The MeidasTouch Podcast - KREMLIN FILE Sneak Peek: Masha Gessen, the rise of Putin

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

MeidasTouch is proud to bring you a sneak peek of our new original series, KREMLIN FILE. For more episodes, subscribe to KREMLIN FILE wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by renowned researcher Olga Lautman and political activist Monique Camarra, KREMLIN FILE takes audiences on a riveting journey through the rise of Putin and the spread of authoritarianism across the globe and into the Trump White House. Featuring interviews with Masha Gessen, Yuri Felshtinsky, Bill Browder, and Craig Unger, Season One dives head first into Putin’s Russia and their ongoing active measures campaign around the world. New episodes drop Thursdays beginning August 5th 2021. Subscribe here or wherever you listen to podcasts for more episodes! Meidas Media + bunker crew ————————————— About this Episode: Masha Gessen, the rise of Putin Olga and Mo journey back to the 90’s with Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen who describes their odd introduction to Vladimir Putin by way of Saint Petersburg and beyond https://www.KremlinFile.com Masha's twitter: @mashagessen Olga's twitter: @OlgaNYC1211 Mo's twitter: @MoniqueCamarra Meidas Media + bunker crew --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What's up, Midas Mighty? Ben Micellis here with Brett Micellis, and do we have a treat for you. The regular Midas Touch podcast will still take place at its regular time, so check that out when we launch our new Midas Touch podcast. But we will be premiering a new original Midas Media Network premiere today called Kremlin File.

Tell them about it, Brett. Hosted by renowned researcher Olga Lautman and political activist Monique Camara, Kremlin File takes audiences on a riveting journey through the rise of Putin and the spread of authoritarianism across the globe and into the Trump White House. Featuring interviews with Masha Gessen, Yuri Felchensky, Bill Browder, and Craig Unger. Season one dives headfirst into Putin's Russia and their ongoing active measure campaign around the world. What we want you to do is right now, make sure you go and subscribe to Kremlin File wherever you get your podcasts. So, if you're listening to a podcast right now on a podcast app,

head on over, search Kremlin File, and make sure you are subscribed. We are proud to premiere the first episode of Kremlin File right here on the Midas Touch podcast, and you can catch new episodes every Thursday. Enjoy, and remember to subscribe. and the impacts on national security and democracy. I'm Monique Camara, and I've been an activist all my life. I saw fascism creeping across Europe and across the globe. And then we got our own radical right-wing government in Italy. I got scared, and I said, okay, that's enough.

This is Kremlin File. People need to care what's happening inside of Putin's Russia because it's affecting all of us. The Soviet Union collapse set him up. You know, he basically came back with revenge for everyone. Today's guest is Masha Gessen, who will discuss watching the change take place after Putin took power. Such an important voice. A lot of people have heard the more sensationalistic part of Russia, you know, as covered in U.S. media. But they need to know the roots of what happened, the transition from Soviet Union, when Putin came into power, how he dismantled the system and then took it over.

Before we jump in, I got to ask you, Olga, what is happening in Russia that we need to keep our eye on? Well, this year, I've pretty much been focused on what's happening post-Navalny. The FSB toxins team was activated in 2017, just days after Navalny announced he would run for president in the election the next year. For anyone who's not aware, Putin's regime attempted to poison him last August. On a flight to Moscow, a passenger captures the awful wails of Alexei Navalny. The Russian opposition leader has suddenly fallen ill, and he knows exactly why. I get out of the bathroom, turn over to the flight attendant and said to him, I was poisoned,

I'm going to die. Then I lay down under his feet and to die. He was flown to Germany for treatment. The German government announces he has been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. I will go back because I'm a Russian politician. I belong to this country. Especially now, when this actually crime is cracked open, revealed. And then when he landed in January to Russia, he was arrested right at the airport. Putin's fiercest critic is sentenced to spend the next two and a half years in prison camps. Within the two to three weeks after, protests broke out across Russia in support of Navalny. The regime started an extremely horrendous crackdown against protesters.

I mean, in a matter of two weeks, around 12,000 protesters were arrested. And since then, it's just nonstop. Let's welcome everyone. Our distinguished guest, Masha Gessen. Masha is a Russian-American journalist, activist and bestselling international author. Their latest book is Surviving Autocracy. Masha, welcome to Kremlin Five. Thank you. Good to be here.

Thank you, Masha, so much. Your voice at this moment, especially, is so needed. Exactly. Every day I'm waking up to another opposition leader being arrested. Recently, the members of the Pussy Riot were arrested. Navalny's organization has been labeled as an extremist organization. Recently, Bard College was labeled as an undesirable organization. Bard College. Yeah, Bard College. What did they do? Yeah, it's because they get Soros funding. I teach at Bard College. Bard was actually running a college in St. Petersburg and had been since 1998. It is by far the biggest Russian-American education exchange program.

You know, it's just one of the many things that are alive and working or that were that the state wants to quash. I was really, really moved, let's say, about your experiences in the man without a face, how you took us through the changes that were going on, the difficulties, the courage of a lot of the people there. It was an emotional journey, gave us a real picture of what was happening there. Thank you so much. When Putin was elected president, what did you know about him? I had an odd introduction to Putin and what was going to happen to Russia. I ended up getting very deep into reporting on St. Petersburg politics. And this is a year and a half before Vladimir Putin came to power. And the rest of Russia were living through this

very messy, but progressive period, right? A period when the media were largely independent and really vibrant and really fascinating. And I don't want to idealize the 90s in Russia, although for someone like me, it is a time to idealize because I was among those people who just were like inventing things and discovering things and really feeling what an incredible moment it was to be living in a country that was reinventing itself. And the same was happening in politics and sort of building up institutions. There was judicial reform, which had trailed other kinds of reform, but that was finally getting off the ground. And I was writing a lot about that. Business was

kind of also trying to figure out what it was going to do. It was coming off of that period of the initial total robber capitalism and actually trying to talk about corporate responsibility, transparency. I mean, it had a long way to go, but these were really interesting conversations and there was a general sense of moving in the right direction. In 1998, a member of parliament, this very charismatic, very visionary member of parliament named Galena Staroboito, who had been a friend of mine,

was assassinated in the stairway of her building in St. Petersburg. And it was an absolutely shocking thing for the nation, I think. At that point, Russia wasn't used to political assassinations happening just as a matter of course. So I went to St. Petersburg to write about the murder, the reaction to the murder, to try to figure out what had happened. The people who pulled the trigger were found, but not the actual person who contracted for her killing. We still don't know who wanted her killed. It was one of the greatest outpourings of popular grief in living memory. Inside the hall where Galina Starovoytova's body lay in state, the men and women she had represented filed past her in silence,

others barely able to tear themselves away. She was really maybe one of the last leaders of the democratic movement. The people who have come here today to pay their last respects to Galina Starovoytova are convinced her murder was a warning from the opponents of democracy. A new battle is beginning for the soul of Russia. Robert Parsons, BBC News, St. Petersburg. And what I realized was that St. Petersburg had an entirely different political culture than the rest of Russia. St. Petersburg was really different. St. Petersburg was a place where people would be afraid to talk to me, where people had gone to jail for no reason that anybody could identify, where journalists would tell me that their offices were bugged, that they had been

followed for months or years, that they were intimidated, where actually political assassination wasn't as surprising as it was in the rest of the country. The deputy governor of St. Petersburg was shot in broad daylight in the center of town, and other killings were happening. So I realized it was a really different political culture, and I was still trying to make heads or tails of it when suddenly Vladimir Putin emerged on the national stage, first appointed by Yeltsin as prime minister and then very quickly becoming acting president. And he was very much Yeltsin's anointed successor. Boris Yeltsin, who was this larger than life figure, he was ailing.

He was also serving at the end of his second term, which was the last legally allowed, something that hasn't stopped Putin. But under that very same constitution, Pilsen respected that he could only serve two terms. And he was becoming increasingly isolated. He was only surrounded by a very small group of loyal people who were referred to as the family, which is funny because it's such a clear reference to the mafia. But of course, the mafia state is what came after. And he had really alienated all the charismatic, the truly leader worthy people who had been by his side in the 90s. So he knew that when he left office, there were a lot of people who would want to see him prosecuted. And there were good reasons to prosecute him. I think he was a well-intentioned man. I think he was a great politician. I think he was really sort of organically democratic, unlike Putin. But he made a mess of things.

And he definitely did things that were illegal at the time, and some things that should have been illegal and um he feared prosecution so he needed to get somebody into office who would preemptively pardon him there was nobody to annoy him because he was so isolated so his his his minions were bringing him people to consider and one of the people they brought him, the leading person they brought him was Putin. And somehow they decided that Putin was perfect. I think that part of the reason they decided Putin was perfect was because he was so unremarkable. He was just, he was not very smart.

He was not curious. He was not very educated. He came from the KGB, but he didn't, it's not like he had like a sterling career in the KGB he was just this little mousy bureaucrat from the KGB and in their very overconfident way these people thought that if they picked somebody who was so unremarkable, he'd be so grateful to them for making him king, that he would be forever loyal and manipulatable. Classic mistake of overconfidence. But of course, they didn't have to have found somebody who had the exact proclivities and talents of Vladimir

Putin, which, you know, he does have some talents, but he came from St. Petersburg. He had served as deputy governor in St. Petersburg in the key years from 1990 to 1996. And he really had been instrumental in creating that culture of suppression, fear, corruption, secrecy in St. Petersburg. And so when I saw that he was going to be appointed prime minister and then that Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999, in order to make Putin acting president and therefore to make him the preemptive, the presumptive winner of the upcoming election and a special election, early election that no one else had time to prepare for. So really to make him president, right?

I thought, oh my God, we're in big trouble because this guy comes from the KGB, but also because this guy comes from St. Petersburg. So Masha, so you realized in the 90s when you went to St. Petersburg, what Putin's capabilities were, or at least the danger he posed. What image was created to the Russian people of who Putin was?

How did they sell him to the Russian people? You know, they didn't have to sell him too hard because Russians were really tired of Yeltsin. Yeltsin was an embarrassment. He had become a huge disappointment to the country, like in bigger ways than usually politicians who are idealized. They come down to scale, they become normal. Yeltsin had really deteriorated. He would have these drunk, embarrassing incidents where he tried to conduct an orchestra or he slept when he was supposed to have a meeting. He slept on his plane on the tarmac and couldn't be roused. So he was an embarrassment internationally.

For a couple of years, he had really been just swinging left and right politically and appointing one prime minister after another. And the country had gone through a huge financial crisis, which ultimately led to rejuvenation of domestic industry. But it had still been hugely traumatic because people saw their salaries, their personal purchasing power get reduced by like a factor of five or six in the course of a couple of days. So I think people saw Yeltsin as being responsible for that. And here came Putin, who was temperamentally and visually and sort of in terms of affect Yeltsin's complete opposite. He was sober. He was really small, both physically and kind of in terms of his presence, unlike Yeltsin, who was huge physically and in terms of his presence, a booming voice. He would

just like take up the entire great hall of the Kremlin, the Hall of Congresses. And you would feel like you were in the presence of something huge. And Putin is just so unremarkable, but also he wore well-cut suits, unlike Yeltsin, who was just wearing these baggy clothes and his shirt would always be untucked. And people saw him as European, as orderly, as responsible. He spoke German not very well, but just the idea that he spoke the European language made people feel like we're entering a different era that was much more civilized. And so people, I think, really purposefully ignored the warning signs. There were very few people who were writing about the danger that he posed. It was really like I was writing in the New York Times, I wrote a series of columns warning about him while he was

acting president, before he actually was elected president. And there was Marina Salia, who had been a member of the St. Petersburg City Council, who had conducted an investigation into Putin's corrupt activities. And that might have been it. Everyone else just kind of jumped on the Putin bandwagon and put him across as an economic reformer, as a pro-democracy politician, but more than anything else, as somebody who was going to make order out of chaos and kind of civilize Russia and Russian politics. Okay. And to follow up on that order out of chaos, but right before Putin became president in 1999, there were a series of apartment building bombings, which killed 307 people.

At the time, I remember Novaya Gazeta started, you know, investigating and there were suspicions that Putin and Khrushchev were responsible or behind it or involved in it, Novaya Gazeta at the time had written, quote, Once upon a time in a very democratic country, an elderly president appointed a young and energetic successor to the position of chancellor. Then the Reichstag went up in flames. Historians still haven't established who it was that set it on fire, but history has shown who stood to benefit. What are your thoughts surrounding that event? There were a couple of outlets that were investigating,

and it was a series of explosions, two on the outskirts of Moscow, one in southern Russia in a military town. And then there was also an explosion that didn't happen in the design, where people saw somebody carrying a bag of what looked like sugar, which is what had been used in the earlier explosions, and placing it under the stairs of an apartment building in the design, called the police, the building was evacuated. The bags were removed. And first the police said they did turn out to be explosives. Then they said it didn't turn out to

be explosives. The people who had planted them were actually found and arrested and then released because they turned out to be FSB agents who the FSB said were conducting a drill. That is perhaps our biggest smoking gun with a series of explosions because it's very hard to explain why something that looked very much like an explosion that was going to happen was organized by FSB agents. At the same time, we have no proof that the FSB was behind those apartment building explosions. It's actually an illustration of how difficult it is to investigate things that happen in Russia, especially before there was enough electronic and other data to be able to analyze the way the Bellingcat does. The Bellingcat has sort of hacked this whole problem of disappearing facts. But, you know, in a normal country, you would have

records, police records, judicial records. You would have ways to find facts that would allow us to know a little bit more about the explosions in 1999. At this point, what we can say is there's every reason to be strongly suspicious that the FSB was behind those apartment bombings. And we know that the authorities covered up and suppressed investigations into those apartment building bombings to the point where pretty much everyone who was in a high-profile way involved with investigating those apartment bombings was killed, right? Yeah. Including the parliament member and investigative journalist named Yuri Shikhachikhin, who is the first political use

of what we now think is the nerve agent Novichok or its cousin, Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in her apartment building in 2006. So there are strong reasons to suspect that these explosions happened in order to allow Putin to consolidate power. Whether or not they were actually set off by the FSB, it's not a terrible comparison to the Reichstag fire. Immediately following those explosions, Russia restarted the war in Chechnya. And it was a war that had been really unpopular in Russian society the first time around. And now the second time around, it was suddenly hugely popular and

it enjoyed the support of the liberal political establishment. And it made Putin the household name because Yeltsin had cycled through so many prime ministers that by the time Putin came around, nobody was paying attention. And suddenly he was on television saying his famous, we're going to snuff them out in the outhouse, promising this great sort of crackdown and war on Chechen terrorists, which is who the explosions were blamed on. So whoever was behind those explosions, the explosions were used as a pretext to consolidate the country against a designated enemy. Yeah. And to make Putin the leader of this crusade. Yeah. I have a quote here, Masha, that you wrote in Dead Soul in 2008. And it actually sums up a lot of what you're saying here, because this is going back to

when Putin was elected in 2000. So afterwards, you wrote, you say you have a country and no one to run it, which is what we were talking about before. You say you decide to invent a president. Say you hold auditions and then you pick someone. You endow him with all the characteristics that you, the people of your country, and many people elsewhere want to see in a president. You present him fully formed to the world. You pat yourself on the back. And that is all you have

time to do before everything starts to go wrong. So my question, Marcia, is what went wrong from the get-go? What went wrong from that point on? So Putin comes into, he becomes acting president. And one of the very first things that he does is he signs a decree re-establishing primary military training in secondary schools, which was something that those of us who went to school in the Soviet Union remember very well. You know, we learned to recognize chemical burns and you learn how to take apart, clean and put back together Kalashnikov, things that every high school student should clearly know. And so Putin, he signed a decree pardoning Yeltsin and he signed a decree reestablishing primary military education, which then didn't end up happening for years.

The point was not that he was actually making people learn how to take a part in puts it back together at Kalashnikov. But it was such a strong indication of who this man really was. Right. What he thought the state was, what he thought priorities were. Like in whose warped mind would this be the first thing you do but i think to him it was like he wanted to take the country back to the way he remembered it from high school and this is like the most orderly uniform in every sense of the word thing that he could think of so his and then fast forward a few months when he actually takes the oath of office, not as acting president, but as legitimately, supposedly legitimately elected president. And on the very first day in office, he did two things.

One was he introduced a package of reforms in parliament, reforms to Russian federal structure. It really reversed course, right? And again, I don't want to come off sounding as though I think that Russia in the 90s was some kind of paradise and a well-functioning democratic country. It wasn't, right?

It was a country in transition, like many other post-Soviet countries, a country in very messy transition. But it had created for itself a federal structure that struck some sort of balance between local governments. So Russia at the time was 89 different regions, 89 different subjects of the federation that had different status, really complicated, like probably definitely more complicated than it should be. But all of them had local government, local elections, local budgets.

And then there was the federal structure, which had a two-chamber parliament, both chambers elected, plus the directly elected president. So Putin introduced a package of reforms that began to change that system. And one of the things it did is it greatly weakened the power of elected governors and made them subject to removal by the federal center. And it also greatly weakened local control over local taxation and budgets and basically centralized sort of all financial flows. And that was the beginning of the dismantling of the Russian electoral system, which took three years. So three years later, right now we're in May 2001. Three years later, by the end of 2004, the only directly elected official in Russia was the president and some very, very minor office holders locally,

but not governors. Governors would be appointed by the center, not senators. Senators would be appointed by the governor who was appointed by the center, and not even members of the lower house of parliament, because they would be elected by party lists rather than directly elected. That has since reversed some of those changes, but that was in place for a decade. And it really was the end of the electoral democracy experiment in Russia. So this was what was happening out in the open. The other thing that happened on Putin's first day in office was a major raid on the offices of Media Most, which was the largest independent media organization. What made it the largest

independent media organization was that it it the largest independent media organization was that it had a federal television channel. It's a broadcast channel. So at the time, there were only three broadcast channels with a federal reach. Two of them controlled by the state, and one started and run by a private businessman named Vladimir Kuczynski.

He also had a daily newspaper, a weekly magazine, which is where I worked, but also a network of regional television stations that were mostly entertainment oriented. So some thugs wearing balaclavas and black uniforms show up, throw people face down

in the corporate headquarters of Media Most. Gusinsky, not on that day, but a couple of weeks later, Gusinsky was jailed. And he was released from jail three days later, having signed over control of his media network and having promised to leave the country.

So he's lived in exile ever since. He's lived in exile for the last 20 years. And the state took over his television network and his his print media and this was the first i mean this is not just like some kind of metaphorical beginning it is the literal first day in office and and and this man communicates look i'm going to dismantle the electoral democracy that has been built here and I'm going to attack independent media. And he's made good on those promises. With that said, Marshall, who is the leader that Putin is trying to emulate from the past? Because he clearly is going back

to Soviet days. That's an interesting question. You know, I don't know if he says to himself, I want to be Stalin. Right. But Putin has a historical narrative that is different from historical narratives that we've seen in other Russian leaders, including Soviet leaders. Right. And this is like the strong leader narrative of Russian history. He sees a lineage that goes Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Putin. And we know this. I mean, he has said as much, and that's very much the line that's peddled on state television. It's a really interesting way to see Russia as a kind of continuous history, and it elides the revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It basically says, well, those things, whatever great upheavals we've had were mistakes. They were mistakes at the time, but they're also mistakes in a kind of historical way. It's a mistake to think of them as turning points in history

because we're on a kind of straight and narrow road. And you see what he thinks makes a strong leader. It's somebody who has dictatorial powers and who exercises them regularly. And also I think somebody who governs for a long time. I actually have a personal question for you, Masha, because on this line,

because I tend to look at authoritarian leaders. I've studied quite a lot of them. And to me, they seem actually fearful and weak. Okay, that's the way I look at them, right? And Putin is painted as powerful, strong, everything that we've been talking about, right? Up until now. How do you see him?

Do you see him powerful or fearful? You know, I don't know that that dichotomy makes sense because I think you can be both at the same time. I think that you're absolutely right that autocrats in general are fearful to the point of paranoia because I think that's actually the way to maintain the kind of vigilance and power that sustains the kind of systems that they built, right?

Just to make this less abstract. If you think about Putin's behavior in the last few months, jailing Navalny, jailing his closest allies, forcing them into exile, jailing the elderly father of one of Navalny's closest deputies, just really going after, you know, declaring Navalny's organization extremist. So making everybody who is a member of the organization or a supporter of it subject to prosecution and banning them from ever running for office by any rational measure. These are excessive measures. The Navalny movement doesn't threaten Putin's hold on power.

Navalny is by far the most popular and recognizable opposition activist in Russia. And still, what opinion polls we have, which of course are not terribly reliable, right? But what opinion polls we have show that yes, Navalny has name recognition and an overwhelming negative rating among Russians. Navalny's closest deputies, the people who are running and trying to run for office, they are second in name recognition Russians. Navalny's closest deputies, the people who are trying to run for office, they are second in name recognition only to Navalny, but basically that means only a handful of people know who they are.

But that's not even the point, that even if they were allowed to run for office, they would only have a chance in clear and open elections, which with the elections, everything from the signature gathering stage to the vote counting stage, everything is rigged. They could let them run in phony elections and still say that they lost, especially if they, and they would lose if they didn't have access to media, which the state also controls, right? There's so many ways in which any threat that Navalny's movement poses has already been neutralized.

And yet Putin feels threatened by it and feels the need to squash it completely. And I wouldn't misinterpret that as a sign of weakness. This is where I think the dichotomy between powerful and fearful is false, right? He is fearful. He is paranoid, but it doesn't mean that he objectively values his system as having weaknesses. It's that he is paranoid. The system is extremely well protected to any kind of external pressure. And what I mean is not just external from outside the country, but external to the system itself. It can only self-destruct. I beg the question then, why is he escalating this violence? If it's a closed system, everything is rigged, right? You talk about, for example, in even just campaigning in The Man Without a Face, when you

were with Garry Kasparov and you went to visit Beslan, you were on the road with him, how difficult it is even to campaign, even getting on the ticket is next to impossible. So why, why this violence? Why the repression, like the escalation at this point? So I think two things. Well, actually, maybe three things. One is paranoia, which I've talked about. Another is personal vengeance. Putin has always been extremely vengeful. And we know this because he's told us that he would say, talk about holding grudges as a kid, getting into these fights and then like getting into the fights again. And we know this because of some of the murders that the state has carried out. But also more recently, we, for example, found out that they tried to poison Dmitry Bykov,

this poet and writer and novelist who has been critical. He writes these weekly satirical poems, news poems. Some of them are really funny. Most of them are just, you know, fine, whatever. I mean, you can't write great poetry every week or even be particularly funny every week but every once in a while he has a real zinger against Putin and that's the only explanation I can see for why he would have been poisoned right so that's that's that's a really strong indication of just how vengeful Putin is and I think he's he's carrying out personal vengeance against these people who ridicule him

and his regime, who expose it, but expose it not in the way that, for example, American media tend to talk about Putin as so powerful and his massive wealth and corruption as being kind of part and parcel of that power but the way navalny's people talk about corruption and and the wealth hoarding is they just think it's ridiculous yeah right they have this really great role kind of tone in which they do they they present their investigations that can't possibly make these people feel good. Even as they see their palaces exposed, they're exposed as being tacky and poor-taste and just awful and absurd. And the third thing, which is the least measurable, is just inertia. The repressive apparatus of the regime can't be static you can't just say okay this is

the state of things and um this is allowed and this is not allowed because actually you know a repressive apparatus doesn't work very well if it's that predictable and if you know exactly where the red lines are because then people you know don't cross the red lines are, because then people, you know, don't cross the red lines, but they have no fear. According to Hanaren, that's one of the differences between tyranny and totalitarianism. Under tyranny, you actually know where you stand, right? And you have every opportunity to stay safe. You just perform the necessary behaviors or say the necessary words, and you don't do the things that are not allowed yeah under totalitarianism it's unpredictable and make no mistake putin has recreated a totalitarian society if not necessarily a totalitarian state but i think this is the most useful model for thinking about putinism is to think of it as totalitarianism not totalitarianism the way we

talked about in the 20th century which was we really were concerned with how a totalitarianism the way we talked about it in the 20th century which was we really were concerned with how a totalitarian state becomes established right but totalitarianism as it actually exists as it lives it's sort of its daily day-to-day life and its lifeblood is still fear it's still terror wow and the only way to maintain a sense of terror, a sense of the possibility of the worst happening, is to continue escalating. So when you have a mass protest under conditions of tyranny, the mass protest needs to be put down. When you have a mass protest under conditions of totalitarianism, the mass protest needs to be put down and an unpredictable amount more needs to happen. And that's what we're seeing. And Masha, I agree with you. I'm on Russian social media.

And I have to say, I mean, some of the memes, some of the comments, they're hilarious when they talk about Putin because it's serious, but it's not serious. And they do it in such a mocking way that I could just picture him sitting there like screaming and like, oh, stop all of them. You know, and with that, I mean, Mo, what do you think? Like, you know, as far as with Trump, you know, it's the same thing. Like like Marshall, what did you see the similarities between Putin and Trump where Putin was aware Trump was taking the United States? Like, did you see any kind of similar direction tactics that he was using? Trump, where Putin was aware Trump was taking the United States.

Like, did you see any kind of similar direction tactics that he was using? Well, you know, it's hard to compare tactics because these are pretty different countries at pretty different stages in their development. is a 200-year-old democracy with a lot of cultural and political assumptions and the other, obviously not. And I think also temperamentally, Putin and Trump are so different, right? Like one is raw emotion and the other is, he tries to present this completely flat affect. But I think there are two things that are really important about them. One is that they

both have past oriented politics. In Putin's case, it's a little bit more concrete. He really wants to take Russia back to the Soviet Union. In Trump's case, make America great again is less specific. It's more of a emotional appeal to, you know, I'm going to take you back to a time when you felt comfortable, when you felt safe, when you felt like you belonged. And hence the focus on all the progressive social movements and reversing social change. These are visible signs of taking you back to an imaginary past. But I think this idea of a past-oriented politics is really central to, I think, all of the autocracies we're seeing right now, but these two in particular.

And then, you know, I think that another way of looking at Trump through the Putin lens that's useful is just because Putin has gotten so much further, right? But we know what the different directions are. It's the direction of dismantling electoral systems. It's cynicism of nothing is true. The only legitimate thing is the thing that I say is legitimate, which of course, you know, found its ultimate expression in the big lie, right?

The election is illegitimate because I am the only source of legitimacy. And if I didn't get elected, then the election is illegitimate. I mean, that's the basic logic of the big lie. And that's pretty much the basic logic of Putinism as well. Yeah, that really scared me because I mean, as far as tactics,

obviously they don't operate the same as two different systems. I mean, you can't replicate Russia. At least here it would take years to get to that point. But just the threats to people who expose Trump, the threats to media, the threats to opposition, the investigations of opposition figures. And now we see, you know, as much more information is coming out. We see, for instance, that Trump's Department of Justice, you know, we're taking records from journalists. We're taking records from Democrats in the Intel Committee. I mean, it's a very dangerous direction that Trump, you know, did want to take the country,

I feel. And it was in the direction of what Putin's Russia is. But with that said, we also have a very huge bureaucracy and a more solid system. So, I mean, here, luckily, you know, we were able to stop it. And media still was able to operate free, very far from what was happening in Russia, where, you know, people were journalists or just being murdered during the first term. I think there were over 100 journalists being murdered in the 2000s under Putin's first term. 108. Yeah. Yeah. With that said, Masha, what do you think the leaders should be doing with Putin now? Should they be having summits? Like, you know, what should the policy be?

Fortunately, I'm not a policymaker, so I'm more comfortable being, not being prescriptive and commenting. And, you know, I've been thinking about the summit and obviously writing about the summit. I think the summit was probably inevitable. You cannot continue to let relations between Russia and the United States deteriorate. I mean, Russian American relations were just a hair's breadth from a total diplomatic break. That hadn't happened since World War II, since before World War II. The ambassadors were not in their assigned cities. The U.S. embassy in Russia had been completely hollowed out. The consulates outside of Moscow were shut down. And having no diplomatic relations between countries that have the capacity to destroy the world many times over is an objectively terrifying thing. Right. I'm not I'm not I'm not doing any kind of Russians love their children to performance here.

We need to have bilateral relations. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about during the Cold War, during the arms race, we know of at least one time when there was a close call, a false alarm about a nuclear attack that was de-escalated in part because there were diplomats on the ground. And not actually having bilateral relations is objectively extremely dangerous. So I think that from that point of view, Biden had no choice but to talk to Putin. But it's a huge gift to Putin to have the summit. It re-legitimizes him. Biden went in with some red lines, so-called. You know, he said, if you hack any of the structures on this list, we're going to take measures. If Navalny dies in prison, you're going to be sorry. The problem with red lines is that it de facto legitimizes everything on the side of the red line.

So Putin got a lot of gifts out of the summit. Was it worth it? Did the United States pay a suitable price for increased safety and security? We don't know yet. Indications are not great. The ambassadors have gone back to their respective cities, but Russia is not going to remove the United States from the list of unfriendly countries, which has the specific legal consequences of the United States not being able to hire anybody but US citizens at the embassy in Moscow,

which basically paralyzes the work of the embassy. There's a lot of people, Masha, that say that, you know, Putin is Russia and Russia is Putin. We've heard this all before, right? Is there not more to Russia than just Putin? What will come after him? Do we know? One thing that I can say is that history teaches us that the West pretty consistently underestimates the potential for change in Russia at moments of transition. We saw that after Stalin died, that Eisenhower's advisers were telling him that hardliners might come to power.

But also they didn't realize that everything was up for grabs after Stalin died because there was no succession plan. There was no sort of written policy. And there's a wonderful book by Josh Rubinstein on that book, Last Days of Stalin, which really shows how the U.S. fumbled the opportunities presented by that transition. The same happened, I think, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. primarily, but in general, Western tendency was to fear change, to prop up Karabachov, to underestimate the potential

for really fundamental transition. So if we've learned anything from those two experiences, we should know that all bets are off when Putin goes. That can happen anytime, right? We don't know, you know, what is going to collapse the system

from the inside. Also, he is not eternal. And at that point, we should know anything is possible. And that's both good and bad. And what is the opposition right now inside? I hesitate to use the word opposition. For years, I didn't use the word opposition at all, because I think opposition implies circumstances that are not present.

Opposition generally implies access to electoral institutions, access to the media. But we haven't had that kind of opposition in Russia. We've had activists and protests. I think that what happened with the Navalny movement in the last year was that they actually crossed the threshold to become opposition. They created their own media that was reaching as many people as state-controlled media. They, I think, in some ways even presented a threat electorally to the Kremlin, not by running, fielding their own candidates, but by being able to throw their support, what they call intelligent voting, throw their support behind any one candidate who is not a united Russia candidate and having enough support on the ground to actually make a difference in elections. So I would say that we had opposition in Russia for maybe a year and now it's been systematically demolished and suppressed. Again, with Russia,

you never know any day when we go wake up and see something happen or Putin's regime buckling from inside. Hopefully something will give. Masha, thank you so much. We can't thank you enough for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. Hey, everybody. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and visit our website, KremlinFile.com.

And please find our links to our socials in the show notes. This is Season 1, Kremlin File, hosted by Olga Lautman and me, Monique Camara. This is a Bunker Crew Media production with executive producers Marlee Clements, Jack Bryan, Grant DeSimone, Ben, Brett, and Jordi Maicelis of Midas Media and producer Ruby Frankel. Theme music by Oreste Camarra. Sound engineering by Mike Greenberg. Sound editing and mixing by Joy Noel-Ellett. Subscribe to Kremlin File wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you. Sound better? They're like, thank you.

Thanks. Thanks. There you have it. Episode one, season premiere, series premiere of Kremlin File, a Midas Media Network original. We hope that you enjoyed it. For future episodes, go look up right now, Kremlin File, wherever you get your podcasts. Look up Kremlin File. Make sure you subscribe on the Kremlin File feed for all future episodes. This was a Midas Media Network production.