Angry Planet - The simple reasons Russians love Putin

Episode Date: July 14, 2016

In the West, people tend to think of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strongman dictator – a former KGB man who oppresses his people, censors the media and antagonizes Russia’s neighbors. From the outside, it’s hard for anyone to understand how Putin stays in power, let alone stays popular.And Putin is popular. Pollsters put his approval rating at more than 80 percent. It makes perfect sense if you understand Russia.This week on War College, we sit down with Anne Garrels, a longtime Russia correspondent for NPR. Since the collapse of the USSR, Garrels has spent more and more time in smaller Russian cities and towns, getting to know people who don’t live the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the country's capital. Garrels gives the reasons why Russians love Putin, and why it’s in the best interests of the West to understand them.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. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. Russians are now sort of saying, we're sick of you blaming us for everything. We're sick of you accusing us of sins. that you share. We're sick of being ignored. So we need to find a new way.

Moscow gets all the attention, but that doesn't mean it's representative of Russia. This week on War College, we talk with a woman who's taken the time to go out beyond the Capitol and to talk with people who make up the heart of Putin's Russia. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front line. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring.

Today we're talking with former NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garls. Garls spent decades covering Russia for various news agencies and was even expelled from the country for her reporting in 1982. Her new book, Putin Country, A Journey into the Real Russia, details the rise of Putin's cult of personality from a perspective the West rarely sees, the common everyday Russian. So, Anne, thank you so much for joining us. I'm delighted to talk to you.

So can you tell us what it means to be Russian now and how that's different from being a Soviet citizen was? It's dramatically different. In the 90s, late 80s or 90s, you know, people were being paid suddenly $10 a month. They couldn't live on that. So they were all just scrambling to survive financially. And then as the years went on, they began to sort of say, well, what does it mean to be a Russian? And all the other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, or most of them, all blamed Moscow for their sins and decided not to pay attention to whatever sins they may have committed. And NATO then began to expand, and the Baltics were part of Europe, and bit by bit.

Russian, who are we? And that, I mean, we can discuss, was part of Putin's strength in the end. He gave the Russians an identity? Yeah. I mean, first of all, Putin comes in in 2000, and while Westerners applaud both Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin for opening up the country. Russians saw very, had a very different attitude to both those men. Gorbachev sort of sold them down the river.

I mean, I'm talking broadly speaking. Boris Yeltsin became an embarrassment, you know, was drunk when he was in Germany and conducting an orchestra as he gets off the plane and can barely stagger. and then is sort of invisible on and off, and nobody knows what's going on in the Kremlin. And Putin comes in, and nobody really knows much about him, but suddenly the economy improves.

Oil and gas prices, boom. Suddenly, Russians can get credit. They can get mortgages. They can begin to improve their lives. They can begin to improve their businesses, despite corruption and everything. And until about basically Crimea and the Ukraine and coincidental with the crash of oil and gas prices,

people began to live a lot better. Were people finally living better than they had been under the Soviet system? Or was it that they were back to after the crash of the Soviet system? Oh, they were living ever more better than after the, then in the Soviet system and then in the 90s. I mean, you had an emerging real middle class. You had people who had aspirations.

Even modest people who were a receptionist in a hotel or somebody working in the market, they could go on a cheap trip to Turkey or a bus trip to Europe. They could travel. They could see the world. I mean, every movie they wanted, and Russians made sure it was all subtitled. I mean, their lives were incredibly enriched.

I mean, you actually went, you left Moscow and went to a town, a city, I should say, that you had actually been to before. No, I mean, when I threw, I threw a dart at the map to find a place that I could cover all the time. I mean, it was clear, I mean, in the early 90s when I was based in Moscow, I mean, I would go here and there and cover this story and that story. But I really need, I wanted a place where I could get to know people and get to watch their progression. Frankly, it was a better idea than I understood at the time. I did not understand how much attitudes were going to change over time. And they did dramatically. I mean, in 93, you know, people in Chilobinsk were, wow, the West.

We want to be like them. And they're providing medicines and lots of financial aid to us in the midst of madness when we can't get food. We can't, you know, there was no, there were no antibiotics. You could go to the hospital and there were no x-ray plates. And the West was helping. Well, over time, they saw Yeltsin stole their election in Chilobinsk. In fact, the communist won in 96. And Yeltsin said, no, no, no, no, no.

They didn't win. I mean, people were, you know, desperate. They had no social services. They had, and they were beginning to look back. At the Soviet system, not with total romanticism, but they were also seeing the corruption that was erupting in their city. All of a sudden, you had, you know, mega villas growing up. And meanwhile, people weren't being paid. And it was like, what's going on?

Can you tell us about the town itself? I mean, what kind of town is it? Where is it in the country? just give us the basics. How many people live there? Well, it's about a thousand miles from Moscow. It's not quite snap dab in the middle of the country, but it's beyond the Ural Mountains.

I mean, during the war, it was beyond Hitler's Air Force. So it became Tankagrod. I mean, it became the military industrial complex. It's a pretty grim industrial polluted city, And the factories were all right in the middle of the city because in those days there was no transportation. And so people live right next to the factories. And that's still true to this day, although it has been changing dramatically in the last decade with new complexes, growing, apartment complexes growing up away from the smoke and smog.

But it's still a polluted industrial city. And it had ties to the Soviet nuclear program as well, right? Exactly. And, I mean, to start with, I was just covering the city. That was enough. But then I kept going further and further afield. And yes, as you say, it was also deep in the woods, about a three-hour drive from the capital. It was the heart of the Soviet secret nuclear program, sort of Oak Ridge and Los Alamos,

all combined together. Chelyabinsk was the capital of the region, and so you're saying this was a three-hour, the actual nuclear facility was a three-hour drive from there. Exactly. It was hidden far away, but close enough to Chilabinsk, the city, so it wasn't totally out of reach. So, you know, Stalin chose very carefully a place that was, you know, a place that had water resources, unfortunately because they became utterly polluted because of the Soviet nuclear program. And when people would come to Chilobin City and then be driven out there, they were driven out there in cars with blinders on the windows. So they didn't know where they were going and were not allowed to communicate from there when they were there.

And that still exists as a closed. city into this day. I mean, you cannot go in and out unless you have a special pass. One of them alone has 100,000 people. What is the city's relationship with that compound now? What do the citizens think of it? It's a really good question. What do they think of it? They don't like to think about it. And in the 80s, the environmental movement in Russia was exploded. And all of the accidents, pollution, poisoning that had gone on since Stalin started the weapons program in the 50s, was hidden. And people in Chelyan City don't want to know about it. That's not their issue.

Their issue is, frankly, pollution in the city. I mean, everybody has a very narrow view of what threatens them. and you can't talk about it now. If in the 80s you could talk about everything, all that discussion has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. What changed? Why do they feel they can't talk about it now when they could in the 80s? Well, it started actually even under Boris Yeltsin

because he encouraged that openness in the nuclear cities and then realized it was going to cost the government a huge amount of money. money because thousands upon thousands had died unnecessarily because the rush to create the Soviet nuclear program. So it started in the mid to late 90s. It was the environmental movement, which had supported Boris Yeltsin, suddenly became excoriated because it was clear it was going to cost them a lot. And then Putin came in and, you know, just, you know, just. start where they seem relatively benign, but at this point, any civil activists who are challenging the government, looking at the past, it's not a healthy place to be. They're causing problems,

and many of them were supported by the West, got money from foundations in the West. They have since become foreign agents, and that is, on the one hand, you know, it's an appellation, but it has huge resonance in Russia because it's a Stalinist appellation. You call somebody a foreign agent, and that means they're a traitor. And they've also been, the tax police have gone after them. They've shut them down. And it's not just the nuclear safety activists. And also the Russians have closed down information about all those sites, which had once been open in the late 80s, early 90s. So it's closed down. The discussion on it is closed down. Anybody who sort of wants to not be fingered by the authorities doesn't deal with it. Does that mean that there's a real act,

a very active secret police now back again? Oh, there's a hugely active now known as the federal security services, but it is very much the air to the KGB. anybody who sort of criticizes the government and puts their head above the transom and becomes too noticeable. Too noticeable in the West, too noticeable in Russia. I mean, their heads are chopped off. But they're quite clever in the sense that the Internet is sort of vaguely open so the kids, they can get any movie they want, they can download any Internet game they want to play. It just encourages their apathy, but also they know that don't go too far, and that's not going to be good for you.

You won't get into university. You will be tagged. It's a very subtle game that is now being played. I mean, are people still worried about the knock on the door in the middle of the night and disappearing? No, that's not the game now. Unlike the Stalinist period, when you didn't even know if you were going to be targeted. and why. People now know what the rules of the game are. You support the government or you don't. And if you don't, if you just sit in the kitchen and moan and groan about it, fine. And you can moan and groan to

certain extent on the Internet. The Putin administration has been very clever about sort of leaving it vaguely open, but there have been, you know, the cases of extremism in the last year where, you know, Some poor guy goes on his Facebook or the Russian version of Facebook and says, I don't believe in God. And that's in, he thought that was just within his eight friends, but it got reposted. And the repost got a reaction. And a court decides that he is an extremist. Excuse me? And he's in prison.

So atheism is now punishable by prison time? I know. I mean, bizarre in the extreme. Yes, we've done this major switch from, but it's enough. What it is is it's, I mean, they're probably only maybe, I don't know, I'm not sure what the numbers are, but maybe 100, 200 in the last year who have been prosecuted for their Facebook content. And it's just enough to make people worried. Uh-oh, that's not acceptable.

So the Internet is free, but it's not. Do they kind of police themselves? Like someone will post that comment, and then other people will say, like, oh, you shouldn't say that. That's not, you know, that's not appropriate. Take it down. Well, within people's, you know, sort of groups, no. But then I think people are beginning to, I mean, what is acceptable to say I don't believe in God? I mean, that is a perfectly acceptable comment under the law.

But a local court decides that that's extremism. Yet the internet still remains quite lively despite this. But for how long I see friends, you know, becoming frightened. Has their attitude towards you changed? I mean, fear aside, I've talked to people who've said that there's a lot of hostility towards the United States or the West in general that's genuine. Absolutely. I was reflecting sort of my more liberal acquaintances. And one reason why being in Chiljavinsk was so valuable was, you know, sort of watching the transition of views and watching initially a love affair with the West. We want to be like the West. And then, you know, as things went on, sort of going, well, you know, the West, NATO's encroaching on our borders. We're not part of the West.

They're isolating us. They're taking advantage of us. And there's a huge debate, although I think it's fairly clear that there was no agreement not to expand NATO. But there certainly was an agreement not to take advantage of Russia. its impoverished state. And I think Russians began to feel absolutely that, you know, the West took advantage of that. They didn't take advantage of their concerns. They didn't consult them. NATO bombs, Yugoslavia, which was a Slavic neighbor of Russia's, or not entirely neighbor, but there's an ethnic solidarity, or at least that's what was played up at the time.

Precisely. And Russians feel, I mean, many Russians, feel that, and many Russians I knew in Chilobinsk, and that was what was so great that in Moscow people stopped talking to you. They've got too much going on. But in Chilabinsk, I could really follow the transition of views to feeling that, hmm, you're taking advantage of us. You treat us like a loser. You don't care what our views are. And in fact, we're not losing. You just kind of touched on something I wanted to get into a little bit. What's the difference between Moscow and the rest of the country? So I think that most Westerners think of, when they think of Russia, they think Moscow.

And that's not really true. Not at all. And in fact, while I chose Chelyabinsk in the early 90s, it became more poignant as time went on. while I was in, you know, Iraq in 2011, or I was actually back home by then, but the media focused entirely on Moscow and the opposition protests, which were indeed pretty dramatic. But Moscow is a big sucking sound of money, unlike, say, well, it is, Washington, New York, L.A., Chicago, all combined. I mean, it has all of it.

You know, government, trade, money, investment, you name it, all condensed in one place. And the rest of the country sort of be damned. And so I would read about the, you know, because I wasn't in Russia at that point, I would read about these opposition protests and whatever. Many of them, I mean, and my friends from Moscow were in those protests. But in Chelyabins, they weren't happening. They weren't happening in Yacquaterinberg. They weren't happening in Vladivostok.

They weren't happening across the country. So the focus that American journalists and European journalists, I mean, all based in Moscow and sort of really just listening to people they liked, I mean, It was incredibly confusing and I think wrong. It did not reflect the rest of the country. I mean, it's like Trump. I mean, if you go to New York, Trump, hey. But you go somewhere else.

You know, it's like covering America from New York or Washington. And that's not what the reality is. You know, middle Russia, the identity is, the identity. crisis was much more profound there about who are we as Russians and damn you, what about NATO coming up to our borders? And I mean, Crimea is ours. And in fact, the issue of Crimea, it was astonishing across the board, even with liberal Russians and whatever. There was no question that Putin did the right thing as far as they're concerned in terms of taking Crimea back. We were pushing the envelope.

You know, the U.S. Victoria Nuland was, you know, sort of pushing the those who wanted to be in Europe. It was a really split issue in Ukraine. And I frankly think that most of the media has really just kowtow to the State Department version and Toria Newland's version of what went on. there and I mean it was a far more complicated issue. Well, what how do can you elaborate a little bit on that from the Russian perspective then? From the Russian perspective, I mean, it was hard to find a Russian who didn't think that Crimea wasn't Russian. Putin got a lot of points for that one.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to to see that that would be the case. I mean, I've been to Crimea any number of times. The population was largely Russian. Was it the, you know, legal? What the West was doing in terms of threatening were the Baltic fleet, the Russia's Baltic fleet based and the overall population that was essentially Russian speaking. I mean, we were really dancing with the devil. I mean, in fact, Moscow from the 90s on had been supporting Crimea. in providing a huge amount of money there already. Our approach was less than nuance, should I say. Well, it sounds to me, and you please correct me if I'm wrong,

then that, you know, in the West we kind of see Putin as this strong man dictator, and in Russia they see him as a guy that gives them an identity and stands up to who they see as bullies. That's a very good description. you know, he is a leader who still has, even though it's a question of the polls, I mean, it's a good 80%. And I kept asking friends of mine thinking there would be red lines. Okay, where are the red lines? When will this not be acceptable any longer as he cracks down on the media? Although he did say recently that, you know, the media should be free. I almost gagged. But in the 2000s, He benefited from the economic boom of oil and gas. People's lives became much better. And he very cleverly turned the sanctions from the West on Russia into sanctions against the West saying,

okay, we need to be independent of the West because everything in Russia, all consumer goods and foods, clothing, you name it, technology, were all West. And he said, we need to develop our own industries. This is a great opportunity. Now, has he provided the space for that? Not entirely. And that may be a shortcoming. But at this point, I was shocked at how many Russians said, we're going to suck up the sanctions. We're going to suck up the fact that we can't get Brie any longer, which we had come to love. We can't get foreign foods and technology and whatever restrictions are on them, because this is going to be good for us, because this will force us to create our own domestic industries, rather than being a total importer.

And they did actually just introduce a new jet, for example, first that they'd made for sale inside Russia and out. I mean, so that is something that I guess they've been putting their resources into. Yes, and into a lot of other military technology as well. How do you think it's going to change going forward? Do you think that it's going to become even more hostile to the West, or do you think that it's just going to, going to go its own way? Well, it can't just go its own way. I think you're seeing signs in Europe now that they feel they're getting sick of the Western sanctions, which especially cost Europeans a lot in business investment. We were never a huge factor in the Russian market,

but the Europeans certainly were the Germans. And you're seeing a backlash against that, how that goes forward. Also, Europe is dependent on Russia at the moment, at least for a lot of its energy supplies, gas in particular. I certainly believe, while I am by no means of Putin's supporter, that there are a lot of things that we need to talk to Russia about, whether it's nuclear arms, whether it's the Middle East, wherever it is. We have a lot of shared interests. and to have locked Russia out of the discussion, basically by sort of dismissing it as an incapable partner, has proven to be wrong. It's a dodgy business. But I think the problem is that Russians, we can't go in there in the same way we did in the Soviet Union and sort of criticize their human rights,

Because, you know, Russians now know a lot more about our country and our failures and our issues, whether it be, you know, I mean, whether we want to criticize issues in Russia on prison reform, or we want to criticize racism or whatever, they can very easily turn back at us and go, excuse me? Right. I guess between photos from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Russians are now sort of saying, we're sick of you blaming us for everything. We're sick of you accusing us of sins that you share. We're sick of being ignored. So we need to find a new way. And I am no Putin apologist. And I fear what he's doing there.

I fear the growth of fear amongst Russians who will, even if you had an opposition movement in Moscow and whatever. You know, when you're in a small town or not such a small town like Jilyavins, a million plus at a region the size of Belgium, three million plus, you know, where people are, you know, they're scared of speaking out because their businesses will be attacked by the tax police. I mean, there is an element of unhealthy, a huge element of unhealthy control. But I would just say, many of my friends would say, we don't like Putin, but it could be worse.

What do you think the end of his, because at a certain point, he stops being in charge, what does that look like? Do you think he'll remain in power as long as he's alive? You're dancing on an area where I'm uncomfortable, but I would just say, as Russian friends say to me, given sort of nationalist tendons, in Russia, give vested interests in the system as it is, it may not change very fast. Just to contradict myself, I will say that in Shil-Jabinsk at this point, there are, even though there is this sort of vertical power of Putin, which reaches down to every village and town, there's a really bizarre fight going on, and I think it goes to your question as to what happens next. And it is not so much ideological.

It would be nice if it were. It is much more about money and power. It is between the former KGB and the Putin appointed governor. I mean, these are not issues of who's better for the community. This is over money, which just makes the forecast totally unpredictable. And I just want to thank you very, very much for joining us. It's been a fascinating discussion. And I think it's a point of view that we haven't really had on the show before.

I think that's a good thing. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Your questions were great, and I'm just delighted to talk to you. Thank you for listening to this week's show. We hope you enjoyed it and that you'll subscribe on iTunes or wherever your favorite podcasts are sold. We'd also love to hear from you. Our Twitter handle is at underscore College, and every episode is posted to Reuters' Facebook page, so you can certainly comment there. War College was created by myself and Craig Heedek, Matthew Galt co-hosts the show, and our producer this week is Bethel Hapty, whose hearing is so acute.

She can actually hear what you're thinking right now.