Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Accidental Czar with Andrew Weiss and Brian Brown

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

On today's episode, Sharon chats with the duo, author Andrew Weiss and illustrator Brian Brown, who are behind the new graphic novel, Accidental Czar, which takes a look at Vladimir Putin's life and his rise to power. As we approach the one year anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Andrew and Brian give insights into why they chose a graphic novel platform to connect the public to a complex history of Russia’s ruling powers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And here's the best part. It's topped with a sauce made from ghost peppers and oncho chilies. If that doesn't send a chill of anticipation down your spine, nothing will. Get your ghost pepper sandwich today at Popeyes before it ghosts you for another year. Hey friends, welcome. So glad you're here today. I am chatting with Andrew Weiss and Brian Brown, who have written a very unique book I think you're going to be interested in called Accidental Tsar, The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. And Andrew Weiss has worked in the White House. He's been studying Russia for more than 30

years. He works at a think tank. He's written so many papers and done so much research on Russia and on Putin. And Brian Brown is a very, very well-known graphic novel illustrator. He has written his own documentary graphic novels. In fact, graphic novel is not even really a great term. More like graphic documentaries would be a better term. And they have teamed up to write an accessible but very fact-based book about how Putin came to power and what he has done since assuming control of Russia. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McBann.

Here's where it gets interesting. Thank you so much for being here today. I read your book with interest. It is such a unique take on the story of Vladimir Putin. And I wondered if we could start with you, Andrew, you tell us why you pursued the concept of a book that is graphically based instead of just text based. What made you want to use this platform to tell the story of Vladimir Putin? Well, first of all, it's great to be here and to be reunited with my co-conspirator, Brian Brown, without whose brilliance this book would not have happened. Just to take your question head on, I'm a think tank person and a former government advisor on Russia. And I have had a pretty amazing set of experiences. I worked in the White House,

I helped orchestrate the elements of US foreign policy regarding Russia, Ukraine, and the broader region from the inside. And then I've spent my time on the outside trying to understand Russia better, understand the region better, and what we should do about it. But I also became conscious, as I've been in this field for the better part of the last three decades, that people like myself are pretty insular. And we tend to aim what we're doing at a narrow set of decision makers, oftentimes. Or when I get a chance to talk to the public, maybe through the media, I've got a soundbite. And I've got to make my judgment about some event that's really

crucial at the moment, like the war in Ukraine. But to help people understand the bigger context of how we got here, why it is the US and Russia are in this head-on collision in Ukraine, and why Russia has become the country it is after a thousand convulsive years of its history, how it ended up with a mediocre or sort of mid-level KGB officer in charge. Those are pretty big, complicated questions that I really wanted to reach outside the standard audience that I typically target big, complicated questions that I really wanted to reach outside the standard audience that I typically target for my work. And I really thought the graphic novel was the ideal way to do that because it was, to be blunt with you, it was going to hit a bunch

of different audiences. There are a lot of people who just don't have time for a 700-page academic book or the kind of policy papers that I write in my day job. And I just love graphic novels. And the chance to work on one with someone like Brian was a once in a lifetime opportunity. That's such an interesting point that you make that you're absolutely right, that people who want to avail themselves of high level foreign policy information, they absolutely can. And they can read those very dense books, they can read the policy papers, they can attend the lectures, and they can avail themselves of that information. But the fact is that most Americans don't have time for that. And they perhaps don't have the academic background for that. And perhaps they're

tangentially interested in a topic like this. But this gives them a very accessible entree into what is a very important topic. And Brian, I'm wondering if you could talk about as somebody who has illustrated a graphic novel about Vladimir Putin, why this project about you know, you know, what sounds fun is a book about Putin, why this project and not a book about a superhero? Well, my other work is not really about superheroes, but it was actually the first time I have ever worked on a book where I wasn't writing it myself. I never really thought of myself as an illustrator. I was always like, oh, you know, I can kind of draw a little bit, but the writing kind of makes it work together. And so it was exciting to me that

somebody wanted me to just be an illustrator for their book. I was like, wow, really just draw it. Wow. Okay. I felt like I was kind of getting like an insider's view of like what was happening on the news and stuff. I mean, I was working in the small studio at the time that in the front of the studio was a CBD store. And they had the news on all the time. They'd be talking about Putin and I'd be like, I'm getting the whole story right here in my work. So it was interesting. And it was out of my comfort zone. Also, I just like learning things. And when I make comics, I make a lot of nonfiction comics, and a lot of them are just me kind of working through processing the information and understanding it myself.

It's kind of like how I teach myself. So getting to work on Andrew's material, it was a really great process for me. And I was, you know, as somebody that was nervous in the beginning, I found it to be rewarding and a rewarding experience to get an inside look and do it with comics. Despite it being a graphic novel style book, it's not light on information. It is very important fact-based material that people can legitimately learn from. people can legitimately learn from. Andrew, let's start at the beginning. How does a mediocre KGB man get to be Vladimir Putin? He's become this sort of mythical creature now almost. How does he get to be the dictator of Russia? The book tries to tell the story of a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grew up in a

working class family. And his only ambition in life, and this is another sort of theme that weaves in and out of the book, was to be a secret agent. And part of why that was is because when he was a teenager, he read a lot of pulp novels, watched a lot of TV shows and movies that played up the heroic image of the KGB and its predecessors in the Soviet era. And then he got there and his career never went anywhere. He never did anything very interesting. And he basically was capped out at the level of major. He barely made it to lieutenant colonel. And then the Soviet Union started to unravel. And he was talking about things like, maybe I'll become a cab driver. Maybe I'll work as a trainer at a gym, teaching people judo. He was never deep selected, to use the military term, for greatness. selected, to use the military term, for greatness. But what did distinguish him, and there's, I think, an important element of his own success that was self-made,

was he was a really hard worker. And even as a high school student, he had taught himself judo, he had learned German, and he'd been a kid who'd gotten in a lot of trouble and whose parents had given up on him when he was in his teen years. He was getting into fights, he was hanging out with a bad crowd. And it was this dream of joining the KGB that got his life back on track. Flash forward to the period of the 1990s when the Soviet Union had collapsed, and Putin is working in a series of kind of back office jobs in both the reform government in his hometown, Leningrad, which became St. Petersburg after the Soviet collapse, and then when he moves to Moscow in the late 1990s, he distinguishes himself by being someone who's showing up for work. And the system is very corrupt, and he's part of that,

but he's working hard for his boss. But the thing that really defined him was loyalty. And he had had a boss who was a very charismatic, JFK-style reformist mayor in Leningrad, then Petersburg, who was caught up in a corruption scandal. And Putin was the person who arranged to sneak him out of the country on a rented Learjet and basically sneak him out of Russia one step ahead of a law enforcement investigation. And at the end of the Soviet period, that kind of loyalty was not a common thing. And people were constantly double-crossing each other. And the first president of post-communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was in a similar jam and needed someone to protect him.

And his family chose Putin. And Putin honored that deal for the first several years of his time as president. How eventually, because he's had, as you mentioned, other jobs in the government, how eventually does he ascend to the position that he's in now? And how has he over the years, and I know I'm asking you to distill down decades worth of history into a dozen here, but how has he over the years consolidated and collapsed power for himself? Part of this wasn't well appreciated by people like myself.

All of us in the West had assumed that having thrown off the communist system and having wanted to embrace a more Western-oriented, democratic, free market system of government, Russia would build institutions and would prioritize the ways that our systems are constructed, where we have checks and balances, and we have institutions that don't concentrate power in one person's hands. And anyone who's looked even for 10 minutes at Russian or Soviet history would see that there are a lot of examples of Stalin or other people who were dictators and that the country didn't benefit from that style of government. But there is a style of person in Russia, and I think this is something we lose when we don't

really think about Putin correctly, that considers himself or herself in Russian a государственник. And that that is the key sort of word, I think, for understanding Putin. And that word means someone who's a statist, who thinks the interests of a strong state should dominate everything else. They should trump the rule of law. They should trump the rights of the individual. And as long as it's good for the power of the state, that's beneficial for Russia overall. That is different than the word dictator in Russian. And it really captures the kind of energy that Putin brought to the job from the very beginning, where these institutions that the Soviet Union had built up over decades collapsed overnight,

and there was a free-for-all. And the vacuum of the early 1990s that he was very much part of was filled by criminal groups, organized crime, mafia groups, KGB, people renting themselves out, a ragtag bunch of sort of pro-Western people who were heavily corrupt or inept at their jobs. neo-Western people who were heavily corrupt or inept at their jobs. And the state basically withered away. And for people like Putin, getting things back together was really important. But one of the themes of the book is to trace all of this to Russian history. And Russia, because it's so big, and everyone I think knows that it's physically the biggest country on earth, has often had to be a place that protects itself against external enemies and runs its affairs on this vast geographic scale. And the formula that's been

around for the past thousand years to do that has been through centralization, not through the devolution of power. And the one sort of crucial example of this, which I love, is that in the Middle Ages, it would take you about a year to go from Moscow to the Arctic Circle, but it was required to register even minor real estate transactions in Moscow. And so you would imagine people literally having to travel a year over terrible terrain to say, I want to sell my hut to my neighbor. I'm exaggerating, but sell this piece of land to somebody else. That tells you a lot about the way Russia has been ruled for a very long time. And for us to expect that overnight in the 1990s, it was suddenly going to

look like Jeffersonian democracy, we had some problems ourselves in terms of setting expectations that were never going to be met. That is a really interesting point. I had never considered the idea that they had this requirement that you actually arrive, send somebody in person to register this transaction. One of the questions that a lot of people ask me is, well, I'm sure you know, there's a lot of rumors, and maybe you have thoughts on these rumors about whether or not Putin is sick, physically ill. And it could be that's anti Russian propaganda, it could be that he actually is, does he have cancer? Is he dying? First of all, what do you make of those rumors? And then I'll ask my second question,

is there any truth in your estimation to the rumors that Putin is ill with some kind of serious disease? My former boss at the think tank, the Carnegie Endowment where I work is now the director of the CIA, Ambassador William Burns. He has a really good one liner on your question, which is Vladimir Putin is entirely too healthy. Whatever it is, it's not enough. And I think we need to get out of the business of wishful thinking about Russia and Vladimir Putin. Russia is not going to be knocked over with a feather. Vladimir Putin is not going to be knocked over with a COVID test or some health condition.

And there is going to be likely, you know, the most likely scenario, I hate to say it, is that Vladimir Putin sticks around. I don't want to give anything away about the end of the book, but Vladimir Putin has just turned 70 years old. He exercises all the time. He doesn't have a lot of the lifestyle problems that previous Russian leaders who were alcoholics and party-hardy types have. He's not going anywhere, most likely. And we shouldn't expect that there'll be some magical event where Batman swoops in and deals with the bad guy. The more likely reality, which is an ugly one, but one we all have to think about, is what if Putin sticks around for a long time? And what if the person who replaces him is even worse? Those are the hard facts of the world

right now. And they're going to be a big drag on the time and the attention of people like President Biden or whoever replaces President Biden. And the goal of the United States has to be to keep this thing from getting out of hand and to avoid something as dangerous as what we experienced in the Cold War, which was, you know, things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where a flashpoint event nearly led to a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. It could have destroyed the entire planet. Like, those are the stakes in our relationship with Russia, and we can't be wishing it away. One of the other things that I'm curious about, and I know a lot of people listening to this are curious about, is who is going to replace Putin? Let's assume we don't have wishful thinking. We're not going to magically

wave a wand and get rid of him and have the Russia problem disappear forever. So assume we're grounded in reality. And it is 15 years from now, and he's 85 years old, and he dies of natural causes. Who is going to replace him? Who is on the horizon? It is a cardinal core element of Putin's political strategy going back 20 years that the playing field has to be clear of any aspirants to replace him. And the word in Russian for that is bizalternativeness, basically lack of alternatives. That's part of what keeps Putin in power. It prevents there from being anybody on the scene who people throw their sympathies toward or would make Putin a lame duck in office.

And it's part of why, for example, they tried to kill Alexei Navalny, the opposition figure, by putting a nerve agent in his underwear. the opposition figure by putting a nerve agent in his underwear. This is a country that ruthlessly wants to avoid there being challengers or pretenders to power. And anyone who puts himself or herself in that category is really asking for it. And the Russian elite know better than to jockey or speculate about this possibility. Yes, it's true that Putin is mortal, we hope, and that he will eventually pass from the scene. But he is stuck. And there's no easy way in a country like Russia, where there's no trust, there are no institutions, there's no law, that he could count on post-government retirement where he and his

family or other people he cares about would all be safe. The other part of this, which connects back to Russian history and a key theme of the book, is that's not new. And that part of what was interesting and different about the path Russia took in history was that the Tsar wasn't like a king in European countries. The Tsar was the embodiment of all power and all things that existed on the territory of Russia. He was the sole owner of everything. And the noblemen who surrounded him were basically given stuff on loan from the Tsar, and he would rotate them around different parts of the country. They didn't own things outright the way that feudal lords did in Europe. And part of what made Russia really different, and this is important for the kind of jokes that everyone likes to tell about oligarchs or others somehow conspiring against Putin and putting something

in his soup one night, is all of these people know that they're basically acting temporarily as the stewards or the quasi-owners of things, and that they could be out on their ear tomorrow if they do something that irritates the powers that be. And it's that sense of being temporary and vulnerable that permeates Russian society, not just at the highest levels, and makes people fear the unknown and makes them rely on their family members or people they grew up with instead of, oh, that's just the guy who works in the office next to me, and he follows the same rulebook I follow. He abides by the same code and same law that I abide by. It just doesn't work that way. Everything is done on a much more ad hoc and bilateral basis in the entire country. And it

makes people feel very insecure. It makes the country really inefficient. That's why the economy is stuck. There's no real confidence in the future. So why would you invest and put your money at risk in a new business opportunity, for example, if you weren't sure you were going to still own the factory after you spent the billion dollars to build it? Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. 21st with new deals added every day. Save on home goods to deck their halls, toys to stuff their

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Well, right now, Putin, you know, I like to think that doesn't even own a wallet. Like he just knows he owns the country and he doesn't need a wallet. He has people who will be stand-ins for him. Part of what happened in the post-Soviet period, right when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was there was this giant carve up and a few eager beavers, which became these people we call oligarchs, jumped on the most tasty things. And a lot of those had to do with resources like oil and gas and things like gold or minerals that you could sell on world markets for dollars. And people made these massive fortunes. As Putin came into power, he did a first new set of rules with those people, which was you can hold on to the things you acquired in this very shady way when the Soviet Union collapsed, but stay out of politics. And then eventually that wasn't good enough. And

there were a lot of people who had been wannabes or Putin's buddies around him when he was coming up in the KGB or other parts of the Russian government. And those people wanted in on that action because the money is so immense. And just to put it in perspective, Russia went from being a country that was totally flat on its back, where it was like Germany in the 1920s with hyperinflation and money's worthless, and no one's got their life savings anymore, and the country's literally starving to death, to a place that had more billionaires than New York City. And it was that massive wealth creation that I think animated a lot of what Putin was doing in the 2000s. And it also overlapped with the rise of

China. China was a resource poor country that needed a lot of the kinds of things that Russia has in abundance, like oil and gas. So there was a natural flow of petrodollars that made the Kremlin rich beyond its wildest dreams. But it created, I think, a sense of self-confidence in the Russian leadership that led to overreach. And we see that overreach every day now with the terrible war in Ukraine. Speaking of the war in Ukraine, first of all, a lot of Americans don't realize that this is not the first time that Russia has tried to expand its territory. But I think there's still a lot of confusion about why? Why now? What is it that

you want in Ukraine? Why February of 2022? What is it about this moment that made Putin essentially press the proverbial go button? Like, it's time, we got to do it. What is the animating principle behind this war? Great question. We were talking about this idea that the US is going around the world, staging revolutions in places that give us advantage and get rid of governments we don't like. And that was very much what the Russians thought had been happening in Ukraine, first in 2004, in what was called the Orange Revolution, then again in 2014, when the people of Ukraine basically threw off an authoritarian ruler who wanted to close out their opening to Europe and tie up with Russia. That kicked off a war, kicked off the seizure of Crimea, which was a disputed

part of Ukraine that the Russians had long had their eyes on. And that war continued from 2014 onward. What changed in 2021, with the arrival of Joe Biden as the US president, was a sense that maybe this problem was only going to keep getting worse. Every year, the United States was helping Ukraine fend off the Russians in the war that had begun in 2014. So there was literally a flow of U.S. military intelligence and security aid to the Ukrainians every year, bipartisan support in Congress to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And this would just keep going. It would be like a mushroom over time that would grow in Russia's backyard, and they would get more and more threatened by it.

The other thing that happened was the US withdrew from Afghanistan in this way that created an impression in the Russians' minds that a friendly government propped up by the United States could disappear overnight if you put pressure on it. And the third thing was Angela Merkel, overnight if you put pressure on it. And the third thing was Angela Merkel, who had been the longtime ruler of Germany as chancellor, left the scene. So Putin is an opportunist. He is a very nimble, cunning operator. And he saw the stars aligning. And he saw a US president who he thought was not made of stuff that would make it so risky for him to do this. And because the odds of Ukraine fighting back successfully, for a lot of us, and a lot of us got this wrong, seemed favorable to Russia, that Ukraine, every time the Russian army went up against the Ukrainians, they got

demolished, especially in the first phases of the 2014 war. That seemed to be a good time to hit that go button. What is his endpoint? This is another question that I'm sure you get asked frequently. When will this end? What needs to happen for him to be like, okay, my work here is done? We all are hoping, again, coming back to the wishful thinking that Putin's just magically going to wake up one morning and say, boy, that was the dumbest thing I've ever done. And this is as bad as George. I'm really sorry, guys. Exactly. Here's some reparations. Let's help you rebuild.

Yep. And he thinks I'm different. I'm like Stalin in World War Two. I'm the czars battling Napoleon. I can outlast my opponents. And I care about this more than they do. And I have nuclear weapons. So they're going to stay really afraid of me. They're never actually going to intervene directly. And I can just keep this thing going. I don't have things to worry about at home. And eventually, I'm going to wear the Ukrainians down. I can outlast. The problem for us is that he may not be totally wrong about that, that there is a point at which the Ukrainians are, as we see this winter, it's no fun living in a country with tens of millions of people and no heat and no light, and you can't restore normal life. And because the country is right next door to Russia, it's really hard to defend its entire

territory against the nasty things the Russians might do, whether it's throw more missile strikes against major Ukrainian cities or demolish kindergartens and schools where people, innocent people are. The Russians are doing all those things. And because the Ukrainians may not be able to defeat Russia on the battlefield sort of neat and clean, which is the ideal scenario, it's the one we're all rooting for, we could end up in, I fear, in an open-ended war that just goes on and on and on. So it lasts many years. And Putin's never satisfied. The thing he wants is he wants all of Ukraine. He wants to lop off its government. He wants to put Zelensky on trial. And he wants a dominant voice over everything that happens in that country. He's never going

to get that. The people of Ukraine would never stand for it. But it doesn't mean he won't keep trying. Why Ukraine? And why not one of his other neighboring countries? Ukraine is the centerpiece of Russia's identity in a lot of ways. It's seen as this geostrategically really important place because of where it's located. And it is also, in many ways now, so closely connected to the West and the level of US support and European support for the Ukrainians in the military area and the intelligence realm and other areas that this is unacceptable because it's literally on his front doorstep now. There's also a lot of conspiratorial thinking within the United States that Ukraine is very corrupt and that there are a lot of nefarious things happening inside Ukraine.

What extent are those thought processes accurate? One of the things that Brian and I explore in the book is the way World War II has become the state religion of Russia, and it's the Soviet victory in World War II that provides the legitimacy of the Putin regime. They kind of wrap themselves in being the heirs to Stalin, the great service the Soviet Union did as a US ally in defeating Nazism. That's how they made their bones, maybe to put it another way, on the world stage, and the world owes them. And there was, for a low information Russian electorate, which is very checked out of politics, which isn't paying close attention, doesn't read the newspaper, doesn't follow the news closely, saying to them, Nazis are taking over. As ludicrous as that sounded to us,

it resonates in a country that's been brainwashed for the past 20 years to think of this victory over Nazism as the thing that keeps the country together and provides the basis for what Putin does every day. It's nonsense. But in our country, and we've already seen this in the US political debate, we saw this under President Trump, there are definite groups of people in the US who will say that, oh, Russia is really more our friend than Ukraine is. President Trump used to say this all the time. We should team up with the Russians to deal with the threat of Islamic radicalism in places like Syria. And all those dogs don't hunt. That's all political hogwash and geopolitical nonsense. The reality

is the people of Ukraine know who they are. They don't want to be absorbed into Russia, and they've been willing to fight and to send their sons and daughters in the front line and immobilize themselves. Literally, the whole country is now either doing something to support the war effort or actually in the fight directly as soldiers, like a citizen army. That's something that we as Americans need to respect and we need to support and we need to honor their sacrifice and we need to pay up. We need to do our part to make sure that they succeed. And that's different than this image, this cartoonish image in a lot of the US political discourse of like,

oh, it's all fake. And their country wasn't perfect. It's still not perfect. I think they'd be the first to admit that. But they're trying to fend off an invasion by an evil government run by Vladimir Putin that is in the wrong here. And we need to be on the right side of that. Yeah. I mean, if you extrapolate that situation and applied it onto the United States and we were trying to fight back against them, it would seem a little bit like a slap in the face if on the world stage, people were saying that instead of saying like, they should not be invading the United States, we should help them fight off their invaders. If people were focused on, yeah, but you know what? Back in the 1830s, the United States enslaved people. That is true. It does not mean that the United States

does not have problems. But nevertheless, it also doesn't mean that we should not have the right to defend ourselves from a foreign invader. And if I could just tag onto that, which I think is a really crucial point that you're making. I took my kids to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. this past weekend. I've got a seventh grader. And it's shocking when you look back at what aggression was at the beginning of World War II. And it's shocking when you look at the utter unique calamity that is the Holocaust and the attempted extermination of Jews and other people across Europe by the Nazi regime. and the attempted extermination of Jews and other people across Europe by the Nazi regime. The Holocaust is a singular event in human history, but we shouldn't close our eyes to the atrocities and the human rights abuses that are happening every day in Ukraine and think that, oh, if only we could just get the Ukrainians to give back this amount of territory and pay off Vladimir Putin, he'd leave them alone. Putin has shown really clearly what he's made of and what he's going to do to get it. It's like the old Maya Angelou line,

when someone shows you who they are, believe them. This is not a question of did NATO say something that made Vladimir Putin mad? This is a war of aggression that was unprovoked and that has brought Europe back to a level of savagery that hasn't been seen since the Balkans Wars of the 1990s or World War II. This is really scary stuff. Brian, I wonder if you could talk about who do you think this book, The Accidental Czar, who do you think this is for? Who is the audience? Well, I think any American would be interested in this because Vladimir Putin is so much in the news all the time. He's a historical figure really at this point and i think also we think about comics a lot

at all the time as um something that's accessible to a lot of readers and sometimes people think that that might mean that it's like simple but it's not it's complex topics that are just easier to understand or more fun i think because and because I'm biased here. I've always been drawn to the graphic form and it's something that keeps the pages turning. And through this, it's complex stuff that very much could be boring in less adept hands and just on the face of it sometimes because it's so fact heavy. It's the magic of comics, I call it, all the time. Yeah, I think there's this idea that comics are for children, that it's a picture book. People who are fans of comics would disagree with that, obviously.

But one of the beauties of this genre is that because so much is communicated with the drawings, you don't need as many words. You don't need to say, and there was a large airplane known as Air Force One, and it was a 747, and it was parked on a tarmac, and the president rides on it. You don't have to explain all of those things when you can just have a picture of those things. Right. It's like it's like watching a movie in a way, you know, you think about the difference between reading anything really, and then watching the film version of it, it's different experience. You know, it's not quite the same experience as just reading about something, but it's a unique and interesting experience that is rewarding and accessible to people. Yeah. In the same way that somebody might like a comedy movie and an action movie,

like you might like both of those genres. This type of information communication is just a different way, a different genre of communicating. And it doesn't make it less than a book that is 700 pages of tiny text. It's just a different way of communicating the same information. One thing to just jump in on this point, if I may, is that this book is, and I'm sort of drawn to what my daughter's learning in seventh grade. This is a book with footnotes. It's written with the same scholarly precision and the same material that I would use in the papers I write in my think tank job or would have written

in my government incarnation. And it's using direct quotes from memoirs and declassified documents. So the word bubbles coming out of Putin's mouth are the real things he says and thinks. And I think it's important when coming back to the question of like, who is this guy? And I think it's important when, you know, coming back to the question of like, who is this guy? As you can tell who this guy is by the things he says and the things he does. And we shouldn't project onto him myth or the things the Kremlin wants you to think about him. The Kremlin wants you to let Vladimir Putin live rent free in your head.

And it wants you to have an image of this bare-chested horseback riding guy. It doesn't want you to see the guy who wears elevator shoes because he's about the same height as Napoleon. It doesn't want you to see that. And they've spent 20 years conjuring up an image of him. The other thing is that the image they conjured up initially was very campy. And it was a deliberate gag that was pushing Russian minds back to Soviet pop culture to be a contrast to this kind of reckless, drunkard Boris Yeltsin, who was the Russian president when the Soviet Union collapsed. They were trying to send a reassuring message to Russians, but also hearken back to certain pop culture imagery that would make Russians feel

good about themselves again. We've internalized a lot of that and taken it literally and then made decisions about who Vladimir Putin we think is based on the cartoon. And the book is trying to peel all of that back. Would you say that this book could be enjoyed by middle schoolers as well? Oh, yeah. As a parent of a middle schooler? Oh, I get friends and others sending me pictures of 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds reading the book. And I get notes from career diplomats who've worked on Russia for 30 years writing me notes about the book. So it's deliberately aimed at being able to communicate these basic and

interesting ideas, but also do it, as Brian alluded to earlier, by using images that are not the cartoons that we're all besieged with. So the information is fresh and the imagery is fresh. I totally get that. And I appreciate your commitment to reality and that we're not recasting Putin as Batman, this myth of who he is. I appreciate that. Yeah. The Russian government literally, when he came into office, because he was a nobody, would put him in a sailor suit or stick him in the cockpit of a jet fighter and do all these things that were deliberately cartoonish. And now we see him and this myth of the daring do and the intelligence operative and the black arts, the KGB, all of

that gives us a sense of finesse and thinking on the Russian part that oftentimes isn't actually true. And part of the reason why Russia creates so many big messes and think of like the assassinations, the horrible war in Ukraine, like they are screwing things up on a royal scale. And they're not the A-team. They're not the elegant KGB operatives that you see on TV. They're doing things in brutal, thuggish fashion. And they often think they can get away with it because we're scared of them. And we just need to be able to navigate all of that with facts, not emotions, and understand more clearly the fact that, for example, Putin wasn't a high-flying KGB operative, right? He was

not the A-team in the KGB. I have so many more questions, but we have to wrap it up. So I would love to hear from each of you. I'll start with you, Brian. What do you hope the reader gets out of this book? What do you hope that happens when they close the book? What do you hope they take away? Well, I mean, aside from being just blown away by the artistic renderings. Of course, of course. I think, and what I got out of drawing it is seeing Putin in kind of a new light. His name comes up all the time in conversation. And I'm always like, no, you got to read this book because you're missing the overall point. Like this is all about presenting this to the Russian people and this to the American people.

So I walked away with such a greater understanding of who he is and what's going on with him, that I think that I would hope that the reader would kind of like walk away understanding who and what Putin is all about. And rather than just being like this person you see on the news and stuff. Andrew, what would you hope that people would get out of reading this book? Well, first of all, I think it's cool that a lot of Russian nerds like myself are now starting to discover graphic novels and discover people like Brian Brown. And so the graphic novel is a great format. There are amazing books about the Holocaust, there are books about the Iranian Revolution, there are books about the Nazi regime that people need to read that are serious and that students of history or people

who are interested in history need to read. In this particular case, I also think Russia has been glommed onto our consciousness in part as a result of Donald Trump's presidency and rise to power, as well as the horrible war in Ukraine. And we need to understand what is driving this country in the horrible direction it's going in, why it's going to be a problem for the United States for a long time, and we shouldn't do drive-by analysis. We shouldn't just be emotional, we shouldn't not have our facts straight, and we shouldn't misunderstand why this is all pretty complicated. And there's a lot of complexity on both sides that brought us to this point. The last thing which I'll say, and I think it's true, is that people need to keep learning.

And this book is my attempt as someone who's been working on Russia for my career for three decades or so. I was constantly trying to find new facts and new things that don't do the first blush or the first draft version of history, and to really try to pick apart some of the assumptions that we all have about who Vladimir Putin is, about what Russia is, about what Ukraine is, and to really challenge myself and to not just rely on the kind of cut and dry version that's presented to us on cable TV or in the pages of newspapers. I really wanted to kind of push some of the analysis forward a bit. And I hope readers come away seeing that as successful. Thank you both so much for being here. I really enjoyed this book,

and I really enjoyed chatting with both of you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here today. I really think that you are going to enjoy the book Accidental Czar, The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. Again, it's written by Andrew Weiss and illustrated by Brian Brown. And it is a very fact-based graphic documentary that is accessible for people middle school on up if you want to understand more about Putin and Russia. I'll see you again soon.

Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? All those things help podcasters out so much. The show is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, and Sharon McMahon. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.