The Rest Is History - 159. Young Putin, the KGB and the Soviet Union

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

[Episode 1 of 4] Welcome to our new four part series on the latter years of the Soviet Union, its fall, Putin's early life and his subsequent rise to power. Today's episode focuses on Brezhnev, Putin's formative years, his early KGB career and Gorbachev's descent into chaos. Was Putin a nationalist or a communist? What changed from Brezhnev to Gorbachev? What was Putin doing in East Germany during the Soviet twilight years? Next episode out tomorrow - or get them all at once by heading to restishistorypod.com! Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. And we would like to go over to Crawford, Texas, where we are joined by a special guest. I'll answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's

a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country, and I appreciate so very much the frank dialogue. There was no kind of diplomatic chit-chat, trying to throw each other off balance. There was a straightforward dialogue. And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship. I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch if I didn't trust him. That was my brilliant impression of George W. Bush. It wasn't actually. That really was George Bush.

That was our first presidential guest. And that was the occasion in 2001 of his first meeting with President Vladimir Putin. In light of the current situation, we thought that it would be interesting to look at some of the historical context. We've already done an episode on the history of Ukraine, but we thought that it would be, you know, I mean, essentially everyone is asking, how did we get here? What is it that's prompted Putin to do what he's doing? You know, what is the background? Is there an explanation for it that can be discovered in history, I suppose, and in his, specifically in his biography? This is a field that you are much, much more familiar with than I am, but I guess I lived through it, so a lot of it.

Yeah. I think, Tom, there's that apocryphal saying by Napoleon, isn't there, that if you know the world, if you've studied the world when a man was 20, you know how his mind works. And Vladimir Putin, like any Russian of his generation, he was born in 1952, has lived through the most colossal, almost unimaginable political, economic, kind of social changes in the former Soviet Union and Russia.

And it's only by understanding what's happened to him and his country, I think, that you can actually get into his, well, attempt to get into his head and to understand why Russia is now as it is. So now it's becoming, you know, it appears to be becoming this pariah state, kind of shut off behind a new iron curtain of sanctions. How on earth has it got here? And that's what we're going to try and investigate. I mean, Dominic, of course, it's been an absolutely convulsive period of change, but there is also always the historians's question, change or continuity. And you could say, and people have been saying, that actually not that much has changed.

That the Soviet Union was a political system founded on lies, founded on a profound suspicion of the outside, founded on an emphasis on military prowess over everything else. And you could say that Russia today is showing much the same. Is the air of that. Yeah, I don't. Normally, I'm a great determinist in this podcast, but I don't think that's really true, actually. I think that misses. Obviously, Putin himself is a product of the Soviet system, which we'll go into in a second. But I think when you actually go through the period of change, you see that there were alternative paths that Russia could have taken. And Russia isn't fated to be this sort of violent, you know, nationalistic kind of hellhole that so many people imagine. What happened in the USSR in

the 1980s and then in Russia in the 1990s, there were all kinds of contingencies and twists and so on. And there were alternative futures for Russia, as we will see. But just before we go to look at the last decade of the Soviet Union, you talked about the idea that Russia wasn't fated to become what it is now. But that idea of fate, the idea that Russia has a particular destiny, I mean, that is something that is very strong in Russian culture, and actually much older, of course, than communism. Yeah, the sort of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, well, I mean, they're two different things, aren't they, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Well, I mean, there are two different things on there, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But the idea of Russia having this almost, as you would say, Tom, this almost kind of sacral destiny. You know, the Third Rome, the home of orthodoxy, kind of on the edge of Europe, half in Europe, half out.

I mean, that is very deeply rooted in Russia's sense of itself. The sense of embattlement, a sense a distrust of the outside but also a fascination with it um so yes all those things are are are there but there was a sort of slightly stereotypical way we talk about russia so we always talk about i mean even george bush did it there when he talked about knowing putin's soul yeah the idea of the russians having a soul that you must understand that is incredibly deep and dark. I mean, nobody says that about, you know, Belgium. Yeah, Belgium. Nobody says that about Belgium. Maybe Bart Van Loo, our previous guest would say that. But also, I mean, today, when you apply the word exceptionalism to countries, it's generally a pejorative. So people are very sniffy about the

idea that there might be British exceptionalism or French exceptionalism, even though clearly, you know, I mean, they are all very exceptional countries. But in Russia, it seems to be something that is pretty fundamental to the way that not just Russian politicians, but large numbers of people within the country think of Russia. Yes. Would you say that's fair or am I stereotyping that? No, I think it probably is fair. I think that's the way that a lot of Russians

are told to think about themselves, that they have an exceptional, a unique past and a kind of exceptional destiny. And we do think of Russia typically as having an exceptional character. Outsiders do. And that's all that stuff

about the Russian soul and about Russians are terribly kind of warm people, but they're also, that the price of human life is lower and all that sort of thing that you hear so often. Yes. So I think there is a kind of exceptionalism, both projected from the outside, but also believed inside. I mean, it was expressed very unsettlingly by Putin, and I may be paraphrasing him here, and this may be dis disinformation but didn't he say something to the effect talking with regard to nuclear weapons that um a world without russia wouldn't be a what you know why

should the why should the world exist if it exists without russia yes and not only has he said that by the way but um his kind of mouthpieces on russian state television have used exactly the same line so that's yeah a well-worn line actually in the sort of putinist ideology right okay so a bit unsettling yeah coming from people with the largest quantity of nuclear weapons on the face of the planet but um something that as we said can be traced back to the czarist period but obviously gets a particular refinement under communism where what had been the russian empire becomes the Soviet Union. And as the Soviet Union is one of two superpowers and sees itself charged with a historical destiny, it is the midwife of world communism. That has sustained it throughout decades of transformation and upheaval. By the 70s, when Putin is coming of age,

that sense of purpose and of destiny perhaps is starting to fade. It's the age of Brezhnev, a man with kind of insanely huge eyebrows and a kind of rigor mortis. I mean, they're all kind of basically dead. They are constantly getting colds, but keep them in their beds for five years. They wear nothing but overcoats. they wear things under the overcoats i've never seen any evidence for that um yeah you're right so it's always snowing so what's going on so putin is born in leningrad st petersburg in 1952 and he's from a working class family his parents work in a factory um and he goes to leningrad State University in 1970, I think. And he's there for five years.

And so he comes of age in the Brezhnev era, as you say. And it's an age of, it is not an age of revolutionary zeal at all. So you mentioned communism and a sort of sense of communist zeal. But that really isn't what typifies the Brezhnev regime. The Brezhnev regime is all about stability, and there's a kind of ordinariness to it. So for most people who are alive in the Soviet Union at that point, the Soviet Union is all they've ever known. And everybody in the world, you know, in America and Britain, in Western Europe and in the Soviet Union, thinks the Soviet Union is going to probably be around forever you

know it is as you say one of the two superpowers um it's sclerotic uh the economy is producing enough to keep people happy so they're fed they've actually got more consumer goods than ever before um you know robert service in his history of russia says i think he uses the phrase most russian workers had never had it so good as they had it in the 1970s. So they've got fridges, they go on holiday there. You know, life's okay. But relatively, relatively, they've never had it. I mean, they've never had it so good.

But relative to the capitalist West. Of course, it's falling further. Economically, they're starting to fall behind. And the prosperity, the apparent prosperity of the 70s is based on a fiction. So it's based on a sclerotic, incredibly complicated, top-down sort of system. You know, the sort of parodies of sort of state planning and tractor statistics and all that stuff. They're all rooted in truth. But it's also rooted in high oil prices. So high world, they're almost living a bit of an illusion. Because when the oil price falls in the 1980s,

that's going to pull the rug out from the system. And Brezhnev, as you say, I mean, he's not Stalin. He's nothing like Stalin. It's still a very autocratic system. It's one that represses dissidents and shoves them into psychiatric hospitals. But it doesn't kill lots of people. So life kind of goes on goes on and for a young man like putin his ambition is to join the kgb um supposedly he applies to join and they say to him

you don't apply you know we contact you but they kind of make a note of him because they know that he's loyal and hard-working and all this sort of stuff um so for him he thinks he's going to be he thinks he's joining the intelligence service of one of of of the actually the world's great power because the 1970s is a terrible decade for the kind of the united states it's the decade of nixon and carter and vietnam and this sort of introspection and the soviet union there's a sort of sense that the soviet union might even be winning the cold war burying them burying them as yes, as Khrushchev said to Nixon. So there's this sort of false image, I think, that people have about their own society in the 70s.

And there are some people at the top of the Soviet regime, so in particular the man who's going to succeed Brezhnev, who's a man called Yuri Andropov, who is the head of the KGB, there are some people who know that there are deep problems, that Russia has, I say Russia, the Soviet Union has huge problems with alcoholism, with absenteeism, that its birth rate is struggling, that high rates of corruption, all these kinds of things. But Putin doesn't see this as a young man, I wouldn't have said. Well, two questions. First of all, Putin, is he a committed this as a young man, I wouldn't have said. Well, two questions. First of all, Putin, is he a committed communist as a young man? Or is he a committed nationalist?

What's the balance there? If you read sort of his semi-official biography, it says that he reads, you know, he enjoys reading Marxist-Leninist books when he's at school. I mean, I think it's a bit like Christianity, Tom. Is it? It is, in this sense. There's a difference between christianity tom is it you it is in this sense in this sense there's a difference between being a christian in the second century a.d and being a christian in the 16th century when everybody's a christian and you know you're not a radical you're not a rebel you're

not necessarily you might be in the 16th century yeah but you might not be fine you might not you might be a good christian but none of those things you might just be an apparatchik and um i think he's a communist in the sense that he's listened to everything he's been told, and that provides his framework. But I don't think he burns with the zeal of social justice or with revolutionary enthusiasm. Actually, Tom, I think a lot of the people who are running the show don't burn with revolutionary zeal. Okay, that was my other question. But I think before I ask that, let's take a quick break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So we're about 15 minutes in, and to be fair, we have barely scratched the surface. So what we're thinking of doing this week is having a slightly different release schedule from usual.

We're going to release these episodes charting the fall of the Soviet Union, the chaos in Russia in the 1990s, and the rise of Vladimir Putin. We're going to release these over the next three days. So we're going to break them into slightly more digestible and accessible chunks because it's such a complicated and an important subject. Now, we will obviously return to our usual schedule next week. But we had such a big response to our Russia and Ukraine episode and so many requests for us to do these stories as well. We hope you understand. And I have to say, if you cannot wait for the rest of the story if you literally cannot wait till tomorrow morning and why would you be able to wait Tom there's another option for people isn't there

there is indeed Dominic yes you can join the rest is history club and we appreciate that we've gained a lot of new listeners over the last couple of weeks so let's just quickly explain how it works so the rest is history club members get certain benefits like as dominic just said early access to new episodes uh you get ad free listening you get a bonus episode each week where dominic and i review uh your messages review the episodes that we've done feedback to that all that kind of stuff um we do live shows on youtube once a month so what have we done dominic we've done the 60s haven't we we've done assass done assassinations. We did clubs, great clubs of history. All kinds of stuff like that. So stuff that you wouldn't otherwise get to hear. And also you get access to a chat room where, again,

we discuss the episodes, we give out book recommendations, all kinds of stuff like that. And you can sign up for this, the Rest Is History Club at restishistorypod.com. That is restishistorypod.com. It's £6 a month, and you become a friend of the show. Now, just one tiny last bit of self-promotion, for which I apologise. We do also have a gold-level member tier, and they're called the Athol Stans, and they get all the friend of the show benefits. And if you join that, you get an invitation to two genuine, actual real parties, Athos fan parties every year. Dominic actually comes out of his Hobbit hole.

Amazing sight. I mean, am I not going to just address the party on Zoom? I fear I'm not. So, Tom, we have the first date, which I think is Saturday, the 21st of May. And, of course, I'm tremendously excited about it. Yes, and it's in central London. It's in a pub.

So that's very convenient for me, less convenient for you. My argument to have it at Banbury Station, sadly, was vetoed. But the whole Restless History team will be there. Everybody will be there. All the lads. And we're going to be doing a pub quiz

for the Athol Stands as well online. And that is coming up this weekend on the Sunday the 13th and Monday the 14th of March. So we've got to get the questions together, all kinds of stuff like that. We do indeed. We do indeed. So that's restishistorypod.com if you want to join the club and you get all these tremendous benefits.

And, of course, crucially, you will get early access to the remainder of the episodes on this story, the fall of the USSR, the creation of Russia, the Russian Federation in the 1990s, and the rise of Putin. And, of course, if you don't want to join all that, and you are absolutely bridling and furious at having the stories been interrupted by this shameless self-promotion, don't worry, you can carry on listening for free, and we will get right back to it right now. Yeah, that is enough shameless self-promotion. Right, Dominic. So you were just saying before the break that a lot of the people at the top of the Soviet Union are not burning with kind

of revolutionary communist zeal. And the question I asked you was on Andropov. He's the guy who notoriously has the cold. It lasts for what, kind of four years, three years or something? I mean, basically, he's incapacitated for the whole period of his term as general secretary yes and then he succeeded by chinenko who is kind of in many ways even more moribund are these are these guys people who apps you know so andropov is a very smart guy he recognizes the soviet union has huge problems is he a believer though he doesn't question the system he just thinks that the system needs a bit of tinkering you know apply the spanner here a bit of oil there and it will tick along fine uh he doesn't question the mission i suppose is what i would say um so i mean chanenko he's a hack he's just a party hack andropov is clever he was the soviet ambassador i think in

hungary during the budapest uprising so he he has taken from that a belief that you have to be you have to be strong. You have to suppress dissent. You can't let things – but he also has taken a belief that you have to get in ahead. So you can't let yourself get in a situation where thousands of people are in the streets. You have to keep changing the system to make it work. So I don't think Andropov is – he's very severe. He's very strict.

He's very anti-corruption. And he's clever. And he has read forbidden books. And as Soviets, sort of the top brass are allowed to do, they're expected to do, to inform themselves. And he's surrounded himself with aides who are relatively free thinking. But he's still, I mean, everybody there believes in them, that their model must triumph. And they believe they're in a global competition with this, with the United States. Absolutely. Yeah. And so he is, you know, said he was head of the KGB. He's general secretary during the kind of the coldest days of the Cold War in the early 80s. Yes.

So he is the guy who's in charge when Reagan is lambasting the Soviet Union as evil. Yeah. And it's 99 red balloons and two tribes, which is very frightening, by the way, for the Soviet leadership. They, they think the Americans are going to attack them.

Well, I mean, we did a podcast about this with Taylor Downing about nuclear war. They absolutely are terrified that the Americans are going to attack them first. But yeah, so Andropov takes over Brezhnev dies. I mean,

Brezhnev basically died multiple times and was literally brought back from the dead. You know know he's sort of resuscitated and dragged around as this sort of embalmed figure in the late 1970s Andropov succeeds in November 82 and is there till February 84 and as you said he's basically ill the whole time I mean they literally you know on one side of his bed there'll be the man with the nuclear briefcase the other side of his bed will be the nurse who's keeping him alive um and then he dies now the person he wants to succeed him is the crucial figure in this podcast and for putin a figure of of utter ignominy and shame in russian history as indeed he is for a lot of russians and that man is mikhail gorbachev that's the man that andropov wants to take over but he doesn't he's too young so the other people in the Politburo, they bypass him

and they get this old hack, Chanenko, who is another sort of – I mean, he's dying when he takes over. And he's there from February 1984 to the spring of 1985. So what was it about Gorbachev that Andropov had seen? That's a really good question. So Gorbachev is a generation younger. He's the youngest guy, I think, pretty much on the Politburo. He joins in 1980 and he's 49, which is incredibly young by the standards of the Soviet leadership.

He has a glamorous wife. He does, right? He's a very clever wife who's a very important, I mean, hugely important figure for him, his chief advisor. I mean, his real soulmate. So Gorbachev is from a place called stavropol he's from a little village called what's it called privol noia i think it's called um and he's from peasant stock he's bright he's he's super bright he's gone to moscow state university and i think he's read law he's got a birthmark on his uh on his head he does he's traveled so he's been abroad he even went got a birthmark on his forehead. On his head, he does indeed. He's travelled, so he's been abroad.

He even went on a three-week driving holiday in France with Raisa. And they sort of drove around France and said, God, you know, this place is so much better than the Soviet Union. You know, this is the sort of classic thing that often happens when people are posted to the West. He actually, one of his chief aides, one of his chief advisors is a man called Alexander Yakovlev, who had been ambassador to Canada

and basically had exactly the same kind of crisis of confidence. You know, he got to Canada and was like, oh my God, this place is great. But when Gorbachev becomes general secretary, he's still a believer. I mean, just because he's got a nice camembert in France,

it doesn't mean that he thinks... Right, absolutely, Tom. Absolutely, he's a believer. He is idealistic. And this is one of the great problems with Gorbachev. Now, Gorb he's got a nice camembert in France, it doesn't mean that he thinks… Right, absolutely, Tom. Absolutely, he's a believer. He is idealistic. And this is one of the great problems with Gorbachev. Now, Gorbachev is a fascinating character because, of course, everybody listening to this, by and large, will think, oh, Gorby, nice guy. You know, Nobel Peace Prize winner, top man. Of course, in Russia, he is regarded with absolute contempt. And I have to say, when you start to dig into the story,

and you think about Gorbachev in a slightly more detached way, I mean, we've done a lot of weak and failed leaders on this podcast, although it pains me to say it because he's an admirable man in so many ways. I mean, but when he leaves office, he's only in there for six years. And when he leaves, his country has completely and utterly fallen apart. Now, some people would say that's because the problems are too great. But I think Gorbachev, I think almost all historians actually who really work on this, people like Robert Service or Vladislav Zubok, who wrote a brilliant book called Collapse that came out last year, The Fall of the Soviet Union, they would just say Gorbachev is a complete and utter disaster. Why? He's idealistic, Tom. He's bright. He and Raisa have spent loads of time talking about the future of the Soviet Union. They like

talking to other kind of intellectually kind of people. Gorbachev is also very canny. So he's been able to get up the kind of greasy pole. He's powerful patrons like Andropov think a lot of him. He says to Raisa when he joins the, he says to race when he joins the i think it's when he joined the politburo he said um we can't live like this any longer and he's determined to fix the system but he goes about fixing it in such a politically incompetent i mean again it slightly pains me to say it um but he he fixes it in such an inept way that absolutely everything gets worse he does too much too quickly too many different areas and everything falls apart and you said what is he a believer he's absolutely a believer so vladislav zubat brings this out really well

in his book he says you know gorbachev is obsessed with lenin i mean this is so much like that you're parallel with your christianity stuff about, you know, people who would kind of, Oliver Cromwell or somebody, reading the Bible to guide them. Gorbachev has Lenin's sort of works on his desk, and he will sort of dip into them in the way that people sometimes dip into the Bible. He will dip into them to try and get inspiration for what he needs to do. And he becomes convinced, he is convinced that the Soviet Union has taken a wrong turn since the 1920s. And it needs to get back to Lenin's vision. He idealizes Lenin, and he thinks Lenin had a vision, it's a more democratic, free, open, creative. And if I can get back to that, we'll establish true communism. And then we'll turn

this sort of sinking ship around, if you can turn the sinking ship around so that's that's quite a kind of abstract sense of mission but i maybe i've got this wrong but i thought that he was also focused on a very specific problem which was that uh the soviet economy was massively distorted by defense spending so yeah they they're spending what 20 25 percent no it's probably not that's actually been exaggerated about 15 i think is the latest estimate quite a lot it is but it's if he's going to if they're going to you know guns to butter yeah then they need to make things up with the west so he does that very effectively i mean he's very good at that yes he he definitely kind of removes the chill from the cold war very effectively, which is why people in the West rate him so highly.

But as someone who is ideologically committed to Marxist-Leninism, I mean, isn't it a definition of the job that kind of trying to construct an economy that will provide Soviet citizens with all the kind of consumer durables and gizmos that you get in the west is bound to fail i mean it's there's just no way it can be done no i don't agree with that i don't actually don't agree with either of those things so first of all the defense spending um that has become a very comforting myth that the west tells itself about the soviet union that particularly in america that we crippled we won the cold war by increasing defense spending so much that they couldn't keep up. But most historians, I think, would now say they could keep up. I mean, they have- With defense spending.

Yeah. They've done it since the 40s. They could have carried on doing it. I mean, that defense spending is not what brings the Soviet Union down. Second point, I forgot what your second point was, Tom. Oh, consumer durables. Well, there is a very good example of a communist country that has embraced a consumerism. China. That's China. And the Chinese, I mean, Deng Xiaoping supposedly said something to the effect that his son asked him what he thought of Gorbachev,

and he said, I think Gorbachev's a complete idiot. Yes, but this is communism with Chinese characteristics, which basically means a kind of freedom to ignore aspects of communism that don't gel with with making money but but leninism absolutely i mean leninism is all about kind of collectivization but it's all about suppression of private enterprise but i think most historians would say well first of all that's not what gorbachev himself thinks he thinks lenin's new economic policy in the 1920s after the russian civil war did allow some space for limited private enterprise and that they can move towards a mixed economy.

I think one of the big problems with the Soviet Union is it's become so reliant on imports paid for with oil revenue. And it's completely failed to develop its own kind of consumer industries. So it's like Saudi Arabia with snow. A bit. What do they do? Do they spend their all money on snow no but i mean it's the sound you know notoriously um economies that have lots of oil yeah to be dysfunctional well yes iran is a good example from the 70s we talked about iran a lot in previous podcasts um and i think yes it's incredibly dysfunctional i mean it's unbelievably complicated economy

no one I mean when Gorbachev is given that they're talking about this thing called the law of state enterprise which is going to be this law that's going to allow a little bit of more freedom for factories to keep their money and to invest it and that sort of thing Gorbachev says at one point you know I basically don't understand this and nobody really understands well i i feel sympathy i mean basically he's trying to he's trying to mend a machine for which there is no instruction manual i think there's a there's a degree of that um but i think he's also you see the thing is he's trying to mend this machine which has incredibly complicated kind of supply chain networks and and it has this weird cashless system that enterprises use with each other whereas citizens use cash and you can't change one to the other i mean it's

completely mad but that's the way it's a bit like any massive sclerotic institution once you start to fiddle with it it becomes very difficult to stop it from falling apart but the other thing is he combines this with a pit so he has the perestroika which is restructuring which kind of has political and economic developments but he combines it with glasnost which is openness and that's in the wake of chernobyl so chernobyl the explosion at chernobyl is in april 1986 and after that gorbachev thinks well i need to i need to increase the speed we need to have more newspapers we need to have more discussion and why is it why does chernobyl have that effect on him because I think he's he's shocked by the incompetence um by the cover-ups by the ineptitude of the managers by the way the atomic industry has been run by their lies

all of that kind of stuff you know Gorbachev of course he's complicit in covering it up a bit because he's the general secretary and he kind of feels like he has to but he still thinks okay we need to you know we just need to be more open and we need to be more creative crucially one of the things he does now one of the things we haven't talked about at all which is very important for understanding Putin is the Soviet Union and I know we have a lot of very, to us, young listeners, the Soviet Union is not anything like a nation state, and it doesn't even really see itself as an empire. So it's got 15 republics going all the way from Estonia.

I mean, it's a mad state in many ways. It's existed one form or another since the 20s, but it's going all the way from Estonia to kind of Tajikistan. And the Russians are about, roughly about 50% of that, you know, the Russian population. And there's always been the issue of nationalism. You know, there's always been tensions in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in the Baltics, and so on. And Gorbachev has this idea that by basically devolving a lot of power to the republics, I mean, devolution, Tom, what could possibly go wrong? Devolving power to the republics, that will invigorate the system.

But at the same time, he wants to open everything up so people can debate things more freely. So that will obviously give nationalism more room to flourish. But he also combines that with an attack on what he sees as the corruption of the old elites so the old elites are embattled people are talking about new ideas but they're also being given more power the whole thing it's a sort of he creates unwittingly a kind of breeding ground for all these kind of nationalistic movements to thrive. And you see it as early as 1986. You see it in Kazakhstan and in the Baltics and Ukraine, movements calling for new language rights and opposing power stations and all these kinds of things. So the seeds of trouble are there

even after he's only been there a year. And Dominic, do we know what Putin is doing? Yes, we do. So this isn't St. Petersburg still? No. This is the interesting thing. He's not. So around about the point where Chernenko gave way to Gorbachev, Gorbachev came into power. Vladimir Putin has been working for the KGB since the late 70s. And he has now been posted to Dresden, East Germany. Of course he has. Yes, of course.

So what he's doing, and he's doing sort of slightly, it seems there are different stories. Some people say he's just compiling information about dissidents. Some people say, actually, he's trying to sort of forge links with the sort of remnants of the Red Army faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. We don't know because, of course, it's secret. But what we know is he's watching all this from outside. So he has left a state that he thinks is powerful, strong, respected in the world, high status. And he sees this guy trying to reform it, to change things. And that's really important, I think, that Putin is watching it from outside. And he's watching it, frankly, with horror.

And he's in East Germany, which has a higher standard of living relative to the Soviet Union. It does indeed, yes. So he is alert to presumably some of the problems that the Soviet economy faces yes I don't think you asked if Putin was a communist um he's certainly not a communist now and has not been since the fall of the USSR but what he is is a believer in the Russian world in the Russian sphere of influence and I think that's what's going to trouble him as we get into the late 80s and early 90s, that that starts to fragment and fall apart. Well, I think that's enough for today. So that's the end of today's episode. Please join us tomorrow

to hear about when things really start imploding for Gorbachev in the late 80s and in due course for the Soviet Union itself. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

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