attacks I think I'm probably more accurate way of looking at it is to say that Russia has been an empire and it has had an expansive vector for most of its history and it's not because it's under attack from the West and that's that's very much in play now I think that one of the missed opportunities and I do talk about this in the book is is sort of the opportunity to develop a post Imperial identity okay the Soviet Union was an empire it was an empire that didn't they denied that it was an empire but but it broke apart like empires do but there is still an empire left and thus Empire had the opportunity to to start thinking of itself in a different way and perhaps to not base its identity on greatness and that didn't happen and under Putin it's very much back to a great Russia the the the the single great myth of Russian history now is World War two which as live both again the sociologist says is the perfect myth because it shines it slides backwards and forwards backwards because it justifies all the terror that came before and for is because it explains how the Soviet Union became a superpower and that's sort of that's that's at this point the source of Russian identity and then in large part dictates you know it's it's outside ambition it's superpower scale ambition and it's expensive expansive motion my name is my name is Jacob and I had a question that I think is sort of a follow on to the the preceding one and it has to do with Turkey and it seems to me that air Dewan in Turkey is really following a very similar strategy as Putin did in Russia and it seems like Putin has offered him very close support in that process since the coup oh sorry since the coup in July of I guess 2016 and I was wondering if you could talk about that relationship from from your perspective and and what you see is its future um I don't judge me I'm not at all an expert on Turkey like not at all so I'd really hesitate to talk about Turkey one thing that I would say about that relationship is that has been quite volatile I mean there was a moment but about six months before the coup when it looked like there might be a war between Russia and Turkey and that's actually an important lesson for Americans I think right the here we have a president now has promised a wonderful relationship with Russia and the u.s. relationship with Russia is at its lowest point possibly since world war two right at the point of you know mutually expelling diplomats at a point when the US Embassy in in in Russia has stopped issuing visas because they no longer have the the people power to to issue visas Trump has suggested closing the consulate in San Francisco I mean it's just it's just spiraling and I think that's the serve the erdowan Putin example is a good example of how unreliable autocratic friendships are and how volatile they can be hi my name is Tina I have a question about the protests that were going on earlier this year so it seems that people like Navalny really capitalized on discontent with the lack of economic growth for the middle classes so the rich who were getting a lot richer and then there was a stagnation or a loss of economic power in the middle classes and the the people that were less well-off and it seems like there is continued interest in going out and doing something or protesting on the streets at least in the bigger cities and then of course the money was arrested but do you see that that discontent is going away or are they neutralizing it in some way or is it still there and just not finding expression in any kind of systemic organized fashion so the question concerns protests that there have been - two waves of protests this year and probably one more coming in the spring and then in June when called upon by Alexei Navalny who started out as an anti-corruption blogger and has become sort of a leading light for for a lot of people in Russia people came out into the streets to protest corruption all over Russia in June people came out in over 100 cities and towns so the most geographically spread out protests in Russian history I believe and the regime responded by arresting 1725 people in one day so the largest wave of arrests in a single day in decades I think that gives us a pretty good indication of of how this is going to play out but to me the saddest thing about those protests as much as I you know as much as I have I have lots of problems with my Balinese politics but I admire his inventiveness and his urge immensely and as much as I admire the people who came out to protest there was something really tragic to me about those protests and that was how both the number of very very young people in them but even more so the the way that older people and by older people I mean anybody over 25 interpreted them all over Russian social networks in what little independent media there is there was the sentiment oh this is the new generation that's finally going to make change and they're talking about seventeen year olds and a lot of the people who are talking about the 17 year olds in it and the 15 year olds are people in their mid-30s who were the young faces of protest five years ago and who have already given up on themselves and on their entire generation and are passing the baton to the next generation to me that was especially painful because I had just finished writing this book a lot of which is about this idea of generational change and ultimately whether generational change is stronger than injured intergenerational trauma the sociologists who think I keep mentioning him more than the other characters but he is he offers incredible analysis and and he and the team that he worked for in 1989 went out to do survey based on the sizes that the Soviet man Hamas of a circus was bound to be a dying breed because it had been decades more than a generation since Stalin's terror ended and so people with the living memory of terror were dying off and that would mean that a Soviet man was dying off and that would mean that Soviet institutions that rested on Soviet man would crumble and that would mean that would bring the Soviet Union down so they had this optimistic hypothesis they went out they did a survey they concluded that they were right two years later the Soviet Union collapsed right on schedule and in another three years they went back to do that survey again and got really weird results that suggested that Hamas of a Turkish was not dying off was surviving and five years after that they did it again and concluded and I quote that's Hamas of a circus is not only thriving but reproducing and they keep getting results that affirm that theory in there they don't see that person that that that that traumatized survivor of totalitarian society going anywhere and so the way that one generation sort of looked at the next and said okay let the let the school children do it just to depress the hell out of me hi my name is Sophie and I studied China oh sorry where there's also been absurd in nationalism and also a crackdown on not democracy because they don't have that but on civil society within roughly the same period of time and in connection with that there's also been a real upsurge I think in a propaganda about traditional gender rules and so I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the impact of increasing authoritarianism in Russia on gender equality and and then also separately you've spoken about the connection between trauma as a sort of collective national experience and how that can be exploited by governments for to implement totalitarianism and I wonder if you think that it also works perhaps in the opposite direction that repairing trauma on an individual level um can have a revolutionary impact should the National Endowment for democracy be adding a line item for therapy for this I hope the grants that they asked people to apply for oh my god that is such a great idea I I think the answer is no one has tried that but that sounds like such an amazing project and and you know you can't go wrong with the project like that like you can't fail at least on the individual level you will help people which is more than you can say for a lot of you know democracy advancement projects so gender roles you know it Evan it's it always gets really complicated when we talk about gender roles in in Russia because it seems so contradictory within women equally represented in the work place and and and and a lot of female-headed households and all of that but so that said and that the complication acknowledged there's been both I think rhetorically and and really socially a real sort of reversion in the last under Putin I mean Putin there's the great anecdote that Hillary Clinton told to Putin told to David Remnick in one when he was interviewing her but her book where she asked Putin and I haven't gotten to that place in the book I don't know if it's in the book as well but she she was looking for something that she could discuss with Putin and he's very interested in nature conservation which is also something I know a little bit about and and so she said to him she asked me a question about that and he just lit her up and started talking to her and he said in fact I'm about to go to Chukotka to place a satellite collar on a polar bear maybe Bill wants to come with me he says to the secretary of state of the United States and she says well bill might be busy I could come with you and he just ignores it and that's sort of you know that's that's the culture very very much the reigning culture and when Putin has also been known to be to respond to a question asked by a woman journalist you know and how many children have you had and a lot of the rhetoric underlying the anti-gay campaign has actually had to do with reproduction and demographics and I think part of the reason that has been so successful is because it does tap into a real demographic panic so all of that has not been great for for for gender equality and more equal gender roles and and they you know the incredible emphasis now on traditional values or whatever that might mean and sort of the imaginary past when we had those traditional values ultimately you know it's just going to exacerbate that situation hi my name is Lia I just wanted to thank you for being here um sorry um so my question was that in other revolutions like for example in the Arab Spring social media has been a really effective tool for mass mobilization of opposition's I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how why you think that given how unregulated social media and the Internet are generally why you think the opposition hasn't really effectively used it - yes right so yeah I wouldn't say that the opposition hasn't effectively use social networks or social media here's what I would say first of all I would say that there is no opposition in Russia right and what I mean is that opposition is a word that suggests access to public sphere access to media access to electoral institutions none of that exists right so their opponents to Putin who publicize who spread information and who sometimes organize protests it's very different from saying that there's an opposition and it has a lot to do with why the potential of how the potential of social media is limited right social media cannot create connections that don't exist offline it cannot create public space that really doesn't exist offline it can speed up communication and it can amplify messages but only within the confines of what already exists offline okay and so when protests broke out people were able to spread the message very very quickly within existing networks using social media among other things it was as often happens the impact of social media was overestimated polls actually that about half the people who participated in purchase in 2011-2012 learned about them from social media and about half from other sources great but it played an important role but it's not you know social media as we have now finally learned in this country as well it's not inherently anything it's not inherently democratic it's not it doesn't inherently it's not inherently a force for good and it doesn't inherently it doesn't create things that aren't already there it just makes them more efficient so I'm originally from Moscow my name is Natasha emigrated about 20 it was the last year of the Soviet Union I have a personal question actually two interrelated personal questions one is you have been living in Moscow after you came back from the US for quite some time and now you are back in the US I wanted to find out how you're finding this adjustment back so the US and the second question there is one of your books which is not political which I really love I read it a long time ago it's called blood matters and it's about genetics and your personal journey and right now I understand that it's very important to write political books but I'm wondering whether you are thinking about writing in non political book again Wow great question so to the question of how the adjustment has been coming back here so I first came here as a teenager in 1981 and then I went back to the Soviet Union actually is a correspondent in 1991 and stayed until December 2013 and then came back here but all along I was writing in both English and Russian and writing books in English so for me coming back was actually it has actually been great it's it's it's been a homecoming in a way I live in New York City which I love I've had a very rewarding career for the last four years I've yeah I mean it's it's it's it's been wonderful what has been and and I have to say that emigrating when you have a choice about it is definitely I mean even though I didn't have much of a choice about the timing of leaving Russia we had to get out in a hurry but but I made that decision myself unlike the first time when my parents made the decision for me and I was just resentful and miserable and but this time I brought my teenage children very resentful and miserable and I can't blame them because I know exactly what it feels like and and I have to say that there's a peculiar difficulty actually to have to have a family in which four people emigrate it my partner and my three kids and I came home and it's that's that's really been a struggle because I think for at least for for people who emigrate as difficult as it is there's also kind of a rewards ladder right because you go from you know working illegally under the table to actually having a regular job to them finding a job in your field there's a Rapids kind of growth that compensates for that loss of social networks and social status that that people inevitably Experion when they emigrate and and I deprived my family of that because we came here quite comfortably bought a house and I moved in but the misery of this location is still there and there's nothing you can do about it and to answer your your question about whether I'm thinking of writing a personal book I am thinking of writing a personal book and but it's like years down the road if I do write it it will be a book about emigration and gender hi um thank you for coming my question is I was wondering if you were able to get outside of Moscow and to some of the other cities and whether you were able to talk with some of the various other ethnic groups in Russia and what were your experiences things well I mean in in my work as a journalist in Russia I I was mostly a roving reporter and I traveled all over the country and and did a lot of reporting on from different cities including a lot of reporting on [Music] non-russian ethnic groups and non Orthodox Christians this book is built around seven particular people one of whom two of whom are not from Moscow and the rest of whom are from Moscow they said one of them grew up in a provincial well a large but but you know I shouldn't know he didn't start out in a large city he started out in a very small town provincial town then moved to a larger provincial city and I had to actually flee Russia all together and he is I think he's an absolutely extraordinary character a young young academic who was very hopeful just just a few years ago started the first Gender Studies Centre at a Russian University and and had really found himself in academia and then a couple years later but later was running for his life and now lives in New York and another of the characters has burst himselves daughter who grew up also in a provincial city but a very large one usually Nova cadets Jean Anjum Silva and she also has had to leave the country following her father's assassination we have time for three more quick questions I am Julie I'm trying to figure out exactly how to word this but I work for LGBT rights and it's been really shocking for me I did not expect Trump to come after the LGBT community the way he has and then you know but the release of the D the Department of Health and Human Services plan which is basically a fundamentalist plan yesterday I'm wondering with both Putin and Trump how core you think misogyny and homophobia is to their how they function and how it ties in with their political worldview or not is it kind of coincidental I mean you talked a lot about traditional values but a little more about that role the role those blue you know that's a really interesting question because I'm and I've I've actually puzzled over this American obsession with core values like why do we care if somebody is deeply racist if they behave like a racist why do we care if somebody is deeply homophobic if they if they're president and they encourage homophobic policies you know or launched an anti-gay campaign it doesn't matter you know what matters is what they actually do and what becomes our observed reality our observed reality is that this president is the Trump I mean but they are the one in Russia to is is going after LGBT people in a fairly conservative manner right I have my ideas about why he's doing it I think because for someone like him and this was calculable and actually I wrote about this very early on in July of 2016 I wrote that he was going to reverse progress on LGBT rights because for someone like him it makes sense to reverse the most pronounced most recent most rapid social change in this country and that concerns LGBT rights and it doesn't matter how he feels about LGBT people and whether all of his best friends are gay it really makes no difference right his power is largely based on his ability to demonstrate that he is serious about taking people to the past and that will necessarily involve reversing progress on LGBT rights and I think we should expect a lot more attacks on that front hi my name is Nancy oops have the economic sanctions that the West has imposed and/or the Magnitsky Act provided any constraints on Putin and his regime and those around him I think so and I also I I'm trying to be like a broken record and saying I don't think this is a great question but this is this is the way we normally pose the question right we normally ask but the sanctions are effective and you know it's a perfectly reasonable question of course but I also think that when we when you deal with someone like Putin who's basically intractable right that question can also lead to to illogical dead-end right because if there is no way to influence his behavior then there's no way to influence his behavior so what's the point of sanctions well the point of sanctions is that they're the right thing to do because it is the wrong thing to do to do business with with the bloody dictator it is the wrong thing to do to allow you know him and his people to to invest their money here and to launder their money here so whether or not we can see that we can observe the strategic results from sanctions sanctions are the right thing to do my name is George just one question what happens after Putin oh well that's that's an easy one um I have no idea but um but actually there's there's a wonderful book that's just out in paperback that is weirdly relevant to that question and the book is called the last days of Stalin have you read it it was great and it's Joshua Rubinstein it says it's a slim book and it's amazing you read it and and I mean the part that that that has to do with how the US foreign policy establishment was worried that after Stalin died the hardliners might come to power that really I thought that was really amazing and so it really puts into perspective similar fears that have been voiced repeatedly in this country but I also the other thing that that has direct implications for today is that he is documented in how much disarray the Soviet Union was and how Americans looking at it couldn't believe that it was in that much disarray and kept looking for sort of hidden meanings and hidden strategies and actually what had happened was that Stalin had planned to live forever there was no succession plan nobody knew what was happening and how they should act and anything was possible and I think something similar is going to happen after Putin Dyke's he definitely planned plans to live forever there will be no succession plan I mean I'm assuming that there will be his death that that will end putinism if it's something else it will not be dissimilar it will also we'll know when it happens right it's a closed system but but there will be disarray one prediction that I feel confident enough making is that I don't think that Russia will stay in its current borders when after Putin it's there's so much sort of outward tension at this point Huson has managed to put so much pressure on various constituent members of the Russian Federation and pumped them for money and/or to the opposite of money into supporting friendly dictators and in in various places once he is gone so the those tensions will come to the surface and various places will various parts of Russia will break up so we'll we'll see major rearrangement mom he's done all right thank you so much for coming you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 24,108

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Literature, Masha Gessen, The Future Is History, Russia, Putin, Vladimir Putin, Susan B. Glasser, Politico, totalitarianism

Id: 65mXumlInvI

Length: 66min 10sec (3970 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017