Today, Explained - The isolation of Vladimir Putin

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

The Russian president has come to rely on a skewed version of history and an increasingly small circle of advisers. Journalist Marvin Kalb explains what that means for the war in Ukraine. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. There is the Russia that's waging war in Ukraine, killing even civilians. But there is another Russia. The Russia of writers, of composers, of mathematicians, of theoreticians, of a really remarkable people, who in their history have done remarkable things, but have always been cursed by a horrible political leadership. Russia's current horrible political leader, Vladimir Putin,

is isolated and getting more so. President Biden calls him a war criminal. U.S. intelligence says Putin's own advisors are misleading him about the war. They're telling him what he wants to hear. So what's going through this secretive, solitary dictator's mind? We found one man who thinks he knows the answer.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. For almost 70 years, Marvin Kalb has loved Russia. In the early 1950s, he studied Russian history as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard.

In 1960, he moved to Moscow as a reporter for CBS News. He's interviewed lots of powerful Russians, but he's never talked to Vladimir Putin. Kalb says to get insight into Putin, it's better to read about him than to interview him. I have found over the years that if you read intensely what it is that a leader says or writes or thinks about himself, you're going to get a pretty good idea of what he actually is. Sometimes in an interview, you get only what a major political figure wishes to convey and he does that very well. Putin is an astoundingly good interviewer and reporters who get interviews with him do

very well because he can play to the personality. He knows how to deal with people. That's terribly important to him. Based on your many years of reading and observing and knowing that you have a keen sense into who people are, who is Vladimir Putin? Vladimir Putin at the moment is a very lonely figure. He is finally a dictator. He used to be an lonely figure. He is finally a dictator.

He used to be an authoritarian figure. He used to have the kind of power that a czar had. He is now an absolute dictator. And for him, that's a bad thing. What it means is, on the one hand, he has absolute power to do whatever he wants in Russia, but the people around him are now terrified of him. And that means that they will tell him what they think he wants to hear. That is very bad for any leader of any country. Putin now is in desperate need of solid, 100% verified information, and he is not getting it. That is the belief of the U.S. government of Western nations, and I think logically given the history of dictatorship,

that when you get to an absolute top point of power, you begin to lose it. And Putin now is in the process of losing the power that for most of his life he sought to accumulate. He is a former KGB official, one of the young men in the dying days of the Soviet Union, who would try to live in the artificial world created by the KGB. He would imagine what the Western world was like. He would try very hard to understand it. He would pick up a language. The government gave him every opportunity to learn as much about the enemy as he could. And he did. and he thought he would be able to figure out how to manipulate the enemy so that he could destroy it.

That was the whole point of the KGB operation. It was an intelligence unit, but it was also a unit that operated to achieve certain ends. And for the KGB, the end has always been the dissolution of the Western threat. We know that U.S. intelligence has tried to assess whether the pandemic changed Vladimir Putin's mental state, whether isolation from the pandemic changed him. Was he a solitary person before the pandemic? Was he a lonely figure prior to this virus?

Every leader is to some degree a lonely figure, but Putin was not. Putin enjoyed being with people, but at the same time, he was always very suspicious of everybody. And so there was always a distance between him and anyone he was always very suspicious of everybody. And so there was always a distance between him and anyone he was negotiating with, and certainly between him and a person he would regard as an enemy. And so yes, distance existed. He was surrounded always by his own intelligence, his own ambition, his drive for power. And when he achieved that, and he was very good at persuading the man above him, the president of Russia, Mr. Yeltsin, in the 1990s. Yeltsin brought him down from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Yeltsin appointed Putin the

head of the KGB, or the new version of it, and a couple of years later appointed him prime minister. And then when Yeltsin wanted to resign, he looked around and the only person he felt he could trust was Putin. And so Putin became his successor and almost immediately established a new kind of governance in Russia. He had his KGB folks ready to roll into power, not only in Moscow and Petersburg, but all over the country. It is a vast country. It extends over many time zones. It is difficult to run a country that large. And Putin had his people in position to run it. He had control over the entire operation. He became the boss. And so who surrounds Putin now? Who are his advisors? Who are his friends?

The people who are around him now are the same people, more or less, who've been around him for the past 22 years. Wow. They are the people from the KGB. He allowed those people to take over control over large economic assets in the country. Oil, gas, timber were invested in the hands of a very small group. And this small group proved to be effective enough for Putin to become the boss and run this very complex society. What does it tell you that Vladimir Putin has not made new friends over the last 22 years?

That the same people who surrounded him when he was a KGB agent surround him as he is president of a world power? And that is an extremely important observation, because what we learned from it is that we are dealing with a man who had a certain vision of the world 20, 30 years ago and retains it only in sharper form today. Please remember, Putin is first and foremost a Russian nationalist. The question that comes into mind, is he an ultra-nationalist? By which I mean, does he see everything from a Russian point of view? And the answer, unfortunately, is yes. And because he sees everything from a Russian point of view, he looks at a country, for example, like Belarus, at Ukraine.

They are both Slavic, they are both Orthodox in religion, and therefore, in his mind, they are Russian. And it is not understandable to him at all that people who are authentically Russian, as he sees it, could ever be in rebellion against Moscow. In his mind, they have to be part of Moscow. And so we can look now at the war in Ukraine and say, isn't it marvelous, and indeed it is, that democracy appears to be holding on in Ukraine? For Putin, that is heresy. That is blasphemy. That is unacceptable.

And so he will continue to fight to achieve the realization of what to him is perfectly normal. At this point, it has become very clear in both reporting from on the ground and in reporting from the U.S. Pentagon, Vladimir Putin is not winning the war in Ukraine. It seems as though it's too early to say he's losing it, but he is certainly not winning, at least in any tactical sense. What does that do for his mental state, do you think?

Oh, I think it's a shattering experience. That does not mean it totally undermines him. He's a strong man and he's very smart. He's cunning, in fact. There's a Russian word, hitri, which means cunning in a street corner sense. He understands power and he understands the utilization of power. He has very little patience for intelligence that comes to him saying, we're killing too many people. Forget all of that. Where are we in terms of the end that I have articulated as our policy goal? In fact, his policy goal now is never going to happen. He thought the war would be over within two or three days. We're now into a second month and it may go on much longer than this, I hope

not, but it's possible. And in his mind, he is pursuing a legitimate historical goal. And can he lose? No. Can he persuade himself ever that he has lost? No. The only people who can persuade him will never persuade him. They will have to get rid of him in one way or another. And those are the people closest to him. They are the ones who know his mind, know his methods, because they are the same people. And if they get rid of him, there may be somebody very much like him who would come into power. Or if we are lucky, we may get to see the other promise of Russia. Of literature, of music, of history, of growth, of creativity. Russia and the Russian people, it's a great society. And if there were another way of leaving the KGB mentality

and reaching into the other Russia, we would all be so much better off led by the Russian people themselves. Is it possible? Yes, it's there. It has to emerge from the soot and the gutter that it exists in today. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday,

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Back with Marvin Kalb, journalist, author, Russia hand for almost 70 years. In 2009, the Obama administration announced what it called a reset between the U.S. and Russia. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva. The cameras were flashing. Clinton handed him a red button with a word on it. I wanted to present you with a little gift, which represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying. And that word in Russian was supposed to say reset, but it was actually the wrong translation.

And the word that appeared on the button was overcharged. You get it wrong. I got it wrong. It should be peria zagruska. Let's talk about that moment. Vladimir Putin was not president. A man named Dmitry Medvedev was at the time. What was the U.S. trying to reset from?

There had been a very long time in the recent historical relationship between Russia and the United States when we were in constant states of anxiety, of tension, of confrontation, and that was all called the Cold War. By the time Clinton came around with Lavrov and the reset idea, what they were trying to do was simply say, enough of that confrontation. Let's try to get along because there's a whole rest of the world that the U.S. has to deal with. And for Medvedev, who was then technically the leader of Russia, with Putin very much in the background, but very much in control. The idea was simply to romance Russia into an association with the West, and they wanted to

reset it. It was an easy, very American way of doing things, but not a Russian way of doing things. From the beginning in 2009 and 2010, were there any gains made toward normalizing a relationship between the United States and Russia? Did anything go right? Absolutely. There were a number of agreements that were reached. There were long-term negotiations on arms control. There were trade agreements that were reached. There was more than anything an attitude of openness on Medvedev's part that had never been apparent with Putin. In 2007, Putin delivered a speech in Munich. He simply attacked the West. He made it very clear that he was unhappy with the status quo. We then came in with this reset, but at that time, Putin felt that the progress that had been made under Medvedev was not healthy for Russia. In the years after 2012, what would you say were the pivotal moments where it became clear to you and other observers, oh, Vladimir Putin

doesn't want a reset. Vladimir Putin wants to do what Vladimir Putin wants to do and the U.S. be damned. The most important thing that happened were the mass demonstrations inside Russia that happened in 2011, the beginning of 2012. This was, for Putin, a threat, a direct, mortal, national threat to Russia and, of course to him personally. He cannot tolerate mass demonstrations he does not control. In 2014, when there was mass demonstrations in Kyiv and in all over Ukraine that said, we want to move to the West. We do not want to be hooked into the Russian Empire.

It might have seemed to the Western world as a great and marvelous thing that the Ukrainian people were standing up and asserting their right to democracy. To Putin, that was a direct threat. And since that time, he has been waiting for his moment. And that moment appeared to come on February 24th of this year.

The Russian president Vladimir Putin is calling this a quote special military operation to protect Donbas. It is clearly bigger than that. Now he made us we are now in a new phase not just in world history, but starting in a more micro sense, we're in a new phase in Russian history. We cannot continue to superimpose Western ideas, Western logic, Western history on Russia. Russia is a special place with a special history, and it feels it has every right to live that history. The problem here is that that history impinges directly on other countries, which have an equal right to their own legacy and their own history and their own future. And they're in collision. Is there a possibility that it will expand? I certainly pray that that is not the case. Why?

Because that might then involve the use of nuclear weapons. We have been so fortunate since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that these weapons have not been used again. Once the weapon is used, if it be a small size, it doesn't matter. The impact is huge. It opens the door to the use of the big nuclear weapons. How do you stop that? We're at a pivotal moment now where the West has to be careful how it uses and deals with

Putin and Putin has to be very careful in the way he deals with the West. In 2016, a remarkable thing happened. The United States elected as President Donald Trump. And now we had a situation in which an American president appeared to both like and admire and possibly even respect Vladimir Putin. What did that do for Putin, in his mind, to have the respect of an American president? I got him. I got him.

Yeah. I think the first thing that must have run through Putin's mind is, I can't be this lucky. Really, I can't be this lucky. In the 2016 election, everybody, including Trump, believed that Clinton was going to win. And in Putin's mind, that him brought back to Clinton when she was Secretary of State and the conflict that she always had with Lavrov and with him. He believed that Clinton, it was a total cockeyed view, but he believed that Clinton was the person who instigated the Russian people to have their anti-Putin demonstrations in 2011.

What she said, and I think is accurate, the United States was in support of people who wanted their freedom. Good. We might have been a bit too careless in the way in which we were using words and the way in which we took certain actions, because Putin regarded the words and the actions as mortal threats to him and to Russia in that order. And he then felt he had an enemy that he had to defeat. Is there someone in particular waiting behind a curtain, so to speak, for Putin to either be overthrown or to be killed? Is there one person, one friend in particular, who you think might take over?

No, I do not have a name. There is a group, and that group is small, and you're talking about a handful of people. From that group, someone will emerge, likely to emerge and replace Putin. But when that is, is that near? If I had to roll the dice right now, I would say we are nearer to a change in the Russian leadership than we have been in the last 22 years. But are we talking about another year, another two years? I think not more than that. Not more than that. Russia has a way of surprising itself and surprising the rest of the world. Every hundred years or so, there is an explosion. Something that emerges from the bottom of society that demands to be heard and it explodes.

And I could give you any number of illustrations of that. The last big one was obviously the Russian Revolution. It was a hundred years ago. So it's about time. Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King.

It's Today Explained.