The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Aslund

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Russia's Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Aslund Atlanticcouncil.org/expert/anders-aslund/ A penetrating look into the extreme plutocracy Vladimir Putin has created and its implications for Russia’s future This insightful study explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the judiciary to his friends from the KGB, he has enriched his business friends from Saint Petersburg with preferential government deals. Thus, Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism. Much of this wealth has been hidden in offshore havens in the United States and the United Kingdom, where companies with anonymous owners and black money transfers are allowed to thrive. Though beneficial to a select few, this system has left Russia’s economy in untenable stagnation, which Putin has tried to mask through military might. Dr. Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. He is a leading specialist on economic policy in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Dr. Åslund has served as an economic adviser to several governments, notably the governments of Russia (1991-94) and Ukraine (1994-97). He has published widely and is the author of 15 books and edited 16 books. His most recent book is Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (Yale UP 2019) Other recent books are with Simeon Djankov, Europe’s Growth Challenge (OUP, 2017), Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It (2015), and How Capitalism Was Built (CUP, 2013). His books have been translated into 12 languages. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. He has worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He earned his PhD from Oxford University.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us. If you want to watch the video version of this, and I highly recommend it, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button, and you can take and watch a live video. It's on the Internet now. It's really cool.

It's the latest thing. Check it out. We're not on TikTok yet because evidently they're going to pull the plug on that baby. But, you know, stay tuned who knows maybe whatever i don't know i don't i don't even know where i'm going with that whole thread so anyway uh plus uh you can refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives the cbpn.com or chris foss podcast network.com uh we had a bunch of books that we were taking in uh going through uh with different authors and stuff that

was centrist from several different places. This is from Yale University Press. And I saw this book and I was like, holy crap, we need to get this author on the show because this is really interesting and very topical, especially with the United States going into re-election and some of the different news things that are going on to here. But we have today the author of Russia's Crony Capitalism, the Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy. And I've been watching a bunch of this gentleman's videos and they are extraordinary, I got to tell you. And the data he knows and the stuff he knows can give us a real great insight into our world, what's going on, and maybe some of the other news. I'm going to ask him about Germany and what's going on over there.

His name, the author, is Dr. Anders Asland. He's a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He's a leading specialist on economic policy in Russia and Ukraine and Eastern Europe. See where we're going with this? This is going to be really interesting, folks. Dr. Aslan is served as an economic advisor to several governments, notably Russia and Ukraine. He's published widely and is the author of 15 books and edited 16 books. His most recent book, this one we'll talk about today, is Russia's Crony Capitalism, The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy.

Other books are Europe's Growth Challenge. Another one is Ukraine, What Went Wrong and How to Fix It. I believe I said that wrong. Is it. Is it Ukraine or Ur-Crane? We'll get to the bottom of this because he's a professional. How capitalism was built and his books are translated into 12 different languages. He is brilliantly the professor at Stockholm School of Economics and founding director of the Stockholm Institute in Transition Economics. He worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institute, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wood-Rulson Center. He served as the Swedish diplomat in

Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, Moscow. He earned his PhD from Oxford University. I think after I read all that, he's officially the smartest person who's ever been on the show. Welcome to the show, Dr. Aslan. How are you doing? Thank you very much, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here. That's quite an impressive resume you got there. And I've seen longer, so we could probably, you know, on your other pages, there's some longer stuff. So welcome to the show. I'm really excited to have you on because this book is really topical, and I've always found Rache and Putin and everything he does intriguing. Can you give us some dot-coms or wherever you want people to check you out on the Internet and order up this book?

Well, you can find my books on Amazon. That's the easiest way of finding them. All right, so check it out on Amazon. You can order it up, and there'll be a link on the Chris Foss show. There'll also be a link to his website. So, Doctor, give us an overview of what this book is about that you've taken and written here. Well, you can say that you have two different ideas of Putin. Everybody agrees that he's an authoritarian and that he wants to stay in power in Russia.

But then you have two different ideas. Some people say that he wants to make Russia great again. My view is that he wants to make Putin richer than he ever was. kleptocracy and that the idea of being good nationalists is just a bit of a cover-up for the kleptocracy. What I argue in this book is that Putin is probably good for a bit more than 100 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. And you wonder then immediately, why would anybody want that much money? It is as if you are rich and have a yacht. You don't want anybody else to have a longer yacht than you have. The Russians are really competing having the biggest yachts, and in the same way, having the biggest palaces. So Putin built for himself a palace on the Black Sea for $1 billion.

And then you wonder where did he take the money? He took it from the state procurement for medical equipment and kept one-third of the money for himself. Wow. He's done an extraordinary thing with Russia, because I grew up, as you did, with the old USSR, and we used to hide under our wood desks thinking nuclear bombs were going to save us in our schools. And it was quite extraordinary to see it go through its iterations

with the different, you know, when, when, when the wall fell democracy and he's done, he's done, I don't know if you call it extraordinary cause that would imply something good about it, but he's, he's done some very interesting things with being able to monetize the old Soviet union and, and turn into what you call a kleptocracy.

And I, I don't disagree with you in any way, shape, or form. It's quite extraordinary what he's done. Well, you can say what has been extraordinary has been that Russia became a market economy. And market economies work everywhere. And what has not worked so well has been with ownership. Russia today has a chronic capitalism. If you become rich, you have to obey the powers.

If the powers are there, they want to get a few hundred million dollars of you. You had better pay up. Otherwise, there's no choice but to leave the country within 48 hours, as many other rich people have done when they have refused. So, of course, this is no way for entrepreneurship. So the rich in Russia, they today have made the money essentially on oil and metals. And what you talk about is he runs it it's very interesting it's very mob like and then it's kind of uh there's like three different ways that he runs it and it's very

mafia like and then and then there's like a government and it's like a mix of several different things that he's put together and in creating a government that sustains itself somehow. Yeah, you can say that Putin rolls through three different circles, as I put it in this book. One circle is his old friends from St. Petersburg who are in business, and they are tapping the state companies through privileged state procurement. That costs about twice as much as they should. The second circle is state enterprise managers who are helping and tapping the state companies on money, in particular oil and gas.

And then you have a third circle, the real powers. These are his old KGB chums who are sitting on security and they're essentially extorting the others. The funny thing is that they think that they're great patriots at the same time. As you think of the old Tsars, they thought they were great patriots. They were working for the country. And, of course, they were the richest people of the land. It's the same. So this is very much going back to 18th or 19th century, the model of old feudal role about Putinistan.

It's amazing. It's extraordinary to think about. I mean, he basically took a lot of the giant, old communist USSR state properties, privatized them, but he privatized them with his own goonies, I guess.

And then, of course, everybody funnels money to him. And just like a mafia, Don, everybody pays up, you know, through the ranks. Like capos and everything else. It's extraordinary. And I watched several different videos you did. The one you did for the Atlantic Council, I think it was. And the amount of money that you were talking about was just,

you just kind of go, Jesus, when is enough enough? Never. That's the fundamental insight, but look upon the same. Port is enough for U.S. billionaires. They are competing. So you can see that Larry Anderson of Oracle is very upset that Bezos is so much richer than he is. How can that be right? So they are competing

in the same way. It's only that they keep more quiet about it because wealth in the US is not so new. So therefore people have learned how to keep quiet about it. And if you compare with continental Europe, in continental Europe people really know how to keep quiet about the wealth.

You have lots of millionaires there also, but they don't show it. So the exciting thing about Russia is in this way that we can know so much. And I think, didn't Putin try to keep that Black Sea Palace hidden and quiet for a while? He did. And what happened there, this was in 2010, it was that a minor, a partner of his, one of his slaves who did the job, probably just got $ 200 million dollars he wanted to retire and you know chris in this business you don't retire it's like someone he realized that they

were about to put drugs in his cars and sue him up in prison for a suitable number of years. So then he fled the country. And he took pictures with him, and he took documents with him, and he showed what was actually being done. So this is one of the main sources to how Putin actually does business. And this chap, Sergei Kolesnikov was his name, he was involved in 32 offshore companies in which Putin had ownership. Wow. Now, is that the one gentleman?

I might be getting mixed up, but there was one gentleman who was jailed for a short time or for a year or two, and then he finally was able to get released to Europe, I think it was. He was a billionaire. I think he had oils. You're probably thinking of Sergei Pogacarov, the banker who was close to Putin. It's about the same time.

He left around 2010. But Pogacarov was never sufficiently close to Putin. And he had billions of dollars. And then Putin thought that one of his closer friends was more worthy of these billions so Pugachev lost it to Arkady Rotenberg

who's one of Putin's right hand men because they did judo when they were 12 years old you must respect your old friends. The longer you have known them, the better they are. If you are competent or smart, it doesn't matter. They have to be close to you, and you must trust them.

This is how Putin has built up his system. And he lets these people run, essentially run the state. And then you don't get a very efficient state. Yeah, and what's interesting is you were talking, and I believe you talk about this in the book, about how he has that close circle of people that he grew up with from like 12 years old or something. And he parks money with them, like $500 million each that he has

that they just hold for him. It was quite extraordinary to see the numbers that you were talking about because I was just like, you know, the guy's pretty old. Like if he goes to, I don't know, McDonald's every day and, I don't know, just throws money out, he probably can never get used to it or get rid of it enough. But I guess if you're an autocrat, you've got to save money for a rainy day when they run you out of the country.

I don't know. We just saw the king of Spain take off, and I think it was the king of Spain. He just took off and was like, I'm out. Well, he had a few scandals, and of course, Spain is democratic, so therefore it's much worse. But Putin, as I discuss in the book, first he has this group of four close friends who are multi-billionaires, each of them. Then he has a circle of lesser friends who have only half a billion dollars each.

And then he has four cousins that he has also given half a billion dollars each, just in case, so that clearly Putin doesn't feel safe at all. As a good dictator, he is suitably paranoid. If you really want to stay a dictator, you had better be paranoid, because otherwise somebody will take you out. So Putin is paranoid, and therefore he has these three completely different circles of people. And the funniest thing is one of these childhood friends, he's a butcher in St. Petersburg Petersburg and happens to have half a billion dollars that he has got essentially through getting stocks

in companies cheaply. You get them for one cent and sell them for 30 cents. That's how he does business. That's called stock manipulation. And it's not really illegal in Russia. So how can we complain yeah and now he's made it so that he can pretty much rule russia and definitely i think in the 2030 or something like that 2036 2036 yeah wow quite extraordinary do you think that donald trump seems to have a real

like he really likes uh putin and some people think it's because he's got something on him or because there's so much money that went through him from russian uh money laundering but maybe he just really loves putin's model and dreams that he could somehow achieve it he certainly loves china's uh China's leader who's just given a lifetime appointment. Well, I think there are several elements to it. One is that Trump simply likes dictators. As he said about Egypt's president, al-Sisi, he's my favorite dictator and that he said publicly. And obviously

the Saudi leaders, particularly this truly awful crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who's a real dictator, is one of his and Jared Kushner's favorite. And then Ben Putin. And all these strict authoritarian.. You mentioned Xi Jinping of China. The same thing. It has nothing to do with national interest. It's nothing to do with values. Rather, it has to do with having new values rather than as much power as possible. And in these cases, you always ask, are there any particular financial issues? And what we do know about Trump is that he got a bit more than $50 million extra pay

for building his soul to a Russian oligarch in Palm Beach in 2008. $50 million is quite a substantial amount of money if you're nearly a billionaire. And also, Reuters has written substantially about how Trump sold 700 apartments on Sunny Island in southern Florida to unknown companies yeah the it's interesting the uh how he idolized them and and they were talking about trying to do a trump tower if he if he lost

the presidency um so what it's interesting to me because i remember someone writing when the wall fell down uh and and they're writing about how everyone was celebrating the fall of the berlin wall and they're like oh it's so great this is so wonderful and i remember somebody wrote you can you can say that it's wonderful but there's a great tragedy of life that has happened here. There's people who've been robbed of a quality of life, of being able to have freedoms and do whatever they want in the old Soviet Russia for, I guess, what, 60 years or something, 70 years under all that rule. Who pays the price for all that? It seems like the Russians do do a little bit better under a market economy, I guess you would call it. You know, they're not as oppressed and living in bread lines like they were in the old USSR, SSR.

But do you ever see a point where Putin could be overthrown by his own people, or does he just have too much control to even have that happen? Yeah, sure. Russia is not that oppressive a society, if you think of it. Turkey has at times tens of thousands of people arrested. Russia, according to the best human rights group in Russia, Memorial, has 250 political prisoners.

That's not much. So the Russian system, more factions like this, you never know if you behave sufficiently badly, you might be killed. Many people have been, but it's not many people who get killed together. Very few get real prison sentences. But it is a complete legal uncertainty. If you misbehave

you can lose out. If you take, for example, this courageous journalist Anna Politkovskaya, or my good friend Boris Nemtsov, who was shot outside of the Kremlin in 2015. In both these cases, people fought for years. How dare they? Won't they be killed? And they were killed.

It's extraordinary to me. I see some of the politicians that have tried to run against Putin that always get jailed and they've gotten poisoned. And then they keep fighting and and it's a real it's an interesting thing to watch that type of human nature because I asked myself would I be that brave you know when I yes you know I think I don't know who it was that told me this but it was kind of funny they said they said in Russia you pay extra for the bottom floor as opposed for the penthouse because you don't fall you pay extra for the bottom floor as opposed for the penthouse because you don't fall off the windows of the bottom floor i don't know if that's your

comment is it interesting on the bottom floor you can have problems with the burglars so that's another oh that's another thing all right when you get the birds because a lot of people seem to fall off balconies and off second floors there in Russia. I mean, it is not only a joke. It is a reality. For doctors now will complain about how Russia has mishandled the coronavirus, have fallen out from fourth and fifth floors, from hospitals and died. I think they do that on purpose too i mean that's like a mafia thing like mafia the mafia used to kill people in a certain way

uh if you were a snitch there were certain ways they would kill you so when they found you you know they'd find your tongue cut out or you know some sort of other thing um and they would be like oh he snitched that's why they whacked him um in in fact i i believe some uh uh up in canada putin just tried to send some mercenaries to take out someone in canada and the canadians either caught him or stopped it aren't you thinking of this it was muhammad bin salman who was wanting to take out oh i'm sorry am i thinking of mlb or yeah yeah okay yeah well i get my authoritarians mixed up it's not one this week uh was even extraordinary was the brazen ones that that putin did in uh england where he you know they took in the toxin and uh and poisoned people this is just crazy man yeah and when you ask russian foreign policy

specialist why do they do this and it was also here in washington in, a former Minister of Information, who had clearly gone over to the other side, was killed in a hotel in the center of Washington. And when you ask the Russians, why do you do this? They say, well, because we can. And our relationship with the U.S. and Britain is so bad in many cases. It doesn't really cost anything. And a lot of people say, I mean, Russia's main thing is they're just basically a giant gas station, right, with gas and oil? Yeah, but at the same time, you have always in Russia strong intelligentsia. You have a good high-tech business. A big threat to the high-tech business is the lack of freedom.

So many of these people have developed first and now they are in Silicon Valley and at Microsoft in Seattle. So you have many thousands, perhaps more than 100,000 Russian computer specialists in the U.S. because they are outstanding. And Russia is wasting its great talent in this fashion. But the Russian search engine, Jandex, is rather better than Google, I would argue. So now the state has more or less taken control over it, but it used to be a fully private company. And now I presume that it will decline.

But it has really been an outstanding company for about 20 years. Yeah. And there used to be the old saying in Russia, the TV watches you, now it's the Internet watches you. And I believe, if I recall rightly, the story on them taking over the Internet was so they can create something much like what China has, where they have their own firewall and their own kind of private cutoff or the ability to cut off the Internet from the outside world. Yeah, but here again, the Russian Internet specialists say they can't do it.

Oh, that's right. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it.

They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it.

They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. They can't do it. Russia is lagging too far behind.

They did not do it early enough so that they can do what China did. The Russian Internet specialists are very good. They use all kinds of tricks so that we can operate internationally. So the Russian Internet is quite free, but there's an enormous amount of disinformation. So when they can't control it, they try to cheat you instead. And I think you spoke in your book about how he owns, one of his cronies owns most all of i think 20 of

the 22 tv stations yeah so they can control the airwaves the narrative the news whatever they want yeah so russia is much more about manipulation of information and cheating you, disinformation, than about stopping information. And then you don't really know, if you're not really knowledgeable, what is true and what is not true. So therefore, Russians who deal with this are extremely good at figuring out what is true and what is untrue. Yeah.

So Russia, I think it just got reported today, Russia and China again are trying to spew disinformation again into our election and everything else, and they're playing those cards. And it's interesting to me that they're not really, it doesn't seem like Putin is looking to overthrow us. I think there's an old Russian saying about how, maybe it was Brezhnev who said it, we'll destroy America from within.

It will destroy itself rather than us destroying it. We just, you know, got to throw disinformation at it. Yeah, and I think that what Putin understands very well, it is war is expensive. You don't want to waste too large resources on war. Disinformation is cheap. Cyber is very cheap, not to mention assassinations. So Putin is doing things that we think are not allowed.

Putin says, do something about it, and we don't. And then he continues doing those things because they are cheap. And of course, the Russians are very good on the Internet. So why not exploit the Internet extraordinarily, as they have done? So we should expect much more of a cyber attack. So all these things is what we should expect. And if you think of it, a US election campaign costs about $6 billion. Throw a few hundred million dollars into it,

as you are allowed to do today in the US, because dark money is allowed since this verdict of 2010 on Citizens United that allow dark money. So then you can tip the balance, and that can be done pretty legally. And of course, you can do it illegally also. So I think that the danger of dark money in the US is enormous. I think it's big also in Canada.

I know that you have serious concerns in Vancouver, in particular about Chinese money coming into the real estate. So it's China and Russia that are doing the same things, and they know how to operate in a dark money sphere. And you and I, we are no good at that. That's not our profession. Yeah. And it's been interesting how he's been able to play on the stupidity of people,

the ignorance, the prejudice of people, watching the 2016 election and what people bought. You know, even now they're running campaigns to turn people against each other over masks and what the COVID-19 is. And it is extraordinary to watch Putin's his behavior his interest in this because to me i mean maybe it's just me but i'm not a authoritarian paranoid narcissistic dictator um at least last time i checked my bank account um off the check again after this um it is i would just be like hey i'm not gonna screw with anybody because i don't even screwing up my little gig I got going on over here.

So I'm just going to try and get along and keep all my money, you know what I mean? So you're familiar with what's going on in Ukraine because you're an Ukraine pro and you have a lot of experience over there. Is he going to fully ever take Ukraine, or is he just going to keep being an antagonist? I think that the ideal for Putin is that the regime falls into his lap, without him having to do anything much militarily. So that he does a little bit militarily.

Crimea was a special thing. Crimea to the Russians, that was the Soviet holiday paradise lost because the Russians don't have much of holiday paradises given that the country is quite northern and doesn't have that much of the seashore.

So this they really wanted. Nobody wants Donbass. Donbass is a rust belt. So it's more who would like to fight for Detroit. Not an obvious attraction. So I think that he has got stuck there. And that his real interest is to stabilize, to destabilize the Ukrainian government,

make it dependent on him. And I talked to a friend of mine who had been a deputy minister in a couple of ministries several years ago, and I asked him about one of his colleagues, why he behaved like that. And he looked at me as an agent, don't you understand that he's a Russian agent?

And I said, no. And, well, he explained, one-tenth of our senior officials used to report to the KGB. They still do, but they don't report to the Ukrainian SBU. They report to the Russian FSB. So you have all these Russian agents all around. And there are a lot of bomb attempts in Ukraine. Normally, nobody is being killed.

But bombs go off. I mean, the scores of bombs. And why? Well, in order to keep people on their toes. Yeah, keep people on the edge. But they kill people when it becomes news. If you don't. Yeah, keep people on the edge. But when you kill people, then it becomes news. If you don't kill people, it doesn't become news. Then it's just local news so that people know that they should be scared.

So I think that we are likely to see a lot of this. And also Ukraine has prohibited Russian television. What happens? Various Russian agents have bought Ukrainian television channels. About half of Ukrainian television is now pro-Russian. So they have to clean this up. But it's very difficult if you have a lot of infiltration and if you have a lot of corruption that works for the Russian.

So the way of cleaning it up is transparency, transparency, transparency, open up, and of course you need more money. Yeah. So was our greatest mistake then making sure they weren't nuclear, even though they were in NATO and not letting them have nuclear weapons would that have held him at bay Ukrainians think so

if you ask Western as I say that the Ukrainians did not have control over the nuclear arms in any case that was not an option Ukrainians think that they got a terrible deal and that they were not even paid properly for the nuclear arms. But there should have been proper security guarantees. And this is a linguistic matter.

The US provided Ukraine with security assurances. In Russian and Ukraine, assurances and guarantees are the same word. So they thought that they had a guarantee and then the Americans tell them, sorry you only had assurance, it's not a guarantee. And in the US terms, it didn't go through the Senate, then it's not a full commitment. The Ukrainians find it rather difficult to appreciate such a point. What's extraordinary, and I talked about this when a lot of people did when Trump was first elected, was that Trump eats the checkers

while Putin plays three-dimensional chess. And it seems like Putin definitely has control over Trump's brain because, I mean, recently we were pulling troops out of Germany, which is going to be scary. Yeah, I mean, this is something that needs to be clarified. I recently read Don Bolton's memoir about his time in the White House and he's very careful not to say anything about what drives Trump with regard to Russia, while Bolton disagreed on every single point that Trump was giving in to Russia. So this is a serious point to investigate.

I'm not going to say more, but it's really dubious. Yeah, I read his book as well. So do I need to worry about Germany being invaded or run over? I mean, I don't know what Germany's army situation is on their own. I'm not even sure they need to defend them. But just as a checkpoint, I know that Russia makes a lot of, you know, they've got a good deal now with the gas pipeline, I guess, going in there. Well, I don't think that you need to be worried about Russia going into a NATO country. The point about Ukraine and Georgia

is that they are not members of NATO, so there is no security guarantee from the West to them while they have extensive cooperation with NATO. But the Baltic countries are full-fledged members of NATO, not to mention Germany. And the Russians, all of what they do, exercises for big wars, they are afraid of it because they know that it costs a lot of money. But there is a fundamental imbalance.

Russia and the US have 95% of all the nucleons in the world. Britain and France have a little bit. Germany has nothing. So Russia could, in certain situations, end up so that they can use nuclear blackmail against non-nuclear countries in Europe. But I'm much more worried about the former Soviet republics and what is happening in the Balkans.

We saw in 2018 that the Russian military intelligence tried to carry out a coup in Montenegro. Fortunately, it was revealed in time and nothing happened. But this is a soft down the belly of Europe. That's dangerous. And we've already seen what's happened in Ukraine and Georgia. It's interesting to me. Did Putin learn from the Afghan war as to how costly that was for Russia

and how damaging it was on so many different levels? Is that why he learned, you know, don't spend money on real wars. Do disinformation wars. Break down a country. Destroy a country from within. Take it apart. Send in the agents and all that stuff. Yeah, I think that he has a good understanding of

what makes sense economically in war. And if you think of it today, a modern fighter plane costs $100 million. And how much does a drone cost? Well, a few hundred thousand dollars. So why not have good drones instead of fighter planes? So I think that we are moving towards a different kind of technology,

but we have these big airplane producers. They want to continue producing very expensive planes, while the military might benefit from a very different kind of armament. It's like tanks. Tanks used to be the dominant feature. Now it costs so little to take them out with a simple tank shot, so why not anti-tank weapons? So why not do it. I think that we are really about to see fundamental change in the war economy, military economy. And I think that the US is far behind having too much money and therefore these very expensive systems, while the Russians realize that they don't have so much money. So therefore they are using their resources much more cleverly. So, for example, the Russian special forces are outstanding

at the level of the best in the world, as the U.S. seems, and probably still the British and French special forces. But it's only a few countries that have really good special forces. And that turns out to be modern technology, what we thought was old technology, while the expensive armaments seem to be

losing out. And what's funny is he's taking us apart. I mean, it seems like the Russians, especially, I guess, the way Putin is aligned, because everything flows through and from him, he can have a singular focus on what he wants to destroy in any different country and spreading disinformation and destabilizing them from within.

And he's got us all fighting each other and going against each other. I imagine the same thing happened in ukraine or is still happening i think in ukraine where everyone's fighting in with each other and and just more and more you know it destabilizes to a point that it's very easy for for him to possibly take over i believe he was behind a lot of the brexit information um and i think now like even there's there's so many there's so much of it going on in Europe that is crazy, the dark money and stuff. Yeah.

But also it is a great weakness, as we do know, that all of these decisions about Russian activities abroad, they do go after Putin himself. If Putin doesn't make a decision, it doesn't happen. So the big thing was at the beginning of this year, Putin was focused on two stupid things. One was to change the constitution so that he could be reelected until 2036 with a referendum on the 22nd of April. And the second was a victory march on the 9th of May. And because of the coronavirus, neither of these events happened on time.

And Putin got very distressed and therefore acted approximately like Donald Trump, didn't do anything about the coronavirus for weeks. And this has caused Russia, now being one of the countries that has been worst hit after the US, Brazil and India by the coronavirus, simply because Putin was not awake, so to say. And right now we are seeing massive popular unrest in Khabarovsk in the Far East. And Putin doesn't do anything. It seems as if he's not awake. And these are peaceful mass movements with 50,000 people out in the street, and Putin just doesn't do anything sensible.

So with that degree of centralization, you make mistakes. And I've been watching that. I've been kind of interested between Brazil, Putin, and Donald Trump. It's been interesting to watch how much people can take before they finally break. And I've been seeing

the protests here, speaking of in Russia, and I'm like, hmm, I wonder if those will get big enough to actually overthrow him or or do whatever he has a very interesting way of dealing with people i've seen the russian they have those russian uh goons that go in and whack people and stuff they're like they're not like secret police they're kind of like little gang dudes sort of like the the poor boys or something it's quite extraordinary and and when you look at the map

of where our country's going what its future is going to be uh there's a lot riding on what we're doing uh here uh coming up in three months and of course what donald trump would do if he leaves office if we continue a sort of democratic thing uh if he wins re-election, holy crap, I don't know where we're going to be if he wins a re-election. It's going to be scary. Yeah. But Putin also, he has been in power for 20 years. He looks tired.

He doesn't look old, but he looks older. But he looks bored, massively bored. And he sits in all these meetings, and he makes speeches where you feel that he, do I really have to give a speech? Can't I fall asleep instead? So he looks as if he's in physically very good shape. After all, he's 67 years old and been there for 20 years. You think that he's so much

smarter than all the other international leaders because they are newcomers. But his population are pretty tired of him. And in a recent trust rating, it was down to 23%. If you ask the popularity rating, then it's still around 65%. But trust, that's what it eventually comes down to. And Putin has very badly suffered from the coronavirus crisis, where he was simply passive. Now he is quite cautious. But his prime minister and three ministers and his press spokesmen have all got COVID-19 themselves. So they were very uncautious.

Now I saw, for example, today Putin was having a meeting with his security council and then Putin sits in his dacha outside of Moscow with a wall of television screens where he has all the other members of the security council and he looks utterly bored. So is that dangerous? Do you think he could get bored enough to make a move on something,

like finish off Ukraine or start something? Or is he just going to keep playing the smart three-dimensional chess card? Well, I think that we're seeing more that he's not doing what he should have done. I mean, he did not act on the coronavirus in time, and therefore Russia is now in bad shape. Unlike, for example, Ukraine, which acted

early and took serious measures of the whole of Central Europe. And it generally seems as if he doesn't want to make any decisions. With regard to money, he's just hoarding money. Russia is not spending a lot in order to balance the crisis.

Real incomes in Russia have fallen for seven years in a row now. Wow. They've fallen by 2.5% a year on average. I mean, you can't go on like this. So the question is when the reality catches up with them and that people see that we can't go on like this any longer, that there is an alternative. The Russians are brave.

What would it take to overthrow Putin? I mean, does you have to have a whole Russian revolution and you know, how crazy does it need to be? I mean, you certainly can't just not vote for him.

Well, the standard thing is I discuss it in my book at the end of it. We have three ways. Essentially, normally they come together. One is if you are overextended abroad. And Russia is now involved in a lot of military actions abroad. So even if they are cautious financially, this might be too much. And it can be, after all, the war in Afghanistan only cost 15,000 young men their lives,

which is not all that much. But it was a very serious reason why the Soviet Union collapsed. The other reason is that people get upset because they see that the government doesn't solve this problem. That's what we are seeing now in a number of local protests for various reasons, mainly on the periphery of Russia, not in the center. And then the third, that's when the chips are down, when the people, the security people say, you're not performing well enough, You're stealing too much. We, of course, steal also, but we don't steal as much as you do. So it's better that we take over the power.

That would be kind of interesting. Like when the army takes over Egypt, you know, all the time. Yeah, but there would be the old KDB friends of Putin from St. Petersburg who are of the same age, and they say, you're not performing enough. You have these other friends of yours from St. Petersburg who are of the same age, and they say you're not performing enough. You have these other friends of yours from St. Petersburg who are stealing billions. We are only stealing hundreds of millions. So we are much more honest than your other friends,

so now we take you out. This is what we can never know until it happens. I imagine Putin doesn't ever get near windows on upper level. You can trust him. He has an enormous convoy of cars when he's going to the Kremlin, which he does very seldom. He stays in the dacha in Novograd Agarjova, the town of Moscow. I thought I saw a picture of an entrance to where he stays,

and it's like a hazmat sort of setup that you go through to get to him or something. I don't know if it was a real picture, because I don't know if anybody knows that picture. Evidently, he's quite protective. He's like Trump. It's really extraordinary to me that we just had like the Ohio governor was going to meet him and had COVID. Like no one can get near him with COVID, but he definitely wants your kids to go to school.

Do you see a lot of Putin authoritarian in Trump so far? I think that Trump really loves Putin and that he really sucks up to him. But think of it also that Putin is a very good influence agent. That's his original profession. And George W. Bush loved Putin. And he saw Putin's soul through his eyes and all kinds of nonsense. So he really knows how to put up a show. And, of course, Trump said all these things from the beginning, before he had met him.

But Putin has these skills, great personality skills. He has emotional intelligence. Yeah, I mean, he probably is very well read, knows history, and everything from the KGB, where Trump is still eating the checkers pretty much at this point. Yeah, I hear from people who see that Putin are not very prominent, and they're amazed that Putin has studied their dossier before, and

poses personal questions to them. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's an interesting character to look at. I mean, whether you look at him as good or evil, there's definitely something very complex and sophisticated about what he does and how he is.

And I suppose you would have to have some of that too. What's the longest any one person has ruled? I guess they're, has ruled Russia. Is he getting close to the longest running dictator or authoritarian of Russia? Well, we have Stalin who said from 1928 to 1953 okay so uh that's five years to go if i get it right so he's probably brechner who only said from 1964 until 1982 so uh but he he did in the last two years, who would take Brezhnev.

But this is a long period. Yeah. Is it maybe that the Russian people are just more used to this sort of abuse than we are? Well, I think simply that there is a massive concentration of power. And if you think of the Kremlin, if you sit in the Kremlin,

then you feel that you are the ruler. So if Russia is to become a democracy, the Kremlin has to become a museum. Yes, that's interesting. So this has been interesting. The book is really intriguing. The interviews I was watching was intriguing as well, and how he has built this and everything else. And you really get a picture of Putin and his setup. And this guy's no bumbling idiot. He might be one of the most smartest dictators in the world, maybe next to the Chinese leader. Just extraordinarily smart and extraordinarily dangerous.

I would never want to piss him off. Yeah, but think of it. Russia has been stagnant economically for the last decade. China has been growing at a very high speed, about 8% a year. So Putin doesn't deliver for his people. This is what ultimately will break him.

It was interesting too, the Saudi Arabia-Russia price war they had where they kind of made it smart for Putin, didn't they, on the pricing where they kind of made it smart for Putin, didn't they, on the pricing where they got into a big deal with OPEC and stuff? Yeah, I think that this was one of Putin's right-hand men,

the head of Rosneft, a former KGB person, who just did this for his own sake, and he didn't think of Russia's national interest and then Putin had to pick up the pieces but then Putin very cleverly utilized it to improve his relations further with Trump

he had five phone calls with Trump about the oil prices and with the Saudis so Putin is very interested in being at the center of international politics. And this crisis helped him to get in there, even if Russia lost economically. Can you imagine what he's going to do if Trump wins for four years? I mean, he's already played into Trump's head and probably has enough games going inside there.

Another four years, and holy crap, man. He'd just be like, hey, why don't you sign over the D in America to me? Just go ahead and sign it over, baby. And he'll just be like, okay. Well, I'm not sure that the Russians are really that happy with Trump. He's too unpredictable. The Russians like things that are predictable. They're happy to be unpredictable themselves,

but they don't want others to be unpredictable. So, for example, Putin has wanted a new START agreement. Trump couldn't care less. And Russia is not adverse to a climate change agreement. They are part of a Paris

agreement on climate control, and they are in the Iran agreement, and Trump has said no to all of it. It's good for them that Trump destroys the West in the U.S., but it's not good for them that we have nobody that we can really negotiate. Because Trump seems to be unable to negotiate with anybody.

Not least Bill Conger. Part of the deal is just a fictional book on him like he couldn't negotiate his way out of a paper bag um and and you see him coming he's he's like this bumbling loud drunk that you see coming and you're just like yeah whatever man and uh it's really scary. What's even scariest to watch with Trump and not caring about the rest of the world, literally Russia and China are cutting up South Africa right now for resources, power, control. You see those Russian mercs that are going in now to South African governments and stuff. It's really interesting. They're just like taking over the country. Yeah, and we are

seeing that the U.S. is just departing everywhere. Libya is the most scary example where they are really fighting, and the U.S. is absent. I can also say in Ukraine, the U.S. is absent. I also say in Ukraine, the U.S. is absent.

There are 400 U.S. military trainers there. But the U.S. government has no role because there's no policy. And it's pretty much the same almost everywhere, apart from where Trump has some specific view of the other. As in Germany, for example, where he's against everybody. I think, God, if he got another four years, he'd

pull us out of NATO, and Putin would throw a party. Yeah, and you see, Bolton reports from the NATO summit that they were all afraid that Trump would actually do what he talked privately about. That's right. They were going to get the U.S. out of NATO, and then in the end, it fortunately didn't happen.

But it's not good that a U.S. president has this power. The checks and balances need to be restored in the U.S. And it's been amazing that the GOP has just been like, whatever. And they've actually got a lot of money, the dirty deals with McConnell and that one oligarch from Russia over the, I think it's an aluminum factory or some sort of metallic alloy in Kentucky. And then you saw the money of the Russian flow through the NRA in 2016. It's just crazy how they're just infiltrated and we just go,

okay, we'll sell it America for some cash. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it's been pretty interesting. Uh, I really highly recommend people check out the book.

Anything more we need to know about the book and what you're doing? No, I mean, the, the, the big point about my book, Russia's crony capitalism, that is how the corrupt system in

Russia really functions, how Putin and his friends are tapping the big state companies on money, and my assessment is that we are doing it to the tune of 10-15 billion dollars a year, and they've done so since 2006,

and they take the money out. So it's all in the offshore. So the best thing we can do is to clean up the offshore. And the offshore is primarily in Britain, in the US, because that's where you can keep anonymous companies of a massive scale. And the European Union has already decided to prohibit anonymous companies. It's in the U.S. defense bill now, so it can happen in the U.S. also.

This is the most important foreign policy measure against Russia. Yeah, I think it was the Canary Papers. Am I thinking right? What was the papers that were down on the Cayman Islands and stuff? The Panama Papers. The Panama Papers, yeah. Yeah, in 2016 that came out. And then it turned out that this childhood friend of Putin,

Sergei Roldugin, held more than $2 billion of Putin money. Just extraordinary. You think about what these people, if that money had gone to the Russian people, what kind of better lives they would have, etc. etc.

Because it's big money. I suppose it's up to them to really claim it but it's it's really interesting i mean you really look at putin and that is one complex sophisticated dude and uh and and ruthless too i mean just viciously ruthless um think of it half the world approximately is run by kleptocrats. People who are just sitting there, the whole of the Middle East, much of Africa, much of the whole of the former Soviet Union, really. And they are just sitting there collecting money. And in order to keep the money, they keep the money abroad, because if they lose power and the money's in the country, they will lose it also.

So they want to keep the money abroad as a reassurance on their power. It's really interesting how you play that game. We support it by letting them park the money. Anyway, guys, be sure to check out Anders' book.

You can get it on Amazon. It's Russia's crony capitalism, the path from market economy to kleptocracy. He lays out the whole pattern and system that Putin uses. And it's quite extraordinary. And to me, you know, like I say, whether you judge these things as good and evil, you know, a lot of people will just be like, well, that guy's a bad guy. But when you really look at the extraordinary stuff that they do that's very complex you you you get to know your enemy a little bit better and how there's probably no way they could have any like

i really don't think he has any good intentions for america i don't think he has a good intentions for trump um i don't know maybe there's's a PP tape in Russia running around somewhere. Who knows? But it's quite extraordinary. So thank you for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it, Anders. And there will be links to get the book on thechrisfossshow.com. To my audience, you can watch the video version.

It's at youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. Tell your friends and relatives to go to thecvpn.com and of course watch for other great interviews of wonderful authors, brilliant ideas and concepts on the

chrisfossshow.com. Be safe everyone and wear your mask. We'll see you next time. Thank you very much Chris. It was a great pleasure.