Breaking History - The Dissidents Who Defeated Russia

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Ronald Reagan’s speech in front of the Berlin Wall in 1987 is legendary for its six simple words: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And two years later the wall fell. In another two years, the Soviet Union came crashing down. Many factors led to these moments. Among them: the failures of communism, the bravery of dissidents, and America’s role in challenging the “evil empire,” at least that’s what Reagan called it.  The dissidents—many languishing in gulags—heard America. They heard President Reagan. And many lived long enough to see their tyrants topple. One of them even went on to lead Czechoslovakia, the country that jailed him. His name was Václav Havel. In today’s Breaking History, Eli Lake argues that Havel’s experience as a playwright and dissident helps explain how plain truths defeat communist lies.  Eli also compares Reagan's Cold War politics with Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin. This comparison is more pertinent than ever after the showdown in the oval office on Friday.  Before any talks, Trump and his team made it clear that Ukraine would not get back the territory stolen by Putin. Trump excluded Ukraine from the negotiations, and accused Volodymyr Zelensky of being a dictator—a comment he now denies. Then, on Friday, Zelensky showed up to the White House to sign the critical minerals deal. The deal would give the U.S. access to half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in perpetuity. In exchange, Zelensky wanted security guarantees. Trump said no. The Romans would recognize this as tribute. The Mafia would call it protection money.  Eli unpacks all of this and so much more. Thanks to our sponsors: https://welcome.chaiflicks.com/lake/ Go to groundnews.com/BreakingHistory to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and stay fully informed on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Czechoslovakia today became the latest of the countries of Eastern Europe, once held so tightly in the Soviet grip, to throw off its hard-line communist joke. Lithuania proclaimed that it had returned to the status it enjoyed up until the Soviet Red Army invaded in 1940. 1989, 1990, 1992. Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania. These are the victims of Soviet communism breaking free of an evil empire. On the right side of history stands America. In the landfill of history lies the Soviet Union.

Today this all feels like a distant memory. Not just because the Russian bear is once again on the prowl, but also because the American president has gone from lofty ambition Mr. Gorbachev Tear down this wall. to hostile aggression. Don't tell us what we're going to feel. We're trying to solve a problem.

Don't tell us what we're going to feel. I'm trying to solve a problem. Don't tell us what we're going to feel. Because you're in no position to dictate that. Remember that. You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. We're going to feel very good. We're going to feel very good and very strong. You're right now not in a very good position. You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position, and it happens to be right about now.

From the very beginning of the war, Mr. Graham. You're not in a good position. It's not Donald Trump's fault that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and it wasn't on his watch that Vladimir Putin renewed the invasion in 2022. But the end of this war, much like the end of the Cold War, is going to tell us a lot about who we are as a nation. Before any Russian concession, before any talks began, Trump and his team made clear that Ukraine would not retrieve the territory that Vladimir Putin's army had stolen, and

that Ukraine will never have the security of joining NATO. Trump excluded Ukraine from the negotiations, accused its besieged leader, Volodomor Zelensky, of being a dictator, only to later claim he didn't say it. I would say that, you know, when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to, wouldn't the people of Ukraine have to say like, you know, it's been a long time since we've had an election. That's not a Russia thing. Trump's big idea was to get Ukraine to sign over half the rights to the country's rare earth minerals in perpetuity. But Trump wasn't even willing to make security guarantees in exchange for that. When Zelensky showed up at the Oval Office, Trump was expecting the

Ukrainian leader to thank him for this shakedown. The ancient Romans would recognize this as tribute. The mafia would call it protection money. But perhaps the gravest concession that Trump made was to relinquish the truth itself. Over the last month, he has sounded like Vladimir Putin's lawyer. He told a Russian-manufactured fable to the world, and he did it voluntarily. Good men went to the gulags for refusing to repeat the Kremlin's lies, and an American president just told them for free. He said last month that it was Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, that started the war. You could read that line in the Russian

state media, but here you were hearing it from the president himself. And I think I have the power to end this war. And I think it's going president himself. When America won the Cold War, it didn't do it alone. It was hand in hand with heroes who lived in the prisons of their prison states. We call these revolutionaries dissidents because they lived in truth beneath a system that compelled their neighbors to lie. Here is how Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it. To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this. Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph, but not through me.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. Against the lies of the Soviet Union formed a de facto alliance between the most powerful country on earth, America, and some of the least powerful people behind the Iron Curtain, the incarcerated authors and scientists rotting in punishment cells. Through this partnership, the 21st century was born in freedom. The victory was not just confirmation that free market capitalism was better than state-planned communist economies. It meant specifically that the nations forced to join a union run by strongmen in Moscow

had a right to chart their own course. Because day by day, democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none, not one regime, has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root. The dissidents languishing in gulags heard America.

They heard President Ronald Reagan. And many lived long enough to see their tyrants topple. One of them even went on to lead the country that jailed him. His name was Voslav Havel and his path from playwright to dissident along with Ronald Reagan's path to the American presidency helps explain how plain truths defeated communist lies. I'm Eli Lake and you're listening to Breaking History, coming up how America won the Cold War with the help of dissidents who refused to let the state's lie come into the world through them. I'm a dissident. Yes, I'm a dissident. I'm a dissident.

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Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. 1975 was a rough year for America. Both unemployment and inflation kept rising. It was a year of terror. The president appeared stunned momentarily, but he was not hit. He was quickly pushed into a crouching position. In the space of 17 days, two crazed Californians tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford.

Carlos the Jackal took an entire OPEC conference hostage. I have never been a quitter. Our country was still reeling from Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon. But as president, I must put the interests of America first. And then there was the humiliating exit from Vietnam. The American embassy was sacked, burned, and looted. The iconic image of a helicopter rescuing American staff in Saigon. 50 at a time they took off for the carriers.

Leaving our allies to the mercies of the North Vietnamese communists. In Washington, Senator Frank Church held explosive hearings that revealed CIA assassination plots and FBI political warfare. Basically, if the Cold War was a battle for planetary supremacy between the communists and America, in 1975, you'd have to bet on red. America was weak. Even the president seemed scared. Here is Gerald Ford talking about the USSR. Military competition must be controlled.

Political competition must be restrained. Crises must not be manipulated or exploited for unilateral, lateral advantages that could lead us again to the brink of war. It's hardly fighting talk. He's saying basically, don't piss off the Russians, whatever you do. Ford himself certainly didn't plan on doing so when the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited Washington in 1975, President Ford refused to meet with him.

And it's the same year he concluded a diplomatic agreement in Helsinki, Finland, which established new rules for political and economic cooperation between East and West. The Helsinki Accords codified the idea that the countries, known as the captive nations, would be recognized as part of the Soviet Union, a major concession. But imagine being a dissident and hearing that America had just given up on the independence of Moldova, Ukraine, or Estonia.

It must have felt like the end of the world. The agreement was not popular with the DC Cold Warriors either. Ronald Reagan, then embarking on his first ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become president, reared up in righteous anger against the concession to what he called the Evil Empire. We gave away the freedom of millions of people, freedom that was not ours to give. Now we must ask if someone is giving away our own freedom." But history is a funny thing. Because as much as Reagan railed against the Helsinki Agreement, by the time he was president, it would become his secret weapon. There was a time bomb hidden in the agreement which would blow up in the face of the Soviet

Union. It would do this with the help of dissidents, and particularly one dissident, a man called Foslaw Havel. Across Europe, there were many of these heroes. There was Lekwelesa, who organized an independent dock workers union in Poland through Solidarity.

Freedom is the right of man. Now others jump fences and tear down walls. They do it because freedom is a human right. There was Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for the Gulag Archipelago. And there was the great Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who was one of his country's greatest scientists, but threw away that glory in order to tell the truth. And of course, there was also Natan Sharansky, an activist who demanded the rights of Soviet

Jews to emigrate to Israel and was initially arrested for the crime of teaching Hebrew. But of all the dissidents trapped behind the Iron Curtain, there was only one man who was best friends with rock stars and Hollywood directors. Vaslav Havel. A remarkable man who rose to become the president of his own country, Czechoslovakia. Havel had been born into considerable privilege. His father built high-end apartments, and his uncle was one of the founders of Prague's version of Hollywood. Vaslav Havel attended the College of King George and the spa retreat of Potibory. His classmates included a future president of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee, a future general

secretary of the country's Communist Party, and Milos Forman, the legendary filmmaker who directed Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But his privilege came to an end when the Bolsheviks took over. In 1950, the age of 14, when young Voslav was officially branded a quote, bourgeois element, meaning he was not deemed worthy of even a high school education. So he became a lab assistant at the Prague School of Chemical Technology. The young Havel though would not be deterred, and finished his education at a night school. Havel discovered his love then of the theater.

He wrote and produced his first play in the Czechoslovak Army, where he was in an engineering battalion and had to carry around a heavy bazooka, something he hated. The play was a one-act affair called An Evening with the Family, about a senile grandmother and a dead canary. It was his first stab at absurdism. That play showed promise, but his breakout hit was The Garden Party, about a communist functionary named Hugo, who adapts so skillfully to the language and personality types of the quote, office of liquidation, that he loses his identity.

Make yourself comfortable. Relax. Undress if you like. Take off your shoes. Damn it, aren't you just among yourself? The play ends when Hugo returns to his parents and they no longer recognize him Hauvel was the kind of genius who could have escaped communism and thrived elsewhere Like his schoolmate Miloš Forman or his friend novelist Milan Kundera, but Hauvel did not leave

He chose to remain in Prague an example of the resilience which would transform him into the mortal enemy of the communists. In Havel's early life, he experienced success, fame, and even a degree of freedom. He came of age in the 1960s when at least in Czechoslovakia's capital, Prague, there was an opening. By the middle of the decade, one could purchase books by D.H. Lawrence and records by the Beatles. If Havel had lived in Moscow or Havana or Warsaw,

he would have never succeeded like that. But in Prague, his absurdist plays like The Garden Party or The Memorandum were performed in official state theaters and received glowing reviews in the state press. In 1965, Czechoslovakia was loosening its chain to such a degree that the American beat poet legend Allen Ginsberg spent the spring in Prague. He was embraced by the intellectuals and youth of the city, so much so that in annual May Day celebrations, he was crowned the King of May.

Here he is reading a poem about his experience by the same name. And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth. And I am the King of May, which is industry and eloquence and action in amour. And I am the King of May, which is the long hair of Adam and the beard of my own body. And I am the King of May, which is Kral Majalas in the Czechoslovakian tongue.

Into this blossoming country, the National Communist Party I am the King of May, which is Kral-Majalas in the Czechoslovakian tongue. Into this blossoming country, the National Communist Party selected a reformer, Alexander Dubček, to be its chairman in 1968. Immediately, he attempted to reform the system, loosening state censorship, allowing citizens to travel. He called it socialism with a human face. A human face that the Kremlin was very happy to stamp out. On August 21st, 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.

Once again, the Soviet Union, demonstrating a colossal contempt for the opinion of mankind, has resorted to brute force to keep a satellite nation under control. Russian tanks and infantry, aided by troops from East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria have occupied Czechoslovakia and have crushed the new and relatively liberal leadership of that small country. President Lyndon Baines Johnson could only offer his words. In the name of mankind's hope for peace, I call on the Soviet Union and its associates to withdraw their troops from Czechoslovakia. In the face of a terrifying invasion, Václav Havel drafted an official manual to Czechoslovak

citizens on how to approach the invaders. Approach the presence of the foreign troops as you would approach, for example, a natural disaster. Do not negotiate with them, just as you would not negotiate with torrential rain, but deal with them and escape them just as you would escape rain. Use your wits, your intelligence, and your fantasy. It seems that the enemy is just as powerless against these weapons as the reign is powerless against an umbrella.

Use against the enemy every method that he does not expect. Do not show him any understanding, ridicule him, and reveal to him the absurdity of his situation." But defeat was inevitable. Moscow had the numbers, just as it does today against Ukraine. Alexander Dobchak was replaced as chairman in April 1969 by an obedient functionary. The empire had struck back and liberalizations were rolled back in a Kremlin-led policy known by the euphemism normalization.

Textbooks that spoke of the horrors of Stalin and the Soviet coup in 1948 were purged. Old neighborhoods and towns were razed and replaced with brutalist housing projects, travel was largely banned. The bloom of the Prague Spring was replaced with a grey monotonous torpor, where the state didn't necessarily enforce ideological conformity at the barrel of a gun, but it maintained its power nevertheless. Havel captured this idea in his seminal 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless. The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window among the onions and carrots

the slogan, workers of the world unite. Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the Enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that

way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. Havel's Greengrocer quietly lies to the state, but also in a sense has to lie to himself. He is what Sharansky would call a double-thinker, someone who presents as a conformist, but privately knows that the state's slogans are bullshit. Before the normalization, Prague had developed a thriving rock scene, but now it was to be normalized. Performance of songs in English, for example, was forbidden.

The bands that went along with the regime by participating in state-approved rock festivals would have to perform new, party-friendly material. One such permitted song from the era was written in praise of a communist spy who had infiltrated radio-free Europe. Voodoo child, it was not. For those that did not want to sing the Politburo's tune, they had to go underground in more ways than one. We are now listening to the Plastic People of the Universe in a video

recording that has miraculously survived from 1971 in the Slivonets district of Prague. The band's name is taken from Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention song Plastic People, and the song they are covering is by a band widely revered by every cool kid who ever started their own band. These guys. Teenage Mary said to Uncle Dave, I saw my soul must be saved. Gonna take a walk down Union Square. You never know what you're gonna find there. You gotta run, run, run, run, run. Take the jacket too.

That's right. The Velvet Underground. The New York band who sung about heroin and sadomasochistic sex and got Andy Warhol to paint a banana on the cover of their first record. The plastics were punk before punk, facing the new rules against performing anything other than totalitarian drivel. They embraced a DIY spirit and created their own scene. They taunted and sneered at the authorities. They really became outlaws, facing arrest and eventually serving prison time.

They were felons because of their music. You can't get more punk than that. Consider their manager, a long-haired Czech rebel who went by Magor, which roughly translates in the Czech language as shithead. Magor spent a year in prison because he defiantly ate a page of the official Czech communist newspaper at a bar in front of a secret policeman, and then boasted that the Bolsheviks would one day experience the same fate. Badass. Part of the DIY Czech underground revolved around setting up makeshift concerts in the countryside because Prague was just too hot. This was, in a sense, serendipity.

Václav Havel was also spending more and more time at his own farmhouse in the countryside. Eventually the playwright and the plastics crossed paths. When the band was first arrested by the secret police in 1976 and sentenced to prison, Havel became their primary defender, and they became the center of his mission. As Havel would write in his essay, Disturbing the Peace, the arrest of McGor and the plastics represented quote, an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity. Havel understood something very important in that moment.

Any effort to suppress an artist is an attack on all artists. The dissident is obliged to defend even the crudest and most profane piece of culture from the censor. This was the same year that the Helsinki Accords came into force inside Czechoslovakia. Remember the Helsinki Accords? The deal struck by America and the Soviets that appeared to seal the fate of the captive nations? The one that Ronald Reagan was so angry about? We gave away the freedom of millions of people, freedom that was not ours to give. Well, they were signed in 1975,

and hidden inside these accords was that secret weapon that Voslav Havel decided to use. Havel and a few other comrades wrote an open letter to the ruling Communist Party, signed by a wide swath of artists, intellectuals, and activists. Inside that document, they pointed to the Helsinki Accords. Hidden in this agreement was the statement that all nations would respect human rights and support

the reunification of families and protect independent journalism and so on. This had clearly, they said, been violated by the arrest of the plastic peoples of the universe. We accordingly welcome the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's accession to those agreements. Their publication, however, serves as an urgent reminder of the extent to which basic human rights in our country exist, regrettably, on paper only. The right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by Article 19 of the first-mentioned covenant, is in our case purely illusory. Tens of thousands of our citizens are prevented from

working in their own fields for the sole reason that they hold views differing from official ones and are discriminated against and harassed in all kinds of ways by the authorities and public organizations. Deprived as they are of any means to defend themselves, they become victims of a virtual apartheid. Hundreds of thousands of other citizens are denied that freedom from fear mentioned in the preamble to the First Covenant, being condemned to live in constant danger of unemployment or other penalties if they voice their own opinions. This document became known as Charter 77. It was a direct challenge not only to the process of normalization and the imprisonment

of the plastics, it was a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the entire Soviet bloc. You say you support all these human rights and yet they are on paper only. The document was finished in January 1977 but getting it to the public and the wider Western press was hard. Havel and a few other dissidents began by driving to various mailboxes in the dead of night in the hope of mailing a few at a time, but they were followed, chased, and Havel eventually was pulled from the vehicle by his feet, hauled off by police, and interrogated. The crackdowns were rough. The aim of the authorities was to pressure the signatories

of Charter 77 to renounce their colleagues and repeat the lie that they didn't believe what they'd actually signed. Artists who agreed to denounce the Charter were honored and promoted by the state. This is how Havel biographer and former press secretary Michael Zantowski describes the crackdown in his book. While the obedient artists were treated to a red carpet reception in the National Theater, the signatories of the charter were being summarily fired from their jobs, had their tenures terminated, and their contracts canceled. Anyone who lived through those days will remember the intimidation and the pressure

to join in this public ritual of self-humiliation. To swim against the tide that was sweeping along friends, colleagues, and families was not easy. Havel himself eventually cracked, in a sense. He never renounced the charter and he did not give the authorities the name of his conspirators, but he did agree to step down as spokesman, a concession that pained him for the rest of his life. After Charter 77, Havel spent the next six years in and out of various prisons, including one four-year stint between 1979 and 1983.

The hardest part for Havel was being disconnected from the world of ideas. His brother, Yvonne, wrote him lengthy letters that included summaries of popular literature and film, international and political news and detailed synopses of books on philosophy and science. After the break, a new American president makes common cause with the dissidents. The early 1980s was a dark period for the dissidents. Many were in gulags or exile. Havel himself was in prison. But there was a bright spot, an unlikely ally in America, a new president, a Hollywood actor with a gift for moral clarity, Ronald Reagan.

For 15 years, American policy had been defined ways to live with the Soviets by accommodation and compromise. Reagan, as we know, was not a fan. Remember what he said about the Helsinki Accords. We gave away the freedom of millions of people, freedom that was not ours to give. Here's former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson explaining the change in the Reagan approach. The difference between the Reagan approach and the decade and a half of thinking on both sides of the political divide with Nixon Kissinger Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter is Best summed up in what is now a famous phrase. It's a remark that Ronald Reagan made to Dick Allen in

1977 and Reagan said well my view of the Cold War is that we win and they lose and That was not the view of the Cold War that was held by the, what will we call them, the detentists. They viewed the Soviet Union as essentially a permanent presence. And since it was going to be a permanent presence, we had to learn to live with them. Of course, Reagan didn't want a hot war with the Soviet Union. He wanted to meet with their leaders and even dreamed of reaching an agreement to outlaw nuclear weapons. But Reagan's pursuit of negotiations with Moscow was also a kind of trap because

he believed that the American system was superior to the fear-based society overseen by its adversary. And he also believed that he could persuade his Soviet counterparts to live up to their lofty rhetoric with sweet reason. His policies were tough. He increased defense spending to break the Soviet economy, and he unleashed the CIA to counter Soviet proxies in Latin America and Afghanistan. But in his diplomacy, Reagan often sounded

like a human rights activist. What Reagan did that was particularly important with respect to the Soviet Union and China was to look at the political prisoners and mention them by name. This is former Reagan administration official, Elliott Abrams. And Sharansky has written that that has an almost talismanic effect. When the president of the United States mentions your name, you're in the gulag within a week, somehow you hear about it. So they told us the dissidents in the Soviet Union and other communist countries, it is much better to mention names and try to get individual prisoners out

than to just say we're for democracy. And Reagan did that. Reagan argued for the release of political prisoners in his private diplomacy with communist leaders, but also in his public diplomacy, such as his 1987 speech before the United Nations General Assembly, where he spoke specifically about Vaclav Havel and other dissidents. Some time ago, the Czech dissident writer, Václav Havel, warned the world that respect for human rights is the fundamental condition and the sole genuine guarantee of true peace.

And Andrei Sakharov, in his Nobel lecture, said, I am convinced that international confidence, And Andrei Sakharov, in his Nobel lecture said, I am convinced that international confidence, mutual understanding, disarmament, and intentional security are inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the right to travel and choose the country in which one wishes to live. This was no small thing. Reagan understood that American rhetoric alone would not end the Cold

War or free the people trapped inside the evil empire. But to win the Cold War, the distance had to survive and endure. It was through them that the double thinkers, as Sieranski called them, would see that an alternative to communism was possible. Remember what Havel wrote about the greengrocer putting a communist poster in his shop window? In that story, he does so, Reagan believed that the dissidents could show Russians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians that it did not have to be that way anymore. In the Soviet Union, if you are not in a punishing cell, if you are an ordinary cell, you are given every day Soviet proof, the official Soviet newspaper.

This is former Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky. And once there is an article, editorial in official Soviet newspaper condemning American President Reagan for making this awful speech calling Soviet Union evil empire and how that he how it disrupts all the international relations. And that was a great day for us, for dissidents in the Soviet prison, because our biggest fear was that the West, we got constantly falls in the scrap of illusion

that we have our problems, they have their problems, let's find language to talk about. And for us, it's question of good and evil, that it's the evil force which tries to enslave all its citizens and in fact, all the world. And the West should understand the danger and they should make no compromise with this evil force. And finally, the leader of the free world

calls the spade the spade. Say the truth. And I remember how we were excited. We were talking to one another through toilets, because that was the most effective way. Or by morse, knocking on the door, or more effective and more dangerous, through the toilet.

Sharansky would call this the happiest day in the gulag that he remembered. Well, eventually, Reagan found a Soviet premier with whom he could do business, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev instituted a series of reforms, known as perestroika, not unlike what was happening in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. The pressure to do so was not just coming though from the outside, it was coming from his own citizens. Inside the Soviet Union, the people were inspired by the dissidents.

They knew who Natan Sharansky was, and Gorbachev defied his own Politburo to release him. The Poles knew about Lekhulessa, and in Czechoslovakia they knew about Voslopovel, and they knew about Charter 77. The dissidents were not destined to a life of misery and obscurity. Reagan's Gambit, in a sense, had worked. The people behind the Iron Curtain began to express an act on their own exasperations. The critical event was on November 9, 1989, when East Berliners tore down the wall that divided their city and no one stopped them. The dam had burst. Eight days later, it was perhaps only one battle in a nonviolent war of liberation, but it was

victory nonetheless and they celebrated. A hundred and fifty thousand showed up in the middle of a town square in Prague and demanded their freedom too. It was now only a matter of time. The evil empire was finished. And what of Václav Havel? He became the last president of Czechoslovakia before he became the first president of the Czech Republic. He died in 2011. A remarkable life. He's a living example of a person who can change things, but not just through art. When I had the privilege of interviewing him, I had said to him, can music, music on its own change things? And he said no, not by itself. So

I would imagine he would say art by itself can't, it's the people along with the art. On the other hand, I think that music and therefore art can change people and because the people are changed, they can go change. That was Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed reflecting on his friendship with Václav Havel. In 1990, he was sent to Prague by Rolling Stone magazine to interview him. He had just won his country's first free election since the end of World War II. And read us onto something in that clip. The art produced by the Velvet Underground inspired the Plastic Peoples of the universe,

who in turn inspired Havel and his comrades to draft Charter 77. Each link in that chain mattered. And that is the legacy of the dissidents. They inspired change, and America encouraged it. The Velvet Revolution, the Solidarity before, and then the actual transformation that we saw in Poland, in Czech Republic, and in Baltic states. This is Gigo Boccharia, who played a major role in the 2003 Rose Revolution in the Republic of Georgia.

Because we were still physically closer, because we were occupied and incorporated inside Soviet Union was an inspiration to say that it's possible to quickly become a free, normal country with liberty and to claim our rightful place within the free world and free civilization. That is what terrifies Vladimir Putin today. He knows that his gangster state will not last if Russians see their neighbors living in freedom and prosperity. Now, of course, that is not the message of Putin's propaganda. He inverts reality and claims the democratic revolutions were acts of Western imperialism,

that the desire of Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, a defensive alliance, is evidence of their plans to attack Russia, not their oft-proven fear that Russia will attack them. And sadly, we hear these arguments not only from Putin, but from many Americans as well. It's not a theory to say that Russia moved into eastern Ukraine because the United States wouldn't give up on pushing for Ukraine admission into NATO. These are wars that the United States led and caused.

And we hear it from Donald Trump himself. We have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating. All of these excuses on the bully's behalf betrays the alliance that Reagan made with the dissidents. Yeah, unbelievable. Unbelievable. Here again is someone who knows exactly what it means

to risk everything to defy a Russian lie, Natan Sharansky. I have to say I'm absolutely shocked by what he did. In fact, I liked the campaign of Trump in the last months, the couple of months before the elections, because he started speaking about bringing back the common sense. But at the same time, I was absolutely surprised when he suddenly publicly took the side of President Putin, in fact, repeated all the most laughable Soviet-type propaganda. But he's saying that all this voice because of Ukraine and Zelensky is not legitimate leader, all this nonsense.

And suddenly, President of the United States As the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, simply repeats these words, I hope it will be somehow corrected, because it's extremely dangerous. I hope it's corrected as well, because if Trump's capitulation to Putin stands, the West will lose something far more precious than just Ukraine.

It will lose the moral clarity that destroyed an evil empire, that Vladimir Putin is doing his best to claw back one country at a time. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, share it with your friends and family.

Use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And also make sure to leave us a five-star rating on Apple and a nice comment or two on Apple or Spotify. It really does help others find the show. If you loved the episode, there's more great content at TheFP.com. Please become a subscriber today, and This all, I'm a dissident

This all, I'm a dissident Tonight, I'll be broken face Tonight will not happen to me You saw I'm a dissident You saw I'm a dissident. Yes, I, I'm a dissident. And now, I'm your prevalent. Yes, I, I'm a prevalent.