The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 44: Russia Then and Now, and the Bard of Katonah

Episode Date: August 19, 2016

In this episode, a Nobel Prize winner talks about the pain of the fall of the Soviet Union, David Remnick remembers the coup the failed, and Hillary Clinton’s top policy advisor considers the problem of Putin New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Mingling with the rush hour traffic, Red Army armored personnel carriers on the streets of Moscow this morning, heading to the Kremlin. They first moved in at 4 a.m., the first sign of the coup d'etat that removed Mikhail Gorbachev from power. With tanks in red square... Twenty-five summers ago, in August of 1991, I had been a foreign correspondent in Moscow for nearly four years for the Washington Post. Michel Gorbachev, as the head of the Soviet Union, had gone about dismantling the old communist ideology and state control over everything from the economy to poetry.

And the old guard was increasingly furious. There had been rumors of a coup for months, and finally, on August 19th, it happened. Tanks in Moscow, Gorbachev under house arrest, and without exaggeration, the fate of the world as we'd known it for decades hung in the balance. President Bush calls the coup a disturbing development, which could have serious consequences on relations with the Soviet Union. Experts say the stage is now set for civil war.

But when it was all said and done, the coup failed, almost comically, colossally, more Marx brothers than Dostoevsky. It was over in just three days, and that was the last gasp of old Soviet power. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union itself was no more. And for my money, the failed coup of 1991 was maybe the most important event of the post-war era. It resonates even today. Many Russians, Vladimir Putin among them, see the fall of the Soviet Union not as the beginning of some new democratic age, but as a tragedy, a loss of greatness and power. And today we're going to talk with people inside Russia and here in the United States about that coup and how it echoes today, even in our own presidential election. I had first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1988,

and at that time we could only hire local translators and fixers who reported every week, I think it was Friday afternoons, to the KGB. But when that tight control finally broke down in around 1990, my colleagues and I hired a young journalist named Masha Lippmann as translator, researcher, and dispenser of office wisdom. Together we covered Russian politics, the reform era of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and eventually the coup that nearly ended at all. Masha Lippman is still in Moscow, a writer and political analyst.

And I thought maybe we'd begin by having you describe the atmosphere in the spring and summer of 1991, because there certainly had been hints that something ominous was coming. Yes, this is how I recall it too. But I would start just a little bit earlier maybe, leading to 91, was the time to many of us in reality. of euphoria over the suddenly expanding freedom. At first, the censorship being swept away by this avalanche

of what people wanted to say for years. This euphoria lasted incredibly for months after months in even, I would say, maybe two years at least, until finally in 1990, there was a sense that something was going on in the opposite. camp in the camp of Hardliners. Now, at that time, I was getting ready to go home for good. My wife and I,

Esther Fine and I, were getting ready to go home. And you and I went to see Alexander Yaakovlyv. Do you remember what happened? Well, for all practical purposes, Alexander Yakovlev, who was one of the closest allies of Gorbachev, was saying that coup is imminent, and a coup can happen any day now.

And like the brilliant reporter that I am, I did the following. I got on an airplane with my wife and my then baby child, and we went home, and we landed in New York, turned on the television, and there were tanks going down Kutuzovsky Prospect, the street on which our office was. Tell me about the morning of the coup, what you thought about it. Just tell us about that experience. Yeah, we were woken up by. call from closest friends of ours who happened to be in California. I remember very well, they said, switch on television. You have a coup in Moscow. And my husband and I got up and we were standing in front of the television screen, I think we were holding hands, listening to the first

statement of the coup plotters, which sounded so unmistakably Soviet. At that moment, we were it would not be this easy ride, more freedom, more freedom, more freedom, until the communist regime falls. And the sense that we developed over the previous couple of years that there is no reason to live in fear. These dreams are not coming true. You know, I was back in Moscow in a day and was there to cover with you

the complete disillusion of this coup after just three days. The coup plotters were disorganized, They were foolish, they were often drunk. It was the worst coup you could imagine this side of any you've seen in Latin America or in a Woody Allen movie. Three days it collapsed. And after that, the euphoria returned. The euphoria was even greater. It was indeed greater because there was this sense that we won with the people.

And it was a very real moment, I think, in the Russian history. People came running to stand up against the hardliners. I think a most symbolic expression of it was a gigantic Russian flag, the three-color flag, as opposed to the Soviet red flag, a gigantic flag that was carried by many, many people along the streets. These are people that came out in the tens of thousands to surround the parliament building of the Russian government. And you saw mothers and grandmothers and all kinds of people giving flowers to young soldiers, telling them that they couldn't possibly fire on their own people. people. Putin himself in 1989 was an intelligence agent living in Dresden and felt abandoned by Moscow. In 1991, he was already back in St. Petersburg. He claims that he resigned from the KGB, but I don't know that we believe today that he ever resigned as an intelligence agent and certainly viewed the fall of the

Soviet Union itself as what he called the greatest catastrophe in the history of geopolitics in in the 20th century. Yes, indeed. I think it is very important about President Putin that he did not live through 91 with us. He happened to be interested in as a KGB officer. So he did not live through the help and the euphoria, maybe even if he had lived through it.

He would not have shared it. He had this very bitter sense when he came back to Russia and nothing of the euphoria and the happiness and the hopes of Gorbachev Perestroika and the end victory of over the hardlinists. I can't help thinking that one of the analytic mistakes that we made in 1991 is that somehow all these institutions, these Soviet institutions, would somehow magically reform themselves. The Communist Party withered away.

But the KGB became a center for economic power and entitlement in the new rule. Russia, to such a degree that a lot of the people around Putin are people who are ex-KGB or present KGB, and at the same time, oligarchs and big figures in what's called Kremlin incorporated. Indeed, and this in Russia was different from countries such as Poland or Czech Republic, which had Soviet armed forces as an occupying force. To them, there was a very clear sense. We want to get rid of the occupying Soviet force, and we want to regain our membership in Europe.

And Europe, of course, came to help. A lot of Russians blame the United States for not helping nearly enough. And I think Putin is included in this number, that they see the United States as gloating about the end of the Cold War, victory in the Cold War, and doing nothing to help Russia, which had cooperated so much, after all, in its own. own the dissolution of communism, starting with Gorbachev. I think from the very beginning, there was, I think, a lot of triumphalism, there was a lot of lightheartedness about what happened, and there was the ambiguity. On the one hand, Russia was welcome as a fledgely member of the democratic realm, but at the same time, Russia was seen

as a threat. But Russia at the same time also had a fear. had a fear of NATO, which was, I think, very natural. NATO had been the enemy, so Russia had its own fear, which the West actually dismissed. The Eastern European nation were paid attention to, and they said, yeah, we realize you are afraid, and we will expand NATO, which was seen in Russia as something that meant that the West was against Russia, not against communism anymore. In this ambiguity, I think, made it even more difficult for the development after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm going to be talking later in this program with Svetlan Alexeyich, who's compiled and written a book called Secondhand Time, which is a compendium of, I would say, post-Soviet pain and disorientation.

It's one interview after another with one person after another who describes what it was like to live in the kind of fantastical society known as the Soviet Union under communism. And then when that's erased, they've lost all their ideals, no matter how perverse those ideals may have proved. They lose their economic standing because suddenly all that system breaks apart. They're disoriented, they're in pain, they're resentful, they're angry at everybody from Mikhail Gorbachev to every American president you can imagine. How do you react to a book like that? What is it capture that you see is accurate and what is it maybe missing? Well, it's accurate in many ways. However, it creates a sense that everything about what happened was a big disaster

making people unhappy. And I do not subscribe to that. The transition was very difficult in all the communist countries. Problem is that in other nations, the problem is that in other in other countries, there was the sense of, you can say, constructive nationalism. We are now on our own, that we're moving in the right direction. We are European again. In Russia, there was nothing like that. To say that we're now moving toward democracy was an empty sound. People to that said, we wanted democracy to make our lives better and not worse. So whoever would be able to address the people and say we're back on our historical traditional track again. And this was Vladimir Putin, who said, I assume the responsibility. I will protect you from the insecurity of

this new life, of this new period. Don't mess up with politics. This is not your business. Not exactly in these words, but he was sending this message to the people. That combined with the growing price of oil during Putin's first decade, created a sense that now we are on the right track. This was the foundation of Putin's rule. I think it's fair to say that you are a member of that species that's called a Moscow intellectual. You can't protest it, but you're in contact with the country. You travel around. You're in all kinds of circumstances.

And when you talk to people, do you sense that the opinion polls are really, reflected in the way they talk generally about Vladimir Putin? I think Putin's rating is genuine. It is very rare to run into somebody who dislikes Putin and would say somebody else would be better for Russia. It is interesting, however, that when people I asked who Putin represents, does Putin represent people like yourself? People rather say no.

They think of him, they see him as representing the rich, as representing state security and what in Russian is referred to as Siliviki, people with power, armed forces, the police, the prosecutor's office. It is important to remember that in Russia, Putin is regarded not just as a chief executive. He is regarded as the embodiment of the Russian statehood itself. And as a safeguard of Russia's tax. on the world scene. There is pride in Russia's military force. There's pride in Russia's past. There's pride in Russia's stature in the world. And all these have grown in the past two years since the annexation of Crimea. And I think people see Putin as a guarantor of that. Masha, thank you. My pleasure. Masha Lippman speaking from Moscow. She's the editor of the Russian language journal,

Counterpoint. You can find her stories about Russia and its politics for the New Yorker at New Yorker Radio.org. Later this hour, the writer who's telling the story of modern Russia as seen by Russians themselves, the Nobel Prize winner, Svjitlana Alexevich. And maybe we'll even translate it for you. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. This is kind of an experiment. This is a new show. We've never done this before. new show. We, we've never never did. I'm very not very experienced.

Yeah, I thought we just just talk about without these. When the Bella Russian writer, Sveitlana Alexeich won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, it surprised people in a couple of ways. In this country, even among big readers, the name Alexeyev was not particularly

familiar. But it was more unusual that she was a non-fiction writer, which is a real rarity with the Nobel. Alexei's books are all put together from interviews with regular people about life during and after the existence of the Soviet Union. She's been described as a journalist, but as she sees it, that's not quite it. And she really bridles at the term.

It's not journalism. It's a different view on things. It's the view of literature. It's a wider view. Journalism deals with banalities. It picks up only the surface layer. I am also a witness of this time, and I approach another witness. and we try to talk.

I try to make it so that people speak, as Dostoevsky said, in what he called a more human language, a deeper language. And these people, they're around me, it's my friends, it's people who I see on the streets. And these people are the people around me. These are my neighbors, my friends. These are people I see on the streets.

I didn't need to seek them out. Enter any house, and so much suffering will be poured out to you that you'll hardly be able to walk out of the house. Because document is a living creature, and it changes. In 2000, for example, after Perestroika, the women in my book,

War has not a woman's face, they said, we want to meet with you again, because back then, we didn't tell you everything. We were afraid, or we didn't understand. There's a wealth of fascinating interviews in this book, and there's also a refusal to differentiate between the oppressed and the oppressor. For example, you're talking to an architect named Anna,

who's about 15 or 60 years old. And at one point, after she's talked to you for many pages about her life and her suffering, she says that people now are all trying to put on the striped uniform of the victim, of the prisoner, but somehow now everyone's the victim, and Stalin is alone to blame. But think about it.

Simple arithmetic, millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all of this. To what extent is everybody from the Soviet past an accomplice? The truth is, in the 90s, we really judged our parents. And I remember how I fought with my father when I went to. Afghanistan and saw what the Soviet army was doing there. I came home and I said to my father, who was very much a communist until the end of his life,

Papa, we are murderers. And he began to cry. He didn't argue with me. That doesn't mean I don't have an obligation to give a voice to a person like my father, to cry out his life. In my work, everyone cries out their own truth. I never allow myself to say,

this one's just a stereotypical Soviet. This one's part of the herd, as they sometimes say. Because first of all, that's not the truth. that's arrogance. From the point of view of art, both Stalin and the victim are equally interesting. We must understand what is this, who are they, why? But that doesn't mean that the executioners and the victims are equal. To understand good and evil, portraits of their vessels must be studied and meticulously painted. I was very glad when at a meeting in France one young man stood up and said, I don't understand what is the problem with your people. You got freedom and you refused freedom.

What kind of people are you? But I read your book, and it became absolutely clear to me where Putin came from, why you had refused freedom. Well, maybe you should answer that question a little bit more broadly and deeply about what comes out of this. The book is filled with stories of people whose hopes were raised, who were confused by and yet thrilled by the late 80s and 90s, and then fell into immense disappointment, confusion and poverty. I think I try to answer this throughout the whole book. Why do we walk through this circular history? Why do we, as we say in Russian, step on the same rake again and again?

In the 90s, I remember, my generation really believed that tomorrow would bring freedom. We ran through the squares, we cried out, freedom, freedom, and then we went our different ways, into our houses. And then we acted as if Yeltsin would bring freedom, Putin would bring freedom, someone would bring it. Does this pattern of repeating history to some degree, the inability for the Russian people and people in surrounding countries to thrust themselves out of this terrible cycle of history, is this related to what people talk about when they talk about Rusky Osobinesty? Is there something about Russia, Russian history, Russian geography, character somehow, that is a kind of destiny? It seems to me that it's the eternal Russian dreaminess,

the eternal Russian dreaminess, the eternal Russian hope for a miracle, that we can go immediately from feudalism to a developed socialism. That kind of socialism could maybe happen someday. There's nothing wrong with that idea. But you can't do that right after feudalism. In 1917, when World War I had just ended, Russia was one of those backward countries. Russia had been bled dry.

It wasn't the place to build socialism. And then the provocative Leninist slogans that brought out human nature, loot the looters, right? Or with an iron hand, we shall drive humanity to happiness. That kind of thing from the first years of the revolution. So I think that what happens is what always happens. Russia always needs an idea, a purpose to be obsessed with. Now you live in the era of Putin.

How do you understand Putin? What does Putin understand about Russia that Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not? I remember how after the 90s, all of us Democrats, I remember how after the 90s, all of us Democrats said, why are the people silent? We talk and talk, and the people are silent. And suddenly Putin arrives, and after a while he takes off all his masks,

his playing at democracy, and speaks. He says, we need a great Russia. They are annihilating us. They are insulting us. They don't deal directly with us. And suddenly the people began to speak. And when they began to speak, it became clear. It's absolutely clear now.

Gorbachev and a few of his companions created the revolution of the 90s and the people weren't ready for it. When I was writing secondhand time, I traveled all over Russia. I heard the hatred, the grievances of this robbed, deceived people. There's no reason to demonize the figure of Putin like everybody does, thinking of him as the problem of problems. In truth, we're talking about our collective Putin. He has made himself the focal point of the desires of millions of people.

Putin is only a metaphor for that longing. He didn't come up with it on his own. what he's doing today is really what the people want. And the Kremlin has been able to redirect all of this upheaval and dissatisfaction to find an enemy outside our borders. I have to tell you, when I watch Russian television, the number one enemy is the United States of America. Yeah, in some cities they burn Obama in effigy.

And not very long ago, in Yeltsin's time, America was considered our best friend. Putin appears about once a year in front of some youth organization to give a kind of program, speech, and the topic is always the same, that Russia is great, but America is insulting us, Europe is insulting us. It's always an outcry that they're considered politically little punks. No one takes them seriously. It's serious, even dangerous, when a national leader like Putin says that whoever doesn't understand our politics is a national traitor. That makes me a national

traitor and others. You understand it's the lexicon of Stalinist times. So on the one hand, your books are published. You travel freely throughout the world. And on the other hand, you are a predatiel, a betrayer. Yes, and if I was writing three years ago, before Putin took off all his masks, people were ready to speak. Now they're cautious. There are three forbidden themes, Putin, the church.

And it's impossible to speak about the great patriotic war, the Second World War. So, for example, when I won the Nobel Prize, I was hounded. It turns out I'm a Russian traitor, a Russiophope. I hate the Russian people. That is Putin, right? It was endless. Because of the Nobel Prize in my Nobel Prize in my Nobel address, they rushed to talk about their opinions in me.

What I always wanted, when I wrote, was for my books to start a discussion. For a long time, we've needed to start a discussion. Who are we? Where are we from? Svetl-Lézhener, a final question, and it's the question you seem to pose to all of your interview subjects in this book. And on the one hand, it sounds corny, on the other hand, profound, which is to say, what does freedom mean to you? This is the question you ask everybody, and it arouses incredible, divergent answers. What does it mean to you?

Well, I can say that I can live freely. But unfortunately, many of us don't have that freedom. I can say what I want, I can write and do whatever I consider necessary. I consider myself to be a free person. And now I'm meeting with people and gathering material for two books. The first is about love. and the second is about age, about disappearing, about the 20, 30 years that progress has given us,

about life without a governing idea. How does that work for us? What is it? I mean, without the kind of big idea that is always foremost in our culture, like communism or fascism. In the beginning, they built a great state. There was no individual person.

There was a kind of collective body of people. Then they built communism. There was no person, no differentiated body. And the person, where is the person? What is a person? Does he want to be happy? Does he want to die? Is all we have developed over all these years a culture of death, a culture of suffering? I can only say that my father, as I said, was a communist and believed until the end. But a lot happened to him. Alzheimer's, all that, his memory totally left him. In the beginning, he talked only about the war, about the Battle of Stalingrad, and about how beautiful my mother was. And when everything, when all of that left him, the last thing he talked about was how beautiful my mother was. I thought, Only this terrible disease has freed him to speak about human things. Svetlana Alex Sage, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Talia Lavin at the New Yorker translated her answers into English for us,

and we heard the voice of WNYC's Emily Boutin. Now, over the last decade, Vladimir Putin has gained seemingly unshakable support in Russia, partly because he's completely closed the press, and partly because of his willingness to challenge the United States, States and Europe, he invaded Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet republics. He sent bombers to intervene in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of the Assad regime, and he likely okayed the killing on British soil of a former KGB agent. And then, of course, there was the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails, very probably the work of a Russian hacker or hackers. Not since the Cold War has a U.S. election

centered so much on the question of how to handle. Russia and its political ambitions. Trying to sort this through, I sat down with Hillary Clinton's top policy advisor, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan was deputy chief of Clinton's staff when she was Secretary of State, and he was Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor. There was a moment during the Obama administration with Secretary Clinton on airplanes going back and forth to Moscow and to other nations in Europe that was called the reset.

And the relationship has going to be. completely soured. Do you think that under a Clinton administration, a Hillary Clinton administration, it would be possible to reset again, or is that relationship really for the foreseeable future going to be adversarial and a kind of maintenance to keep that at a low burn? I think it's going to be a challenging relationship because Putin has made fundamentally clear where he stands on a number of issues that are adverse to the United States. On the other hand, Secretary Clinton, if she's elected president, is going to continue to look for opportunities to cooperate. She was involved in getting the nuclear treaty through that reduced U.S. and Russian stockpiles to their lowest level in decade.

She was involved in working with the Russians on Iran and North Korea sanctions in getting the Russians to agree to allow lethal transit of supplies to our troops in Afghanistan. And, of course, in the accession of Russia to the WTO. So she's not shelving the concept that there are places where the United States and Russia can work together. Do you think we're in a new Cold War right now? No. Why not? Just last year, the United States and Russia worked together to produce the agreement with Iran that has put a lid on Iran's nuclear program. So we are clearly capable of continuing to work with them.

But do I believe that we are in a challenging space where Russia is going after some of the core basic principles, of international law, invading sovereign countries, threatening our allies. But they look at us and they say, wait a minute. They say, you are absolute hypocrites, the United States. You have invaded Iraq and made a mess of the Middle East. You have invaded all kinds of countries over the years, whether it's in the Balkans or Libya, which we, quote, unquote, told you not to do. How do we go about lecturing Vladimir Putin when it comes to the sovereignty of other countries?

injuries and that's the Russian psychology. That's certainly Putin's psychology. And he has laid that out at length in some of his speeches. I think these are debaters points and false equivalences. He loves to compare Kosovo to Crimea and Ukraine. And on a number of different dimensions, they are not at all comparable, starting with the fact that his asserted reason for going into Crimea in the first place, that the Crimean people were somehow going to be subject to gross and systematic human rights violations is a bunch of nonsense. So what Putin does is he points to circumstances where the United States has engaged in interventions, primarily for humanitarian reasons, primarily with many other countries joining us, and then tries to say,

I'm just doing the same thing. But a close examination of those circumstances shows just how different they are. But he would argue that those invasions have caused untold chaos and geopolitical problems in their wake. Well, there's no doubt that the invasion of Iraq was ultimately a mistake and caused tremendous damage and tremendous problems. And the United States needs to take responsibility for that. But the U.S. taking responsibility for what happened in Iraq does not excuse Vladimir Putin's destabilizing actions in Ukraine, nor does it excuse the saber rattling and the incredibly aggressive

behavior he's displaying towards our allies. What are you concerned about next coming from Vladimir Putin? And where do you suppose that he will make his next moves, whether it's in Ukraine again, whether it's in the Baltic states, where? I think we do have to worry about direct assaults on NATO allies. He's shown with his various instruments, military power, that's a possibility. But the thing that really worries me in the immediate term is actually not so much tanks rolling across a frontier as the insidious exercise of malign influence over. democracies in Eastern and emerging democracies in southeastern Europe, the use of corruption, the use of political pressure, the use of economic pressure to try to stunt democratic development

and undermine and destabilize countries on his border. That's an asymmetric form of low-grade warfare that I think the United States and our allies need to get used to seeing from Russia and need to be prepared to deal with. One of the most incredible parts of maybe the most incredible campaign, of my lifetime or yours, is the Russian element that is taking place in the presidential campaign to see emails, in fact, some of your own emails to Secretary Clinton and Vice and emails going back to you that have been hacked almost certainly by Russian hackers, either doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin or with the winking acknowledgement of Vladimir Putin. Tell me what your view and Secretary Clinton's view is of why he's doing this.

Is it just a way to mess with us? Is it personal? Is it strategic? What is it? The stakes on this issue are so high. The fact that Russia and Russian intelligence agencies are actively meddling in this election, the stakes of that are so high that I really think it is inappropriate to speculate as to motive. All we can state are the facts.

And these are the facts that we know. We know, number one, that there is now a consensus of experts that the Russians have done this. We know, number two, that the Trump campaign's policy agenda on a wide range of foreign policy matters lines up very neatly with Vladimir Putin's wish list for what an American president would do on Russia. You should make clear what that wish list is. How do they line up? Number one, that we wouldn't necessarily back up our NATO allies in the event of a Russian invasion. Number two, that we should consider lifting sanctions on Russia.

Number three, that Trump campaign officials actually intervened in the Republican platform to remove references to support for Ukraine. Number four, a total excusing of anti-democratic behavior in Russia and waving away of things as egregious as the killing of journalists using Vladimir Putin's own logic that, well, the United States has its own problem. so why are we lecturing other countries? Those are just some of the examples of where the Trump campaign and Trump himself have gone out and basically adopted not just the position, but the logic and the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin. So we know that. We also know that Hillary Clinton has on a number of occasions over the last several years and in this campaign stood up to and countered some of those positions, been against Putin on certain things. To the point where, as I understand the chick, that when they're in the same room together, it's a very nasty atmosphere. Can you speak to that?

It's not a nasty atmosphere. I think it's an atmosphere that is tough and direct, but not nasty. They were able to have practical and productive conversations when they met about sanctions on Iran and North Korea. And even talked about issues kind of far beyond traditional statecraft, what to do, for example, about wildlife trafficking. So it's not like Hillary Clinton and Vladimir Putin can't sit down. But wait a minute. I've heard about a certain meeting between the two of them when they were in the same room, when Putin would barely look at Hillary Clinton. Well, the times that I've been in the room with the two of them, not only were they looking at each other, but they were speaking very plainly and directly.

And Hillary Clinton was saying to Putin at the time, there are areas where we can cooperate, but there are areas where I need to tell you and look you in the eye and tell you, the United States is not going to support what you are doing. Putin was just as direct and candid in response. I did not find a circumstance where it was either nasty or where they didn't have the capacity to work together with one another. Do you think this business of hacked emails is going to go farther? There has been a long history in Russian politics of what's called compromise, compromising information, films of people in their private lives, sometimes having sex, sometimes doing smoking dope or whatever it is. This is very, very common in the Russian political sphere. Do you assume and fear that in the coming couple of months of the campaign that more is coming? Given Russia's track record and Putin's track record, it would be folly to assume that there isn't more that they would try to do to disrupt the election, more emails that they would put out.

So I think we have to proceed on the assumption that that is very possibly going to happen. I would just say that whether you're a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent, that should absolutely motivate you to say what the heck are we going to do as the United States of America to push back against a foreign power and oftentimes adversarial foreign power interfering in the basic institution of democracy in the United States. That is a national security issue. It is something new under the sun. We assumed that, to a great extent, they bug our conversations, and let's face it, we bug a lot of theirs. It's a great record of our knowledge of conversations that have taken place inside the Kremlin and the cars of Russian and formerly Soviet officials. Let's not be naive about this. We're here sitting in a studio.

You've got an iPhone on the desk, which is also a tracking device, a camera, a movie camera, a movie camera. a recorder. I think anybody who's not naive knows what that implies in terms of its intelligence capacities. How are governments going to ever assume with any sense of confidence, with much less political campaigns, that they can operate with any sense of discretion and secrecy? I think that's becoming increasingly more difficult, not just because of the seals that Russia is breaking, but also because of things like WikiLeaks and other developments that make the exchange of emails, phone conversations, you sort of have to increasingly assume that everything you do outside of a secured facility could easily end up in the public domain.

You're somebody who's mentioned any number of times as the National Security Advisor for Hillary Clinton. We'll see if that happens. But have you are, is your style of conversing over email changed? Yes. From what to why? Well, at this point, you cannot use email as a means of communicating anything of really meaningful substance, classified or otherwise. At what point did it change?

I think it developed over the course of my time in government, and certainly since we have seen what has happened with both WikiLeaks and now increasingly with what the Russians are doing. Every passing year, I become more and more terse and careful in the use of email, but not just email, the use of the telephone as well. And, you know, I think there's an unfortunate to mention to this because the freedom to be able to exchange ideas, discuss matters across great distances, a U.S. government that's in hundreds of posts around the world, has been. been compromised to a significant extent. And the result of that is that it is more difficult to actually conduct business for the U.S. government than it was before. But that's the nature of operating in the information environment we're in now.

Jacob Sullivan, thank you very much. Thank you. Jake Sullivan is a foreign policy advisor to Hillary Clinton and worked in the Obama administration. In a minute, we'll be back at you with a different kind of story about as different as you could possibly get about an American kid with dreams of pop star. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. And now this. I would build a great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. March 27, 2018, we were issued a winter jumpsuit and a summer jumpsuit.

but the early spring Texas weather is kind of in between. Today I went with the summer suit. Hopefully the hard labor will warm me up. April 4th, there were taunts again from the Mexicans on the other side of the wall. They keep making fun of our inexperience with manual labor. Most of us used to work in the arts, entertainment, or media, so we don't really know how to use things like tools. At night, we're too tired even for reruns of The Apprentice,

which is the only thing that's on TV now. April 13th, two Mexicans by the United States. busted through the wall today. Turns out they didn't even want to come to America. They just wanted to show us how shoddy our craftsmanship was. I have a master's degree in semiotics. It's all so demoralizing. April 20th. As a special treat for completing section 4568 of the wall, our section boss let us share some lemons. Granted, it was 20 workers to one lemon, but still, ever since all the farm workers were deported, nobody knows how to grow lemons, or avocados, or grapes, or lettuce. These days we eat corn and astronaut food. May 1st.

They say we've built enough of the wall that you could see it from space. But because we canceled the space program to pay for more sheetrock, no one will actually get to do that. May 6th. The hipsters used to talk about making their own shoes and beer, but now they're mostly depressed. The Ivy Lakers are a cunning tribal bunch. Early on, they tried to drum up support for a resistance movement,

but these days they're focused on advancing within the system. May 11th. I got a letter from my cousin Kevin today. As a Trump voter, Kevin is now allowed to take justice into his own hands. To shoot someone, he has to ask permission, but he can beat people up pretty much whenever he likes. It sounds like he's flourishing. May 18th, the astronaut food is gone,

so there's only corn to eat, and not much of that. Even after Trump declared it should only be distributed to citizens who were a nine or a ten. May 27th. At night, we whisper about escaping through the wall to Mexico. that golden land of lemons and opportunity. It won't be easy. Mexico is building its own wall now. Rumor has that there's actually works.

Another brick in Trump's Wall, a story by Jesse Wan performed by the actor Chris Eigman. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've got just one more story this hour. One of those stories that begins with sitting down next to somebody on a plane. And it comes from Andrew Morantz,

who's an editor at The New Yorker. So I was flying from New York to L.A. recently, and I noticed that the kid next to me in the middle seat, he kind of had gel in his hair, and he had like a little diamond stud earring in. And he just, he looked like a high school kid, but he just looked like cooler than you kind of need to be to just be sitting on an airplane. And I sort of noticed, because we're right next to each other, that he was playing around on a music software, on his computer. So then towards the end of the flight, he tells me, I'm Mike Sabbath. from Katona, New York, which I knew was this kind of affluent, you know, bucolic suburb. And I think he'd even told me his parents were in the finance industry. And I just thought, oh, you know, this is just a kid with a hobby.

I actually wrote, this song has a funny writing story to it. I, like, really, really wanted to write this song, but, like, I was still, like, this was definitely, I was still in school. And so I've literally wrote the song in between classes on voice memo. And, like, I literally had all the vocal melodies so that when I got home, I'd be able to record the song. Is that in a class? Probably.

Do people know what you're doing when you're doing that? It's questionable. So this was here. So I was like, have you done anything like this before? And he was like, oh yeah, you know, I work in, you know, in the city. I'd go to DJ Cassidy's studio all the time. And I was like, oh, I've heard of DJ Cassidy. And then he was like, yeah, you know, I've written these songs for Chris Brown.

And like, they almost made the album, but they didn't. But then, you know, I was in the studio with Wa-A a couple months ago. And then I was like, oh, so you're like a real. pop songwriter. He was like, yeah. So he told me he was going to L.A. to stay for a month and just go to music studios and work on his career. And I said, but wait, isn't it still high school spring semester? Don't you have to be in school? He said, yeah, but I already got into college and I might even defer next year. And I really just want to get my career off the ground. So I convince my parents and my teachers to just sort of let me come out here and just concentrate on that.

And I still, you know, it sounded impressive, but I still wasn't sure if maybe he had a parent who was calling in a favor with a record executive or maybe he was paying his way. I just didn't know. I just thought, look, let me come over to the studio and listen to what you're working on. So I actually went to his parents' house in Katona. How was the job? It was like a very good day for it. It was the day before his high school graduation. It was beautiful spring day.

birds chirping in the trees and everything. And he met me at the door. We went down to the basement where he has a little home studio. And as soon as I heard five seconds of his music, it was clear that this kid knows what he's doing. Actually, I'll play this one. This is cursing, is that a lot? Okay, this is called, It's on you.

Okay. So, and this was something you sent to Chris Brown to be like, do you want to put this on your album? Yeah, and so they did really like the song, which was cool for me. So this is an example of one, and it doesn't work out. So they really like the song

who was like, I think, thinking of cutting it but there was another song on the album called, like, Loving You. And so they're like, well, and that was already, like, a done deal that was on the album. Or, I don't know, it was something like that. It was a similar name.

And anyway, so they were like, oh, we can't. So, that was it. There's that. So upstairs in the kitchen, I met Bruce and Karen or Mike's parents. Hi, this is my mom?

Andrew. Hey, wait. Nice to meet you. I'm Karen. They're both ex-finance. People who, uh, are now pursuing their own artistic dreams. Bruce is an actor.

Karen makes honey. She's a beekeeper. We went out into the backyard where they have a pool and sat by the pool and talked. The expectations for Michael in terms of schooling were not low. I mean, he wrote music after he came home and did his homework. This is where, you know, I have some rules. But I never had to be in a position to really sit there. and beat him about doing his homework because he had a real goal,

which was get it done because I can't do anything until it's done, but I better get it done so that I can do what I'm really passionate about. So on the one hand, you know, he won the birth lottery in some ways in terms of not having to get a job after school that paid, you know, bills. But on the other hand, he, you know, got sucked into our family, which meant he had to work his tail off. We wanted Michael to have the opportunities that we couldn't, provide just by

throwing up some YouTube videos. While we were out talking by the pool, Mike's manager showed up. His name was Don Isaac. He'd just come in on a flight from D.C. He'd originally found Mike six years earlier on YouTube when there was this video of Mike playing the guitar and the bass and the piano

and the drums and singing. And this was, by the way, before Mike's voice had changed. Yeah, so I saw a YouTube link of Mike in his basement playing like six instruments. and recording a song at the same time. Me being a musician at heart too, I just thought it was exceptional, and I knew it was a rare talent.

So around that time was when Mike and his parents started thinking, hey, maybe he could be a professional pop musician. We don't really know the industry. We have to see, you know, we have a basic sense that we can trust Don. You know, we might have Googled him. Found out there was no shady background issues. He's a kid. He's underage.

He's got to be. taken around and we just want to make sure that he's safe and, you know, both, you know, with people as well as just physically and he's got to be driven around. He's underage, you know. He's got to, you know, rent hotel rooms. He's got to, you know, rent cars, all kinds of things in other cities. So sort of like Scooter Braun, who was the guy who discovered Justin Bieber on YouTube and then convinced Justin's family to let him manage his career, Don was sort of doing the same thing. He drove up to Katona, met with Bruce and Karen. Don was basically, making the case like, you know, your son could really make it.

You met us in Mount Kisco, we had brunch at the diner, and then you continued on to Cambridge after we had spent like an hour together. Michael was performing in a concert up there. I think before seeing him in person, of course you see a YouTube video, but to see his effect on sort of the, I call him kids, but the high school students that were there at the time, I mean, Mike performed, and it was the first time I had experienced teenage girl fanatics. So it was like a very unique situation where by the end, you know, I saw over 20 or 30 girls, if not more. It was like, yeah, I would say closer to 100, take that back.

Girls standing up at the completion of Mike's performance, like fanning themselves because they were getting hot. Basically, the next thing Mike has to decide is whether he's going to college next year. See, part of why he was able to take time off from high school and everything was because in the spring he had already gotten in to Harvard. And at the time, when we talked in L.A., Mike was conflicted. Do I go to school next year, or do I keep striking while the iron is hot with the music stuff? Yeah, so I officially deferred. Yeah, I deferred college.

Do you think of this as a kind of like, lucky position to be in to be able to make a choice like this. Oh, I mean, I, you know, that's a thing I always think about, you know, because I obviously, I can't just sit here at Poolside on an interview, be like, all right, I like to make music, here's my manager, here's my family, here's the New Yorker, like what? There's a lot of things that I've been able to accomplish because of the situation I'm in, but a lot of it has been focused, and that's the biggest thing for me.

It's not getting distracted by all the things that we already have, but being focused on the things that you want to have. And that's not even possessions. That's like being able to go to a studio every day and write new music. Because of this situation, I look at it as like, I don't even have a choice. Like, I love to do what I do, and, like, I have to do it because I love it, and, like, I'm getting the opportunity to do it, so I have to do it 200%. Michael's very sure of what he wants.

And so Michael calls me one day. I'm out on the street doing some errands. And he says, I have everyone here on a conference call at school. Are you available to talk? So I just kept thinking, I totally am rooting for Mike to succeed. And I think it's completely possible that he will. Either as a songwriter, as a singer, you know, he could write a smash hit for Rihanna tomorrow that could make him millions of dollars. On the other hand, it's also possible that all that charm and all that talent won't end up paying off financially.

Probably a good idea not to lose the email address of the Harvard Admissions Office. Just check in every once in a while and see if they're keeping that spot open for you. Andrew Moran's talking with singer and songwriter and maybe future pop star Mike Sabbath. That's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to stay on top of what we're doing every week, you can get our news. and subscribe to our podcast at New YorkerRadio.org. Or find us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. I'm David Remnick. Have a great week, a good vacation if you're able to take some time off, and see you next week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.