Putinism: the ideology

organized by LSC ideas which I will be moderating this evening I am professor Michael Cox of the LSE one of the two founding directors of ideas along with Arne West at one of our objectives in creating ideas some years back was to provide a platform for informed debate and one of the ways we've been able to do this luckily is through our Philip remor professorship the first person to hold this prestigious position here his ideas was Paul Kennedy the last was ramachandra guha the great indian historian and the current holder of the post is the author and journalist and Applebaum and was formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board she has also worked as the Foreign and deputy editor of The Spectator magazine in London as the political editor of The Evening Standard and as columnist at several British newspapers including the daily and Sunday Telegraph luckily I think for her and luckily for us from 1988 to 1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of The Economist magazine and her first book between east and west across the borderlands of europe derived from that period described a journey through the trainee you crane and Belarus then on the verge of independence the book received many prizes her next book Gulager history was published in 2003 who won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004 and a latest book Iron Curtain was published last year in 2012 she holds degrees from Yale and from a much more serious institution to London School of Economics in tonight's lecture which she will bring all her formidable forensic skills to make sense of Russia and its leader since 1999 Vladimir Putin the title of the lecture this evening is putinism the ideology I would like you all to put your hands together welcome and tonight [Applause] right good evening thank you very much I'm delighted to be back here for the third in this series of lectures I'm impressed that so many of you came here on this freezing cold night right why Putin years and years ago it always used to annoy me when journalists and analysts became obsessed with the personality of the leader of Russia you know speculating about his taste and whisky or his wife's fashion sense or lack of it and using these little elements of his biography to make judgments about him nevertheless in analyzing Russia today we are once again confronted with an inescapable fact and namely that the personality and beliefs of Vladimir Putin the current Russian president matter just as much as those of his predecessors if not more in a state where authority is still vested in individuals and non institutions the president of Russia's vision of his country his understanding of its history his education and training and background and his personal experience of life in the Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia now have an incalculable impact on Russian political life and is is if that were not enough of a reason I have another reason why I want to talk about the personality of Putin to start out with which is that I feel that I spotted him early back when he was still Prime Minister during the president of presidency of Boris Yeltsin and what caught my eye at the time was a visit he made soon after his appointment to that job to the Lubyanka in Moscow and once the headquarters of the KGB and its most notorious jail the Lubyanka is now the home of the FSB Russia's internal security services an institution which Putin himself directed before being asked to head the government he visited the Lubyanka in 1999 on December the 20th a day still known and still celebrated by some in Russia as Czechia stay it's the anniversary and that was the 82nd of the founding of the Cheka which was Lenin's secret police the institution that was later became the nkvd and the and later the KGB and in that place and on that day so redolent of the bloodiest pages of Russian history Putin solemnly unveiled plaque in memory of Yuri and drop off nor was this an accidental gesture later as President Putin ordered another plaque placed on the Moscow building where and drop-off had lived and he also erected a statue to him in a st. Petersburg suburb now for Putin who's the man who pays nowadays extensive lip service to the theory of democratic elections and indeed the practice and drop-off would seem an odd hero and drop-off was the longest-serving director of the KGB holding that office from 1967 until 1982 the year when he briefly became General Secretary of the Communist Party but unlike some of his predecessors and drop-off was not just some faceless apparatchik or aging party hack he had a very straightforward theory of governance in Soviet terms he was a moderniser but not a Democrat so on the contrary having been the Russian ambassador to Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and drop off understood very precisely the danger which Democrats and other free thinking and self organizing groups posed to totalitarian regimes he also understood simultaneously that like everyone else in the KGB that the Soviet economy was lagging far behind that of the West at the time of his death he'd come to the conclusion that something had to be done about this and and what he the conclusion was that order and discipline as enforced by the methods of the KGB and that concluded the fight against alcoholism laziness and corruption coupled with the use of carefully targeted violence against dissidents and other representatives of potentially disruptive small groups would restore the sagging fortunes of the Soviet economy now Vladimir Putin not only came of age in and drop-offs KGB an organization that he first tried to join by his own account at the age of 15 but he shared some life experience with the man who later became one of his heroes as ambassador to Budapest and drop-off had been shocked when young Hungarians first called for democracy and then protested against the communist establishment and then took up arms against the regime and not coincidentally lynched several secret policemen Putin had a similar experience in Dresden in 1989 where he witnessed mass street protests and the ransacking of the headquarters of the Stasi the East German secret police somebody reminded me today that it is a story told about him is that he was one of the people standing in front of the Russian compound in Dresden the sort of Russian KGB compound where he talked a mob out of sacking that building - whether that piece of it is true it is certainly the case that German colleagues of his as he recalled years later had suddenly lost their jobs and their privileges from one day to the next and this was very shocking now both Putin and drop off drew the same conclusion from these traumatic experiences no talk of democracy even when it seems on a pathetic and small and unimportant level can lead to protests protests can attract more followers the more followers can lead to bigger protests which lead to attacks on the Czech ists so better to stop all talk of democracy before it gets any further and as a result order and discipline are now words in putin's vocabulary - now this is not to say that Putin isn't drop off or that Putin wants to bring back the Soviet Union but it does mean that Putin and more importantly many of most of the people around him is steeped in the culture of Andropov's KGB this is where he was educated just in a way that some day people will say of the the students in this room you're steeped in the culture of the early 21st century LSE but what does this mean in practice you know at the most fundamental level he and the people around him believe deeply that the rulers of the state of the Russian state must exert careful control over the life of the nation so events cannot just be allowed to happen they must be controlled a minute related by the same token markets cannot be genuinely open elections cannot be unpredictable and the modern equivalent of the Soviet dissidents that they're very small groups of mostly urban activists who sometimes oppose centralized Kremlin rule must be carefully controlled through legal pressure public propaganda and if necessary carefully targeted violence so just like their Soviet predecessors Putin and the men around him also assume that anyone not supportive of their regime is by definition suspicious this is a narrative paranoia and probably a foreign spy so at a rally as long ago as 2007 Putin declared that and is a quote unfortunately there are still those people in our country who act like jackals at foreign embassies who count on the support of foreign friends and foreign governments but not on the support of their own people this and I'll come back to it later was a direct warning to Russia's few remaining human rights activists trade union activists as they well understood it was also a comforting signal sent to Putin's followers who continue to believe like Soviet secret policeman before them that all important decisions are best made in Moscow by a small and elected group of people who know how to resist these foreign conspiracies his concern about foreign influence has not faded during his years in power on the contrary on the night of his third and most recent re-election to the presidency last year Putin described the protesters who had thronged the streets of Moscow for a few weeks in the previous winter in very stark terms he'd won the election he declared with great passion and tears welling up in his eyes and he said we showed that our people can distinguish between the desire for renewal and a political provocation that has only one goal to destroy Russian statehood and usurped power so Putin doesn't merely dislike his Democratic opponents in other words or his opponents he believes they are sinister agents of foreign powers and he doesn't just object to the liberal political system they claim to support he believes they're plotting to destroy Russian statehood usurped power and hand the country over to rapacious outsiders now maybe it's just talk but I believe that it would be a mistake to believe that this kind of talk is mere propaganda in the past few years as historians have had more access to Russian archives it's become ever more clear that Soviet leaders often meant what they said even when they were using what sounds to us like absurdly ideological language so without any evidence to the contrary we should assume that Putin means what he says too but although I find Putin's character and life experiences fascinating and although I am particularly interested by the language he chooses to use these things are really only important because they help us understand the nature of the regime which he's created and over which he now presides so remember this is a man who held influential positions in the 1990s a head of the KGB prime minister a head of the FSB sorry Prime Minister and who has in practice functioned as his country's leading politician for 13 years since 2000 according to his interpretation become vision of the Constitution he's allowed to remain in office for eleven more years until 2024 so he might well have the chance to dominate Russian politics for a full quarter of a century now searching for a way to explain the system that he created some people have used the expression managed democracy others refer to it as corporate capitalism since I think it's a bit of both and since I do think it's also closely aligned to the culture of the 1980s KGB from which Putin emerged I am NOT very originally calling it putinism the ideology and yes I'm using the word ideology with great deliberation for although there aren't tones and tones of books written about it as there once were about Marxism this is a carefully worked out system with carefully designed institutions it's deliberately taught to Russian children it's promulgated to the voting public it's propagated in the media putinism is the basis for Russian foreign policy and it comes complete with an interpretation of the past and predictions for the future it even has an a sensible goal which proposes to make just strong and feared again and it promises this for insiders to protect the power and the wealth of Russia's ruling class it's not immutable on the contrary it changes under the pressure events just as Marxism Leninism once did at the moment it is realigning itself to cope with the fact of the new and somewhat louder and better organized Russian opposition but what is it well clearly the most central element of putinism at least until now has been the carefully managed electoral process the managed political parties which take part in that process and the managed results so there's nothing remotely unique or especially Russian about falsified elections let's just say that such things have been known to happen in the most democratic of democracies as well nor is the phenomenon of a leader anointing his successor as Putin did to Medvedev and Medvedev to Putin is that completely unheard of either look no farther than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but the Russian manipulation of political outcomes has gone far deeper though even Gordon Brown eventually had to face his electorate in Russia voters are at no stage allowed to intervene in the democratic process you know there are no accidental Victor's in Russian elections because there are no accidental candidates instead the semblance of choice has been carefully preserved not just through the advanced choice of the winner but through the advanced choice of his opponents as well because they do not want Russia to appear to be a one-party state the Kremlin ensures that there are always several candidates from several parties some of which have been especially created to look like opponents of the status quo so the revival of the fake opposition party phenomenon familiar from communist Eastern Europe is one of Putin isms great contributions if that's the correct word to modern political life now the best and sort of oldest example of this is one of the most famous of Vladimir Zhirinovsky Liberal Democrats this very confusing title of his name of his party which has been known to which at one point made the German Liberal Democrat Liberal Democrats feel they should be allied with him until worked out that that was wrong the wrong group but this is a group which routinely won parliamentary seats by sounding more nationalist and more extreme even to the point of absurdity than the mainstream Kremlin parties but somehow when push came to shove zernov Skees party inside the Russian parliament inside the duma always voted with the kremlin more recently the kremlin has tolerated weak and certainly unpopular opponents such as the oligarch mika Prokhorov who was allowed to stand against putin in recent elections though he had no chance of success so by contrast the Kremlin's genuine opponents have been marginalized beaten up at demonstrations jailed harassed and insulted the other russia which was the political grouping created by Garry Kasparov the former chess champion was once described on the state-owned website Pravda dot are you as a quote motley army of deviance criminals want to be politicians fraudsters and gangsters on the fringes of Russian societies it's nice and clear more recently this is following last winter's demonstration judges have handed down jail terms of political demonstrators for plotting quote-unquote mass unrest police have also raided the homes of opposition leaders and lawmakers have increased fines for illegal protests so-called illegal recriminations of treason in order to control their opponents but Putin has long had ambitions beyond the mere creation of political parties it's also aimed successfully or otherwise to create organizations which we and the rest would in our context would refer to as civil society or sometimes as nongovernmental organizations or NGOs so again to repeat because of their background in training the men around Putin view all kinds of environmental educational and charitable institutions not as a normal aspect of a functioning democracy but it's evidence of secret networks probably involving Western spies don't laugh at the same time the Kremlin has encouraged state-controlled youth groups state controlled trade unions and even state controlled organizations dedicated to the promotion of democracy several years ago I was asked by an acquaintance at the US Embassy in Moscow to speak at a seminar on civic education for high school teachers which was being held at something called the Institute for democracy so I went and I gave a short fairly predictable speech about Western journalism of a kind I've given many times in Russia before to other other kinds of groups and immediately the audience attacked me and the first questioner wanted to know why does America support chechen terrorism another asked me how i as a representative of the washington post which I then was which they said was widely known to be u.s. government controlled newspaper and a mouthpiece of the White House how could I even come there and speak about a Free Press well you know the audience went on parroting this very really extreme version of this kind of neo communist anti-american propaganda which actually now more frequently appears in the Russian press and then was a little bit more surprising I was very surprised by it and afterwards I asked the organizer to explain to me the origins of the Institute for democracy ah yes it was she told me actually an older organization formerly known in Soviet times as the Institute for world peace though it had a new title it was under the same direction same guy was still running it and it operated according to the same principles in other words it taught students to follow whatever government line was currently in fashion once that was international communism and now it's democracy so I don't know I would guess that the perks proffered by the Institute for democracy I don't know what it was a free trip to Moscow free meals maybe a stipend encouraged many of the participants who were by their own account mostly provincial high school teachers and that resume encouraged them to attend the seminar but I expect I suspect they'd made an ideological decision as well they came from that part of society which like Putin's entourage preferred the more orderly world of state organised civic society too unconstrained individual Liberty from the part which believes as the Russian press frequently state that non government groups who promote democracy by definition Western spies now this same group of people are also no doubt attracted to another equally original element of putinism namely the managed press this is not the censored press it's the managed press so in his media policy this Putin has at least for the most part deviated from the methods of and drop off and and and the Soviet colleagues who simply locked up all critics censored everything and made sure that everything that appeared in public was according to the party line nowadays the system is different theoretically the press is free up to a point you can for example publish a small independent newspaper as long as it remains very small you can function as an independent journalist so long as you don't publish anything that truly in dangers the status quo nevertheless there are limits for just as the press knows it has a certain sphere of freedom it also knows that if its circulation goes too high or its reporters questions become too uncomfortable then official attitudes will change some years ago when traveling in the Volgograd region I met an attractive young woman journalist who worked at a local television station who was which was owned by the regional government as most local television stations in Russia are Sochi we talked about press freedom and all the exciting opportunities open to young journalists and she I think wanted to go to the west and study and I was very impressed and then I asked her what would happen if she on her local television station broadcast something critical of the local governor and she looked at me as if I was an idiot you said they would shut us down you know what do you think sometimes controls are less subtle on Novaya Gazeta this is the one moscow newspaper which still criticizes it most mostly its anti-corruption but also criticizes Putin and the Kremlin directly even directly has had its journalists beaten up its office has broken into and its accounts audited again and again and a plug cost gaya which is whose Novaya Gazeta SMO same as' and most talented reporter was murdered several years ago in the middle of the day in the stairwell of her own apartment building by in under very suspicious circumstances so with tactics like that there's no need to shut that many newspapers down and in fact the Politkovskaya case illustrates rather well how putinism has worked so it doesn't eliminate all real political opponents it only eliminates those who become too famous or too popular it doesn't use mass violence but to repeat it uses targeted violence on the grounds that if the arrest or murder of a single person is is as well-known enough then that might be enough to scare hundreds of others Politkovskaya was allowed to function for many years actually and and wrote some very brilliant books and articles but she was killed when her investigations brought her too close to the truth about Putin and some of the complexities of the Chechen war Mikhail Khodorkovsky the oil magnate who had been allowed to get rich in the 1990s was arrested by Putin when his money made him too independent the women of women of Riot were allowed to stage protests this is more recent story but when they began to attract real notoriety they were sent to labor camps so thus at least until recently Putin has been able to exercise greater control over the remaining oligarchs the remaining journalists and the remaining protesters you know without Stalin style mass arrests would be regime opponents can be intimidated into silence and cooperation because no one wants to share the fate of political scale huh Tarkovsky or the women in prison in Siberia now the Putin ideology does not operate in a vacuum as Mark said and he said many wise things base determines superstructure the the the economy has impacts the society and there's no doubt about the fact that Russia's carefully managed democracy is fueled funded and supported by a carefully managed economy it is and it has been since 1991 a mistake to call this system capitalist although it possesses some apparently capitalist institutions like stock markets and banks because in fact the resemblance is superficial in truth Russia is not a capitalist society it's a rent seeking oil economy one which resembles Saudi Arabia are more than the United States or Western Europe but even as an oil economy Russia is an original one with distinctly Putin Estella ments as in Saudi Arabia the nation's largest companies and banks gasp ROM Luke well Ross and after owned by a small group of people yet these owners are not an official ruling family like the House of Saud instead they are a subset of Putin's inner circle so some of them hold double jobs as government officials end captains of industry other magnates share their wealth with the politicians in order to stay on top economics is politics and vice versa although not always in a transparent manner oligarchs can and do fall out of favor the richest men in Russia are not the same as they were ten years ago but it isn't always clear how or why so since taking power Putin has taken this system which was first created in the under Yeltsin and he's turned it in his favor so although he sometimes speaks of economic reform he's actually not interested in creating a legal system which would encourage entrepreneurship on a broad scale or a banking system that would help small and medium-sized enterprises grow instead he's trying presided over an enormous transfer of assets from the state and from other oligarchs to his friends and probably himself so the trial of Boris Berezovsky versus Roman Abramovich which was staged in London last year some of you may have read about it in the papers was in essence the public airing of the bitter dispute between a Yeltsin era oligarch who lost much of his fortune to a Putin era oligarch yet if Putin whose friends have made themselves extremely rich and if they control print and television media and if they control the police and the army then why does the Russian president bother with the fiction of democracy you know given their wealth and power and apparent security why should Putin mid be ativ and the ex-kgb men around them need all of these elaborate games and facades you know why does Putin hold elections at all and why didn't he just appoint himself president you know why maintain all this pretense the the answer this as I hinted earlier is what I think is the key to understanding the nature of this regime so remember Putin's goal is to main maintain dominance his cleek and for some time now this ex-kgb inner circle have believed that the greatest threat to their power and control and their money is not the West as such but Western democracy rhetoric so Putin and Medvedev do not and they cannot possibly serious seriously fear Western military attack you know that NATO and the Belgians and the Portuguese will get together and invade Putin made it that they do fear popular discontent they fear the public questioning of their personal wealth they fear the open criticism of the basic tenants of putinism and of course political demonstrations of the sort that created the orange revolution in Ukraine and those which happened on a smaller scale after the parliamentary elections in the winter of 2011 now to stave these things off they believe they have to work hard to maintain their legitimacy both at home and abroad so during his for example during his 2008 election campaign it's true Medvedev did not travel around the country and he did not meet with supporters nevertheless a campaign atmosphere was created people are encouraged to vote the media covered the election story and all the trappings of democracy were present even though we all knew who would win the same thing happened in 2012 Putin refused to take part in debates on the grounds that to do so would impede his impede his ability to do to dually carry out his duties in the words of his spokesman yet the campaign once again was a matter of public discussion debate for all of his professional weariness of the real thing Putin continues to adhere inward if not in spirit to the language in to the appearances of nirakar see and indeed these appearances mattered to him enormous ly the appearance of democratic politics democratic discourse and capitalist economics and this it's really this which gives his regime its novel and deceptively powerful ideological edge the need for legitimacy has also inspired some of Putin's harsher rhetoric about the West and especially about the United States the more than once he's accused the United States of encouraging the spread of weapons of mass destruction and urging terrorism we all forget these kinds of comments because they often get thrown away but he has openly compared America and Nazi Germany he recently set up an institution designed to monitor democracy in the United States and he frequency accuses both Americans and Western Europeans especially the British of hypocrisy of various kinds and human rights violations now this rhetoric serves several purposes but above all it is designed to inoculate the Russian public against the example of more open societies underlining this rhetoric is the Putin s interpretation of history famously we all know this the ex Russian president once described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the twentieth century he's also displayed Soviet flags in anniversary parades and he's brought a neutral version of the history of Stalinism to Russian textbooks and more importantly Putin has spent much of the past decade trying to promulgate an alternate post-soviet history so in his version of events 1989 in 1990 was not a moment of liberation but it was the beginning of economic collapse and the hardships and deprivation which Russians genuinely experienced during the 1990s were not the result of decades of communist neglect and of widespread theft but of western-style capitalism democracy and Western economic advice communism was stable and safe and post communism was a disaster you know the Soviet Union was great at least within some parameters and Russia was until Putin's arrival of failure the Soviet empire launched in 1945 was a moment of triumph to be remembered proudly and the blood and terror required to achievement achieve it are forgotten the more people believe all this the less likely they are this is what I assume is the case then less likely they will be to want a system which is more genuinely democratic and genuinely capitalists are the more nostalgia there is for Soviet era symbols especially imperial symbols from the Year 1945 the more secure the KGB KGB clique is going to be this context makes Putin's harsher verbal attacks on some Russia's neighbors easier to understand - in the past his most vitriolic rhetoric has been reserved for those countries which most successfully navigated the path from communism to open societies and which maintained the most open and most Pro Western political systems Poland Estonia until recently Georgia and until recently Ukraine so it's highly improbable for example that Putin ever feared that actually feared this the missile defense shield was President Bush wanted to place in Poland and it's impossible to believe that he was truly intimidated by NATO's somewhat pathetic relationship with Georgia but he is afraid of the example set by these countries since they challenged his own country's geopolitical choices and they offer an alternate narrative and American support for them has infuriated him Russia's foreign policy towards the post Arab Spring Middle East is also dictated in part I believe by concerns for legitimacy at home you know Russia's behavior in Syria is in this sense highly ideological you know again although Russian diplomats are openly contemptuous of Assad and although Russian economic interests when you look at what they really are are in fact very narrow it's it's clear that the Russian government in the wake of the successful Libyan Revolution does not want to see another authoritarian state toppled by a popular revolution it's just too close to home nor does he want to see another victory quote/unquote victory for the Western democracies or for what might be broadly understood as a Western political movement although how Western they are who knows but but that he fears that undermines his own authority and his place in the world now Russia is not alone in fearing the Democratic example of the West and in preferring therefore to see authoritarian regimes around the world succeed and although there have been a lot of arguments about whether Russia does or does not have so so-called soft power it's true that putinism as a model does have a great deal of Appeal in many places Central Asia whose Beca Stan Tajikistan Kazakhstan but also in Iran as whele and elsewhere the iranian president ahmadinejad took a leaf out of putin's book a few years ago when he held an academic conference in tehran to discuss the holocaust and he invited a number of famous holocaust deniers so he declared this an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust you know so if the West is going to shelter Iranian dissidents in other words that Iran will shelter David Irving and David Duke just as Russia will sponsor institutions which investigate democracy in the United States and Russia of course will give passports to roaming French actors who don't like the tax regime at home now Putin is politics politicians and businessman have also tried and again with some success to gain influence abroad through the spread of Putin his style corruption often they've done so with the help of Russian oil and gas companies you know and through commercial transactions you know again at the moment Russia's the company Lukoil controls refineries in Ukraine Bulgaria Romania it has assets in Greece in ex-yugoslavia gas problem now owns the Serbian national oil company which according to things said at the time was openly purchased with an eye to the influence it would bring as well as a third of the Portuguese gas company no Galpin area it has very close ties with the Austrian energy giant own V and a strong relationship with for gas in Germany so if all of these were purely economic relationships I wouldn't bother to mention them but in every single country where they've invested the Russian oil and gas oligarchs have not only lobbied have also lobbied for financial and banking regulations which will be favorable to their interests and they have used their money to influence foreign politicians as well so famously even a German Chancellor Gerhard schröder was induced to go and work for gas problem immediately upon leaving office so the Staz putinism try to preserve itself a home at home promote itself abroad and protect the wealth and power of its leaders and yet of course the ultimate test of an ideology is not whether it can work for brief period of time but can it last if I had given this lecture five years ago I might well have argued that yes absolutely it can last with energy prices still rising and the media monopoly firmly in place there really seemed no reason to doubt it the events of the last 18 months though mean that I have to be more cautious about the durability of putinism as does everybody in the wake of the Arab Spring have to be cautious about predicting anything but but it's true that in recent years the building blocks of putinism have begun to look weaker so clearly the glories of the Internet has helped undermine Putin's media monopoly partly as a result the managed elections once accepted by Russians without apparent comment have sparked a series of open protests it's harder to fool this generation of Russians or at least harder to get them to roll their eyes you know support the traditional fatalism and ignore the obviously falsified elections at the same time Putin's his own political party and his own civil society organisations naxi and other groups have more recently attracted opprobrium rather than new members because they're associated with official corruption as a result of these changes a new Russian opposition has emerged unlike its predecessors its rhetoric and energy are focused not on ideas about human rights but on corruption on theft government theft and on the lack of transparency in the government and the economy precisely the things which putinism depends upon to survive meanwhile the implicit promise of putinism we will offer you stability and a slowly rising standard of living if you allow us to rule has been eroded by much slower growth in parts of the country and a major drop in oil prices would accelerate this process because it would deprive the Russian state budget of most of its revenues so if the dramatic fall in gas prices in the United States heralds a real change in Europe then some of Russia's ability to influence the political views of its neighbors might change as well certainly the uptick in violence the harsher legal methods and the extremely harsh language Putin has used in recent months against the new and still very small political opposition indicate that he too is worried you know managed democracy the hope was to keep these kinds of movements weak and fragmented so is there anything we can do to help this new opposition to encourage change in Russia speaking frankly not much our ability in the West to alter the course of internal events in Russia is limited and it always has been still the fact that we have very little influence on the future of putinism doesn't mean that we have to go along with its central tenets you know we don't have to pretend as the Russian political elite does that Russia is a democracy or that Russia is a normal member of the West or an international community you know we don't have to accept its description of its NGOs as foreign agents we don't even have to continue to allow Russia to remain a member of the g8 which is historically a club for rich democracies originally Russia was allowed to attend its meetings on the muddled theory this would help Russia become a democracy but it didn't so why not end the pretense and the point here is that our standards remain our standards and our language should remain uncorrupted but even if we can't do much the Russians can do a great deal and I hope we don't make the mistake of under estimating them one of the things I've learned living on and off in Eastern Europe over the last 20 years is that no country is incapable of change you know sooner or later the generation trained in the mindset of andropause KGB will retire sooner or later young Russians will draw their life lessons not from the experiences of the 1990s but from the experiences of the 2000s you know there's no guarantee this new generation will be better or more liberal or more democratic but it will definitely be different perhaps in this context we should all remember the words of an ancient Slavic proverb taught to me by my mother-in-law where there is death there is hope thank you very much when an when an was talking about Russian influence abroad as a lifelong supporter of Arsenal immediately I thought of Chelsea II and wonder should I view the team in bloom more differently today than I've ever done in the past there you go Chelsea is soft power discuss I want to start off with one question which goes back to the beginning of your wonderful lecture there on who you said he created this system we don't ago it necessarily into deep origins but much of what you described seemed to me sound like Stalinism in a modern variety but maybe many of the things that he also inherited from the Yeltsin period it doesn't seem to me that often we get this kind of comparison between the Yeltsin years and the Putin years it does seem to me that many of the practices which were very liberal and very undemocratic and the use of money to buy elections remember Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky and the others bought the election for Yeltsin 90c so I wonder in terms of the origins has he inherited more than he's actually himself creates I think absolutely he inherited previous system and it's also true that many of the elements of what became putinism were put in place in the 1990s the you know the the the the the the the it was possible to control the media and to take charge of the media because it had been divvied up between various Yeltsin era oligarchs who were then some were made to conform or made to leave the country or made to hand over their hand over there were the the the revival of the old KGB now the FSB also began in the Yeltsin era - it was there was a sort of there was a moment of there was a kind of wobble in the early 90s when it looked like the KGB might not last but really by 1995-96 it's been reinvigorated it has new powers I think it was given power to begin to control the Internet very early 96 97 I don't remember the date but it's absolutely this begins earlier on and Putin is really the effect of these chain rather than the cause of them and I certainly didn't intend to make him sound like it was all in his you know putinism came out of his his brain one you know you can understand when you when you when you name an ism after a person it like Stalinism it have been invariably sounds that way but it's it's really a shortcut yeah because I can't think of a better name for it no no no great and it was also Yeltsin who facilitated Putin's ascension to the prime ministership in 1999 yes yeah I mean we were discussing this earlier Yeltsin and people around Yeltsin brought Putin into the government and it's all under still fairly murky circumstances exactly how and why that happened but it was certainly them they they were the ones who promoted him yeah great okay a number of hands have already contacted I'll take to it gentleman over here and I'll take Adam Roberts from the front there a second please yeah thanks a lot very much press Applebaum he talked about the way the Putin manages the press rather than senses it and I was just wondering if you could just explore that difference a little bit more comprehensively thank you okay oh you got one Adam please Adam Roberts could you say a bit more about belief you suggested that the lesson of the Soviet archives is that good communists believed what they were saying but we know that they didn't always and there was a decline in belief an observable decline in belief in the communist system over decades and you also suggested that perhaps whether the present rulers of Russia really believe in this ideology but if and it's perhaps a bigot but if they can see some of the paitent absurdities of it the extremism of the accusations just as many in the soviet union saw the absurdity of calling all opponents in czechoslovakia as it were Western lackeys and the like one could see a rot set in and if Putin gets associated not with success but with failures perhaps over Syria perhaps over another case might the level of belief be vulnerable to change I'll start with Adam Roberts a yes indeed belief rises and falls and declines and putinism is by comparison to the massive edifice that was Soviet Marxism it's a pretty thin thing it's it does have a theory of history and it's you know been put in the textbooks and there is rhetoric around it but it's it you know it suffers from some of the same things that yes Stalinism was always an attempt at tutela terian ism it never succeeded in being totalitarian you know the idea was that it would you know everybody would eventually believe all the same thing but it never quite worked out in that way and putinism in that sense it's also it's an attempt to create a kind of stable managed democracy and I was trying to describe that attempt whether it will succeed is doubtful I mean in fact the the the the the nature of the new opposition which is which is very which has interestingly evolved with putinism it's quite different from the old opposition so in in in in in the ten years ago there was a kind of opposition to the parties of power in the Kremlin that used human rights rhetoric and spoke of democracy and harked back to an earlier era of of dissent and the new opposition doesn't do that at all it speaks very clearly about corruption it's organized around websites that examine and report corruption and it's aimed in a way it's it's more symbiotic with putinism it attempts to undermine Putin's claim to have created this stable and useful system so absolutely it can be undermined the person who I think believes what he says at least some of the time is Putin himself I mean the the the rhetoric about Western NGOs and Western group and you know environmental organizations and so on he's he's repeated several times you know over the years unprovoked I mean it comes out of him when you know when when he wants to talk about these kinds of organizations and I see no reason to think that's fake I mean I don't have any you know in in the way that when you know Stalin said he wanted to conquer Europe you know do we have any reason to think that was a lie I mean no he did he made a stab at it so it's you know again you you're gonna have the question with Putin is and that you often have with Bolshevism to what extent do people believe what they say and to what extent do they say things because it it makes you fit in better but but absolutely it's undermine abble and it's it can be you know in a way more easily than then Marxism which was a much more complete system do you think there's a social associate logical aspect is things rather crudely is the middle class you don't like them but essentially maybe a lot of working-class people it clearly has been it has been the case that people have been saying it's not so bad I mean opinion polls in Russia have for a decade been saying you know people are asked questions you know do like your local government know do you like the way the justice system works know you know do like the way your factory works know do like Putin yes I mean there there have been there have been poll after poll has looked like that and he has he did become a cotton you know successfully I mean it was it was he successfully became a symbol of stability you know as and he and the the rhetoric about the 90s that the 90s were all chaos and catastrophe and that I have now created something better I think was indeed popular I don't mean to imply at all that he's not popular the high school teachers at the Institute for democracy clearly very keen on it the the manage press is a complicated thing I mean the managed press in some ways works it works more like some of the East European press like I mean I happen to know that it works quite a lot the way the East German press used to work so there's no censor you know when you read an article you don't send it off to a censor who's Stan it and sends it back to you which is which is how it worked and something you know newspapers don't have in-house government censors who run them and newspapers and television stations aren't government state-owned institutions you know where people are hired and fired by the state it doesn't work like that it's more a kind of if you can think of a sort of a very extreme form of political correctness you know that everybody knows what are the parameters of what can be said and what can't be and people are always pushing at those parameters so they you know they're there are no absolute rules about it so they you know you you're allowed to say you're allowed to criticize certain people but not others or you can pushing things too far in one direction gets you in trouble so it's okay to you know it's okay to talk about certain kinds of local corruption but it's not okay to talk about Putin's personal wealth you know any articles about his family or his money or his girlfriend get get you in enormous amount of trouble and keep get your you fired in your newspaper shut down and so people are aware of these parameters and sometimes they push at them and sometimes they don't bother just sorry what do you mean by more subtle no no there's nobody no self-censorship rather than censorship so no there is nobody stamping it and saying so yes it's more subtle yes it's it's ill-defined it it changes over time you know what what what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say is evolves all the time there aren't absolute rules about it and there are newspapers and there are local magazines and there are local radio stations which push the envelope all the time and try and say more than they've been allowed to say in the past and but it can be extremely dangerous so so you know that's the system that the one piece of it they have not successfully controlled surprisingly because others in other countries have managed to control is the internet and until recently that didn't matter so much because not that many people had access to the Internet and I think I'm afraid I don't know off the top of my head the numbers but it's still relatively low relatively small and you often find that even when people do have access they have the connections are so weak that you know they can't download videos and so there's a limit to what people can see but the internet they they've they've not successfully controlled it and that has been the vehicle by which the the anti-corruption movement such as is has has has operated you know their websites which collects stories about corruption and named particular officials and try and nail some of these and Putin has recently taken up that theme himself I mean he now talks about corruption and he now talks about prosecuting corrupt bureaucrats so he's clearly been influenced by that it's not a it's not at all a black and white system it's really not Stalinism it's not and drop-off it's not it's not the Soviet Union there are there is it's a give-and-take between how much how much pressure journalists are willing to put on him and how much he's willing to and I keep saying he but of course it's large I wanted to go back to this question of belief I mean you said that you you're inclined to believe that Putin really does give credence to this idea of foreign conspiracies and so on and yet when he talked about missile defense he said he can't possibly believe this stuff are you sure about that because I mean as you mentioned maybe I'm wrong maybe maybe he believed I mean I'm n he couldn't possibly believe in it because in my view was never ever gonna happen an any rational person analyzing you know the the the the arguments and debates about missile defense in the West couldn't couldn't see it as some kind of threat to Russia but no actually you're right he maybe he could believe it and maybe heat maybe he was made paranoid but right and a broader sort of follow-up question I just wanted how much respect you have from not as a as a human being but as a leader I mean do you look at putinism and Putin himself and think well this is quite a formidable system quite a competent person or do you think he's actually thrashing around he doesn't it doesn't really know what he's doing my there are the different question its to ask you to say what you think about early Putin Putin when he had just taken over in the first presidency it's disapproved it really is an ideology this early putinism late at that stage I mean George W Bush is famously not for having said I looked into his eyes and I saw his soul but there were quite a lot of Western leaders at that stage you had the impression that Putin was trying to explore what power might be like what what were the options for Russia the enthusiasm for WTO membership possible NATO membership all these things do you think that this was simply because he was new in the job oil was only $10 a barrel he was one casting around wondering what to do or do you think that this was always a sham and that the Andropov and then the Yeltsin context made it inevitable that he would always have behaved like this and I suppose as a subset did was there anything the West Western countries did at that stage which would have produced a different Putin's ideology yes we always go back to this thing of what could we do which um gosh is he competent yes he's competent up to a point I mean this the the system that I was descried a stab at describing in his speech has been put together and this is sort of an answer to your question - it's come together in pieces over time he did not enter you know public consciousness in 1998 with a clearer idea and the vision of exactly how he was going to construct this and so on I mean it's a little bit bits of it had been put together and and added and and and and molded with time he's he has competently constructed you know for the last certainly for the last decade he has competently remained in power he has competently you know he has enriched the people around him and he has created something which has seemed very stable and so in that sense yes it's a successful system you know but coming back to Adam Roberts his question has he created something that you know people believe in and feel enthusiastic about and want to fight for and die for and will never question you know that I doubt the the the the the the kind of fatal flaw all the time it seems to be is the corruption because it's something that touches people not just at the highest level but also much further down and the the sense of lawlessness you know people know that if their car gets in an accident with a police car you know or with an official car that they're the one you know and it was the official cars fault they're the ones who are going to get in trouble and there'll be no recourse and this sense of lawlessness up subsets and bothers people and undermines that sense of stability and this kind of relief that people people salaries are paying on time which was so important in the very beginning so you know is it well thought out and can it run forever I mean they're and they're they're also you know there are pieces missing such as one of the problems with running a very corrupt rent-seeking when managing resources that way is that you might not be investing in them in the way that you ought to be you might not be building the new pipelines you might not be investing in the oil fields you know the the this the other element that this system depends on in the long term you know for any kind of stability is high oil prices and high gas prices and also on the the the continued success of rush and natural resource extraction you know is he managing that well as he ensuring that the people who run these companies are competent that I doubt I mean if people's primary goal is extracting money for themselves then it's then I don't know whether how long it'll stay they'll you know that will that work early putinism I mean he he's actually a I don't want to make a caricature of him because I think he's somebody who thinks of himself as blending you know the best of the west and the Russian II and he has at times appointed people who who sound like they're going to be reformers and in the very beginning he did carry out some very important reforms you know the flat tax change you know making property rights work better in Russia now than they used to and in some ways Russia is you know as a functioning economy and it functions better than many of those around it probably functions better than the Ukrainian economy and that's that's you know they're they're you know I don't think it's I don't think it's because he doesn't understand how these things work and I think he initially had hoped to achieve some kind of fusion of the the best of the Russian and the best of the best of the West whatever that would mean I mean it's a it's it's a kind of a mishmash idea you know what was the point at which he stopped doing that you know I don't know you know because I didn't have access to his inner circle I would I would guess it's to do with the the the personal interests of people around him I mean he's he's a symbol but he's really the head of a group you know of a kind of economic and political cabal and they all have enormous interests and they have a lot of money at stake and the you know the the strict application of rule of law to everybody would not be good for them and he's he's as fluent as influenced by them as they are by him and so it simply at a certain point I think became not in his interest to to continue his path the the harsh inning of the rhetoric I think is I really think is part of this anxiety about legitimacy you know by what right am I allowed to maintain it stay in power and well one of the rights I'm allowed to say you know if the West is trying to undermine us and sending these group --let's to undermine me and trying to fight us incipio this area and Libya you know then I you know then I can defend Russia against this kind of this kind of talk and I think that's that's he perceives and people are run and perceived that to be good for his his status you know in a way using using foreign policy and using anti-western rhetoric for his own purposes is there anything to fall on question is anything the West could have done might have done differently to changed or altered the course I mean NATO enlargement I suppose Georgia maybe whatever you were thinking up there I actually I I don't think I mean the mistakes that we've made as we in an American Britain have made about Russia in the past have very often been you know for example I think it was a mistake throughout the 1990s for Clinton to walk around with his arm around Yeltsin and say we brought democracy to Russia when that was patently not the case I mean the mistakes we've tended to make have been in not calling things by their real names and in in in in allowing you know the Russian description Russian descriptions of them of themselves to pass I mean in the case of Putin and and particularly the last several years I think that the biggest mistake we've made is to not not question the and not investigate the impact that Russian money is having on our own institutions and whether that's offshore banking in cyprus cyprus now two EU member or whether it's City of London or whether it's you know drove Gerhard schröder and and the relationship of the German gas industry to gas problem I think the degree to which we've allowed you know that system to corrupt ours which has in turn supported that system I think it's it's more on that level rather than the high level of politics and Tony Blair and and George Bush where we've been very accommodating of this new Russian system which was has been quite comfortable for a lot of people in the West and particularly in this city yeah John Berryman I can't the impression you don't like Putin and I'm gonna give you now a little bit of neo communist anti-american propaganda which obviously we needed some yeah that's why I chose you difficult to pick out you know where I would sort of mean gifts inside is really lost all your interpretations it's difficult to find where I could start what I would like to suggest is the following putinism what is it I don't see it in quite the terms you do I see it as an attempt to establish a strong sovereigns sovereign state which doesn't seem to accord with the prevailing ideology in some other parts of the world and that's what irritates those other parts of the world I put that with the fact that you'd rather dismissively suggested at one point that he regarded the breakup of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe you are aware of course that to the Nevada Center and many other polling organizations which the West are very happy to use all the time indicate that that is view which is shared by a significant probably getting out of three-quarters of the population of the Russian Federation so what I want to suggest is that Putin's worries and concerns which you expressed at the beginning of the time is election about what he saw to be American intervention interference in India Internal Affairs of Russia it might it not be connected with the fact that the Soviet Union broke up only 20 years ago that the breakup was not until-- and connected with some brilliant self liquidation by leaders that were wildly applauded in the West like Yeltsin and Gorbachev and that really what sticks in the throat of Dera suggests out of Appelbaum ISM is is is the existence of an independent leader an independent state in the Security Council and elsewhere which refuses to conform to what the West perceives to be it's it's like axiomatically correct ideology I know the United States is an indispensable nation every administration tells us this but you know there is a possibility of plurality in the world and it seems to me Putin embodies the possibility that there could be some other perspective than the one that you've so eloquently expressed thank you very nice all right and something else yeah please well Nicholas my nephew edenian from the Department of Law clearly yeah it's directly linked to the question that the gentleman just had and I would suggest that a fully qualify as an ideology probably the Putin's work worldview should also encompasses also a firm vision of Russia's place in the world perhaps you could elaborate on that a little bit because you suggested that it's more or less its his aim political aim all sort of Russia's Mallis to protect the self-serving system that he has put in place here and I would probably have how you feel about it does it go beyond that this okay so so yes indeed putinism and Putin's Russia does represent an alternative to Western liberal democracy it it is a it is it is neither liberal nor democratic it is a it's a kleptocratic state which regularly uses violence against its citizens and which in which there's the judicial system doesn't work and there's no rule of law it is it is it's an alternative and you know there there can be many alternatives but I don't really quite know I mean I would be careful about opinion polls in Russia I recently read a very brilliant book by a writer called Leon Aaron who has written a book about perestroika in which he went back and looked at what people were saying actually saying and writing and at what what opinion polls said in the late 1980s about the collapse of the Soviet Union and people were wildly in favor of it and they were the the support for democracy and for what style capitalism was very high and the why there would be less support for that now is clearly the effect of the last 20 years including the last 10 years of Putin's ideology and and rhetoric and power and I would be careful about what that means that's all I would say the question is does Putin have a does he have a view of Russia's view in the world absolutely it's it's it's complicated by the fact that Russia does not have the military power that it once had but he would he would let he would very much like it to be a kind of deciding voice in the world a you know and again this is part of backing up his own legitimacy he would like Russia to have a to be to be a decisive inside the United Nations to be a leading voice in Europe and he can want you know he continues to see Russia as the obvious rival to the United States and even though he the United States does not see Russia as an obvious rival itself anymore in fact Russia figures very low in American priorities right now he rightly or wrongly and whether that's good or bad it's you know problem number 17 on a list that starts with Iraq Iran you know North Korea and so on but he continues to raise within Russia he speaks as if the United States is still his main rival and he he he continues to want to play a role in Western and in European politics much more so than in Asian or and although there's you know somebody said well you know one week he's you know there's the Shanghai forum and now there's a true free trade zone and you know customs union inside the former Soviet Union sometimes he plays with relationships with the east but he keeps returning to this role of a kind of arbiter of Western policy of a you know balancing a figure who balances within Western Europe and who is some kind of opposite number to the United States you know whether that's whether it's deliberate whether that's his you know Soviet habit whether it's because that's popular in Russia you know I'm not quite sure but that is clearly what he wants and how he sees Russia's role just to add to that do you think he sees any value or importance in the BRICS the Brazil Russia India China they've now held their third fourth meeting in India last year I mean Russians the Russians are very very keen on being absolutely keen on being in the BRICS because of the BRICS they are by far the least successful economically and so being in the group know being inside the group of the BRICS is good for them I mean you have these very fast-growing economies Brazil China and India and Russia has you know it's been said several many times that Russia doesn't quite fit in that group in the same way because it's it's essentially an oil economy rather than an entrepreneurial economy but it's very good for Russia's image you know to be part of that group so yes they're keen on it yes I just want to redress the gender biases to two women over here this yeah one and two yeah doesn't matter which show you on Thanks and then in in red when you were discussing the establishment manage civil society referred to the establishment of state trade unions I wondered if there was any space in Russia for a free trade union movement to develop I'm of course thinking of the example of what happened in Poland and in its role in the downfall of the Eastern European Soviet empire solitaires question and then putting it a long please thank you yeah hi yes I just wondered if we know and you know anything particular about Putin's view of China not particularly as a Chinese economy but of the Chinese Communist Party and its relationship with them okay two questions are the the free trade union point is interesting I was actually in of all places are Hong asked about eight years ago now and I met a woman who was trying to organize trade unions there and she was very keen on me because she thought with my connections to Poland that I could help her meet some of the founders of solidarity as on I think I tried to arrange it meeting and so on this has been one of the things that though that the Russian you know that that that the the the Putin is cleek has been very keen on suppressing for exactly the reasons why you can think of and you know one of the first Western groups to be kicked out of Russia was the afl-cio because it was doing exactly that it was advising people how to organize a trade union you know what are the techniques it was fairly neutral ILO kind of UN material but it was a but it was it was bothersome to Putin and to the people around it because of exactly the reason why you would think so yes there has been an effort to prevent free trade unions from forming China is interesting is somebody said to me today in that in a seminar you know the problem with Russia being close to China is it's like the rat being close to the boa constrictor I mean this the size of the of the economies are now so different and the dynamism which China has which Russia does not have I think makes the Russians very wary of the Chinese and the you know the fact that some several million probably Chinese now live on the Russian side of the border in Siberia it's something that people know about but don't talk about much I mean that and the the if you've ever seen photographs of that border you know on the Chinese side there are these huge buildings now an enormous brand new brand new city and on the Russian side you know wooden huts I mean I'm exaggerating but it but there's not much there and so there's there's an enormous amount of there there's kind of rivalry in tension in built right into that relationship and the fact that it doesn't come out more in public is interesting and I'm not quite sure what it means except that the Russians like to what he thinks about the Chinese Communist Party I have no idea I mean they I don't know of any public statements he's made about it I mean they certainly maintain cordial relationship the official position of the Chinese Communist Party is exactly the same as true since the collapse of the Soviet Union was a strategic and ideological design don't say my friend professor Westat took me around the parts of bookshop and translated all the documents and and the CH and the Chinese paid a lot of attention to Gorbachev and a lot of attention to what went what they think went wrong the lessons of history and they if they follow the lessons of history very well but but what how it works the other way around I know less about okay we've got a few more questions over here this could be the last set of questions hello gentleman that first movie for ya Robert Chancellor's and Antony's Thank You professor of film for your carefully constructed portrait of Putin bearing in mind that the British Council remains closed in Russia and also there's no progress with latrine Yenko and also the American Magnitsky bill in contrast to the need for energy security how do you see the future for the policy of engagement do you agree with Sir Neil Ferguson that Russia shouldn't really be included in the brics because of its over dependence on energy its aging population and that really after the early to mid 2020s it will be in decline economically okay and then there's a chat behind you would just take a three please yeah I'd like to ask a question that Medvedev um would see anything other than a puppet of Putin okay there's another just positive I would take four agree oh I know you can have yeah and last one could you elaborate a little bit more about on the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin or differently asked what role does it play in ensuring the power of traction right okay so we got one engaged in one of the BRICS one of them in theater for one on the church you answer all those and then we'll say goodnight how much time oh right well you know I don't have Neil Ferguson's strong views about the BRICS yeah I'm not sure I'm invested in the existence of this institution but but I mean I think I will repeat what I said earlier which is that yes Russia includes thing that looks odd in that company because it's a it's a one-trick pony and because it's such an it's an energy dependent economy in the way that those three aren't whatever else they may be or may not be and however successful or not they might or might not be so so so yes it's always there they look increasingly odd in that group and if it continues to remain energy dependent and if the shale gas revolution goes the way we think it might then yes you will see a rapid economic decline but who knows engagement I don't think we have a there is another policy except for engagement I mean there's you know rush is not a it's not a hostile regime I mean they don't have their you know in the sense of you know there's no immediate threat of Russian war with the West we have a trade relationship with Russia we have strategic relationship with Russia in all kinds of odd places you don't think of in Central Asia to do with Afghanistan we have you know there are useful things we can do with the Russians I don't I don't at all advocate cutting off relationship or ending diplomacy what I mean that that would be counterproductive and I don't I don't see a use for it I mean I think the the slow engagement the the non naive and you know without illusions attempt to engage Russia where it's possible to engage and do things with Russia where they can be done I think is the only policy there is so I don't have a I don't I don't I don't I don't see what the alternative is I'm Advaita vis an incredibly interesting figure who and I you know I don't know to this day exactly what what his role was or what I mean he clearly was a puppet in the sense that Putin and the people around him placed him in power and they ensured his election and then they when they decided you know to end his presidency then I ended it so in that sense he's their creature he did try while in power to sound different and he met with all kinds of people in Russia ranging from the Novaya Gazeta journalists to the you know range of activists and journalists and businesspeople and he sounded more he used language that that made it sound as if he were more interested in a more genuine democratic or liberal reform what that meant is now hard to say he was clearly surprised by the Putin's announcement that he would become the president again and you know there's always been speculation there was some kind of deal done between them and Putin's you know Putin then change the terms of the deal that I you know I really don't know I mean he clearly Medvedev clearly speaks for a part of the Russian elite I mean there is part of the business class part of the middle class part of the intelligentsia likes Medvedev and wanted you know he you know he may have thought he was becoming the leader of that group he may have been trying to do that he may what what what what seems clear though is that he doesn't have a real power base I mean he was not able to make sure that he was reelected because he clearly doesn't have the power the influence to do that but he does speak for somebody inside the the leak and therefore he's an interesting figure and we'll see what what happens to him Russian Orthodox Church very long story a piece of Putin's search for legitimacy and for a kind of historical story that will support his right to remain in power is his relationship with the church somebody I taught a seminar today actually we were discussing the that there there are some oddities about this you know that you know just is is is does Putin want to revive a kind of red version of history or a white version of history - the white version of history let's revive the Orthodox Church and and and bring back the role of the into public life you know but you know if we're gonna also be reviving elements of the Soviet Union and Stalinism that's a bit odd because the Soviet Union killed all those people and destroy them so which is it you know I mean he has put together kind of patchwork where he's picked elements from the past that he you know that he wants to bring back into public life and and and repressed others I mean even for example in his revival of the Soviet Union of Soviet history he's been quite choosy so a lot of emphasis on 1945 on imperial conquest on the victory in the war not much talk about the 1930s about even about industrialization and collectivization that whole piece of the Soviet story he's he doesn't bring that up he doesn't speak of it the Russian Orthodox Church again as a way to you know establish his credentials to be leader of Russia clearly having a relationship with this very ancient institution it's part of it and he's he's he's he's played with it does it contradict some of the other things he says yes but life is sometimes contradictory Galleon note we shall we shall conclude I just want to make a couple of quick announcements ideas being the highly efficient organization that is already has hands lecture in print form being a highly peculiar organization we're giving it away free I think we should be charging for it but there's clearly I've been overridden in the Politburo but it will be outside we have about 150 copies for those who would like to pick a copy up and that in a sense gives you more detail from this particular place you got wood idea I didn't want to tell you beforehand you know right away secondly just to announce that Ann will be lecturing here on the 12th of March with the wonderfully enigmatic title does Eastern Europe still exist and I think it's fantastic title and I'm sure it's gonna be a great lecture finally just thanks to Ann for a wonderful lectures here and thank you to all your [Applause]

Channel: LSE

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Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, podcast, Seminar, Talk, Speech, Professor Anne Applebaum, capitalism, corporate, KGB, Russia

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Length: 81min 30sec (4890 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2013