MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s start in Dresden. Who is that man in Dresden? MASHA GESSEN - Well, he’s an unhappy man. He has wanted to be a secret agent all of
his life, as long as he can remember, and he was—waited patiently for his foreign
posting. Then he gets posted to East Germany, and not
even to Berlin, to Dresden, which is just such a backwater, and his job in Dresden isn't
even to spy on the East Germans. His job in Dresden is actually to try to work
remotely to get intelligence from the West. So he’s working with students in Dresden
who might have friends who are students in Berlin, and his big “get” during his entire
time in Dresden is buying a 700-page unclassified U.S. Army manual. That’s all he’s managed to do. Another thing that’s happened to him is
that he’s experienced envy like I think he didn’t expect. The fact that he recounted it nearly 20 years
later, when he was already a wealthy man, but you know, they got to Dresden, and East
Germany was not terribly exciting or glamorous or wealthy place by any means, especially
Dresden, which had been, you know, virtually destroyed in the bombings in 1945. So here is this bland city, and still he sees
that East Germans, ordinary East Germans live better than a KGB officer in the Soviet Union. They all have their own separate apartments. They have washing machines in their apartments. They have color televisions. All these things are luxury in the Soviet
Union. He grew up in a communal apartment. His parents still live in a communal apartment. He’s never had a washing machine in the
house, an automatic washing machine, that sort of thing. So he’s a very unhappy man. He’s drinking a lot of beer, getting fat
and wiling away his time uselessly. Meanwhile, back home, things start happening
as soon as he left the country. The country started to transform, which is
something that no one could have predicted, because it felt, you know, that era in Soviet
history is known as the era of stagnation. It just felt like time had stopped. People were living in sort of horizontal time. There was no future; there was no past. Things were always going to be the same. And suddenly Mikhail Gorbachev, who’s the
new head of the Central Committee, the first sort of young person—he’s in his 50s—to
have that post in generations, he comes out and says: “We need change. We need transformation. We need perestroika.” He says that word, and “glasnost.” “Perestroika” is restructuring, and “glasnost”
is transparency. And it actually begins. At first, for people in the West, it seemed
like so much hot air, and the system really couldn’t be transformed. And Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote this scathing
book about how the Soviet Union could never be transformed; it could only bring its own
collapse on, which turned out to be a prescient book. But people in the Soviet Union are completely
caught up in the excitement of change, because suddenly things can be said, things can be
done. Things that were unthinkable yesterday are
entirely normal today, like having a demonstration in the street, which first people sort of
tried gingerly, and then they see that people aren't getting arrested, and then all of a
sudden, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. All of that excitement and all of that discussion
that’s starting to happen out in public, like “What should the state be like? Should there be one party, or maybe more than
one party?,” That’s a radical idea; all of that is happening back in the Soviet Union,
and Putin has no way of knowing about it. MICHAEL KIRK - We’re going to get back there,
but let’s go just quickly back into a little back story. When I read the books about him, they always
say at 16 he wanted to join the KGB. It isn't until he’s 23 that he does, but
he walked by the building every day and saw it or something. How much of any of that is true? And I think you say that his dad was actually
a KGB agent. MASHA GESSEN - His dad was actually in the
NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]. NKVD was the precursor to the KGB, at the
start of the war, the start of World War II. This is something that’s very much a part
of Putin’s personal mythology, and he’s pedaled the story more and more as time has
gone on. We have no way of knowing if it’s true. I would assume that it’s true. I would assume that he was indeed in NKVD
at the start of the war. The thing about the Russian secret police
and the Soviet secret police is that one never leaves the secret police. Once a KGB man, always a KGB man. It seems that probably Putin’s father maintained
some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone,
and people didn’t have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Very rarely would a communal apartment have
a telephone, and never would somebody have a personal phone inside a communal apartment,
which is what Putin’s dad had. So he was possibly on active duty. He was possibly on what's called active reserve,
which is what Putin himself was for a little bit after he returned from Dresden. But it’s basically when somebody doesn’t
have—when the KGB doesn’t have a job to give you, but they keep you on the payroll,
and you keep coming back and sort of snitching on whatever workplace you were actually in. MICHAEL KIRK - When you talk about a communal
apartment, maybe you could describe it. I know that, as a boy, he liked to play in
the courtyard. This is the version of it that some people
tell us. He liked to play in the courtyard and define
himself—he was a slight boy—by judo and other things. But it was a kind of rough-and-tumble world,
I gather. Could you help us understand that? MASHA GESSEN - Communal apartments, especially
in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad at the time, were this very weird thing. St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been
a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had—there
were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings
in the center of town. So they had these vast lavish apartments that
were broken up after the revolution, in the first few years after the 1917 revolution,
so that the rich were either exiled or killed or imprisoned, or in some cases, just forced
to occupy one room out of what had been seven or 15 rooms in this communal apartment. Putin grew up in one of those apartments that
had been, two generations before he was born, had been opulent but now was dilapidated. Putin was born seven years after World War
II ended. During World War II, Leningrad was under siege
for 900 days. A million people died of starvation; at least
a million people died of starvation. And the city itself was constantly shelled. One wonderful Russian writer who did an oral
history of the siege had this phrase that “It’s like living in St. Petersburg after
the war. Living in Leningrad after the war is like,
if soldiers had never left the trenches after the war ended, and just continued to live
there.” I mean, they lived where it had all happened,
where people had died, where they had struggled to survive. Most people had lost family members, often
the entire families. They had seen their neighbors die. They may have eaten their neighbors after
they died. MICHAEL KIRK - Eaten? MASHA GESSEN - Yes, eaten. There's a lot of cannibalism. And they also, you know, burned their books,
their furniture, their window frames, to keep warm. These were these buildings that had been shelled,
that had been disassembled by their residents for firewood, that were being heated with
these tiny little wood-burning stoves, one per room sort of thing. That’s where Putin was born, and in a town—in
a city that was still scarred in all these different ways. It was also a period of extreme poverty throughout
the Soviet Union. Basically, people were always on the edge
of subsistence. Food was scarce. All goods were scarce. There was also no child care. People worked six days a week. There was no state-subsidized child care. There was no retirement. The retirement benefits were introduced for
the secret police in the 1950s and for everybody else much later. Children were basically left to their own
devices. Putin’s parents worked pretty much around
the clock, his mother various unskilled jobs, his father at a factory. And he was left to his own devices. He hung out in the courtyard with other boys,
like all children did. And he was often picked upon and bullied until
he started studying Sambo, which was a Soviet version of martial arts, and then later switched
to judo so he could compete. MICHAEL KIRK - What is the composite of that
character who comes up out of there and finds himself in Dresden? MASHA GESSEN - He’s scrappy, very ambitious,
very, very greedy. This is actually an extraordinary trait of
his, something that he has talked about. He doesn’t call it greed, but the behavior
he describes is so atypical for a Soviet boy or a young man that it really stands out. There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary
about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary. He describes a couple incidents. ... One is, is he had a wristwatch as a kid. Now, even when I was growing up, and I'm 15
years younger, a wrist—and I come from a much more privileged background—a wristwatch
for a kid was something that just you didn’t see, and certainly not a little kid. A wristwatch was a luxury. It was a luxury object, and he had one. We don’t know the provenance of the wristwatch,
but the fact that he got it, which probably means that his father gave it to him and didn’t
have a wristwatch himself, shows a very skewed and unusual relationship, both for material
things and between sort of child and his parent. The second story is, when he was in college,
he got a very well-paying summer job building up in the far north, which was not unusual
for Soviet college students, boys. So he made a lot of money. The first summer he did it, he went to Crimea
afterward and spent all that money. Normally a young man from a not well-off family
would give most of that money, and often all of that money, to his parents. It would be their—the money that they would
eat on for the rest of the year, and he went and blew it all on vodka and entertainment
in Crimea. The second year, he says that he learned his
lesson. He didn’t blow the money. He returned to St. Petersburg with the money
and bought himself a beautiful overcoat and a cake for his mother. And again, that incredible disbalance between
the luxurious object that he got for himself and a cake for his mother shows a very strange
relationship with his parents. The third story is that his parents won a
car in a lottery. There was a single Soviet lottery that a lot
of people, most people played; sometimes some people would get lucky. You could take the car, or you could take
cash. If his parents had taken cash, it would have
been enough to get them out of the communal apartment and into a place of their own, which
was every Soviet citizen’s dream. But they took the car, and they gave it to
their son, a college student. I'm quite certain that he was the only college
student in Leningrad in the 1970s who had his own car. MICHAEL KIRK - What's up with the relationship? You must have asked lots of people and thought
about it long and hard yourself. What is up with that? MASHA GESSEN - Well, that’s all conjecture. But he was born to his parents very late. He was a miracle baby. His parents were in their early 40s. They had lived through the siege of Leningrad. His father had been disabled in the war, and
his mother had nearly died of starvation. They had lost a son during the war to starvation,
and they had lost another son before the war to a childhood illness. So for them to be an intact couple in which
both parents, both people survived the siege, that was already a miracle. It was something you almost didn’t see in
Leningrad after the war. Then for them to be able to have a child in
their early 40s would have been nothing short of a miracle. He may well have been the only child born
to a couple of survivors in their 40s in 1950s Leningrad. So we can only imagine that it affected their
relationship in some unusual way. MICHAEL KIRK - Well, it makes him feel, in
some way, magical and entitled. MASHA GESSEN - Right, chosen. MICHAEL KIRK - Chosen. Chosen. Any proof of that, that he feels that he’s
chosen? MASHA GESSEN - Yes, there's a lot of proof
that he feels that he is chosen now, now that he is president. I think that his unusual path to the presidency,
the fact that he was an accidental president, actually makes him feel more like he was chosen—because
we don’t actually believe in accidents as humans. We always think there's a reason for something
happening. MICHAEL KIRK - I make lots of films about
famous presidents and leaders of agencies, and the idea that there's somebody who has
“chosen” as a character trait is astonishing and wonderful. So let’s deal with KGB volunteer at 16 years
of age. True story? MASHA GESSEN - I mean, there's no way to corroborate
this. The way that I've always treated it is that
Putin is highly unusual in that before he became the prime minister of Russia, he had
no public life, so he had a chance to create his own image. I think it’s actually very important to
know what he wants to communicate, what kind of image he wants to project. In a sense, it’s more important than what
actually happened. This is what he wants us to know about himself. He wants us to know that at 16, he went to
volunteer for the KGB. Whether it actually happened is immaterial. He is the kind of guy who, at 50, wanted people
to think that at 16 he volunteered to be in the KGB. MICHAEL KIRK - Great. OK. So now we’re back at Dresden, and he’s
missed glasnost and perestroika. Let’s dispel or deal with another rumor,
“Moscow is silent” and the shoveling of documents into a stove so much that the stove
cracks and breaks. Again, more of the myth-making? MASHA GESSEN - Again, we don’t know, right? This is a story that he tells. It’s a story that’s clearly very important
to him. It’s his memory that he owns. Whether it’s based on real events, we have
no idea. I mean, it’s definitely true that there
were a lot of demonstrations in East Germany at the time, and especially in Dresden. Dresden was a city that the railway went through,
so a lot of Hungarian refugees were going through on the trains through Dresden to West
Germany after West Germany started taking refugees and Hungary opened the border. Dresden was sort of a key place in that sense. And it’s definitely true that there were
huge demonstrations. Now, what Putin tells us is that during one
of those demonstrations, people were outside the KGB building where he worked, and he was
afraid they were going to storm the building, and then he went out on the porch and addressed
them and said that he had every right to be there, although he said he was an interpreter. He didn’t say he was an officer. Then he called the local Red Army outpost
and asked them to send security, and they said, “We can't do that without orders from
Moscow, and Moscow is silent.” He then went and started burning documents
that they had in this KGB building, and he burnt them in the furnace until the furnace
cracked from the heat. That’s the story as he tells it. I think the important elements for him in
this story are sort of three. One is that he’s afraid of public protest,
and that’s demonstrably true. He is terrified of people in the streets. The other is that he felt betrayed by the
Soviet Union as a KGB agent in Germany. I think that that’s the reason that he keeps
returning to this sort of origin story, is that it partly explains his understanding
of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of our time,
as he’d have said. And number three is that he is loyal. Moscow had betrayed him, the Red Army had
betrayed him, but there he was, burning documents to the last for some reason that only he could
actually deduce. But it’s very clearly a story about how
he continued to do his duty, even though he could have walked away. I mean, clearly understand that he could have
just shut the door or padlocked the door and joined the protesters, right, but he continued
doing his job even after the Kremlin had abdicated. MICHAEL KIRK - There's this film that he apparently
watched all the time, again, another part of the story, The Shield and the Sword or
whatever it is. And by the time—it doesn’t matter. But I think it’s remarkable the way he has
invented a sort of him that explains the him that will live in the world in his 50s and
early 60s. MASHA GESSEN - Well, we all do it. MICHAEL KIRK - Well, not me. (Laughs.) No, I'm sure that’s true. But it, in this case, manifests itself in
some amazing ways, which we’ll get to. One of the things we seem to be sort of discovering
is, he and all the KGB people that supposedly leave in the collapse of the Soviet Union,
800,000 men and women who disappear or who fall out of their jobs, are kind of—the
word we keep coming up with is “shipwrecked.” They're just out there somewhere, right? MASHA GESSEN - Right. MICHAEL KIRK - He lands in Leningrad and then
St. Petersburg. I don’t know how much time we need to spend
in this territory as we get him up to the FSB [Federal Security Service] in Moscow. But is there something about the era, the
place, the time, other than the documentary he has made about himself at that time, that
is relevant and important for us to know about? MASHA GESSEN - Well, the important thing is
that he stayed in the KGB. He returned to Leningrad. He got a job. And this was a classic KGB posting. He got a job as the man in charge of foreign
relations for the university at the time. Very sensitive posting at the time, because
universities were just starting to open up to foreign students, foreign teachers, foreign
exchange programs, so of course you needed a KGB man to oversee all of that. He was in that position not for very long,
and then he takes another classic KGB posting, which is being an assistant to an official,
who was one of the first elected officials in the country. Leningrad was the first city in the country
to hold elections to its city council. It’s a very large legislature. It’s a huge city. It’s 5 million people and a very exciting
election. They were really trying sort of radical democracy
at the time. They wanted a leaderless city council, some
of them, and direct democracy of all kinds. It was really beautiful. [Anatoly] Sobchak, the mayor, emerged as a
kind of centrist. He had been a member of the Communist Party,
unlike some of the new democrats. He had very much been a member of the establishment,
a professor at the university. It means that his ideological credentials
had passed muster with the Communist Party. Now he’s a democrat, but not as radical
as some of these Leningrad direct-democracy advocates and that sort of thing. He is able to get sort of the more conventional
communist constituency and the new democratic constituency, so he gets elected by the city
council to be mayor, and Putin becomes his assistant. He served as his deputy up until 1996. Now he was in charge of the city’s foreign
business. Again, that would be something that would
be a logical sort of place to plug a KGB man into, but also, in all fairness, probably
a job that he could navigate better than many other people. He had been abroad; he had been trained in
talking to foreigners. So it makes sense that his skills would appeal
to someone like Sobchak. Sobchak wrote in his memoirs that he was fully
aware that Putin was with the KGB, and he implied that he preferred to pick his own
KGB agent rather than have one sent to him. MICHAEL KIRK - But wait a minute. I thought the KGB was disbanded. MASHA GESSEN - … Right, right. The KGB was not disbanded. After the failed August 1991 coup, Yeltsin
gave orders, or actually forced Gorbachev to give an order to the new director of the
KGB, who replaced the one who had organized the coup, to disband the KGB. This new man had four months to work on it,
four months that the Soviet Union remained legally an entity, and all he succeeded in
doing was breaking it up into 15 different KGBs, for each of the constituent republics
of the Soviet Union. MICHAEL KIRK - … So here he is, he’s made
the— MASHA GESSEN - Maybe we should then mention
the embezzlement in St. Petersburg. MICHAEL KIRK - In the food? MASHA GESSEN - Yes. MICHAEL KIRK - Yes, OK, let’s go do that. We’re back in Leningrad. MASHA GESSEN - So as the deputy to the new
elected mayor in 1991, Putin has to administer this weird program. The new Russian government, the new government
of the independent Russia, was terrified that people were going to starve, because food
shortages had become so profound that they had no way of basically ensuring that the
population would have enough food to not start starving. And they decided to issue different regions
of Russia permissions to use strategic reserves to exchange for food imports. At the time, the ruble was not convertible,
so they couldn’t give them money to buy food. But they could tell them, “You have timber
or precious metals,” or whatever else they had in that particular city, “that you can
use to procure food for your city’s population to prevent starvation.” Putin had $100,000 worth of those credits
that he could use, and he had to create a system for exchanging timber, in that case,
timber and metals for food. He created a system that never delivered any
food. But the city council, when it began investigating
what had happened, concluded that he had purposely created companies with faulty contracts that
could not be enforced so that the company could basically write off a loss, and the
city could never demand reparations because the contracts were purposely
constructed in such a way as to prevent enforcement. The city council investigation concluded that
Putin needed to be prosecuted, but that required an order from the mayor to allow the prosecution
of his deputy. Instead of allowing that, the mayor actually
disbanded the city council and proceeded to govern by decree for about a year and a half. MICHAEL KIRK - So much for democracy, yes? MASHA GESSEN - Right. MICHAEL KIRK - Fledgling democracy, strangled,
drowned, whatever you do with it. So how do his characteristics manifest themselves
as he’s made the head of the FSB in Moscow? MASHA GESSEN - Unsurprisingly, we know the
least about his time as head of the FSB, except that he was a bit of an outsider there, even
though he was a career KGB man. He was a colonel, or actually a lieutenant
colonel, when he was promoted to head of the FSB. He felt that he wasn’t trusted and that
he didn’t trust the men there. He held his meetings in a disused elevator
shaft in the FSB building because he was afraid of being wiretapped. That's about all we know. So not—he wasn’t a reformer. He didn’t leave a trace on the FSB except
for that, that funny story about taking his meetings in the elevator shaft. MICHAEL KIRK - And that was with [Boris] Berezovsky,
right— MASHA GESSEN - That was with Berezovsky. MICHAEL KIRK - —who plays a central role
in the ascension of Vladimir Putin. MASHA GESSEN - Right. Berezovsky was an oligarch who fancied himself
a kingmaker. There was this sort of phenomenon of men who
had become very, very wealthy, very, very quickly, in the 1990s, because they were smart
and well-placed. Berezovsky was one of them, and that really
went to his head. He was a masterful sort of bluffer. He would buy a minority stake in a company
and then pretend that he owned the whole company and proceed to give orders, and people would
believe him. I think he felt a little bit like that with
the whole country, and Yeltsin seemed to like him and trust him. He made him the head of his Security Council
at one point. He was very much part of Yeltsin’s inner
circle, what was called “The Family,” even as Yeltsin alienated everybody else,
and Berezovsky lobbied for Putin as a successor to Yeltsin. Yeltsin needed a handpicked successor because
he was afraid of being prosecuted in case the opposition took power after his second
term was over. He was a very different kind of man [as compared]
to Putin. I don’t think he considered the possibility
of, say, canceling elections and going for a third term, something that Putin has done. He is now in his third term—although he
hasn’t canceled elections, but he’s fiddled with the constitution in all sorts of creative
ways. But Yeltsin wasn’t like that, but he certainly
didn’t want to go to prison. The idea was that they would put somebody
they could play in the president’s chair, someone loyal, who would prevent Yeltsin’s
prosecution. Because I think Berezovsky fancied himself
so much a kingmaker, he didn’t consider the fact that picking a KGB man for this job
might be dangerous, or anybody else. I think he just thought it was such a brilliant
scheme. Here he was; he pulled this guy out of obscurity
and made him president. MICHAEL KIRK - And the man he pulls out of
obscurity, a lot of people I've talked to, and a lot of things I've read, this man is—everyone
says: “I met him. He was sort of gray. He was sort of boring. He was completely unobtrusive,” or “He
was a kind of BSer who would bring flowers to people and just self-aggrandizing in lots
of ways.” Is that the man that Berezovsky moves up? MASHA GESSEN - Berezovsky perceived him as
a decent man, for some reason. When I asked Berezovsky about it, he said,
“Well, there was one time that I needed to open an office in St. Petersburg, and Putin
didn’t take a bribe.” I mean, that is a pretty low benchmark, especially
because we have plenty of information about Putin taking bribes under other circumstances. And then, at another time, when Berezovsky
was sort of on the outs with the power elites, Putin brought flowers to his wife’s birthday
party. Loyalty is very much sort of something that
he cultivates as a part of his image, and that’s something that Berezovsky also valued. It’s a very Soviet trait, especially Soviet
male trait, to value loyalty in a country that had sort of given up all principles as
such. Personal loyalty was very much the currency
of public men. Other than that, there was nothing to say
about this man, not that he was smart, not that he was skilled, not that he had any kind
of relevant experience, not that he was liked or likable. I mean, he spoke a foreign language, which
made him sort of European. He wasn’t a drunk, unlike Yeltsin, which
was a relief. But that’s about it. Then everybody projected onto him whatever
they wanted to. People projected onto him this idea that he
was going to be a democrat and an economic reformer, and the American press ran with
those projections. MICHAEL KIRK - Why? Because we were hungry for that? We wanted to believe that having the Soviet
Union having collapsed, it was now—and we had spent so much money and time and energy
in the Yeltsin years, that we had really started something, and the green shoots of democracy
were finally yielding a new, young Russia? MASHA GESSEN - I think so. I think that American correspondents and foreign
correspondents tend to sort of perpetuate narratives. And the Russia narrative was the victory of
democracy, the end of history, the triumph of popular will, that sort of thing. So a young guy who speaks a foreign language
fits into that narrative, as long as you ignore everything else about him. MICHAEL KIRK - Well, you wrote this amazing,
this wonderful little sentence about him being sleek and trim and in European-cut suits,
and it made him look like, you know, the way Pierre Trudeau used to look in Canada. MASHA GESSEN - I wouldn’t go quite as far
as Pierre Trudeau, but yes, he had a way about him that seemed different from those Central
Committee men. Yeltsin was also not quite a Central Committee
man, but he did wear these gray suits, baggy gray suits. They were like the Politburo-cut suit, and
Putin had a different cut of suit. What's interesting is that now he wears those
baggy suits with pants that are like eight inches too long, but he didn’t used to. He actually, he wore these expensive, well-cut
suits. MICHAEL KIRK - He is an information warrior
in that sense. He’s making an image, as you already articulated. He’s making an image of himself that’s
almost like—you're right; he creates a numina-like effect about himself, and then we can all
project onto him whatever we want. MASHA GESSEN - I don’t know how willful
it is, because actually, the interviews that he gave when he was acting president—so
Yeltsin resigned on Dec. 31, 1999, making Putin the fairly new prime minister. He’d only been in office for four months,
making him the acting president, and a shoo-in in an early presidential election. That was very much part of the idea of resigning
on Dec. 31. But Putin still has no public persona, so
a media team was assembled very quickly, and he sat down for interviews with them six times,
with three journalists, [Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova and Andrei Kolesnikov]. They wrote a book that’s still available
called First Person. And if you read that book closely, there's
nothing in there about his being a European. There's nothing in there about his appreciation
for democracy. Basically, he’s projecting one main myth
about himself, which is that he’s a thug. The story that he keeps telling over and over
again, and that his friends tell, the sort of the vetted stories by friends in the book,
are all stories about Putin getting into fights, and they all unfold according to the same
scenario. He lashes out when he feels wronged, and then
he quiets down, and everybody thinks it’s over. And then, when they least expect it, he lunges
again. MICHAEL KIRK - And Masha, what did that tell
you about him? MASHA GESSEN - Well, this is a story about
a man who is vengeful, and he wants us to know that he is vengeful. And he’s aggressive, and he’s reckless,
because he talks about how he got into a fight like that as a young officer. He got into a street fight over—I don’t
remember—the tram ticket or something like that, a bus ticket. And he points out that he was risking his
career. If as a KGB officer it had been discovered
that he got into a street brawl, that would have probably killed his chances for a foreign
posting. He has so much trouble controlling his temper,
that he will risk everything that he’s worked for in life for an opportunity to vengefully
lash out. MICHAEL KIRK - That’s at least the story
he wants to tell. MASHA GESSEN - That’s the story he wants
to tell, and he’s certainly acted in accordance with that. MICHAEL KIRK - Exactly right.… I mean, he’s basically creating an image
all the way along about himself, which is very interesting. We passed by when he’s at the FSB [Federal
Security Service] a story that I don’t want to spend very much time on, because we just
can't, and it’s unknown, which is the apartment bombings. Unknown whether he had a hand in it. … regardless of whether he did it or not,
he certainly took advantage of this sad occasion of the bombing of those apartments. Tell me how he took advantage of it. MASHA GESSEN - Within three weeks of his appointment
as prime minister, a series of terrorist attacks starts happening in Russia. First there are small sort of incidents, and
then there are several large apartment bombings in the south of Russia and then in Moscow. Especially the ones in Moscow are just shocking
to the country. The country at the time I think felt very
much—it so happens that I was there during those bombings, and then I was here in New
York on 9/11, and I think the mood was largely similar—because the spectacle of all of
it, right, the fact that these bombs went off in the wee hours of the morning, so everybody’s
home asleep in their beds. And these large apartment blocks just folded
in on themselves, burying these people alive or dead, but burying everybody in the building. The fact that these were just standard apartment
blocks, so so many people in Russia, watching that on television, could imagine themselves
so easily in their beds, because those beds were just like their beds, and those buildings
were just like their buildings, and those families were just like their families, right? These were clearly explosions designed for
the maximum number of casualties. That’s why you would have a bomb go off
at like 5:00 in the morning, right, when no one has gotten up yet, but everyone has already
come home who’s going to come home, and everyone has gone to bed. All of Russia, I think, identified with the
people who died. Everybody was afraid. Everybody was in shock. People started watching out for strangers,
anybody who might be planting explosives in their buildings. And then suddenly Putin emerges, this prime
minister that most people don’t even remember his name because there have been so many prime
ministers in the last couple years, and this one is the least charismatic of all the ones
that have come along. Suddenly he comes on television. He says: “We’re going to hunt down the
terrorists, and we’re going to wipe them out in the outhouse. If we find them in the outhouse, we’re going
to wipe them out in the outhouse.” It’s an amazing moment in all sorts of ways. One is that he claims this power that legally
he doesn’t actually have. The military didn’t report to the prime
minister, and the military still reports—all the uniform services report to the president
in Russia, not to the prime minister. It would have been Yeltsin’s job to sort
of say: “I'm going to save you. I'm going to have my Army or my police.” And Yeltsin is nowhere to be seen. Putin is given the front spot. And he’s also doing something that Yeltsin
wouldn’t have done. He’s not saying, “We’re going to find
those responsible and bring them to justice.” He has already called them terrorists, and
he is going to say: “We’re basically going to extrajudicially execute them. We’re going to wipe them out in the outhouse. Forget the process. Forget this idea of bringing them to justice. It’s war.” It’s hugely resonant with this really scared
and battered population, so Putin’s popularity skyrockets at the same time that he gets name
recognitions, like it’s the same curve. And all of a sudden, he’s the most popular
politician in Russia because he is seen as spearheading the war on terrorism. MICHAEL KIRK - Fabulous. So on that midnight or that night to Christmas/New
Year’s Eve, when Yeltsin appoints him, Yeltsin apologizes. And Putin comes on at midnight. Ordinarily, the prime minister or the president
speaks at midnight, but he comes on at midnight as the new president. What does he promise? What does he say? … MASHA GESSEN - Well, he very much saw himself,
I think at that point, as still a bureaucrat, and that became evident later in the year
2000. But there was Yeltsin, who I think had fully
accepted responsibility for the country, and fully felt like he had failed. So he gave this absolutely heartbreaking speech
in the middle of the afternoon that was just—he apologized. He said that he wished that he had done a
better job by the Russian people, and he said, “I'm tired, and I'm leaving.” It was impossible not to cry watching. It was impossible not to cry watching it years
later when I was watching it again for research. Then at midnight, when normally the president
would speak, the new president, the acting president came and said that he was going
to do his job. You would think that that might be disappointing
to a lot of people, that after that sort of—I mean, with Yeltsin, even when he was ill and
despondent, it’s impossible to overstate how charismatic he was, and how, as we would
say in Russian, the scale of his personality was just outsize. So after he exits the stage, and this little
thing comes along and says nothing, but that wasn’t disappointing for people. It was actually an invitation, as it turned
out, to project their expectations, so there was a sort of surge of optimism that now things
were going to get fixed by this nobody. MICHAEL KIRK - As you watched him in that
first year or two, did you see manifestations of what was to come? Was it obvious fairly early, the authoritarian
the Russian people have loved from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great to Josef Stalin,
a certain kind of person, and I'm going to be that person? MASHA GESSEN - It was—I think partly because
I had reported from St. Petersburg for a couple of years just before he became prime minister,
and I knew what a different place it was politically than the rest of Russia, I think I recognized
things in him that took other people a long time to recognize. Another thing was that I came from a dissident
family, and I had been an émigré, and I had come back. So I had this sort of, I don’t know, somewhat
different optics, especially because I had been brought up to be suspicious and afraid
of anybody who had any connection to the KGB. One of the things that struck me as very important
was what he did the day he became acting president. He signed a bunch of decrees. His first decree was giving Yeltsin immunity
from prosecution, which was part of the deal, and probably anybody in that position would
have done it. But among his first 10 decrees was a decree
reinstating primary military education in high schools, and this was something that
was, to me, highly symbolic. When I went to school in the Soviet Union,
everybody—all the high school students had to learn elementary military trades. I mean, first of all, we had military games,
survival games, from the time—I mean, games. We called them games. They weren’t games. They were training sessions, right? But from the time you're very little, there
are bomb raids, and you learn to recognize chemical burns, and you are drilled on how
to respond to chemical burns. The thing is, you know, these classrooms that
are—where the walls are covered with posters on how to recognize different kinds of chemical
weapons, the effects of different kinds of chemical weapons and how to respond to them. And then in ninth and 10th grade, so in high
school, which is just two years, you learn to administer first aid in a military situation
and to take apart and clean a Kalashnikov and put it back together again. Anybody my age or older will be able to tell
you how long it used to take them to take apart and clean and put back together a Kalashnikov. A good amount of time is around nine or eight
seconds. That was eliminated when the Soviet Union
fell apart. And we forget now how much the 1990s, even
though Russia never really sort of fully entered a post-imperial era, but still, it became
a demilitarized country. All of a sudden, there was much less emphasis
on how every boy was a future soldier, which is the way I was brought up. You would just see very many fewer people
in uniform in the streets. When I was growing up, when I used to go meet
my mother at the subway station when she was coming home, I would—to entertain myself,
I would count the number of people in uniform coming off the trains as I waited for her. Roughly every 10th person would be wearing
a military uniform. All of a sudden, that was no longer the case. And of course children stopped learning how
to take apart and put back together a Kalashnikov in school. One of the first things that Putin did, on
the day that he became acting president, was set in motion the process of bringing that
back. And I was convinced that—go ahead. MICHAEL KIRK - Sorry. MASHA GESSEN - No, I was convinced that he
was signaling his intention to remilitarize Russian society, which is exactly what he
did. MICHAEL KIRK - What does it do to a society
to grow up with that eight-second Kalashnikov rebuild and then have it reintroduced? What's the signal that that sends to people? MASHA GESSEN - Well, different people receive
the same signal differently. It frightened me. I didn’t want to live in a militarized society
again, and I thought the militarized Russia would be a dangerous country for the rest
of the world. Countries don’t militarize in order to be
peaceful. For a lot of people, though, it was a signal
that they were going back to something that was familiar and comfortable, both on a private
level, which is that you would do the same—their children would be doing the same things that
they did as children, right, but much more importantly on a public level, so that they
would have a chance to identify with a great country again. He would make Russia great again. For so many people in the 1990s, the instability
and discomfort that they experienced became concentrated in this idea of no longer belonging
to a great power. So a lot of Putin’s early signals were that
he would bring back that wonderful feeling of being part of a great power again. MICHAEL KIRK - In a way, it’s right. He’s merging probably how he felt, having
missed glasnost and perestroika, not participating in whatever was great about it, but he comes
home, he’s shipwrecked, whatever happens to him, it’s a different world than he probably
anticipated finishing his life in. That sort of ethos that he shared with the
people was what he decided to employ as his method. In the end of his first year, George W. Bush
becomes president of the United States. One of the things we’ve noticed in tracing
the arc of this gigantic narrative is how often an American president arrives to a Russian
president with hope that all is going to get better, from Gorbachev on; democracy will
flower now, and thank God. … MASHA GESSEN - Well, I want to say one more
thing about what happened with George W. Bush becoming president in ’99, or in 2000, is
that Putin had just become president in a very orderly manner. He was handpicked by the previous president. An election was scheduled. He won it handily. Everything went according to plan in his popularity. His margin of victory was pretty good. It was, I think, 53 percent in his first election. And his popularity was sky-high. Then America goes and has this ridiculous
election that isn't settled for two months or two and a half months, and that just goes
to show you how a democracy is such an imperfect system, and probably an outdated and failed
system. I'm convinced that that’s the first time
that Putin really watched an American presidential election closely. He’d never thought of himself as somebody
who existed on that level. Now he’s waiting to see who his counterpart
is going to be, and he can't even know who his counterpart is going to be for two and
a half months, because democracy is such a mess. … MICHAEL KIRK - When they meet, the way the
stories go, and especially—I've just talked to a lot of American diplomats and ambassadors
who were there at that first meeting. This is the “I looked in his eyes and saw
his soul” meeting. Some people tell the story that here is a
KGB guy who’s the president of Russia, who’s studied Bush, knows he’s an evangelical,
knows that he has a penchant and a weakness for a religious story, dredges up a religious
story out of his own past, the crucifix-in-the-ashes story, and somehow they connect. Tell me what you know about that version of
the story. MASHA GESSEN - Actually, I have nothing to
add to that version of the story. What I would say is that early on he was a
charmer, early on in his term as president. That’s no longer the case. But everyone I've talked to [who] had a meeting
with him in the first year or two of his becoming acting president and then president came away
transformed, at least for the first few minutes. Well, actually, with one exception: one of
the journalists who worked on that official biography. But everyone else felt that he sort of, he
turned on the recruiter charm, and he was well-briefed, and he always used a little
personal anecdote to connect with you on the grounds that he figured would be good for
connecting. A few years down the road, he stopped paying
attention. He would start mixing people’s names up
or the facts of people’s biographies. By the time I met him in 2012, he wasn’t
even briefed. He knew almost nothing about me, like he hadn’t
bothered. But early on, he was a real recruiter. And I think he certainly worked his charm
on George W. Bush, which apparently wasn’t very difficult. MICHAEL KIRK - There's a lot of hope, of course,
that they’ll do all kinds of things. A lot of people have said—we’ll ask them:
“What did Putin want from Bush? What did Russia want from Bush? But more importantly, what did Putin want
from Bush and America?” What do you think that was? MASHA GESSEN - Well, Putin wanted the return
of a bipolar world. That was his agenda from the very beginning. He wanted to be treated with respect. He wanted people back home to see that he
was being treated with respect. This was also coming very soon after the NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia, right, which, for the Russian political establishment and for a
lot of Russian people, was a really difficult pill to swallow. ... The U.S. and its allies decided to bomb Serbia
and Kosovo to resolve the Kosovo crisis without consulting with Russia. And to make matters worse, they started bombing,
or the U.S. started bombing when Yevgeny Primakov, the then-prime minister, was in the air, on
his way to the United States to meet with Vice President Gore. So they didn’t even make a show of informing
Russia before starting bombing, never mind consulting Russia, and that was really insulting
for the entire Russian establishment and a lot of Russian people. One of the things that Putin wanted to project
was that that kind of thing was never going to happen again. MICHAEL KIRK - Then America pulls out of the
ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty, not really consulting. In fact, he begged Bush not to do it. They invade, or we invade Iraq, taking down
an authoritarian figure who stands astride a big—somewhat in the sphere of influence
of Russia. Russia joins with France and Germany and says:
“Please don’t do this. Are you guys going to do this? Are you really going to do this?” And they do it with a certain level of impunity,
at least. It seems that the word you used early to describe
what he was hoping for, which is respect, was hardly in the air between George W. Bush
and the United States of America, and Vladimir Putin and Russia. MASHA GESSEN - And what's even worse, I think
from Putin’s point of view, is the expansion of NATO. It doesn’t ever sort of—in his worldview,
it is not a question of these countries asking to be part of NATO. It is merely a question of the United States
deciding that NATO should expand to the Russian border. He’s also convinced that the Soviet Union
got assurances from the United States that NATO would not be expanded. ... The quote that Putin likes to bring up was
a quote by the then-NATO commander given during the negotiations about the reunification of
Germany. The promise was that there would be no NATO
troops stationed on what had been East German territory. That’s the quote. And that was a matter of negotiations. This was, first of all, this was a negotiation
with the Soviet Union, and then—and the Soviet Union was pushing for a solution where
somehow Germany would be united. But East Germany still wouldn’t be a part
of NATO. And the compromise solution was that there
would be no troops on what had been East German territory. That has nothing to do with NATO expansion
as such, and it also certainly has nothing to do with Russia. I mean, this was being negotiated with the
Soviet Union. This was before the demise of the Warsaw Pact. But in 2007, at the security conference in
Munich, Putin shocks world leaders by giving a very, very strongly worded speech about
how Russia was not going to take it anymore. MICHAEL KIRK - Can you take me there? What has angered him, or what has happened
in his world that he can go to Munich and so forcefully declare? It’s not declaring war, but it’s certainly
declaring verbal war on, in an unspoken way, the United States of America. MASHA GESSEN - This is the end of his second
term, and he has really been transformed. He has already taken over the media in Russia. He’s already canceled gubernatorial elections. He’s canceled elections to the upper house
of the Russian parliament. He’s solidified power. He is ruling very much like a dictator. The process of dismantling what democratic
mechanisms had existed in Russia was completed in his first term, and this is the end of
his second term. Also, Russia has been living for seven years
through a period of unprecedented prosperity, because oil prices just keep climbing. Money is just flowing into Russia. Putin has enriched himself. Everyone around him has enriched himself. At the same time, he has emasculated the men
who used to be known as the oligarchs. They’ve ceded their political power to him,
and a lot of their financial power, in exchange for safety and security of those assets that
they're allowed to keep. He’s really the patriarch of this country. In Russia itself, people perceive him as enjoying
the respect of the West, but he doesn’t feel any respect, because the United States
has invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq without consulting with Russia, and in fact ignoring
Russia’s wishes. The United States has pulled out of the ABM
Treaty. And worst of all, NATO has expanded. He’s been saving all of this resentment
up because there he is—he feels like he has transformed his country. He’s made it great again, and he still doesn’t
get any recognition of that when he meets with world leaders. He is still treated very much like a junior
partner by everybody. And so he comes to the security conference
in Munich and says, basically: “I don’t have to mince words, do I? I can say what's on my mind.” And then he just lashes out, and he lists
all these resentments, especially the NATO expansion, referring to a nonexistent agreement,
a nonexistent promise that NATO would never expand. It’s a total change of tone that comes as
a complete surprise to his Western counterparts. MICHAEL KIRK - Then one of the other things
we do is we’re tracking the development of military power, including hybrid power
and including cyber and information war and hard power. Things begin to happen. Estonia is two months later. Then Georgia 1, or Georgia 2, Ukraine—all
of it begins to happen, and all of it feels like a rehearsal for something, or a perfecting
of the military might. Help me understand what he’s doing in terms
of military power and where that fits into this sense I'm getting from you, that he’s
looking for not only making Russia great again, but making people believe Russia is great
again. MASHA GESSEN - So he starts increasing military
spending. First it’s not extraordinary. Now it’s quite extraordinary, the amount
of money that Russia has been spending on the military. But he’s certainly interested in military
reform. A lot of people believe that he has militarized
the Russian power establishment. There are some counterarguments against that,
but I mean, he loves his generals, and he loves talking about how he’s bringing the
military back. He’s also investing money in ways of waging
hybrid warfare, and an excuse to test some of that presents itself. Really, it’s just—it’s even hard to
call it—it’s a pretext. In the spring of 2007, Estonia moves a monument
to a Russian soldier, right? When the Soviet Union occupied Eastern and
Central Europe in 1945, it erected monuments to the liberation of those countries, in the
centers of every capital of those occupied countries. Now, some countries have chosen to look the
other way, like Austria, which still has a giant monument to its liberation by the Soviet
soldiers in central Vienna. But for some countries, it was much more problematic. And for Estonia, which had been not only under
Soviet occupation for half a century, but really based its post-Soviet identity on the
idea of occupation, right, to have that monument in the center of town was really problematic. It also became a focal point for both Estonian
nationalists who would deface the monument and [for] pro-Russian gatherings. Estonia has a huge ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking
population of non-citizens. So this was—it was a problem in town. They decided to solve this problem by moving
the monument to a military cemetery. The monument included 12 graves, so they moved
the monument to a military cemetery, and Russia really could have reacted in any number of
ways, but Russia reacted with outrage. Now, another thing that Putin had been doing
is he had been creating these youth movements sort of semi-vigilante, military in style
if not—though not armed, basically para-armies of young people to support the Kremlin. So they are unleashed on the Estonian Embassy
in Moscow. The Estonian Embassy is essentially occupied
for three days, and these so-called activists demand that the Estonian ambassador go home. The ambassador finally went home officially
on vacation, but they said, “OK, our job is done,” and left. But at the same time—and Estonia is the
most technologically advanced country in the world. Its entire government is electronic. It’s the first country to offer e-citizenship. Everything is on a chip. You get stopped for a traffic violation or
you go see a doctor, you use the same ID card with a chip in it. And all of a sudden, the entire Estonian system
of government goes down because of pretty primitive but enormous DDoS attack, [Distributed]
Denial of Service attack launched on Estonia. At the time, Russia denies that it’s involved. Two years later, the leader of one of those
youth movements says, “Yeah, it was an army of volunteer hackers who unleashed that war.” But it really shows Estonia who’s boss,
because Estonia may be the most technologically advanced country in the world, and it may
have built a great democracy, but it’s just 1.2 million people, and you unleash 1.2 million
hackers on them, and they can't stand up to it. MICHAEL KIRK - How much of this and the Orange
and Rose Revolution responses by Russia are manifestations of Putin’s temper? MASHA GESSEN - I think it’s both his temper
and his perception of the world as essentially hostile. He personally perceives the world as essentially
hostile, not just hostile to Russia, but hostile to him, hostile to people he loves, just a
really dangerous place. So every time something happens, it’s probably
a sign of danger, and the revolutions in both Georgia and Ukraine were signs of danger. In fact, in 2004 Ukraine had an election. The election was very clearly rigged. People started protesting in the streets,
and eventually the Supreme Court, the Ukrainian Supreme Court, ruled that—invalidated the
results of the election and called for a third runoff election to set things right. Now, there were a couple of things that, for
Putin, I think, were indications of danger. One is— there's an obvious one—which is
that an independent judiciary is really dangerous for a leader who relies on the rigged elections. But again, people in the streets is a really
frightening sight to Putin. People in the streets can make all sorts of
things happen, so instead of sort of watching it and thinking, oh, we don’t have an independent
judiciary, so people can come out in the streets and then go right back home, because they
can't set in motion any mechanisms, because he’d long since reversed judicial reform
in Russia, which didn’t get very far in the first place, instead he sees people in
the streets wreaking havoc. But he’s also convinced that people don’t
just come out into the streets. They have to be driven by somebody. There has to be a puppet master. Somebody’s funding them, and it’s probably
the United States. That’s actually when he started creating
these youth armies. There's a wonderful Australian scholar named
Robert Horvath who calls it “Putin’s preventive counterrevolution.” He launched a counterrevolution in his own
country without waiting for a revolution to happen, but he was terrified of a revolution
like the one in Ukraine or the one in Georgia. The one in Ukraine is known as the Orange
Revolution, and the one in Georgia is known as the Rose Revolution. Nothing like that would ever happen in Russia,
because there was already an army of young people in place to basically to fight the
protesters in the streets if they should come out into the streets. MICHAEL KIRK - By the time Obama comes in—we’re
talking about the reset—[Dmitry] Medvedev is in. Is it an obvious fiction—was it an obvious
fiction to you what it was going to be, or is it an irrelevant fiction? He [Putin] is still the most powerful guy
in the country no matter what? I know to Obama and Hillary, it seems like
they—and we’ve talked to lots of people who are around them—they really had high
hopes that it was a true reset moment. MASHA GESSEN - … I think at this point I
can probably say it. I was able to observe a little bit of that
policymaking, and part of it was this idea, this cynical and I think overconfident idea
that if the United States empowered Medvedev, then he would become the actual president. I think that there were certainly intelligent
people in the State Department at the time who knew perfectly well that it was a fiction,
and the basic understanding in the State Department was that yes, it’s a fiction, but maybe
we can make it real. MICHAEL KIRK - So what did you witness? What did you see? What can you talk about? MASHA GESSEN - I witnessed some of those,
sort of the policymaking, and the idea—I mean, everybody on the team, on the Russia
team, I think in the State Department, did realize that Medvedev was a fiction; he was
a placeholder. But there was a hope that sometimes these
things take on a life of their own. They really do. I don’t think it’s—it’s not a crazy
idea. In fact, Putin was very much that kind of
phenomenon as well, right? He was sort of a fake accidental president,
and then he was a real one. I think that what they underestimated hugely
was just how entrenched the clan system that Putin had put in place was by 2008 when he
put Medvedev in that chair as a placeholder. I think that’s best described as a mafia
state, which is a term invented by a Hungarian scholar named Bálint Magyar, who actually
makes a very strong argument that it’s important to understand that it’s not crony capitalism
or a kleptocracy; it’s a mafia state. It’s administered by a patriarch, and power
is distributed by the patriarch, just as money is distributed by the patriarch. Putin was still the patriarch. It doesn’t matter what title he had. I think they also didn’t realize, and I
didn’t realize this until probably a couple of years into the so-called Medvedev administration,
that Medvedev just had absolutely no resources. He had a couple of people working for him,
a press secretary and an assistant, and like one other guy. Everything was concentrated around Putin. At the same time, Medvedev had—legally,
he had the right to fire Putin. The president can fire the prime minister. MICHAEL KIRK - But he’s not going to do
that. MASHA GESSEN - Well, one could hope that he
would do that. Then it’s very hard to sort of to discuss
a counterfactual. Like if the United States had not gone for
the reset, would it have worked any better? I don’t know. I think that the fact that the reset came
after the war in Georgia, and the war in Georgia was technically fought under the Medvedev
administration, and to sort of come to Russia and say, “We’re willing to write it off,
you know, write off the annexation of a third—of a neighboring country,” it’s deeply immoral. It also so happens that it was completely
ineffective. So the U.S. sacrificed some of its key foreign
policy principles for nothing. MICHAEL KIRK - It seems like it all falls
apart, really falls apart starting with the Arab Spring, from [Egypt’s Hosni] Mubarak
to [Libya’s Muammar al-]Qaddafi and the vote Medvedev makes. But when do you think it—what was the tipping
point in that sort of false presidential moment? What happens? MASHA GESSEN - The false presidential moment? MICHAEL KIRK - Well, it makes Putin reassert
himself actually and say, “I'm going back in.” MASHA GESSEN - Oh, I think he was always planning
to go back. MICHAEL KIRK - No matter what? MASHA GESSEN - Yeah, I don’t think that
he ever considered the possibility of not running for election again. If he did, it was more of a possibility of
changing the constitution to make it basically a parliamentary republic. MICHAEL KIRK - And then he’d have it anyway. MASHA GESSEN - And then he’d have all the
power legally. There was no way he was going to stay in a
legally less powerful position for more than four years. The fact that the first thing that Medvedev
did when he came into office was change the constitution to extend the presidency to six
years indicates that, from the very beginning, the plan was for Putin to then come back in
for six years. Then it was, you know, it was done right away,
and it wasn’t being done for Medvedev’s benefit. MICHAEL KIRK - When the people hit the streets
in the midst of the announcement that he’s coming back, and Hillary says, the statement
she says around the election, the unfairness of the election, and Putin reacts so negatively,
negatively enough that, whether it’s a pretext or not, he seems to remember it, a lot of
people are saying it’s a motivation for the attack in 2016. How do you read what was happening with the
people on the street? Here we are again, people on the street, Putin;
it’s becoming a familiar pattern. But how do you read that, Hillary’s statement
and the effect it had on Putin? What did that look like from Putin’s perspective? MASHA GESSEN - Well, so from Putin’s perspective,
I mean by 2011-2012, he has completely lost the ability to distinguish himself from his
regime, his regime from the country—from the state, and the state from the country. When he sees people coming out into the streets
to protest him and his regime, he sees them protesting Russia itself. I think that’s a sincere view of the world. He knows what's best for Russia. They want to destroy Russia. If they want to destroy Russia, then obviously
they're not Russians. So they must be—their puppet master—and
he’s always been convinced that there are puppet masters behind any protest—but their
puppet master has to be whoever is opposed to Russia. Well, obviously, what’s the only thing that’s
powerful enough to oppose Russia and to incite these protests? It has to be the U.S. State Department, because
it would be insulting to think that it was anything else, anything less than that. And Hillary is the secretary of state, so
obviously it’s her fault, personally. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s address Sochi, Crimea,
Ukraine, all in a kind of moment, if you can. What does Sochi mean? It’s been going on since late November,
early December [2014], down in Ukraine. I don’t really need to know the details
since I know about [Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych and all the rest. But it’s to Putin this glorious moment. This other thing is happening. He hates it for all the reasons you’ve just
articulated, and he’s got a kind of plan, I guess, to go after Crimea and then down
into Ukraine, using his new hybrid forces, I suppose. MASHA GESSEN - I think that by 2014, really
military buildup has become his number one priority, and there are a few reasons for
this. One is that he loves the military. He sees it as Russia’s ultimate greatness. But the other thing is that he has to become
a mobilizational leader. The bargain that he had with the population,
which is basically exchanging sort of a sense of overwhelming prosperity that he was giving
them for unlimited power that they were giving him, that’s not working anymore, because
the Russian economy is becoming stagnant. Oil prices haven't started dropping yet, but
because of corruption and because of the overreliance on extractive economy, the economic growth
has basically slowed to a crawl by 2013, by the end of 2013. He still has to throw this big party, which
he’s been planning for many years. He went to Guatemala City personally to lobby
for the Olympics. Not only that, he gave a speech in English,
which he’d never done before. I think it was—or was it French? Anyway, it was a language that he doesn’t
usually use. So he has been planning for this great moment. And the Olympics—remember, the last Olympics
in Russia were the Moscow Olympics in 1980, which were supposed to also be a symbol of
greatness, and turned into something entirely different because the United States boycotted
the Moscow Olympics over the invasion of Afghanistan. So it’s also partly taking revenge for that
humiliation of 1980. All of that is on one pile. And then in the fall of 2013, it turns out
that a lot of Western countries aren’t sending their luminaries, the first—I think it was
the president of Germany [Joachim Gauck] who said he wasn’t coming, then Belgium, then
someone else. Then finally Obama announces his delegation,
which doesn’t include an elected official. The highest placed official that it includes
is a deputy assistant secretary of state, which is just an insult. And, to add more insult, there are two openly
gay former Olympians in the delegation. This is about a year and a half into Putin’s
anti-gay campaign, because the way that he ended up dealing with the protesters was by
queer-baiting them and by sort of focusing Russia’s ire on the LGBT population. There are no good photo ops in Sochi. It’s basically, instead of a party, it’s
a disaster. At the last minute, Putin tried to clean up
his act by releasing [Mikhail] Khodorkovsy, the former oligarch, who had been a political
prisoner for 10 years; releasing the members of Pussy Riot, who had been in jail for nearly
two years; releasing the 30—I think [thirty] two members of Greenpeace who were in a ship
that Russia had hijacked in neutral waters, in international waters in September, a ship
flying the Dutch flag. So they release all of those people. But it’s too late to save Sochi. That adds more resentment to his feelings
around Sochi. Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is not just Russia’s
closest neighbor but very much sort of the country that Russia identifies with, and really,
really identifies with, right—I mean, Russians of all kinds look at Ukraine to understand
their own country, and Putin is no exception. In Ukraine, there have been these protests
going on for now several months, and it’s because Ukrainians want a closer association
with Western Europe rather than [with] Russia. He interprets those protests as anti-Russian. But they’ve thrown the country into absolute
turmoil. Now, so all of that is in place. And his military buildup is in place. I don’t think it’s a matter of having
plans for the Crimea in place. It’s a matter of having plans for everything
in place. It’s like Chekhov’s gun hanging on the
wall, except that they have a plan for invading every country on the wall, right? That’s what a lot of the investment of the
military has been, is making plans for how are we going to fight this war and this other
war? How are we going to re-annex parts of Finland,
and how are we going to re-annex the Baltic states and Moldova and Ukraine? So here is the moment to take Crimea. And it’s clear, from the way that the Crimean
operation was carried out, that it was indeed a well-planned operation. It was carried out on the spur of the moment
when he saw the opportunity, but the plans for the operation had long since been designed. It was just a matter of implementation. Then there are a lot of people around him
who want to go further, who want to go into Ukraine, and he has nothing to lose by going
into Ukraine—not that he actually thinks about his losses. He’s a brilliant opportunist and not a planner. Actually, Sochi is a perfect example of how
little he plans. Usually, the Olympics aren’t very often
held in dictatorships, and dictatorships usually clean up their act a year or two before the
Olympics, and then do things like arrest all the political dissidents and reinstate the
death penalty like China did the day after the Olympics ends. But not Russia. Russia didn’t clean up its act because Putin
is not a planner, right? Putin realized that he had to do something
six weeks before the actual Olympics and released everybody, but it was too late. It’s not like he’s looking ahead to what's
going to happen if he invades Ukraine. He invades Ukraine because he can, and because
it’s good for mobilization, and it’s worked really well for him. If you look at his popularity curve, it goes
up vertically again, just like it did in September-October 1999, when he promised to hunt down the terrorists. It goes up vertically again, just as the economic
expectations curve goes down. You never actually see that in a normal country. You never see a leader whose popularity is
up and holding while people’s subjective economic well-being is down, drops down precipitously
and holds. Sociologists will tell you that those lines
have to meet. In fact, they have to cross in opposite direction. But that doesn’t happen in Russia. And I think the reason it doesn’t happen
in Russia is because ultimately, Russia has reverted to this state of mobilization identification
with the state. He has delivered what he promised, which is
to bring back to people the feeling of identifying with something great. MICHAEL KIRK - And when they're hammered with
sanctions, does that diminish him in some way? Does it diminish him with his people? MASHA GESSEN - Well, did something really
interesting with the sanctions. The U.S. and the European Union and Australia
and I think a couple other countries introduced sanctions, which were designed to—they were
based on a ridiculous premise that comes from a basic misunderstanding of the way that Russia
works, that if they squeezed him economically a little bit, his popularity would suffer,
people would protest, and then he would have to change his behavior. First of all, Putin had been power, by that
point, for 15 years. He had never shown an ability to change course. He had never shown that he reacts to pressure
with anything but aggression. But also, there's a fundamental misunderstanding
of how his dialog with his people was working. By this time, he had cracked down in the wake
of the protests, so Russia was two years into a full-fledged political crackdown. It’s not like he was worried about feedback,
and it’s not like protests were a real option. But they also clearly weren’t looking at
how much more popular he had become because of the invasion. So sanctions—I'm not opposed to sanctions. I just think that sanctions should be based
on moral considerations and values, not on the idea that they could squeeze him into
changing his behavior. But after sanctions went into effect, Putin
did something extraordinary, which is he made the sanctions worse. He introduced countersanctions, banned the
import of food products from all the countries that had joined the sanctions, with the exception
of Switzerland. That actually was a huge blow to the Russian
economy, but especially to sort of individual economy, because at the time, nearly all Russian
food was imported, partly because it’s an extractive economy. The ruble had been very strong for many years. There was no reason for Russians to make their
own food. They were importing it. The saner rationale for those countersanctions
was to jumpstart Russian food production, but of course, that’s not how it works,
right? Prices went through the roof. People really felt the squeeze. But that actually made the sense of being
at war stronger. Even though people suffered, Putin’s popularity
didn’t suffer, and it still hasn’t suffered. The reason that he hates the sanctions is
not because they put the squeeze on the Russian economy. He is concerned about a different set of sanctions. He’s concerned about personal sanctions
against that—that really make things difficult for him and his friends who are banned from
entry to this country, who are banned from having assets in this country, and who are
essentially banned from doing any business involving U.S. currency, which really hampers
their style. MICHAEL KIRK - So let’s take ourselves to
the summer of 2016. Why does Vladimir Putin, really in 2015 and
in the spring of 2016, initiate, unleash the hounds if that’s what he did, decide to
go in to, invade the presidential election in the United States of America in 2016? MASHA GESSEN - A couple of things. One is that Russia has actually made a habit
of being a disruptive force in Western elections for a few years now. It didn’t begin with the American presidential
election. A better way to ask the question might be,
why wouldn’t Russia try to meddle in American elections when it’s made a habit of meddling
in democratic elections? Now, the reasons for meddling in elections
are obvious, and I would actually begin with psychological reasons rather than strategic
reasons. The psychological reason is that Putin is
really and truly convinced, and the people around him are really and truly convinced,
that democracy is an unsound way of running things. It is messy. It is, as he saw with Bush and Gore, doesn’t
run very well, and it also probably isn't as honest as everybody says, right? In fact, when you ask a Russian official or
a Russian patriot about rigged Russian elections, they will always say, “You think your elections
are so honest?” That’s a sense of relief. It’s not, you know, this bit of—it’s
not hypocritical “What about-ism?” It’s sincere “What about-ism?” They're really arguments that democratic elections
are rigged. Well, if their democratic elections are rigged,
why wouldn’t you want a part of the rigging if you have an interest in the outcome? Of course Russia has an interest in the outcome
of American elections. It also has an even deeper interest in proving
that democracy is as rotten as they say it is. To prove that democracy is as rotten as they
say it is, it is good to help it along in becoming more rotten. The other thing is that I think in this country,
we’ve come to imagine the Russian system of meddling as a well-oiled machine or a well-commanded
army. That’s not what it is at all. There are a lot of technically savvy and not
so savvy people who want to get federal grants, and the Kremlin throws a lot of money at organizations
that will sell a good pitch of being able to meddle in something or wreak some sort
of havoc somewhere, where havoc ought to be wreaked, right? It’s not so much that Putin sends out an
army of hackers; it’s that there are groups of hackers who want to take the initiative
of doing something really awesome, which is, of course, how we get two different groups
hacking the Democratic National Committee at roughly the same time, without apparently
being aware of each other. MICHAEL KIRK - Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. MASHA GESSEN - Right, Cozy Bear and Fancy
Bear. The whole thing is self-perpetuating and messy
in different sorts of ways. But of course there's also the element of
his personal hatred for Hillary Clinton, and it’s not just hate her. I think it’s like Hillary Clinton was impossible
as a U.S. president. To imagine that he would have to deal with
her as a senior partner, a woman—I mean, he already has to deal with [German Chancellor
Angela] Merkel. The lengths that he has gone to to assert
his masculine dominance over Merkel is amazing. He literally sicced dogs on her. He has made indecent jokes in front of her,
just to try to discomfort her. He hates dealing with a strong woman, and
one as president of the United States would be just awful. I don’t think he ever believed that he was
going to be able to help get Trump into office. I think in that sense, the people who prepared
his briefs read all the same sources as we do. They were just as convinced that Hillary Clinton
was going to win the American election as The New York Times was convinced that she
was going to win the American election. MICHAEL KIRK - So in 2008 and other times,
it was obviously espionage, and everybody steals everything from everybody. It’s when it’s activated through WikiLeaks
and others that it changes into pure politics? MASHA GESSEN - Well, that’s where it gets
really—I mean, we don’t know, right? I think that Julian Assange has his own megalomaniacal
views of his role in the world. He’s certainly alone against the entire
world. Who made the decision to release the products
of the leaks at that particular time? I think there's actually every indication
it was Assange. How long had he been sitting on that material? Did he get it on the eve of the leak, or months
and months before? We actually don’t know. MICHAEL KIRK - One question in passing. Nobody’s actually reached out and tried
to stop Putin along this long narrative we’ve been discussing, that we know of. When Ukraine happens, we don’t fire back
cyber stuff or close a bank. ... With the lethal arming of Ukrainian rebels
or Ukrainian soldiers, one might have said, “Well, we’ve stepped up to him and stood
up to him,” but maybe not. And, as you have articulated, it might have
pissed him off, and off we go again further and further along. We get here, we know it. [Then-Director of National Intelligence James]
Clapper knows it. Eventually the FBI knows it. Certainly Obama knows it. And there were certainly arguments: “We’ve
got to push back here. We’ve got to let him know.” From what you know about Putin, and what you’ve
been talking about this afternoon, how would Putin have reacted if there would have been
pushback? MASHA GESSEN - Again, it’s very hard to
argue a counterfactual, and I don’t think that Putin’s reaction should be the consideration. I think we have known for a very, very long
time that Putin is dead set on a particular course, and he’s going to pursue it. When he gets very strong pushback, he steps
back, and then he comes back again in the exact same direction, doing the exact same
thing. The question should not be, what does Putin
do? Obviously it’s responsible to consider it,
but it’s not terribly complicated to predict what he is going to do. The question should be, what are our values,
and what do we do in accordance with our values in this situation? The sanctions, I think, are a very good example,
right? The sanctions, as a strategic move, are a
failure, and a predictable failure. The sanctions, as an expression of American
values, wouldn’t have been a failure if they had been framed and implemented that
way, right? It is wrong to do business with a dictator. It is wrong to do business with a head of
state or with a state that carries out the first forcible annexation of land in Europe
since World War II. In accordance with those considerations, what
does the United States do? It probably introduces similar sanctions. Doesn’t do it step by step the way it was
done, because it is not gradually more and more wrong to do business with that kind of
state. It is instantly wrong to do business with
that kind of state. So you introduce sanctions all at once, and
perhaps in somewhat different areas, or perhaps not. But you don’t do it step by step, because
the step-by-step process was intended to show Putin that we mean business, and he has to
stop. Like hell he’s going to stop, right? That’s not the kind of pushback that will
make him stop. You know, again, there's also basic misunderstanding
that he thinks that making life worse for his people—I mean, we think that making
life worse for Russians is going to make Putin stop. He has been making life worse for Russians
for years, and it certainly hasn’t made him stop. MICHAEL KIRK - So what do you think Trump—what
do you think Putin thinks of Trump? … MASHA GESSEN - Oh, he very clearly sees Trump
as a buffoon. Trump is, in some ways, the expression of
everything that Putin disdains. He disdains lack of control. One thing that he also has cultivated as part
of his image is his never betraying emotions. That’s not true. He actually betrays emotions quite a lot,
but his idea of himself is somebody who has a flat affect and purposefully never shows
any emotions and is always calculated in everything he does and says. Also not true, but that’s how he thinks
of himself. Trump is the exact opposite of that. I mean, I think that that kind of lack of
control over his words and actions and emotions and reactions makes Putin look down on him. And I think, at this point, Putin feels also
a little bit betrayed, because along with much of the media establishment, and certainly
much of Russian media, he has bought the idea that he elected Trump. He loves that idea. He took a couple of victory laps after the
election. And now Trump hasn’t delivered. In a way, Russia is worse off with Trump in
office than it was with Obama in office. MICHAEL KIRK - Because? MASHA GESSEN - Sanctions remain in place. There's no sign that they will ever be removed. Trump is less predictable. Obama was always—you could basically easily
predict that he was going to go for the least engagement possible in any given situation. It’s not true of Trump. Trump liked firing 59 Tomahawk missiles at
Syria. Trump loved dropping the mother of all bombs
in Afghanistan. It looks really good on television. As Trump gets pushed into a corner, what is
he going to do to make himself to look good on television again? Putin understands that kind of thinking very,
very well. As we speak, things are getting pretty rocky
in Syria between Russia and the U.S. I was just in Moscow recently, and Russian
television is talking about how Trump hasn’t sort of made good on his promises. Russian television is also spending a lot
of time on Syria, on how Russia is waging a heroic war against ISIS and Syria, and American-backed
terrorist forces are pushing back. That’s the narrative. America is backing terrorist forces in Syria,
and Russia is waging war against them. It’s hard to get Russians mobilized behind
the Syrian effort. It hasn’t been nearly as popular as Ukraine. But it’s important to Putin personally. And he will not step back from it. MIKE WISER - So one of the questions is by
2016 election, there's a lot of talk of Russian botnets, propaganda, influence on social media. How does that happen? Going back to 2011 and 2012, the Russian government,
what does Putin see when, at that point, it’s Facebook and social media seem to be driving
protests, change and the Arab Spring? Is there a moment where they're reconsidering
tactics, are realizing the power and the danger of social media after 2012? MASHA GESSEN - I wouldn’t overemphasize
it. I was just talking recently to Adrian Chen,
who did that wonderful story on the Russian troll factory, and he said, “If I had known
that the intelligence agencies were going to use my article so prominently in their
report, I would have emphasized how incompetent they are.” It’s not all that we imagine it to be. They did catch onto social media. They caught onto social media late, and not
every agency has even figured out that social media exists. When the political crackdown began, they didn’t
employ social media at all in their investigations. They would go through people’s printed out
photographs and handwritten notes to try to figure out context. They never went online to try to figure out
how to crack down on people’s actual networks. So it’s—they have a lot of money to throw
around. They are interested in increasing their electronic
influence around the world. This is true. And there are some companies that are enterprising
in sort of absorbing that money and doing stuff for that money, and they have no scruples
about what they do. But to imagine it as a concerted effort and
as sort of an all-out war on Western democracy through high-tech means gives them a little
bit too much credit. MIKE WISER - But does he change his approach
even inside Russia after those protests? How does Putin change once he sees all those
people in the street? MASHA GESSEN - Oh, well, no, what changed
when he saw people in the streets was actually much more conventional. They started arresting people. They changed the laws. They changed the laws to enable them to prosecute
anybody for perceived violations of public assembly laws. So it used to be that—I mean, the laws were
very restrictive in the first place, right? You had to get a permit to hold a demonstration,
and on that permit you had to indicate how many people were coming to the demonstration,
and if the number of people who came to the demonstration exceeded the number of people
on the permit, then you went to jail for 15 days. But that still only hit the organizers of
these protests, right? So that’s what happened, for example, after
the first protest, the first large protest. People had a permit for 300 people because
that’s how many people used to show up, and 10,000 people showed up. So the people whose names were on the permit
application went to jail for 15 days for all those people who showed up. What they did, when Putin cracked down, is
they changed those laws to be able to prosecute anybody who participated in the protests for
violations. That is a basic instrument of state terror. You have to create the mechanism of random
prosecutions, because by definition, you can't apply a law like that uniformly. If 50,000 people come to a protest, you can't
arrest 50,000 people. You can only arrest some of them. You certainly can't send 50,000 people without
reinstating the Gulag. You can't send 50,000 people to prison colonies,
put them through the courts, etc., etc., so you have to pick out a few to make the threat
credible to the many. But they can't be the leaders, right? They have to be ordinary people. So they did that. And they prosecuted—at this point, the number
of people who have been prosecuted in connection with the 2012 protests is over 30, and most
of them have gone to jail for three or four years. These are just ordinary people, right, going
to jail for peaceful protests. They're picked out at random, and they're
picked out at random times. It can be two years after the protest. They say, “We found videotape of you beating
up an officer,” and then that person is picked up. So that’s one thing they did. Another thing they did is the “foreign agents
law,” which creates unbearable burdens for functioning of any NGO [nongovernmental organization]
that receives foreign funding. Basically they’ve decimated civil society
through doing this, and they’ve prosecuted a lot of people from various organizations
for failing to register as foreign agents. They’ve paralyzed the work of many organizations,
basically, with these prosecutions. Let me just finish. The third thing they did is the anti-gay campaign. The anti-gay campaign is, it’s much more
of a sort of standard scapegoating campaign. But queer is a perfect stand-in for everything
that Putin perceives the protesters to be. They're foreign; they're other; they are something
that didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. We've only had queers since the Soviet Union
collapsed. They're a stand-in for everything Western
and everything imported. And it gets traction with sort of this desire
to return to an imaginary past with the traditional values, whatever they were. That’s also unleashed a lot of violence
on people who are perceived to be gay. So that channels a lot of the violent impulses
in the population. MIKE WISER - So what does Putin want now? He started wanting respect from Bush. But where are we at this point? What's his approach to the West? MASHA GESSEN - Oh, he still wants the same
thing. He still wants a bipolar world. The Syria story is actually a perfect example
of how this unfolded. You know, Putin’s happiest moment came in
September 2013, when he hijacked Syria. If you recall, Obama said there was a red
line, and then he couldn’t get congressional support for intervention in Syria. Then he decided not to do it without congressional
support, and he basically was losing face. Putin stepped in and allowed him to save face
and said that he was going to negotiate a chemical disarmament with [Bashar al-]Assad. He wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, which
the Times published, that was just perfect Soviet use of American rhetoric against the
United States, calling out the U.S. for its willingness to violate international law. I mean, this is the man who annexed huge chunks
of neighboring countries. So that was—he was on top of the world then. And then, a year later, suddenly he is an
international pariah. Nobody comes to his party. He’s under sanctions. I mean, Ukraine, he could have anticipated
that there would be a strong reaction. But the anti-gay campaign, he certainly never
anticipated that there would be an international outrage over it. So he comes back to the U.S. for the 70th
anniversary of the United Nations, Sept. 20, 2015, with a proposal. He spoke at the General Assembly of the United
Nations, and he basically articulated his proposal. His proposal was that a new international
coalition, an anti-ISIS coalition modeled after the anti-Hitler coalition should be
formed. What he means is, because the Soviet Union
was part of the anti-Hitler coalition, the Soviet Union got to be a superpower and got
to have Eastern Europe. He wants the same thing. He wants to enter into this coalition with
the United States and get to be a superpower again, and also take parts of the world that
he wants, which is not necessarily former Soviet territories, but certainly what he’s
already taken and some more. Obama didn’t even meet with him. He was completely snubbed. He went back to Moscow humiliated, untended
to. Russia started bombing Syria a week later,
and has been ever since. The war, Russia’s participation in the war
in Syria, is basically an attempt to blackmail the United States into giving Russia its superpower
status back. JIM GILMORE - I think you missed the back
in September of 2004, Beslan and what it represented, and why it was important to understand about
what was going on there. MASHA GESSEN - Beslan was, if you could imagine,
an even more shocking terrorist attack than the explosions that killed people in their
sleep. That was Beslan, the siege of a school in
the south of Russia, where nearly 1,000 people were taken hostage. Then more than 300 people died, most of them
children. As we learned, thanks to an independent investigation
carried out over the next couple years, the deaths of those children were really the FSB’s
doing, the federal troops’ fault. They shelled the school at point-blank range. They fired at it from tanks. A lot of the children who burned alive because
of a fire that raged, because the school was shelled at point blank range. I think that they were trying to do everything
to maximize the number of casualties, to maximize the shock effect. It’s also possible that they were just so
inhumane that they would just do it without even having that goal in mind. But Putin used Beslan as a pretext for canceling
gubernatorial elections. He framed it as an antiterrorism measure. It was a cynical move, because clearly his
very detailed decree in canceling gubernatorial elections had been prepared before Beslan
happened. But at the same time, it also expresses, I
think, his basic belief that anything democratic is always messy, and the way to respond to
extreme violence and to extreme disorder is to create more dictatorial powers. MICHAEL KIRK - So now my last question, which
is, are we at war? Is he at war with us? MASHA GESSEN - He is. Putin has portrayed and the Kremlin-controlled
Russian media have portrayed both the wars in Ukraine and the wars here as proxy wars
against the United States. Russia does not perceive itself as being at
war with Ukraine. It perceives itself as being at war with the
United States by proxy of Ukraine. And it certainly doesn’t perceive itself
as being at war with ISIS, even though it says that it’s firing at ISIS fighters. It perceives itself as being at war with forces
that are backed by the United States in Syria. They're quite open about it, on television. It would be beneath Russia’s station to
go to war with Syria or to go to war with Ukraine. Only the United States is big enough to go
to war against, and only the United States is grand enough to mobilize people enough
to have the kind of popularity that Putin has come to depend upon. …
