Modern Wisdom - #273 - John Sweeney - Alexei Navalny: Putin's Enemy Explained

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

John Sweeney is an investigative journalist and a writer. There is a fascinating and incredibly dangerous poker game going on in Russia at the moment. The establishment versus the newcomer. Expect to learn why Navalny is galvanising such support, how he survived poisoning with novichok, how he convinced one of his own assassins to admit to trying to kill him and why he once nearly became a pirate... Sponsors: Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Navalny's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAw3WynQJMm7tMy093y37A  Buy Useful Idiot - https://amzn.to/3936FEz  Listen to Hunting Ghislaine - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hunting-ghislaine-with-john-sweeney/id1539949999  Follow John on Twitter - https://twitter.com/johnsweeneyroar  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello wonderful people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is John Swini, investigative journalist and a writer. If you've been watching the news this week, you will have seen that the leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, was arrested, as he got back into Russia, having been in Germany recovering from nerve agent poisoning after an assassination attempt. There is a fascinating and incredibly dangerous poker game going on in Russia at the moment, the establishment versus the newcomer, and John Swini is an expert on the situation, so I go on to explain exactly what's happening. So today, expect to learn why Navalny is galvanizing such support, how he survived poisoning with Novi Chok,

how he convinced one of his own assassins to admit to trying to kill him and why he once nearly became a pirate. This is just, I couldn't believe how ignorant I was to so much that it's been going on in Russia. It's going to be terrifying and fascinating to watch what happens over the next few years, but yeah, this episode tells you everything you need to know. I really hope that you enjoy it. But for now, it's time to learn about Russia with John Swini.

John Swini, look at the show. Pleasure Chris, great to um, it's great to have a matter. I feel like today is going to be, Alexi Navalny is a guy who's been poisoned in prison multiple times, had acid and green paint thrown on him, called Vladimir Putin a poison toad and flown drones over his mansion on YouTube and somehow not died. This reads sounds like a spine novel. It's actually I'm thinking of a poem by Le Montove, a hero of our time. Actually, it's a novel. Le Mondeauve, a hero of our time. Actually, it's a novel. I don't, whenever I get into this,

I want to drink vodka and annoyingly, I'm on gin. But he is a hero of our time, Alexei Navalny. You know, I've met him twice and I, the first time I properly engaged with him is in 2016. And this guy is challenging the Kremlin in a way which is extraordinarily brave Chris. And people who say, what are you doing? He's been poisoned. Why on earth is he going back to Russia? People who ask who say that haven't been paying attention. In very simple terms, I met, I've been going to Russia since 1992, I did Russia at O level at school, I scraped through it, I don't speak Russian,

but I love it, I love the culture, and when I used to work for the BBC, I would go there every two years, do something that would annoy the Kremlin, they would follow us around, and then I'd leave. And the last time I did a film called Taking On Poo-Tin, and I met Navalny for that twice, and he really is a hero. But here's the background, is that I met free Russians who were all critical of Putin. At a time when the West was still trying to rub along with Putin, one of them was Anna Politivskyar, the second Natasha Estemarovar, they were both great journalists and the third was Boris Nemsov,

he was the journalist and the politician. Shot, shot, shot. So these three people who had the bulls to stand up to Putin and to be critical of them were all shot dead. And Navani knows this, he knows the history and basically he's been challenging Putin's, you know, the Poison Toads, lock on power, lock on the gremlin For the past decade and he knows that if you do that you may well die Um, the backlog doesn't look very good for him. Does it? No, but he's doing it because I think it's perfectly possible for him to live a light an exile in Germany or the states or here And then for one day a cement mixer to sort of cross

over the road and knock him out. That isn't so what he's doing is, I mean I think you know why the timing, I thought the timing was far too uncritical of Vladimir Putin, has gone and Joe Biden is now in place. And then the moment he's locked up, up pops the video, and the video is about Vladimir Putin's fancy new palace. it's a billion pound house and it's disgusting. The detail I tweeted was that there's some kind of hooker bar, hooker H. double O.K. H, but also ER. You would imagine, and I say that with a fair bit of evidence because there's a stripper's poll in it. Now, the other thing is if you got a Russia, so I did a film when it was 2005, about vodka poisoning. What happened was that Putin hiked up the price of vodka

and threefold, putting it out of reach of a lot of ordinary Russians who were very, very poor, and the mafia moved in and started flogging hand sanitizer, alcohol-based, and basically you have to put in a a colourum, nobody cares, people with alcohol problems, didn't care, and this caused an epidemic of liver disease,

and people turned yellow, and I went into the hospitals and the sticks, and God it was bleak. So what you've got to realize is that Russia is far crueler and far more unfair and wealth is divided far more unequally than anywhere in Western Europe or other states, unfair as the state says. So that the idea that there are ordinary people really suffer in Russia, but the idea that what Navalny calls the ZAR of corruption has built himself a new mansion, a new palace is disgraceful. So it's a fascinating and incredibly dangerous poker game between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny. And, you know, the poison toad and the Kremlin, he's got the killing machine, machinery, the FSB,

which is the new name for the KGB. He's got his lock on this monstrous corruption engine, the Russian economy, and he's got the oligarchs. And Navalny's in prison, he's in Roman prison at the moment, facing trial, he locked up again. So the odds are really, really against him. However, Putin has been in power for 20 years and good Russians, I mean there are, there's a new generation of Russians who have only known Putin in power who are now 20, who've got the vote, who've got energy, they've got belief. And at some point, the poison toad is going to run out of supporters of money, of people willing to do the killing. So the bets very much, you know, it's not a, the odds are against it, but my money isn't

on the poison toad, my money's on the valley. How would you define Navalny's political approach, his stance, and why is he important? Why is he popular? He's enormously charismatic. I mean, you're a bit charismatic. I can shout, he's not as dead. He's got kind of intense blue eyes. The only person, actually, there are two other people

I'm thinking about who I've met in my time. One of them is the Dalai Lama, the God Kings Tibet. Who, by the way, has got a fantastic laugh like Sir James, when Barbara Windsor used to pop a bra and so that's the Dalai Lama but he's got a real commanding presence in a beautiful way the other person has built Clinton when he walks into a room Bill Clinton can command a room the third person is a lexena Naval night. So he's got a real commanding presence. He's also, he's got a wit, if you watch the video, which is, how many people have seen it now?

26 million people have watched the YouTube video he put up last night. So we're recording this on Wednesday, the 20th of January, last night on the 19th, he puts this two-hour long video up. So it's not like something that feeds the algorithm to go viral. It's not just a short little clip. It's a full-blown documentary. And you're totally right. Like the level of charisma that he's got. I can't work. I almost want to chalk it up to the translations,

the captions, because I'm like, you can't speak this precisely with this much wit just on command. It must be the closed captions making him look cool. So he's got charm, he's got fire, he's got wit, he's got fire, he's got wit and it's for real. I mean, 20, I've done a podcast called Hunting Joland, which I've just heard it's now hit 2 million downloads. Link in show notes below, go and listen to it, it was awesome. Probably, this bastard, Alex, say, has got 13 times as many hits as that I got 2 million and my staff in a day fuck off. Sorry, come this way. No, fire away mate, yeah, you're on the gin. But he really funny, really intense and sticking it, sticking it to the Russian, the then Russian prosecutor general Chyka, saying all concerned in irony wrongdoing, but putting out the evidence that the prosecutor

general and his family had benefited from corruption and the victim of the corruption who complained ended up dead. So Navalny's been doing this, you know, to my personal knowledge, from 2016, but actually he's been doing before that, and there's almost something monkish in the sense of there's a religious further that he's bringing this war against corruption. So Navani is a dissenter. He appears to not really care about the powers that be and he's just happy to continue on his path. I like how you said that he seems almost monkey.

He's got this kind of religious further behind him that's compelling him. But really, all that is is just values and integrity in a place where there isn't much. Many of your listeners might might start falling off their chairs, but they're going to say it. He's a lawyer and he believes in the truth of the law. And he kind of reminds me of Sir Thomas Moore in the Bitton-Mantral seasons. I love Robert Bolf who wrote that. It was just a fantastic writer.

And there's a bit in Thomas Moore, at Manvel Seasons, where Richard Rich says, oh, you know, it's unparafraising, screw the law, doesn't matter. And Thomas Moore says, no, you're wrong, because the law is, the law of England, or England has planted thick with laws, and they're there to protect us and if we knock them down the devil can come for us. That's what the laws form. And so what Navalny does very cleverly both in his videos and in his defenses, he says, no,

that's unlawful. And he uses the information that's available to him to nail Putin's illegality again and again and again. And then anybody who knows Russia knows how crooked the regime is and how crooked the Russian state is. The Soviet Union was crooked too, but it had some sense of equality. I'm a little bit Soviet nostalgic in relation to the late 70s because there was so much hope then. I wasn't old enough to properly understand this, but I've heard

this from from older Russians, but they had some hope that what replaced the nonsense, the great big lie of Soviet communism would be better. And it's turned out that yes, economic life has been better, but actually in reality, a political life is somehow darker because there's no hope and it's more joyless. I make a distinction. I've written a novel called The Useful Idiot, which is about Stalin's time about fake news in 1933, and that time was really dark and Stalin looked good because Hitler was so bad, but Stalin was bad too. And what's happened is that Putin is more of an heir to Stalin than people think. It's not for nothing the other day when he was arrested in the police station and there's a trial taking place in the police station.

On the wall was a picture of this man, Biria, the rentier Biria. Biria was Stalin's secret policeman. He was the mass murderer. He killed occasionally the death of millions of people who died in the gulag. died in the gulag. So there's a continuity of darkness, of evil and power, which certainly Gorbachev and Yeltsin broke. Both of those men were good men wrestling with all the contradictions of Russian power. Gorbachev, ineffectually Yeltsin, good to begin with, and then he drank himself into being a useful gibberish, wasn't good enough. And the problem is, there's this awful dark moment of succession, when nobody quite knows who's going to take over from Yeltsinin and then the poison-toed Putin appears. Is Navalny Juk's deposing his extreme integrity and extreme virtue, at least publicly, to

create a contrast with Putin? Is that part of his appeal, do you think? He always does it with a joke. So the downside to Navalny and some of my Russian friends are worried about him if he does get power, is that around about 2007, 2008, 2009, he dallyed with the Russian right, the national nationalist right. Now Russia is, for the whole series of reasons,

it is a center of its politics, almost like 10 or 20 degrees to the right, and that's the most normal. I was gonna say, the extreme right in Russia must be really, really right. No, there are Nazis, and he wasn't one of them, but he said he used language in code, but the code wasn't very good, which was talking about effectively the purity of Russianness about Russian roots and this was politics of the other and the other here being the mainly Muslim people from weren't, who many Russians and Sears Russians. What happened was,

the Valygot locked up and going to prison was the making of him because he started doing well, he became too well, he was on telly and people could see his charisma and they switched off the telly and they locked him up for a short while But while he was locked up in prison He he really got to know the liberal opposition and he listened to their arguments and beliefs and when he left prison he He had absorbed the arguments and beliefs of the liberal opposition and allied himself with them again and again and again. And since then he has dropped the nationalist rhetoric and

you haven't heard that kind of language from him for a decade. So I think he threw that point and that's in the past. Since then, he's done two particular things. I forget the details of it, but his family is mixed up Russian and Ukrainian. There's many, many Russians and Ukrainians are. And he learns to speak Ukrainian. He's got obviously had, or has Ukrainian gram, gram parangrammar and none of them

opposed Putin's war against Ukraine. Now that's big potatoes, because the Russian right doesn't like that. And then the other thing is he has, he's the only serious figure in Russian politics who stands up for same-sex relationships, same-sex marriages. And that's super non-right.

So the idea, which the Kremlin put out, but he's a racist, I don't think that's true and hasn't been true for a decade. May not have been true back then, but I'm uneasy about the language he used. Back then, he doesn't use it anymore. What has some of the wars that he's got into over the last decade? Because there's been his brothers in jail in solitary confinement and then he was getting locked up himself every five days because he didn't have a permit to campaign and summit with green paint and then embezzling and all sorts. Take us through some of those

stories. So the by the way, I'm a bit wired because Donald Trump has left and Joe Biden has come. And so you're hitting me with asking me, so I'm apologizing to your listeners in that I can be better than this, but I'm too excited about what's happening in America. I'm also excited because of this queasy relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, that's over folks. And the bounty knows it. That's why the timing. So in a rough and ready way, what happens is that Putin has been ineffective, the boss of Russia for two decades.

And that's against the Constitution because borrowing from the American Constitution you can only do two terms I think four years four years which got due to 2008 at that point. It's out of a d'Archi, Mr. Putin, you're out What he does is he does a switch with this guy called I'm gonna what's his name? Dimit, I've got the wrong name stuck in my head, but he becomes the president and Putin is the prime minister. The reality is all the power sticks with Putin. There's a wonderful friend of mine, who's written a great book, Stalin and his hangman. And I've

gotten his name too, but never mind, it'll come back to me, memory pops up in a wonderful way. And he described the president. It's Dimitri damn, I keep on wanting to say Lebedev, but it's not Lebedev. Demetri, it means the bear in Russian. Demetri the president described by my friend Donald Rayfield, Professor Donald Rayfield, author of Stalinist Hangman, there's Al Capone's lawyer. So Al Capone's lawyer is the president of Russia for four years until 2012, and then in 2012, guess what? The constitution is rewritten and Vladimir Putin pops back up again this time

running for president. He wins, but the whole thing is a joke, it's a lie, it's an undermining of the true spirit of democracy. And the valmiume coming, as he is from the right of politics, allies with the liberals, and they start a big series of demonstrations, a big and the two great cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, but there are shadow demos across the country. Remember, it's huge, no-in-time zones. And it's a big threat to Putin's power. Eventually, what happens is the demonstrations die out. People, they can see that power isn't shifting Putin's there to stay. And also, once the big noise on the streets is quietened,

then the regime starts locking people up. And one of the people they lock up is, of course, Navalny, who gets locked up inside. And he gets to know people like Boris Nemsov. Nemsov is fantastically funny. And would have been a wonderful president of Russia. I interviewed him for the Russian Olympic, Winter Olympics, and the Putin's cronies had built a road between Sotchi, which is on the coast, and the ski resort up in the mountains and it cost $5 billion which was more than

the Mars lander NASA put on Mars and it was so expensive and the valley said to me it would have been cheaper to pave the road with Louis Vuitton handbags. He was born in Sochi, Nemesov, which is kind of like Russian Brighton and lots of gay bars. So there's an issue in that will gay Olympians when they come to compete, will they get persecuted because the law in Russia is fabulously and it disgracefully anti-Gay. And I interviewed the Putinist mayor of Sokchi who says it's not a problem in Sokchi because there are no gays in Sokchi. And I put this to them so that they said what? Not sure that's a solution. There are no gaze in surgery. There were so many gay bars and actually at the point I made to the the

mayor of Sir Wax because well that's funny because I went to a gay bar last life kind of deliberately. Anyway that was the kind of lovely humor that Nemsoft had and then he shot the head a hundred meters from the Kremlin. And of course, he's a big friend of Navalny. Navalny knows this, Navalny knows he challenged Putin, you may die. But he carries on. Then the Kremlin bring a case of embezzlement that he's got a corrupt business with his brother. What happens is his brother is put inside the slumber and he's held in horrible solitary confinement. And all I've interviewed prisoners who've been tortured. Cruelly, in all sorts of awful places, Algeria, Syria, the dark bits of Africa,

all sorts of ghastly places in Iraq. The worst thing is solitary confinement, or you don't talk to anybody, and they kept Alex's brother in solitary confinement. You still know, right? No, he's out. He's out. So part of the game, he's out. He's out. He's out. So, so, so part of the game, he's out, uh, part of the game with Putin is that Putin affects to be a Democrat, um, who follows the law. But in reality, the system is rigged. Uh, it's a joke, democracy. It's a veil tyranny, a tyranny with gloves on.

The gloves are fine. They're made of the best goats leather, but nevertheless, it's a tyranny. And in particular, Angela Merkel, the West more feebly, but Angela Merkel, who was brought up in East Germany, who spoke Russian as you had to, as a little girl. She speaks good Russian, and she pushes Putin on stuff, and every now and then Putin sort of backs down when Angela gets on the phone, says,

what are you doing about this? So anyway, he done for embezzlement I think part of the aspect of that trial ended up him going to Strasbourg winning his case that's where I met him in 2018. So this is a constant background hum to this. Now the other thing that happened was that he was you know he's let out and he he pushes and he set up this wonderful clever thing, which is basically the policy of the opposition is to unite in opposition to Putin's party, which he calls the party of thieves and crooks. And it is Russian is really, it's really beautifully and powerful expressed. And people can remember the plays of Dennis Potter, where one of the characters speaks so beautifully,

that's kind of the force. You can hear the force of Mavallini's rhetoric. He talks so beautifully and so powerful. And what you've got then is, Navalny never stops, and he's a bit like a juracell bunny. And there is, I mean, there is this kind of monkish belief in him, but said against that, there is a sense of humour. So for example Putin has made a policy never to refer to Navalny by name Causing the blogger the vlogger, doesn't he? Yeah, the blogger and

So I said to it when I'm finally caught up in the valley properly and interviewed him in Moscow in 2018 I called him so you know Putin never calls you by name. Ah, you mean Lord Voldemort never calls me by my name. I like, I just want to bang in this, right? But it's funny. I mean, like, I would, you know, we can't because of lockdown, but if the three of us were in a pub, Navalny would be fascinating. His English is good. It's way... I'll tell you my mother. My mother has. The favorite thing that I found from him. So he is doing a march somewhere or doing one of his parades, one of his speeches.

And someone comes up to him and throws green paint in his face, right? This happens twice. First time it happens, it's green paint. And the second time, I think, it's green paint with acid in it. And he's sat there and the doctor's saying to him, Mr. Navalny, he may need to accept that he might not get eyesight back in this eye. And he's recalling this tale in English to someone in this interview I watched today. And he says, so he tell me, I may not get my eye back. So what I think is not so bad.

Maybe I become like a pirate, you know, I can wear a patch. And I just thought, fuck me. The same as before this flight that he's just been arrested, getting off the other day. Someone says to him, uh, Miss Navalli, like, you're not worried about being arrested. And he says me arrested. No. And you're like, okay, like, okay, this guy really understands humor.

Yes, he's, so I worry about my Russian friends because of this balance with the far right a decade ago, he ends up in some kind of new Putin figure. I don't think so because, or something I've observed, as people may know, I fell out with the Churches Scientology when I did the panorama with them, and I got interested and fascinated by cults. There is a cult of personality in Putin, and it was a wonderful Professor Robert Lifton, who was a great American military psychiatrist, who first of all treated American GIs, had been brainwashed by the Chinese Communist during the Korean War when they had been caught in North Korea.

These are American GIs who became prisoners of the Chinese Communist and they brainwashed them. And it's the origin, he wrote a book which became the origin of the Manchurian Canada, the novel was based on this guy's research. And he said the enemy of the authoritarian mind of the cult is tolerance of mockery and a sense of humor. And so I treasure Navalny's humour, because it's proof to me that he has got inside his head,

somebody who's taking the piss out of him, and he plays with that, and it's also his shield as well. And so that's why I think he won't become, if he gets power, he won't become another Putin, proved me wronged. But I think he's a sense of humor, a sense of the ridiculous saves you from doing what I think

Trump's ended up doing. You can't believe you're on bullshit, can you? Yes, and if you do, I mean, it's a problem because in power, there are a lot of people out to afflict you all the time. So you have to have some belief, but to have inside your sense of mission, which he's got no question, something that's mocking and funny and aware of irony, then that's a fantastic and beautiful safety belt, and he's got that in space. So we roll the clock forward, he's doing these marches, he's getting a lot of young people

to go along with him, and then it was poisoned last summer and Survived and then get to one of the assassins to admit to the poisoning on the telephone and then post it to his YouTube channel What's going on? So what happens is So the way Russia works is none of this could happen without Putin. Who's responsible? I'm going to take you a little bit back, too, because we talked about the blinding in the eye, because I met the group that did that for this film I did called Taking on Putin.

And I met these people, and they went along and after them, so I knew and admired very much was shot. Local people who lived in his apartment block put up a shrine to him, a little plaque and there's a refover it and they came along and took the reef down through it away, put it in the bin because he actually lived in the next building along, but the owner of the next building along wouldn't allow the plaques, so it was the nearest thing the locals could find. And these are, anyway, what happens next is that we are detained and sent to the Moscow Police Station. We're inside the Moscow police station

when the Kremlin media said that I had desecrated Namsal Shry. Our cameras and our tape can prove what happened. So that gives you a and low and behold stories about, appeared in the Moscow media, and then my passport, my cameraman's passport, appeared on Russian social media. And we've obviously given our passport to the police. Hello, how did that happen? It gives you a flavor of it. So what we heard was that there was a wonderful couple, Andrei, so that of and his Mrs.

Erena, they've written a fantastic book called The Compatriots, blah blah blah, but he told me that the work here is done by an organization called Centre E which is the Counterterrorism Police, but the group, one of the members of the group threw the green dye with something like acid, it was the thing that scarred his eye. We don't know what it was exactly, but whatever that was was effectively controlled by group E, badly the counterterrorism police. And they're the same people, so what happened to me was after we got detained, my passport was taken by these police officers and go and bang up it goes on social media and I had to cancel the passport because of that. You get some flavour. What's happening

here is that Putin's goons are using administrative law to deny that natural justice again and again and again and the valley being a lawyer is fighting them all the time all the time all the time. The poor man is blind in a half blinded he was going to lose his sight and he makes a joke of it so there's something about his courage, which is exceptional, really exceptional. So last summer, he's on a plane, he's in, what he's doing is he's going to the sticks, the way it works is that most people in Moscow and St. Petersburg, if there was a free and fair election, would vote against Putin, they would vote for Navalny. The problem is in the sticks, you get people who don't get the internet properly, who just

watch State TV, who believe the nonsense that it's Putin or the devil. So he's going to the sticks on a regular basis. He was in Trump's forum stuff to get wet and he's doing a thing. What happens is the goons get into his hotel room and they put novicechok, which is the poison that was used in the Salisbury, which killed Dawn Sturgis, meant to kill Skripow and almost killed that poor police officer in Saul's Brie, the same nerve agents. And by the way, you cannot buy this in a shop. This is something that's made in a poison factory and the wonderful people of Bellingcat of and the wonderful people of Bellingcat of Doug and found pretty damning evidence of where that poison factor will be. It's a state-owned poison factory and

what happened in the next morning, Navalny put on a fresh pair of blue underpants. We know this because I'll get there. And he's flying on the plane, it's whatever it is, five hour flight from Tom Square to Moscow. And suddenly he feels violently, screams in pain, knocks out. The pilot heads the plane down, he's going to save the guys, and he saves the guys life. And there's some nonsense about it, but the airport being closed and the pilot doesn't take it, he lands the plane. The moment the plane lands, the emergency people jabbing with the staff that you give to somebodyies. It's kind of standard for a state, but it's good and actually work. And exactly the same effect happened in Salisbury. So really quite quickly, the immediate

people in Russia did the right thing, the pilot and the emergency people, straight away. Then he's in the hospital, they keep him there for slightly too long, the point being for the Nova Choc to die away so they can't see it. And then he's flown to Germany. In Germany, the best doctors and scientists in Germany find the, find Nova Choc.

And then that's, I think it's tested by other labs. I think one is in France, one is in Switzerland, or something like that. So free, separate state level labs, fine novichock poisoning, the same thing, the same incredibly rare nerve agent used in the Souls were used against Navalny. Navalny then gets in bed with Bellincatch, which is this wonderful organisation of British nerds, or is led by a British nerd.

And it beautifully, they use various holes and opennesses inside the Russian system to identify everybody who was on that plane flying with Navalny, to and from as he was on his travels around Siberia. And they see the same names coming up again and again and again. And then they track them back for years. And they discover an assassin's crew of the same FSP and then they find that they're FSP and they all work for the FSP and some of them are connected through the point and factory. Then they find their telephone numbers and they give this information to Navell and Navell only goes down a list of like 20 possible people in

the assassins crew and on the last call he gets to some good. I said you know what I it's and then the valley's pretending to be a high up in the in the security people. And he said what went wrong and the guy said well boss went wrong? And the guy said, well, boss, everything went wrong. And the guy talks for about an hour on tape to Navalny explaining what happened. I said, so we put it on his underpants, and Navalny didn't know that. Because, and so what happened beautifully.

I mean, it was like Chris, it was like following a burglar's footsteps in the snow. You look like guilty, guilty, guilty. Now what I would have done is to stop there and just wait until Putin goes. But the valney knows that if he's not in Russia, he's no longer a player, he's just been sideline, he's out of the game. So he sticks this out, he flies back to Russia, he's arrested and bang, he pops up the video,

which he's been doing while he's in recuperation in Germany of Putin's latest palace. It's an extraordinary fuck you. The guy is super rigorous. You can't fault the level of precision that his team is going through this. So he had this two hour video done about a billion pound palace of Putin's with the Hukka and Hukka bar in. You're from the Northeast, aren't you? Hukka. It's a Hukka bar. And he's using, this is the thing, right?

This is, I've only looked into it this week ahead of our episode today. And the sense that I get is he's kind of like a sort of a 21st century jockey trickster using modern technology, using drones and YouTube against this sort of old clunking behemoth of the Russian state. And they're sort of playing whack-a-moll with this this sort of the old tools of the old world, whereas, Navale only made this YouTube video about the new mansion by flat by getting drones and literally flying drones over the top of 63 hectares of land. And then there's 3d CGI imagery that shows you this is where the tunnel goes.

This is where he can have his coffee on a morning, because this is where the tunnel goes, this is where he can have his coffee on a morning because this is where the mezzanine level is that looks out over the beach. Like it really does feel like two worlds kind of colliding. Do you get that sense? Very much so and there's something beautiful about it too because what this is is it is Russia's cruel past, fighting Russia's potentially brilliant future. Now when I made the film, when I met Nibbarni, I met some of the people around him, and they were astonishingly brave. And as I said, the free critics I spoke about earlier, shot, shot, shot. These are Nibbabani supporters. One man was tazered then stabbed. Another man was beaten senseless,

beaten unconscious by thugs who never once said anything. That's special forces. When you beat somebody up, you say fuck you, whatever, you swear. These people beat him up in total silence. What he was doing by the way was monitoring an election with a video what watching I think either an election or a demonstration from a video in real time from the Navalny people and they they sourced him because it was in real time they found him videoing and then they beat him senseless, almost until he was in the coma and they never said a word.

And then, the Lebanese office manager was hit over the head with an iron bar by an assailant. He put in a quite properly, he made a complaint so that the man who attacked him would be charged and he was accused of wasting police time. Now, I've been there in that I filmed somebody taking a reef of Nemsoft Shrine and then I was accused by her and I suffered to a limited extent. I understand what's going on. I am very moved by Navalny's courage and by the people who will support him. So this Saturday, people will come out on the streets. He's asked them to do so. But in the middle of a pandemic, Russia's numbers have been faked but they're bad. It's freezing cold and I'm going to be fascinated to see how many people turn up.

He's inside for 15 or 30 days, then he will be tried, because they're saying he didn't comply with the terms of his previous release, and therefore they can hit him with a long sentence. That's very likely. But the world has changed Chris because Trump has gone and Biden is, I think, in no mood to play Mr. Nice with a man who he believes with evidence along with the CIA, interfered with America's democracy. Are you gonna have at this stage though,

this is something I was thinking about increasingly as I read this story, and it reminded me of the, I can't pronounce it, you go Muslims in China. Like, if someone, we go, that's it, sorry. We go, yeah. If someone commits a crime against the citizens of their own country, there's no one else to step in. If the state doesn't do it, America isn't coming to the aid of Muslims in China and Germany

isn't coming to help Navalny. Is it realistic to expect that the American president would say, I don't like how you're running your country over there, even though it's not affecting your relation with us. Is that realistic to see that happening? Well I think the idea of a nation's state can do what it down well pleases, went out with a holocaust. That went out with an at-sise. The virus is, you know, underlines the point, we live in the same world. So, the rule of law, respectful life, a fair trial, is a right for all of us, not just people who live in the happy and relatively happy and safe and prosperous democracies,

and the value is pushing it. Now I'm, I mean, it's another conversation for another day about what's happening to the Uighurs. I've done a film about them when I was the BBC talking to a couple of people in Istanbul who managed to get out and that story's grim. For the moment, fingers crossed. I hope he's going to be okay, but Navalny's story gives me tremendous hope. It's also, it's a kind of von Stalfenburg thing, Chris. When people say, hey, you know, the Germans, they were all Nazis. No, they weren't. von Southenburg tried to blow up Hitler. So he didn't succeed, but he tried. And he got killed and all of his friends were treated horribly, but they tried.

There were good Germans who tried to kill Hitler. What's your prediction? What do you think happens? You got 30 days, the next 30 days where he's potentially back in Russia, he's in jail, he had this fake mock trial thing in the police station. I think I mean all of that pantomime will continue and there will be cruel, meanwhile ordinary and extraordinary people, in particular young people, the kind of people who are watching this, there will come out on the

streets and they'll get beaten up and bashed and they might lose their jobs. And I think it's our duty to stand by them and to do something to help them. And then the values put out, these people have put out, I think they're saying we should have the West should act against some of the oligarchs who've ended up all concerned in Irony and you're wrong doing, but we heard some of them. Roman Abramovich, the guy who owns Chelsea, Alishio Uthmanov, who was a part owner of Arsenal who's still a big player in Britain. The Vowley doesn't mention them, but I will. The Lebedevs, they only evening standard and the independent, Yavgeni Lebedev has just been made a Lord by Boris Johnson. They're striking people because they, you know, you would appear that they're independent,

they don't do what the Kremlin does. None of them have said a word about this, not a word. You have Gennie Lebedev, Lord Lebedev, Baron Syberia, has not said anything about it. And he's a British lawmaker. He'd be holding to a foreign power. But essentially, how a bit what we should do, if I was in Parliament, if I was in the House of Lords, Lord Sweeney of Gil and Son right now would say this, that we should,

that Putin is there, he's been there for far too long, he has rigged our elections and he's locked up the effective leader of the opposition, his goons having poisoned him and his goons having poisoned Dawn Sturdison's sorcery. Let us cut convertibility between the rubble and the pound and the rubble and the dollar. That makes life much more difficult for the rich people in Russia to run their lives like they have. Because they don't want to spend their money in Siberia, they want to spend it in London and in Rome and in the south of France. But if you make that much more difficult for them, then the calculation, if you're a Russian oligarch, my life is to make the status quo, which is being maintained by a careful structure of money and power and enforcement.

You need to make the world that potentially could be offered by Navalny, like genuine democracy, more attractive than the current situation with all of these restrictions in. Yeah, so what you say, and there are sanctions on at the moment, they're not really hurting, and they're not hurting the rich people. So you know, you zap the oligarch's wallets their calculation, Putin is our man, may change. And that's something that we could do and we should do, and that's what I'm arguing here, or concerned in I only wrongdoing. I mean, when I, the last time I was in Russia when I came back, my neighbours said to me,

no, that was great job, but we're not gonna accept any of your Amazon parcels, any more. I was gonna say, especially not if it's a pair of blue pants. What's it gonna take for Navalny to get into power? Like, is there, there's no chance that you're gonna be able to, with some 18 or 24-year-olds, like tick-tockin' in the street

and doing a few parades with some signs there's no way that you're going to knock down Putin with that, is there? As I said towards the start it's the odds are against him but my money is with the challenger not with the poison toad. I think behind the 18 and 24-year- olds there's a whole bunch of middle-aged and old people who get it, who's been in power too long. Who've seen Trump's and Panna, Trump's gone. That's the benefit of American democracy. It changes. The tone will change. They will see all sorts of stuff about Biden who's plainly a decent man, well why can't that happen in Russia? It can't happen in Russia because Russia never changes. I don't think that is sustainable

over time. So I think Putin's in trouble. He's in trouble number one because oil and gas are boring and they're damaging the planet. The other day I started listening to David Attenborough's a life on this planet and it was so good and yet so depressing. He's pulling on some heartstrings at the moment, man. David's every single time, he goes on Instagram and he's making everybody cry. And he's saying, I don't have long left for this world and he wants to try.

I just think... Well, I listen to the man, and my... Okay, we don't need Russian oil and gas. We actually don't, we're not flying. The amount of... I mean, it's lovely to see people on the crazy e-scooters. I mean, I used to see cars. I don't see cars outside my place in London. I see people on these scooters and bikes. We don't need Russian oil and gas. So Putin's got a problem

in that he's a political dinosaur sitting on a dinosaur economy. Still strong, still massive, still frightening and cruel, but there are limits to it. And there are limits to the loyalty of his people, but we've got to work harder at doing that. But the odds are against Navalny. But what he is doing is the idea that Russia is a kind of boring far-right authoritarian stasis where no one is challenging the Kremlin. That's not true. Inside Russia, inside of prison right now, is the future of Russia, the Russian soul, at its best, the most interesting place to be right now, is in prison with Alexey Navalny, if I was Russian. I'm kind of, I can't because of lockdown, but if I could, I'd fly straight out there,

get in to a fight, get locked up, and I'd... You have a chat with him next door. Yeah, what a pleasure, and say hello, I mean, it's been quite a while, but here's your first inside jail interview, and somebody would smuggle it out because remember, even the panor stuff, the hawker room set again in your funny Northeast accent. In the hawker room, there is somebody who's given that to the valet, has given that to the valet. And that is the thing about Russia, it's got proper soul. There is a proper sense of the people around him that this is a war, they're fighting. And it's a war where truth and justice and the law is on their side and the people in power are

rigging the thing again and again and again and what the valley is doing is proving that in a way which is it's kind of beautiful. I want everybody's listening to this nonsense. It's not nonsense to watch the the valley video because we linked it'll be linked in the show notes below. Can you just give us the, what's the cliff notes on this new mansion video and why is it important? It's disgusting. It's disgusting. But is the issue that he, President, Lord of Russia of Vladimir Putin has no class and style? Is that the issue or is it the issue that he's spent so much money? Is it where it is? What's going on?

Yeah, so the primary issue is Everybody is suffering because of the because of the virus also in Russia too and For him to squander a billion pounds on this sub-served palace, well he's got plenty of other palaces, beautiful ones, historical ones, he doesn't need this, he doesn't need this at all, and yet he squandered this money and that is the fruit of his corruption, and that is a criminal waste of money. So what it shows is that is that Vladimir Putin is the al-Kapun of Russia. He's the Gambino crime family and he has his family,

he's got Richard and Richard of Russia. He is the Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Russia, two ghastly twins in one and a whole sum, poison-toed body. I mean, another thing I haven't talked about, but I will. I did a report for Panorama about MH17. This was the plane that was shot down by a Russian rocket launcher, lent to the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels, and they thought it was the Ukrainian fighter jet, but they shot it down. 200 and 98 people died, and I went out there for panorama and I did a piece of camera and the dying of a light surrounded by engine oil and broken engines and broken plane and the nose. Other people's luggage and the worst thing is Chris is the, I was little things that

kids, the little mini suitcases with little wheels, but a toddler sits on, or mum and dad run them along. And they were in the fields, the airplane oil burnt fields of the middle of nowhere in Ukraine. And whenever I go through Gatwick or he's broke and I see one of those, a kid on one of those things and I start welling up, I start to cry because it triggers that. Ten Britain's died in that, a ton of Australians, lots of Dutch people, Malaysian people, 298 people, and the person ultimately responsible is that because you cannot buy a rocket launcher in a shop, there's Radhima Putin, and he got away with that. Dawn Sturge's died of Novichok in Saul's Pri. It feels like Putin's got away with that,

It feels like Putin's got away with that. And, you know, there's a certain point at which we've got to stand up to this man. And also we should help this beautiful brave, slightly crazy guy, or Alexei Navalny watch his stuff, writes your MP, push it. What is your opinion or what is your estimate for the next 10 years in Russia? Where do you think it's heading? I know where you want it to head, but given the realism and the power and the money and the state and all that stuff, what do you think is going to happen? Right, so most likely, the valley, the sun, accident happens to him in prison. One of the other psychos kills him. There's a trial. Putin stays in power. How long to Putin now? He can't stay in power for that much longer. He can stay in power

as long as he bloody wants. As long as he's alive. But that's the thing. So that's the most likely, what I'm hoping for, what I want to happen is that the soul of Russia wakes from its slumber, sparks by Alexey Navalny's heroism, people get out in the streets. And at the same time, Joe Biden, who's seen his country defiled by Donald Trump, but also in part by Russian interference in American democracy does stuff. I'm skeptical whether Boris Johnson would do anything. He's the man who's a no-noble one of Vladimir Putin's oligarchs. I feel that, but I feel that change is in the air and that and as I said at the beginning, my money is on the challenger, not the poison toad. I said this about my about uh if you learn Maxwell, that story that was a dark

throw story and this is true, but I'm, it is a dark story and you've got the charismatic guy who's gone into the lion stand, he's gone back into prison, knowing he's going into prison stand, he's gone back into prison, knowing he's going into prison. And it's kind of like, see, between in the great escape that he's sitting in the cooler. But boy, boy, you know, if you've got a heart and soul, who side are you on? You've got to be on the side of the prisoner. There's one more thing is that in 88, as a young reporter for the observer, I went to South Africa when Mandela was still in prison, and I got, you know, gassed by the South African apartheid police, apartheid wasy and power, but you could tell that they were more afraid of the prisoner, that somehow the politics, the shape of power had been switched, so the

prisoner was more trouble in prison, and that they were finding a way of getting him out. Now the problem is that Putin is different, but if Putin has a stroke of Putin drinks the wrong cup of tea, then who knows what happens. So once again, my money is on the challenge at not the poison toad. Anyone that can deliver 26 million YouTube views in the space of 24 hours shouldn't be messed with. Absolutely not. That's dangerous, man. I mean, I was looking at, I did a little bit of crunching on the stats on the back YouTube views in the space of 24 hours shouldn't be messed with. Absolutely not.

That's dangerous. I mean, I was looking at, I did a little bit of crunching on the stats on the back end. His YouTube channels had a quarter of a million subscribers added in a day. It's absolutely terrifying. And then when you look at the total plays across his channel, the trickle down from people finding that one video, which is probably trending across Russia and Eastern Europe, has trickled into everything else as well. So I mean, if there's any aspiring YouTubers listening

and you want to go and look at some ridiculous stats, just go on social blade and search for Navalny's account because it's absolutely terrifying. But this is the most interesting time. I can't imagine what it's like to be inside of, I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to be inside of, I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to be inside of Putin's head most of the time, but I certainly can't imagine what it's like now when you have this new weaponry rhetoric and charisma that's being utilized and promulgated through a channel which you don't use and you're fighting with

sticks and clubs and this person's come in with like a laser sword and has decided to use that It very much does feel like David and Goliath old against new There's definitely some archetypes going on which I think is what makes it so interesting What I found fascinating and you may have noticed this if you watch one of Navalny's videos, is that he's got some hard coded adverts partway through. And this young guy who hosts the channel and he's letting him speak, same way as we've been tonight. And he goes, but first, like a word from our sponsor, and it cuts to him talking about the sponsor. The first thing he says is 50% of people aged between 18 and 24 in Russia say that they want to leave to go and work somewhere else. And his campaign is don't leave, you don't need to leave Russia, you

can work for these, cut these different countries companies from within Russia, but you needed to learn English and I learned English with this particular company. 50% of the population aged between 18 and 24 don't want to be in that country anymore. Like that, the fact that you have that, in you don't think of Russia, I know that there's jokes made about it being a dictatorship, but you don't think of Russia in the same league as North Korea, but when you think that half of the people who are probably the most up to date, the most informed about what's going on and also have sufficient time left to be able to make a choice, given the freedom without the restrictions of family and debt and all the rest of it. And they don't want to be there anymore. That's pretty terrifying.

Yes, but it's a logical consequence. The number doesn't surprise me that if you want to, if you apply for a permit to do something, you have to pay somebody off again and again and again. If you annoy somebody in power or, you know, like you've got a relationship and then you're in love with somebody, but then somebody else who's in power, who's a policeman or worse, an FSB officer fancies your woman, then you could get locked up, you could get into trouble because of this. Those are real, well, things there. So crazy. It's a dark place. Now, I've been to North Korea. And I'm telling you the truth when I got to Beijing, I thought, thank God, I'm just in a real... So my tolerance, I'm sorry. Yeah, my God.

There were people with a thing here. I thought, thank God, I'm in only slightly fascist China as opposed to that place. Because, by the way, left and right, in places like North Korea and China and Russia, they kind of fused but actually these days Russia is, it was under Stalin. The story of I try and tell my thriller, The Utility of Israel, is that Stalin's Russia was close to Nazi Germany, long before the Midnight Pack of 39, they were doing deals, the Nazis and the Nazi sympathizers and the Soviet

states from 31 onwards. And also remember that the Russian state has been funding the far right. It helped Trump get elected. It's been helping the far right in Britain and across Europe. That is what the Kremlin is doing. That's where the money is doing. So in part, what we should be doing in helping the ballot, least watching his videos and becoming incentivized to his terrorism, is also we're trying to defend our common democratic values,

which is that's a universal thing. The other thing I'd say to you, everybody who's watching, when we can travel again is go to Russia, go to, by the way, go via Belarus, take a copy When we can travel again is go to Russia go to by the way Go via Belarus Take a copy of a 1984 animal farm leave it in a bar Go, you know if you can if the valley is still doing it. I hope he is go on a demo if you're I hope he is, going to Dema. If your family has got money and your dad's access to fancy lawyers, get arrested. It sounds like a wonderful holiday. I'm actually going to Ukraine,

Levov, and then going St Petersburg and Moscow this summer with my friend Michael Males who is a podcaster and a media personality in his own right but he's born in La Vova and he's going going back to his homeland for the first time ever. I'm going with him we're gonna do a full video series. It's fantastic. We usually because I lost my temper with the Church of Scientology, I did this panorama of robberishing Scientology. I'm a pin-up for psychiatrists, the world over. And when there was a the Royal College of Psychiatry through an international symposium for psychiatrists, I was the the funny man before the drinks at the Excel Centre and I got 5,000 psychiatrists to dance to Saturday night fever with John Travolta, who is of course a famous

Scientologist. And I got the then head of the Royal College of Psychiatry, so Simon Wesley to pretend to be John Travolta and dance. he's a terrible. Anyway, never mind this. What happens is as a result of that, I got an invite to give a talk at the Ukrainian College of Psychiatry in the Volth and they flew me out there and it's a wonderful place. Formerly Ossahongerian then Soviet, but was always a center of resistance to Soviet groupthink. And it's a fantastic place, but so is Russia. I mean, it is an incredible, the thing that gets my go to the one I'm accused of being Ressa Fobick. I love Russia. I love Russian culture. Russian books, Russian poetry. There's a wonderful phrase by LeMontov. The restless he begs for storms as though in the storms there is rest. Incredibly beautiful culture. Fantastic alcohol. Vodka freezing cold in

the snow. You won't get that, but you can anyway, it will have the time of your life. I'll ask you for some recommendations, John, you can send me some of the... But Chris, if you don't go to an avalanche demonstration and don't get arrested, then I'm on your case. Okay, fair enough. Well, that looks like it's going to be, look, man, we're going to do, we're going to do around two. I'm going to get you back on to talk about one of my favorite podcasts from last year, which was your hunting Jolaine series. If anyone wants to go and learn about the Jolaine Maxwell scandal and where everything's up to now, and that's a really interesting arc as well, which we're going to get into on the next one, but I implore everyone to go and have a listen to that. Also, useful idiot.

And the usual, I've done an audio book as well. And there's a quiz, I have to do a bit of Welsh in it. Okay. And my mispronunciation of the Welsh, you have to listen to it to get it. You're just causing bother with every different country that you can find, aren't you? Where else should people check out your stuff? Why'd you want to direct them? So I'm on Twitter.

I don't use Facebook, but I'm on Twitter. John Swini Raw, R-O-A-R. And I've got a website, at johnswini.co.uk. And I'm on Amazon. I've written 12 books. Some of them are good. Some of them are a bit rubbish, frankly, but you can wet that out. Amazing. John, thank you so much for today. Pleasure.

Get over it, get over it