Angry Planet - ICYMI: The Origins of Russia's War in Ukraine

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

We’re digging into the archives one more time to bring you two episodes from the early days of the show. They’re all about Russia and Ukraine. I chose these two because I think they give a unique view of the origins of the war and reflect how much our thinking on Russia has changed since its “official” invasion in February of 2022.We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode. Stay safe until then.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew here up at the top. Jason is back from vacation. Just got back.

I am still a little bit on my back, but I'm going to be fine. We're going to get back to things as normal. Next week, Jason's already got the next guest. line up. I've got a big list of people from producer Kevin O'Dell, who is kind of the secret sauce behind the show, if you don't know. He kind of is amazing at picking topics and knowing exactly who we should get on to talk to. So I want to shout at Kevin. He doesn't get

come on the show very often, but doesn't get enough praise for the stuff he does in the background, which is a lot of like question suggestion and guest suggestion. But again, we're going to do another set of rerun. this week will be the last set before we get back to normal, going again deep, deep into the angry planet slash war college archive to a time when we were at Reuters. This first one is very funny because it's very Reuters. Jason introduces the Moscow bureau chief who then introduces

the guest. But why is it of interest now? It is of interest now because it's a gentleman talking about the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine. We've, forget, I think, sometimes that all this started back in 2014. It is older, much older, than the current situation. It's been brewing for a long time. So we're going to get kind of a view of that. The other episode I'm going to play, we're going to do two kind of cram together here, is our first episode with a gentleman we've had on a couple times, Peter Pomeranzov, talking about Russian disinformation. And I think it's very interesting because, for a long time in this country, we were a bit obsessed with Russian disinformation.

I certainly was. We had this idea that they were masters of it. There was obviously the conspiracy theories during the 2016 election that Russia had bought off or swayed our election in some way. I think a lot of that stuff is pretty overblown. Obviously, they spent some money, but not much and weren't super good at it, I don't think. but regardless, they were perceived as master manipulators. Well, now, you know, a few months into this war in Ukraine,

they can't control their own soldiers posting cringe on telegram, posting videos of them firing light machine guns at surfaced air missile emplacements and just blowing themselves up. Not exactly master manipulators, I would say. If you're subscribing to the substack, I'm going to have a little bit more to say about this there. But, you know, I've been talking a long time here at the beginning. So let's go ahead and get into it. When Ukraine pulled itself apart in 2014, the world was confused over who exactly was doing the polling.

Was the takeover of Luhansk, Benetsk, and other regional capitals, all part of a Russian plan, or just a local movement? Today, on a special edition of War College, we speak with Anthony Butz. I was in Dynetsk when it all went down and has a very interesting take on exactly what happened. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to a special edition of War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And today, I'm joined by Tom Barton of Reuters Moscow Bureau.

And Tom is also going to introduce our guests. would you be so kind? Of course. Anthony Butz is an independent journalist and documentary maker specialising in assignments in the former Soviet Union. He's covered the effects of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, the disaster of Hurricane Hyan in the Philippines, and has spent weeks filming inside the separatist declared Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine. His documentary on the subject, DIY country, is going to be shown by the French TV channel Arte, and also screened at the Hot Docks Film Festival in Toronto between April the 28th and May the 8th. Anthony, welcome.

Welcome. Thank you for having me here. If we could just start with Dinesk, when were you there filming? So I turned up in Denexk about 10 days after they'd captured the administration building in Dernetsk. I think that that was beginning of April 2014. And this was after Russia had already taken over Crimea, right? Yeah, I mean, things were moving very fast at that point. There'd been, obviously, the revolution in Kiev two months before,

and then Russia had invaded Crimea shortly after that. It was sort of spearheaded by its sort of special forces taking over buildings, pretending to be locals. And then, you know, it seemed like a similar kind of thing was going down in the sort of Dombas at that period of time, buildings sort of falling to, you know, mixed bag of soldiers, soldier types and locals. And when I sort of turned up in the region,

I went to Slaviansk first and filming there was impossible. It was just far too dangerous. But then Dernetsk was taken over and that seemed to be a sort of a different kettle of fish. It was almost like an entirely separate project. The building wasn't taken over by gunmen like elsewhere. It was taken over by local activists. And that was kind of very interesting because it was far more open. It seemed a kind of a different project to kind of put the civilian face on things.

And it was very difficult to disaggregate. whether it was really planned by Russia or was something kind of like very freewheeling and fluid from the grassroots pro-Russian movement. Can you just describe Denedzsk to us? How many people live there, Russian speaking, I assume? Yeah, so Densk is the capital of Dombas, which is the sort of eastern Ukrainian region. It's sort of famous for its coal and industry. just under a million people live there.

It's almost entirely Russian speaking. It doesn't necessarily mean what people's sympathies are. My guess is that people were wanting to return to the Soviet Union. Denex was kind of quite empty until the Soviet Union came along, and they sort of just obviously used it as a big industrial power base, lots of mines, lots of smelters and stuff like that. So people had this sort of very kind of like industrial, real, you know, stereotypical worker identity.

Suddenly, you know, 23 years ago, they find themselves part of Ukraine. And this really leaves the people quite lost at sea. Some of them take up the Ukrainian identity, some of them, the Russian identity, but most of them still feel in the Soviet Union. And over those years, Ukraine didn't really serve these people very well because of the corruption. The oligoths took over all the mines and industry, milked. for all it's worth left it in ruins. And so people were kind of very bitter at what

independence had done for them because of the oligarchy. And they saw the Soviet Union as, you know, better times. And simply because Russia, under Putin, it's kind of making itself out like it owns the Soviet Union brand. So people associated Russia's sort of oil wealth and so on with the Soviet Union brand and thought that somehow joining Russia, being part of Russia, is going to make their lives better. Russia's going to bring back the Soviet Union. It's going to give them some of that nice oil wealth and restart their industry,

whereas they felt that Ukraine, with its pro-Western stance and association with the IMF and sort of structural adjustment programs, and all that stuff was just going to leave the whole region much worse off than it wasn't even back then. Their identity was very fluid. Do you perhaps feel that, obviously, the big question that the world,

us is about Russian involvement. And obviously, Russia continues to deny that it ever had its actual official forces there in eastern Ukraine. But do you feel that without whoever these mysterious people that were coming and helping the local rebels, do you feel that if they hadn't stepped in, and many people assume they are Russian, that were Russian, that the local elites or groups simply didn't have the organisation, the skill to pull it off, and the whole thing was going to collapse unless there was outside help. Is that a picture that you saw that stood up by the evidence? I think that Russia was involved somehow, but I don't think it was as direct as everyone's thinking. I think it's more, at least in Denez. I think somebody was behind the scenes in place in Prushil in there,

but I have a feeling that that was done through oligarchs, and who told the oligarchs to do that, who put them up to it? I don't know. But Russia did play a vital role psychologically, which is the most important thing. Russia had moved its army to within, you know, the borders of Harcqv and Dernetsk area, so it could have invaded at any time, and the Ukrainian army would have been completely flattened. So people really felt that Russia was behind them. The Prime Min precedent also gave people the idea that whatever they do, they're doing so with relative impunity, because, as in they can rebel, because no one's going to stop them. The police who could have put down the uprising in Denex relatively easily just did nothing.

There were guys with knives holding knives in their hands, and policemen would not do anything. And these guys were just walking around the streets. And I spoke to the police and they said they were just waiting. to see he would win. So if the police have been confident that they would be punished by the Ukrainian government, if they weren't neutral, I think things would be very different. And that is down to the threat of Russia in that, in creating this atmosphere of impunity. In addition, Russia also had a very important role in the formation of the identity, steering the identity of the republic. In Dernetsk, it was initially, mostly a working class revolution. People who were in the mines, in the factories,

who felt they've got nothing out of Ukraine because of the corruption and oligarchy of all these years saw in this revolution a chance to upend things and sort of seize control. This was very quickly steered by the Russian media into a uprising against fascism, not against oligarchs, because of course Russia doesn't want to have a, my theory is that Russia doesn't want to have a working class revolution in its backyard, right? So it wanted to use the mobilization that all these angry miners had sort of brought about and turn it into that these miners had risen up spontaneously to fight fascism. This was a sort of a very important thing because when Odessa happened, when something like 30, 40 people were pro-Russians were killed in an arson

attack in Odessa, there was a massive psychological challenge. change that I observed in Dernetsk, it really was like night and day. The people really felt their identity was under threat. The people who had stood up for the referendum in Odessa, like they were standing up for a referendum in Denex, they had just been, do you know what I mean? It wasn't that they were scared that the same thing would happen to them.

It wasn't that. It was more like a kind of a moral outrage, backed by the fact that they could get away with it. So they could let loose their feelings. It was, they were looking for evidence that there really were fascists. And Russian TV spun the, what happened in Odessa, so much so that it looked like on TV as if Ukrainian government back near Nazis had incinerated 35 pregnant women. And that's what people were telling me in, in the,

administration building. And that they felt that this was like proof positive that they really were fascists. And after this period, the mobilization just like was like picked up so fast. You know, political scientists talk about mobilization before civil war as a bit like a kind of like an S. It starts off slowly, builds up a big head of steam and rises really, really fast and it sort tailers off when all the would be rebels have sort of joined up. And that was the moment when when everything really started going south for Ukraine after Odessa, because Russia had given them the psychological reason to fight. Some of this actually does go back to World War II.

I mean, the propaganda does, that even though Ukraine was actually probably more people died in Ukraine than anywhere else at the hands of the Nazis, they were able to form a Ukrainian Nazi brigade, if I remember right. and people are still, they still have that narrative in their heads. The Russians do anyway. Whether or not it's a false narrative and clearly it seems to largely be false, it's definitely very useful for propaganda.

Yeah, I mean, indeed, it's, unfortunately, there's always an element of truth in this stuff. And there are, as many the pro-Russian activists I met, you know, would tell me that, you know, There's a video you can find on YouTube of people in L'Avolve dressed up as SS officers going foyer, foyer, as they're reburying SS soldiers. This kind of stuff, I mean, of course, these guys are minority, but they are inflated to, so it becomes in people's minds that this is the entirety of the enemy they're fighting. And in essence, it becomes a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy because people's start talking about media wars, identities get polarised and more and more people become

radicalised on both sides. So you saw the rise of the Idar battalion, the Dombas Battalion, some of which had openly neo-Nazi people inside them and this is sort of, in any society, have these kind of people. And the media really brought them to the fall. Yeah, we've talked about the early days of it. I think, though, I mean, certainly outside Russia, very few people believe that Russian forces were never involved, certainly when it came to bigger battles later in the east of Ukraine. And I know you were based in Dinesk, but there was a lot you saw, a lot you heard, a lot of people you talked to. How, if you can answer this, how great an involvement do you think from what you saw and heard was there from the Russian military? and do you think that there, again, that seems to be the great shadow hanging over the Ukrainian forces there,

that they are worried if they push too hard, there would just be an outright invasion. Was that a realistic prospect as well, do you feel? Okay, so on May the 16th, I think, I was kind of, well, I wouldn't say kidnapped, but I was sort of held by a militia commander who, for the Nets People's Republic. And after he released me, we were talking about what the scale of the Russian involvement was. And he was saying, look, the Russians have provided, there was a guy that came over. He was saying that we're all going to be involved in a project called Project Retribution,

where we're going to go all the way to Lvov. And the idea is that the Ukrainian army is going to be shelling civilians the whole way because they're so incompetent, which was just radicalized the population and will just ride that wave of radicalization due to civilian casualties all the way to Kiev and beyond. I think that was a fantasy spun to get people like him involved. But he was saying that there were weapons and training that was going on in this base that was just near Lugansk

right on the border. And that was Russians who were training them and Russian weaponry coming over. I was actually, I got permission, and Moscovoi, by the way, was in that base. I got permission to go to that base. On the very day I was going to go, the Ukrainian Air Force bombed it. So, and this militia commander I was with, he was injured in that raid, so it was kind of lucky I didn't go. The point being that mid-May, the Russians had already set up some training center.

there was an active moving of weaponry across the border. Whether this was the Russian army that was directly doing this, whether this was Russian volunteers, you know, I don't really know, but for sure it can't, you know, it must have had the blessing of the Russian border guards or elements in the Russian forces for that to happen at a minimum. So, I mean, that's like two years ago, right? This kind of trickling in of weaponry that was coming in at that,

time really sort of was important in a sense that it started giving people guns because there weren't many guns that people had in Dernetska at the time. And it was also this time when Russian volunteers started coming over. And really, they were Russian volunteers. I know a lot of talked about the Russian army, but all the guys I met were volunteers. Whether they were paid for by the Russian government, it's not clear. But the Russian army was important, I think, as later on, when it looked like several times that the Nets People's Republic was losing because the Ukrainians were much stronger than they anticipated. And so the Russian army came in to save the day at least several times. And that's really why the thing was a stalemate, because the Nets People's

Republic was never allowed to really grow beyond its initial sort of borders. And, yeah, just became trench warfare. Can we talk just a little bit about the situation now? Who controls Denez? Yeah, it's a good question. So, in my opinion, you've got people like Pushilin, Zakhine, and so on. They notionally controlled Denezsk, but really the true masters are the Russians. For instance, my character in the film, Boris Litvinov, who is the head of the Communist Party, was kind of threatened by Alexander Borodai, who was the Prime Minister of Denex People's Republic, and he's a Russian consultant, right, from Moscow. So he basically said, look, this is a recorded phone call.

You can sort of listen to it on the internet. It's quite entertaining. He said, look, Boris, don't run the Communist Party. Stop all your activities, you know, because I've got to know that you're on our side. And Boris was kind of like tried to bluff Boroadai by saying, you know, like people are going to have another revolution. and I am barely holding them back from the barricades. And, well, this was kind of like bullshitting from Boris's part because I turned up to a couple of his sort of little rallies

where he was trying to get communists involved to try to put in some kind of bring the government of the next people's republic back to its sort of working class origins. Kind of nobody really turned up apart from a few old women. And then Boris was then pushed out of the local elections. So there seems to be a lot of evidence that Russia is really pulling the strings here using people like Pushulin as puppets. And insiders that I met with in Dene's People's Republic were saying that the way it works is Russia provides the military guarantee. Their economy is also completely dependent on Russian aid.

So Russian can always withhold the aid. And that will mean there's civil unrest inside the republics. this is their sort of lever over them. Plus also because they allow the officials to skim off some of their aid, that's a way for keeping them sweet. So, I mean, Russia controls it through mechanisms like that. It's also sort of taking over the military structures as well. I know that your film was very much focused on the sort of the personalities, the sort of the human side of the revolution. But I mean, I think that's, you know, all revolutions are actually at the end of the day, not made up of sort of faceless forces. They're made of a

people, aren't they? So that's actually very a unique viewpoint. Yeah, yeah. And that's really something I wanted to get across because when you watch the film, it's not like you really learn that much about Ukraine and geopolitics, but I think you do learn a lot about what it's like to be in a revolution, the kind of people that turned up, the kind of forces that drive it and the sort of ultimate destiny of revolutionaries. Like, I think it was it, Camus once said that every revolutionary is destined to be either a heretic or an oppressor. So that certainly was the case. And I just was so struck by how very Russian it looked, you know, just the way everyone was dressed, the casual profanity, you know, I mean, it's just such a interesting looking group.

I mean, they look, I guess, like what they are. They look like people who came out of factories or mines or, you know, I just thought it was fascinating. There really is a civil realisational difference between the type of people in Donbass that are for the Soviet Union for Russia, because they reject, you know, they're kind of people out of time, right? They reject the way the Ukraine is trying to, the hipsters and in Kiev and the Maidan, people who want no corruption and so on. because they, it's completely different kind of people, really. All this kind of stuff about gay Europa and that thing.

It's just, it's just sort of an expression of the fact that they really consider themselves a different kind of people. And this was really what the Kremlin were tapping into, that kind of dissatisfaction and anger. Russia helped a lot by providing key military and logistical support and ideological support and so on. but they gave voice to grievances that were already there. And one must have forgotten that Ukraine deserves a significant amount of blame in this whole crisis for basically failing to deal with these kind of deep set, deep set grievances. That's why you'll find now that there's a lot of public support still for the rebel movement, even though they know that they were taken over there were in many ways they were fooled and so on.

they're still proud that they stood up for, you know, for, I guess, I mean, it's a bit pathetic, but for their dignity, you know, these were things that Ukraine hadn't addressed and it dealt, you know, it sort of paid the price really in the kind of, you know, in the sort of anarchy of geopolitics for that. And it's also, it's very logical. I mean, it seems to fit the fact. So it's hard to, you know, if you listen to it from the outside and, I mean, just an American point of view, I mean, I couldn't be further. from the events, you know, it's hard to defend, right? I mean, yes, they are getting screwed, but, you know, maybe it doesn't help to do what they're doing. But you know what?

This is very, very philosophically interesting. Because if you don't stand up and fight against these big forces, right? Because, you know, capitalism is about conflict, right? If you don't fight, then you don't get anywhere. But they had tried, it's not as if it's the first time. that people in Ukraine had sort of tried to fight these big forces of corruption and so on. Each time they'd done that, they'd been screwed over. I remember going to Denex about five years ago and doing a story on kidney transplants.

People were selling their kidneys in Denexk because the corrupt policemen were framing their relatives, threatening to not let them be in school, go to university and so on. And so they were having to sell their kidneys to raise the cash to bribe the police. this is if you don't control this kind of stuff then people will seek more violent forms of getting what they want and they'll obviously get manipulated along the way this is no different from what Trump is doing and whether you blame Trump as the baddie

who is responsible for that for what's happening in Russia yeah Trump is there'll always be somebody like Hitler or Trump or somebody who'll capitalize in on this grievance but ultimately you've also got to blame the people and the system that lets it get to that state as well. And when you ignore that, when you just put the blame on Russia or Trump or whatever, you're doing a massive disservice to these people because it's not like they're going to not be pissed off. They're going to carry on being pissed off and at one point they will rebel. Whether that's morally right or wrong to rebel, you know what?

I'm kind of feeling as though if you ignore people, then they have a moral right to rebel because they're literally, you know, society has got to be fair. I think we'll have to end it there, but thank you so much for joining us. And it's fascinating to find out exactly how this came about. All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We'll be back after these messages with a brand new episode from the past. All right, Angry Planet listeners, thank you for sticking around for this ancient two-stack.

Without further ado, here is Peter Palmerensev. The media in Russia is lively, often entertaining, and largely state-controlled. Still, an illusion of freedom remains key to the Kremlin's grip on a country that spans 11 times of. Today on War College, we look at how Vladimir Putin crafts his message for both internal and external consumption. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello, and welcome to War College.

I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. Today, we're speaking with Peter Pomeranzov, a journalist and former Russian TV producer. His book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which, by the way, is a fantastic title, explores the Kremlin's weaponization of information. So thanks very much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. So, Peter, I want to open with a quote from your book and then a question. So you say that TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country,

referring to Russia. It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than the 20th century strains. Can you explain to us what this new type of authoritarianism is, and how is it more subtle than its predecessors? Sure. I mean, the big difference between, well, there's two or three big differences between contemporary authoritarianisms. And it's not just Russia. I mean, there's several, there's several ones we could focus on.

I thought one Russian professor approved very well to me. He said, like, if Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violence. You know, in a world where there's just so many more information mechanisms, new authoritarian can use them to a much more sophisticated degree. I mean, the way it was more sophisticated, and it is shifting now, was that if the Soviets would basically suppress any kind of dissent and try to hammer home one big message, Putin's tebeocracy was much more cunning. it would allow sort of pockets of freedom. It would allow liberals to exist. But then it would

fray and manipulate them in a certain way to make them, at the end of the day, strengthen Putin and the Kremlin. I mean, in a world, there are so many media resources, you can't censor everything, you can't suppress everything, but you can be subtle and sort of play it. I mean, so I'll give you a few examples. So you do have talk shows in Russia. I mean, if you've sort of debating shows, political debating shows. They're actually very, very good. But they're centrally scripted. So there's a sort of fake left-week party, which is created in the Kremlin and run by the Kremlin. And there's a fake right-wing party, which is created and run by the Kremlin. And they kind of debate with each other. Both of them are so absurd, they make Putin look sensible by contrast. Or, for example, there is, you know,

one of the institutions I worked for in Russia was something called Snob Media, which was run by, created by Russia's richest man. And it was meant to be like the Russian version of the New Yorker. Plus, there's going to be a TV channel which never materialized, but there was a publishing house. And there was a website, sort of an elite Facebook, sort of a closed Facebook. And anyway, so it was dedicated to creating a new type of Russian, what we called global Russians. And you could tell everyone how awful Putin was, Mashchegasen, you know, the great Mascheges. I'm sure you know, it was one of the editors.

You know, it was, it was, you know, an arc, a Noah's arc of liberalism in many ways. But at the same time, we were all really aware when we worked there that, my God, you know, this is being funded by Russia's richest man. There's no way he couldn't have done this without the Kremlin's kind of, you know, permission. And that was kind of the point. So, I mean, the point was to give liberals a place to breathe and sort of bend their frustrations. But at the same time, you know, it was called Snob. It was funded by Russia's richest man that Kremlin could easily go. look at these liberals, look at their global

Russians, look at the lifestyle that promotes. Their politics is liberal and their lifestyle that the promoters of holidays in Europe, which is inaccessible to the vast majority of Russians. So, look at our liberal oppositions, funded by these sort of like the westernized, spoiled oligarchs. And sure enough, the guy who funded it

then became the pseudo-liberal candidates at the elections. He got very respectful, 14%. soaked up the liberal vote and then promptly disappeared from the political seat. You kind of done this job. So it's a much, much subtler and much more kind of system than just like, you know, stupid old Soviet rule to suppress dissent and thus created a really sort of like strong anti-communist movement. So who's behind it? Who's thinking in such a, I don't know, a sophisticated, smart way? Well, I mean, look, it develops.

You know, we can look at the way it developed through the 19s. Actually, the first people who let it happen were Democrats. So in the mid-1990s, it looks as if Yeltsin, who was a more kind of pro-Western president, would lose the elections to the communists. He'd really become social democrats by then. And so all the oligoths got together because they were really scared of this. And in order to save democracy, they hired a sort of a new type of political consultant called a political technologist, a 21st century propagandist, to create sort of pseudo-scare stories and help rig the votes and help rig the election. And it's quite funny, it was a class of liberal political consultants who actually made this happen.

A lot of them regret it now. A lot of them say, openly, that was the moment when Russia lost it in 1996. So in order to save democracy, we used undemocratic means. But with time, kind of one of this class of political consultants emerged as, you know, as the most powerful one. a guy called Vladislav Sarkov, who's very much, you know, a tight guy's kind of figure. He was a bohemian and a dissident, all kind of dissident in Soviet times, studied theatre, then became a PR guy, sponsors modern art festivals, writes postmodern novels, which are okay about cynical PR men.

And he kind of, he calls himself one of the authors of the system. I mean, he talks about it openly, and he ran him for a while, he ran TV and political parties. But I wouldn't say it's one person. It's a very, you know, it's a big state. It's a very fluid, reactive state. So it came to symbolize it in many ways. I don't think anyone has total control. Not even Putin himself?

Well, Putin doesn't, oh, in that sense, you mean? As in like, is it, Putin is the arbiter of all the decisions. I mean, nobody's, the system isn't, it is a postmodern system that way. You know, it can sort of like work in various ways. And like, somebody in the provinces can be running their own mini projects or some of the oil and gas thing will be running their own mini project. It's quite flexible. It's not actually very rigid that way. All right. We've said the word postmodern a couple times here. And in your book, you say a

postmodern dictatorship is one that uses language in the institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. And you kind of talk about how this model of Kremlin propaganda kind of takes the West, digests it, and then perverts it. So could you explain how the Kremlin does this? How do they use the Western messages and twist them on television? And what exactly is, do you mean by a postmodern dictatorship? Well, so the key ideas of sort of postmodernity are the idea of the, you know, or Bodry article, the Simulacra, yeah, a thing which looks like something but actually isn't it itself and something quite different. Some lacquer is maybe the most overused word in Russian politics, all the analysts use it. So we have pseudo political parties,

pseudo-independent media. It's all pseudo. It all looks free, but actually once you get into it, it works to completely different ways. This was one of the great things of Khachabendu Kizu, the great Georgian reformer, maybe one of the most effective post-Soviet reformers. He was like, we live, and he's quite a lot. We live in a world where nothing is what it seems. I mean, the police are not actually police. They're involved in racketeering. The tax agency are not the tax agency. All the signs you see are something else.

So that's what we mean. Also, we mean by the loss, the lack of any one coherent narrative, many, many, many little narratives and the lack of a stable social individuality and role. But just coming back to this idea of some alacra, because that's the most coherent one where we talk about policy. So take elections in Russia. Russia has, you know, elections.

with different political parties, running against each other and competing, and, you know, there are debates on TV. If you were to just tune into it, you would think, oh my God, it looks just like America. However, everybody knows who's going to win, a priori. Everyone knows that they will be rigged.

And there's a great essay by Stephen Holmes about the New York University. Professor Liddah, it's actually a ritual. It's actually a ritual where you go and pretend to sort of take part in the serious vote. Everyone knows exactly what's going to. to happen. The faking is quite transparent. The state is saying, we are so powerful, we can fake these results. And, you know, the whole point is for the state to show its power. So even though

it's authoritarian power. So through the ritual of a democratic vote, or looks like a democratic vote, you're actually reinforcing an authoritarian model. So that's one, I think, very, very good example of it and a sort of a, you know, a fairly pointed one because elections is always what we sort of associate with democracy. So that's actually taken from the West in a way, right? I mean, that's, I mean, the Western idea and ideal of democracy. And you talk about how the U.S. is used. Foreign media is woven into the Kremlin's version of the media.

Right, you talk about Larry King quite a bit in your book and his RT show. Yeah, well, not quite a bit. I think Larry King has two lines in my book, but there are very important two lines. I apologize. You talk about Larry King as an example in your book. Well, Larry, look, so I mean, here we're talking about RT, which is Larry King had a show in RT, which is the Kremlin's foreign broadcaster. It's not in Russian.

It's an English, Spanish, Arabic, a few other languages, I think. So RT is very interesting, again, for the same reason. So RT, when you switch it on, looks just like CNN or the BBC. I mean, down to the music, you know, it's like it's very, very similar. The presentation, everything is switching on and going, oh, look, it's just another sort of like international TV news channel. And its slogan is very interesting. The slogan is question more, which is a really clever slogan because, you know, that's very much the Western ideal of what journalism should be all about. I don't know if you saw their advertising in Washington, D.C.

It was sort of Tony Blair preaching before really nicely sort of drawn posters. Tony Blair preaching before the Iraq war. And below it says, this is what you get. I said the Iraq war if you don't have a second opinion. And then Conan Powell as well. Which is, you know, how can you possibly disagree with that idea? That's, you know, the essence of Western, the Western ideal of journalism is to question more and question power and have a second opinion.

But then RTE used that ideal to kind of do something very, very interesting. They sort of, well, basically they destroy, well, they destroy sort of the line between information and disinformation. Once you sort of get rid of the idea that there's any kind of sort of, you know, objective truth out there, which is, you know, there probably isn't. They kind of take that to its extreme by saying, well, then it's fine for us to do disinformation. Or they'll have experts who aren't, who just literally, just muck cases taken off the street a lot of the time.

A neo-Nazi from Germany will suddenly be key German expert on European affairs or somebody from Linda LaRouche's organization will suddenly be key American experts on world development. Because once you get rid of, you know, once you take the very noble idea of questioning more of undermining sort of hegemonic truth and you take it to its absolute extreme, you can basically say there's no difference between a Cambridge University professor and a freak. And so they take that, so strangely, they take a very, very healthy idea. and they take it to kind of like a place where it starts to undermine sort of its own, it's, it's own ideals.

So again, a little bit like election. You take elections and you push them to a place, which is the opposite of their original meaning. So that's why RTE is very interesting. And Larry King, God bless his soul and God bless his conscience, had a show on this. And I really liked the advert for it because it was, you know, was Larry King going, come watch my new show on R-T. And then it was like all the words that we associate with good journalism, I don't know, you know, truth-seeking, research, you know, bravery,

all these words sort of going very, very, very, very fast across the screen. Just visually, it was sort of taking all the cliches of Western journalism and sort of putting them through this kind of fast-forward effect, which in the end sort of makes them feel almost meaningless. You know, they just become just words. And it always seemed to be like a big FU towards Western journalism. We can take your cliches and we can destroy them from inside. I don't know if they meant that.

You know, sometimes an advert says something deeper than it's the people who created it, intended it. I have this feeling that RT, or at least RT, or at least RT, dot com used to be a little bit more subtle. And the reason I say this is a couple of years ago, I don't know if you remember there was an American, at least alleged American spy who was a fairly low-grade official in the Moscow embassy who was wearing, at least according to the RTV footage, a bad wig when he was caught. I think that was true. Yeah.

That was true. Everyone covered that. Well, it was absolutely fascinating, though, because, of course, they broke the story. And I remember sitting in a newsroom people wondering, oh, wow, who is this RT? And I think at least at first it was kind of subtle. And people didn't really recognize it as Kremlin propaganda. And I don't know. When I watched RTV not very long ago, it was right before the Russians.

stepped in and started bombing in Syria. And they were talking about the U.S. bombing in Syria. And on the television channel, one thing I noticed is exactly what you were talking about. I mean, they did seem to have experts off the street. And they spoke about when they were talking about the U.S. bombing of ISIS, they referred to it very specifically as bombing civilians in Syria. And I don't know. Was it more subtle? I mean, was it always sort of this level?

I mean, they had some prominent anchors walk out a couple of years ago, saying things had gone too far. You know, it actually started as a soft PR project, quite classic soft PR project, just doing fluffy stuff about Russia. And then nobody wanted that. And they kind of changed in 2008 during the Georgian War. But they go through peaks and troughs, you know what I mean? My sense is that maybe they've really decided to zero in on the kind of, on the viewer they feel isn't. catered for in the US, which is the kind of fringe left and fringe right view. I think before maybe they were going for a slightly more, you know, maybe PBSy sort of view.

So I don't know, but listen, they occasionally do really good stories. I mean, they have a couple of, you know, it's all mixed in. This is the whole point. You do a good one, then you do a crazy one. You do a good one. You do a crazy one. So even now, you could switch it on and see a perfectly good story. So my sense is that after Crimea got really, really, really crass during the war in Ukraine.

That's when they were told off by Ofkhov, the British regulator. And like in the US, we have regulators in UK. And they've been told off, I know, four or five times, which is, you know, a lot for just, you know, telling lies, basically. So I don't know. It's a, I mean, I think it's a tool of Russian foreign policy. So if the foreign policy is very sharp at the moment, at that moment, they'll really go. for it. If the foreign policy is being friendly with the US, maybe they'll change their approach in the next couple of months because now Russia and the US are buzz and buddies again.

All right. I have a question for you, Peter. You actually worked in Russian TV. You were a TV producer. How overt is the control from your bosses? Like when you wanted to tell a story that they didn't necessarily want to tell, would they just, how did that work? How did they kind of steer the ship? Well, listen, I worked for an entertainment channel because when I arrived when I still was working with Russian channels, which is 2006 to 2010, it was already kind of dodgy to work for in these channels. So I was working for, you know, my background is entertainment. So I worked for a channel which brought the sitcom to Russia and bought stand-up comedy to Russia and brought some reality shows to Russia and all that kind of stuff.

There was very, I mean, they were actually, because they were an entertainment channel, they could do really risque stuff in their comedy. I mean, they did, they did a, they did a, Russian version of a British sketch show called Little Britain where they could do really risque stuff without ever naming names. I mean, there would be stuff about there was a regular sketch about Russia's most corrupt, Russia's only uncorrupt traffic cop.

And it's like, you know, he refuses to take any bribes and he lives in Penurion, his wife is always, he must become corrupt like everyone else. And there was a sketch about a hospital where like, you know, there's a room where you pay a bribe and, you know, you get this incredible sort of like, sort of, you get incredible healthcare and prostitutes and everything.

next door is the normal one where, just the sort of national health thing, and the people just dying horribly. Well, I got to say, though, speaking as an American here, I don't know about the NHS, that is actually literally the case. Yeah, no, no, no, no, I mean, I think we know, the whole world knows about America's healthcare due to the excellent subjective and analytical report for Michael Moore. but the difference in Russia is you just give a bribe to the doctor. You just put in this pocket. You don't pay it to an institution. It's not, you know, they haven't got to the point where corruption becomes market capitalism. It's just corruption still.

Maybe they'll mature into that. Actually, one of the big arguments for fighting corruption is just why don't you just institutionalize it, you know? Just make it exactly. You have it like in the US. Have it done it. But, so anyway, so, that. Actually, being an Entame Channel, they could do a lot of really risque stuff. But I also worked in their documentary department.

And one of the things they wanted to do was stories about teens, because it was kind of youth-oriented. And when I started doing stories about teens, I just found a lot of the stories had a political edge. Because, you know, it was about teens being beaten up by the cops, which is a real problem. Teens, you know, being sent to the army as national service in Ukraine. And, you know, there's a terrible problem with hazing in Russia. really bad. A lot of suiciders story about suicides

among cobscripts. And these shows rated well because they were about people's lives and people enjoyed them and young kids enjoyed them but suddenly

that made it political and when I pitched the next one they were like go and do one about footballers' wives. So it's everyone kind of decide to themselves

and everyone senses where the lines are and it's much more a case of self-censorship than that sense rather than anything else people just instinctively know that they've gone too far.

You were just talking about the military service. That was another really interesting part of your book. You wrote, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service. And I wanted to see if you would speak to, like, explain to us what those rituals of avoidance are and how they shape those people's relationship with the state. Sure, sure. I mean, I always find this fascinating as well.

It's a great question. So, you know, compulsory national military service is one of the, you know, basic ways that many states build loyalty and identity. So Israel, clearly, probably the most obvious example of a state is people really become Israeli when they're in the army. So Russia has compulsory national service. Certainly in Soviet times, going through the army was a big, big deal and a big part of you. Really, you know, in a sense, being broken by the state, you know, that's where you were kind of broken in and humiliated a lot. and you became a good Soviet citizen. Nowadays, there's still compulsory national service,

but everyone who can gets out of it. But some people, if you're studying, if you're a student at the university, that's one way of getting out. And actually there's all these sort of, again, there's some black, there's all these pseudo sort of higher educational institutions that get founded,

that you just pay some money and say you're studying there, and that gets you off. But not everyone can, you know, that's a lot of money. Imagine, like, just buying a college degree. It's going to be pretty expensive. So a lot of people can't have all that. So what do they have to do? They have to pretend.

They have to get like a letter from a hospital saying that they're physically unfit, you know, you've got asthma or diabetes or whatever. And that basically involves both the young person and their parent essentially kind of being sucked into a world of corruption, even if they never wanted to be corrupt. because you firstly have got to find a doctor who's going to give you this false piece of paper. You've got to find it. You've got to pay him money. That it's not, I mean, this is where Russia is so much fun.

The doctor won't just give it to you. You still have to come into hospital and spend a week there pretending to be really young. So already a young person of 18 is already learning how to sort of like to survive in the society. He's going to fake it. A bit like later when he grows up, he's going to pretend to vote. And everybody knows that they're pretending, but everyone kind of plays along, because this is the way society is formed over a long period of time. So you lie there pretending to be ill. Then you get out, and you still have to go to the military place where they will test you again.

You'll give them the letter. They'll test you again, but they go along with it as well. You should have to give another bribe there. And so, you know, to get out of military service, you've gone through this whole kind of sort of labyrinth of faking it and bribery and corruption, which actually makes you the ideal citizen of contemporary Russia, because all your life you're going to be sort of faking your voting in elections, faking your taxes, you're part of this game, but where you're actually very dependent on the state, because once you've faked it, firstly psychologically you're really, you know, you're a little bit like that.

Corruption, always a great way. It always corrupts the person who's, you know, at the bottom of it giving the bribe as well as a person demanding it. and you kind of learn to think it's normal. You know, if you're already faking it from the age of 18, then you know, it's no big deal to then kind of like go and pretend that you're, you know, voting a real election or pretend you're paying the taxes when you're not. We had a guest just a couple of weeks ago, Mark Galiati, who was talking about the fact that Russian military conscription is only for one year.

And that, in fact, it's very, very hard to train anyone. then turn them into good soldiers. And he said, basically, you have like three months of someone you can actually use on a battlefield before they're gone. So I guess what you're saying would actually almost explain that. It's about breaking people in. Mark is the world's biggest ex-exeter on the Russian military. I mean, I, so I actually have no idea what happened to the battlefield. But it definitely explained that it's much more about breaking people in. But the idea is very much to, you know, socialize people, make them part of, you know, make them part of the states rather than make them

integrate soldiers. All right, Peter, what do you see are the, what are the weaknesses of this system that you've described and are the cracks kind of showing? The weaknesses is that it's got nothing to do with reality. It's a pseudo, everything is fake. There's, there's, there's, there's, like this Tori Ador, you know, this bullfighter with this red cape of corruption and propaganda through which you avoids reality. And that's why everyone in Russia says.

said. It's like when will reality catch up with Russia? Because this like world of, you know, truth is actually quite a useful thing. You know, there's a reason democracies allegedly try to stick to, you know, a real process. Makes us, you know, face up to the problems in the country. Elections make us sort of like checks, checks how well your administration's action you work and so on and so forth. And so a system based on pretence and fakery at one point should hit the iceberg of reality. I'm really mixing my metaphors. Every time Putin comes near reality, he finds a way out there so far. So, you know, in 2012, there were mass protests calling for real democracy, a real modernization plan, and he looked in trouble. And he invented a fake war. He invented

fake fascists in Ukraine and, you know, this kind of complete enough solution, but it was efficient to get his ratings back up. Now, you know, that's kind of expanded into the war with ISIS. I mean, ISIS, of course, is a very real enemy, and it does need to be dealt with. But again, he's found a new story, a new narrative that distracts from the sad reality of the way Russian economy and society is going. There is no domestic policy anymore in Russian TV. I worked on an EU project recently about Russian TV, and we did like an analysis of, a content analysis of the news and stories on Russian news and current affairs. And there's hardly anything about social problems. It's all, when we were doing it, it was Ukraine.

It was all, you know, the global conspiracy against Russia, civil war in Ukraine. The whole world is going to, you know, going to hell. Only Putin can save it. It's like this movie about a world disintegrating to chaos with Putin as a sort of Batman-type hero to save it. Not a mention of sort of like, you know, hospitals or anything like that. So every time we think he's going to hit Hillary, He thinks of something bigger and better. And there's still a big stories that he can think of.

He can still do a big missile crisis somewhere. There was the Arctic War, which they were playing with. It's on and on and on. It's when he runs out of stories. But he's like Herazade of the Arabian nights. Thinks of another story. As soon as we think he's going to get executed, no, he pulls another one out of the hand. Which is very much based on TV, which comes back to our first thing.

TV is obviously sort of the satanic machine. that cooks up all these new stories. They don't need to be that related to reality. I mean, with ISIS, they are related to reality. In Ukraine, it was, you know, hallucinated a war into reality. So they just need to do good stories. So there you go. He's like a huge TV producer, a huge entertainment TV producer.

Like I was a tiny entertainment TV producer in Russia. He's like the great entertainment TV producer. Well, that sounds like, I mean, a terrific point to stop. I don't think we're going to get much better than that. So thank you very, very much, Peter, for joining us. Oh, and let me mention the name of the book again. Again, I think the title's fantastic. The book is, nothing is true, and everything is possible.

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We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Everyone's where they should be. Jason's back. I'm going to be ambulatory again. We'll talk to you next week.