transcript
Putin is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World.
The Russian American journalist on how Putin’s war in Ukraine is playing out inside Russia’s highly controlled media environment.
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- ezra klein
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
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I’m recording this on Thursday, March 10 — this intro. And as of today, the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It’s a special military operation.
And under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He’s wiping out independent news operations. He’s tightening access to social media. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.
But if you don’t know you’re at war, then how do you understand war’s consequences? What do Russians know of the sanctions that are beginning to destroy their economy and change their lives? How are they being understood? And importantly, how are they being narrativized? And then this separate, but related question — what is it exactly that Putin is telling Russians? If you were to listen to him, to trust and believe him, what would you believe is happening in Ukraine?
Masha Gessen covers Russia for The New Yorker and has been doing remarkable reporting from Ukraine and Russia alike. And Gessen has paid particular attention to what Russians are seeing and not seeing. This is an interest that goes way back in their work. They wrote a biography of Vladimir Putin’s rise, “The Man Without a Face,” and then the National Book Award-winning, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which I cannot recommend more highly.
It’s both a remarkable book, but it’s remarkably relevant now because a core question of that book — and that is a book partially about Putin — a core question of that book is how authoritarian regimes shape not just what a public knows, not just what a public believes, but how they think — the tools and information and raw material they have to order and understand their world. And that question is so horribly relevant right now. And it makes Gessen’s perspective particularly essential right now. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Masha Gessen, welcome to the show.
- masha gessen
Thank you.
- ezra klein
So you’ve been in Moscow in recent weeks. Paint the picture for me. What was it like to be there during the early days of the invasion?
- masha gessen
So I flew to Moscow actually on Thursday the 24th. I got there on Friday the 25th. So it was a bit more than 24 hours into the invasion when I got there. And every time I speak about what it felt like in Moscow for the week that I was there, I think I probably have to make a distinction between what you can see and feel and observe, even as a very informed observer, in the streets, and what you can see and hear and talk about in people’s houses in private.
It almost got to sort of a Soviet-level difference in that way, which is something I remember from my childhood, but I hadn’t experienced in the many, many years that I lived there or that I have visited since I left, right, where there are two entirely parallel realities. And this to me was the most striking example was actually the last night that was in Moscow, which was last Wednesday night — so it was just less than a week into the invasion.
And I was coming back to my hotel in Pushkin Square. And I should say, I actually chose to stay at a hotel in Pushkin Square because Pushkin Square is the central square in Moscow that is the traditional site of protests going back to Soviet times. It’s also the traditional site of all sorts of rendezvous. And so I wanted to make sure that out of my hotel window I could see if there were mass arrests or large protests that I could observe from the window.
But this time I was coming back to the hotel and I saw almost out of the corner of my eye three policemen in full combat gear dragging a young woman into a police bus. And then behind them another three policemen dragging another young woman. And then everything else was going on as normal, right.
And imagine in the street in New York, or anywhere else, that when you see three cops dragging somebody down the sidewalk, the first thing you would actually notice would be the onlookers. You’d rarely actually see the event itself. You’d see people observing the event. But nobody was noticing. Most of the people on the street were in one reality where they were going about their regular business.
This was happening right in front of a giant three or four-story H&M store, which that night H&M, like many other retailers, announced that they were pulling out of Russia. The next day the store closed. But at that point, it was still illuminated. It still had the sort of — all the gloss of the consumerist Moscow of the last 20 years. And most of the people seemed to exist in that. And just these two young women and an entire army of cops that were posted all around the square existed in this other reality where there was a war and people protesting the war.
So on the one hand, on the surface, it felt like nothing had happened and nothing was happening. And on the other hand, every time I would go to somebody’s house, there was like this incredibly speeded up sense of something horrible has happened. Maybe we should consider leaving the country. We’re leaving the country tomorrow. And by the end of my week-long stay there, it was like this 36-hour leaving party where every house I went to it was people with a stack of passports, with their passport on top of the stack, saying goodbye to their friends.
- ezra klein
I assume that reflects, at least in part, that the people you know and see there. And it makes me wonder how bifurcated both response and the understanding of what’s happening is. I mean, if you’re an average Russian news consumer right now, what do you probably know about the war?
- masha gessen
Well, if you’re an average Russian news consumer — although I don’t know that it’s right to call an average Russian a news consumer. We already start getting into this tricky language territory.
- ezra klein
It’s a very good point.
- masha gessen
But if you’re an average Russian —
- ezra klein
A T.V. watcher.
- masha gessen
A T.V. watcher, yeah. Or somebody who has the T.V. in the background all the time. So if you’re one of those people, then you don’t actually think there’s a war going on. And you don’t think there’s a war going on for two very specific but distinct reasons. One is that the government has decreed that there is no war. It is, in fact, a crime now, as of last Friday punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to call the war a war, or an invasion, or aggression.
So there is on television you hear that there is a special operation, there’s a peacekeeping operation, that there’s an operation to stop the hostilities. They use various turns of phrase, but basically the official name for it is the “Special Military Operation.” And you get the impression that it is led by these so-called separatist troops from Eastern Ukraine and supported to some unknown measure by the Russian military.
But I think that’s not even the most important reason that you don’t think much of anything is going on. The most important reason is that the actual tenor and flow of news hasn’t changed. So this newscast in which you learn about the special operation, or whatever it is they’re doing at the moment, lasts five minutes, right. It’s the regular news at the top of the hour.
It’s not — when I was flying to Moscow, that 20 hours that I spent because my flight was late and I was stuck in Paris for a while — 20 hours that I spent in airport terminals against those giant displays, you could tell, without even listening, without being able to hear what was being said, that something huge was happening in the world. You could tell that the flow of news had changed. You could tell that the picture had changed completely.
And it’s the opposite in Russia. The picture hasn’t changed. The tenor hasn’t changed. The timing hasn’t changed. And so the overall message is nothing much is going on, nothing huge is happening. And of course, you see the results of that in the street as well. On the Monday when the currency collapsed, there were some places there were some lines on banks, but other places there weren’t. There were no observable bank runs. People weren’t rushing to stores to buy durable goods.
One really interesting thing was a couple of days later, I was trying to buy some SSD drives. And I went to a whole bunch of electronic stores one after another. And they were all completely empty. And these huge chain stores that sell household appliances, washing machines, ranges, hair dryers, air conditioners, and computers, and computer accessories — so the stores were pretty much empty, but they were also out of SSD drives.
So a very small portion of the population that was thinking, oh, we’re about to lose our access to cloud storage, our access to the larger world, we have to back everything up. But the larger population, the majority of people weren’t thinking the ruble is worth two-thirds of what it was worth yesterday and I should go out and buy a washing machine. So none of that stuff that happens in a normally communicating society when there is a currency crash, none of that was happening. It was another kind of bifurcated reaction.
- ezra klein
That gets to something that I’ve really been wondering which is how much the average hides here. So I had asked you what an average Russian television watcher knows. But what does somebody who wants to know know? What does somebody who has a sense, saw on social media this is going on, saw a Russian tennis star or actor put up an anti-war message, what are they able to find out if they go looking?
- masha gessen
Well, that’s changing really fast. So on Friday, one week and one day after the invasion, Russia basically blocked every single remaining independent media outlet. And by blocked, I mean blocked web access to it. And two of them — at least two of them — were also just forced to stop operating altogether. And they were the two main sources of information for people who aren’t using — who aren’t relying on official state media. And that’s the Echo Moscow radio station, NTV Rain, the independent web-based television channel. And Russia also blocked Facebook.
Now, that hugely reduces the amount of information readily available to people. The effect is a little bit delayed, because people in Russia are still able to use VPNs. But with Visa and Mastercard pulling out of Russia, a lot of people who rely on Western-paid VPNs are not going to be able to make payments anymore. So they’re going to lose access over the course of the next few weeks. But now we’re talking about vanishingly smaller numbers of people. People who really want to look for information, they still have access to Telegram where —
- ezra klein
Telegram being the messaging service not literal telegrams.
- masha gessen
Right, right. Thank you. Yeah, Telegram — it’s a little bit different than a messaging service. It’s a weird little platform, or weird big platform, that’s very big in this part of the world that is used for messaging but it also has publicly-available channels. So you can subscribe basically to a news-stream.
And a lot of independent, and not so independent, news media in — Russian news media, Belarusian news media maintain these Telegram channels. So people who want to are watching these Telegram channels and they’re seeing footage and photographs from Ukraine. They’re getting more or less the same information that they would be getting from reading The New York Times. But that’s a very small number of people.
- ezra klein
One thing I really appreciate about the way you lay all this out is it is disorienting even to listen to you talk about it. I can’t imagine the disorientation of living in it. But something that occurs to me is an inversion of the experience that many of us are having in, let’s say, the United States, which is you mentioned the flow of news. And I think it’s a really important distinction. There’s what the news says and then there’s how much news there is, the volume of it, the loudness of it, the size of the type on The New York Times home-page. My podcast, which typically does all kinds of things, it’s now it’s only Russia-Ukraine episodes. But for most people in the West, with the exception of a modest rise in gas prices, they’re not experiencing any difference in their day-to-day lives.
But what you describe, it has this reversed quality, which is this normalcy in the news environment. But as much as maybe there aren’t bank runs, I mean you already talked about big chain stores closing, Visa and Mastercard, which are pretty important payment mechanisms, pulling out of the country. A lot of players are pulling out of the country. The ruble is losing a lot of value. The number of sanctions are going to make it hard to get certain kinds of goods that aren’t produced directly in Russia or require parts that don’t directly come from China.
Does it not feel to people like there’s some difference between the world around them changing somewhat eerily? It almost sounds like the beginning of a zombie movie where everybody is acting normally, but on the sides you begin to see weird things on the headlines and all of a sudden people are just walking in circles.
- masha gessen
I wish I had watched a single zombie movie —
— because I’ve actually been wishing that for the last few days, because I realized that this is an important point of reference. I mean, a small minority of people have a sense of absolute total catastrophe. When I was — I think I used — ill-advisedly used the word party earlier when I said leaving party. But I mean, these are people saying goodbye to their entire lives, to their apartments, to everyone and everything they’ve ever known. Packing their belongings, what they can pack into a suitcase or two in the course of often hours, not even days. But again, that’s a small minority.
And then the majority of the population taking things in stride or pushing them out of their minds. And the question is, what are the mechanisms that they’re using to push them out of their minds? And I think the mechanisms have to do with adaptations that people have developed over the last 30 years. Things have changed drastically a lot in Russia.
And even things like having access to international payment mechanisms, losing access, having access to consumer goods, and then suddenly facing hyperinflation, not being able to afford them, and then being able to afford them again. People have gotten accustomed to a series of financial crashes and periods of hyperinflation and even periods of scarcity. And I think people have no idea about the scale of the catastrophe that they’re facing. That is something that is much easier to see from the outside or if you’re one of those Russians who are reading the Telegram channels.
Then you realize this is not just your local H&M store closing. It is not just IKEA shutting down. It is not just a break in MasterCard and Visa being serviced, which happened in Russia in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea. For a while, there were shortages of some imported goods and for a while there was trouble accessing international payment mechanisms. And then it kind of sort of all leveled out and even got better than it had been before. And I think that’s people’s general expectation. They have a much higher tolerance for things changing suddenly, but also have an expectation of a return to a particular level of comfort.
But of course, what makes that possible is the lack of any kind of circulation of information in society. Right? You can’t get a bigger picture than your own slice of experience unless you’re reading the independent media or Western media. You don’t know just how overwhelming these sanctions are. If you tune into the television, what you’re actually hearing is a kind of reassuring buzz. They mention Western sanctions. But then they say, but we’re still going to have South Korean electronics. Not anymore, actually. South Korea is also joining the sanctions.
So all you have is your private experience and maybe the private experience of a couple of people that you’re communicating with. But you don’t have the experience of a public sphere. And if you want to believe that things will probably get back to normal, it’s easier to believe that and you do want to believe that. But also, you have no way of understanding the scale of catastrophe, right? And for example, you are not thinking about all the trains, and planes, and cars that are going to stop running in a few months because there will be no spare parts. You just don’t have a way of knowing that.
- ezra klein
One of the things this implies is that you could see sanctions playing out in really divergent ways. So I think in the implicit model of how sanctions work in the minds of many policymakers, or at least let’s say in the minds of people commenting on them that I hear, is that sanctions put pressure on elites around Putin and also on the citizenry of Russia to want this to change, to try to push Putin to change what he is doing. But one version of this is that this is simply treated as some kind of roughly normal economic calamity but things will be back soon. And that there’s a push from state-influenced media to understand this is normal.
The other that I’ve wondered about is the degree to which as sanctions get worse, the narrative of the state will be that there is an offensive attack from the United States, from Europe on Russia. That Russia is under a kind of assault. And that if the narrative around that can be sufficiently controlled, that far from creating friction around Putin’s regime, it will create a rallying around the flag effect, a sense that Russia is being almost economically invaded and, you know, that there needs to be unity in the face of it. I’m curious if you find one of those more persuasive than the other.
- masha gessen
Well, I mean, you’re absolutely right. The state narrative is already that — and, in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea — the narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it’s always us against the world. It’s always as against the West. And the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia.
But I also think that if we now switch perspectives and think about sanctions from Western perspective, or particularly the U.S, perspective, the way that the narrative of sanctions works is it matches the working definition of insanity. Sanctions is the thing that never works, that the United States and other Western countries try over and over again expecting a different outcome. At least that’s true in relationship to Russia. Right?
The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin’s behavior, or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It’s been tried over and over and it doesn’t work. Now, obviously we’ve never seen sanctions on this scale and it is mind-boggling.
And part of me thinks, well, maybe the change in quantity becomes a qualitative change when life as people have known it in Russia is completely destroyed over the course of a few months. Realistically, the full impact of sanctions will be seen in a few months. But I still don’t think that they can produce a revolt in the elites and even less than they can produce mass protests, especially in the face of a matching crackdown.
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- ezra klein
This is a hard question to answer probably. But something that I think a lot of this revolves around is the question of in extremists, how much power does Putin have over what Russians believe? And what I mean by this is that over time, the contradictions here between different narratives become deeper. One of the things the sanctions are trying to do — and I agree with you, by the way, that sanctions do not have a awe-inspiring history of efficacy — but one thing they’re trying to do is create a situation where over time normalcy is impossible to maintain.
And you, in your really remarkable book — people should pick it up — from a couple of years ago— “The Future Is History” — you talk about how the Soviet Union at its core had these deep contradictions that people had to believe simultaneously, and that as the contradictions widened, one of the explanations for the regime’s instability and ultimate collapse is they became unstable. And it seems to me that the theory here is that you’re going to make the contradictions of what Putin is doing unstable. That, on the one hand, he’s promising normalcy. He’s promising a stronger Russia. And on the other hand, what does success at this point look like for him in a realistic way? Military success is an occupation of a Ukraine that does not want to be occupied and is likely fighting back continuously and complete economic strangulation from the West.
And the question I think that raises is, you can maybe survive that if you can really convince people — your own people — that you’re in the right. But it’s very hard to survive if you can’t. So how much do you think the willingness to believe media in Russia comes from a sense that Putin normally has things under control? And if that sense begins to falter, then that will change? Or how much does he really have the faith of the public? And between that and his control over the information channels that will be enough over a long-term, too?
- masha gessen
Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words about the book. I mean, part of what I tried to think through in “The Future Is History” is the impossibility of knowing what people think in a totalitarian society. And like the actual impossibility of it, because it’s not that you can’t find out what people really think. It’s that people can’t really think. And so you can’t find out what they can really think.
And so there can be sudden and truly unpredictable shifts in what passes for public opinion in a society in which there’s no public and no possibility of opinion, which is kind of what happened at the end of the Soviet Union. And it could happen again. The Putin regime and the Soviet regime before him rested on a perceived legitimacy.
And there’s actually a piece I wrote for The New Yorker a little while ago where I talked to this wonderful contemporary Russian sociologist and philosopher, Grigory Yudin, who talks about the way that people are forced to manufacture signs of this legitimacy. Like, for example, this enormous bureaucratic apparatus is mobilized to herd people to the polls to vote for Putin so that then Putin can laud the results of that vote over the bureaucratic apparatus that has just been forced to manufacture this evidence of legitimacy that supports Putin. The reason that a totalitarian regime needs a perceived legitimacy is because it’s the only thing that stands between it and losing control of its armed forces.
Now, Putin has put some other precautions in place. He’s a true paranoid dictator. I mean, the worse people live, the more, up to a certain point perhaps or perhaps indefinitely — and we don’t know whether it’s up to a certain point or indefinitely — the more people want to hang on to the illusion of stability. And this is something that Hannah Arendt wrote about — that totalitarian regimes hold out the carrot of stability while constantly manufacturing instability.
And so when you’re always on the edge of a precipice and your one true leader keeps telling you the only reason that you haven’t fallen over the edge is because of me, then you are in some way simultaneously believing that the leader has led you to the edge of the precipice and that the leader is keeping you from falling into the precipice. But you have to hold on to both beliefs for dear life or else the precipice opens up and swallows you.
- ezra klein
I want to hold on a point you made before that this kind of regime makes it hard simply to think. It’s something you talk about quite a bit in your analysis of the Soviet Union in “The Future Is History.” And you talk about how the tools of self-understanding were withheld, everything from sociology to Freudian psychoanalysis. All of the different sciences that we use to create different lenses on our own society — to say nothing of the empirical information that feeds into them — not Freudian analysis, but others — were withheld.
But something you were just making me think about there in the way things changed is that for all of the internal horrors, and killings, and jockeying, a lot of what changed came as regimes changed, as somebody new took power and they had different views than the person before. And, you know, from everything you’re saying and from everything I have read, I don’t think the hope of Putin being toppled is a very realistic one.
And so in a regime like this where you have withheld a lot of the substance that allows reasoning and societal planning away from people, and you have a dictator in control of this apparatus, are we really simply in a situation where what simply matters at the end of the day is what one man believes Russia should do? I mean, is it really that vertical in the power structure?
- masha gessen
That’s a simple question and it has a simple answer. Yes. And we’ve never seen that more clearly than in the last couple of weeks. What has emerged is not only that Putin is unilaterally making decisions but that those decisions are based — you know, those enormous decisions, the decision to wage a war, are based on a series of conjectures and fantasies that he seems to have created out of whole cloth.
I think it’s a combination of two things. One is actual physical and mental isolation, which apparently has been exacerbated by Covid. He had an extremely tiny circle of interlocutors before the pandemic. And he has apparently cut it down to something like zero since the pandemic began. So we’re — I mean, we’re living in a world — a world — not just a country, but a world that is right now being shaped by a man who has been thinking alone, and not very well, but also, most dangerously alone for two years.
- ezra klein
Let’s talk then about the way he sees the world. And I’m trying to think of where to begin this, but I actually want to begin with the question of time. What time period is he mentally and metaphorically grounded in? And by that I mean right now in the U.S., I think the metaphor and the time period governing a lot of thinking is the Cold War. I think a lot of people are reaching back either to a remembered past then or to a studiable past, then. But I don’t get the sense from reading Putin’s speeches that that’s really true for him. I think that it seems that his periods are different. So what time period is he using as his metaphorical and conceptual base?
- masha gessen
That’s a great question. But actually, first, I would say that Russians, in general, I think are much less likely to see the Cold War as a distinct period in history. The Cold War was, perhaps from the Russian point of view, is specific — a particular example of the post-World War II period, which is characterized by the Soviet Union becoming a superpower.
But Putin appears to be placing himself on a continuum of Russian history that he sees as a series of great leaders beginning with Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was not an emperor that Russians particularly revered ever before Vladimir Putin’s reign. But the first monument to Ivan the Terrible went up, I guess, six or seven years ago in Russia. So Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin.
It’s a huge span. It’s a series of great, brutal, expansionist dictators.
He skips right over the great divide of the October Revolution. He doesn’t see the Soviet period as distinct in Russian history. And so he gave a scary and rambling and ridiculous speech on February 21 by way of introducing this new invasion of Ukraine. But as a Putin text, it was quite remarkable because he laid out his vision of the entire Soviet period in more detail than he ever has before.
And what he said was that — without using the word empire — but he said that that whole Soviet way of constituting the empire by nominally giving its constituent parts the rights of statehood and nominally making the union voluntary was a fiction. That, in fact, there is a continuous history from the Russian Empire to the present day and that all the separations from Moscow’s rule that have occurred over the period of the last 100-plus years are illegitimate.
So he places himself in this really, really long period. But he also — I mean, he’s profoundly anti-modern. He’s a president of a European country in 2022 who’s engaging in completely uncritical, unexamined, imperial rhetoric and sort of saying everything that came after is bullshit.
- ezra klein
Yeah, that is exactly what I’m getting at. And I want to talk about that speech in some detail. But what has been striking reading him — listening is the wrong word because I need to read the translations — but there’s been a tendency to call him irrational and unhinged.
And I’m not here to make any judgments on Vladimir Putin’s mental state. But what he seems to me mostly is somebody who has decided to act and think as if it’s 1847 and that his logic works better and is more comprehensible under the rules of imperialism and great power expansion and so on that were taken more or less for granted then. There were things you had to justify and things you didn’t. And it all makes some sense.
And he’s also throwing back to the 19th century, the early 20th century for the legitimacy of what he thinks Russia owns or what he thinks has always been Russian. But that there is something in him right now that has become, I think, confusing to a lot of onlookers because he simply refuses to accept the logic and norms of the international order that at least a lot of other countries believe they need to pretend to be following.
And I think it is a fair thing to say America does not actually follow these rules, this order, but it tries to pretend to. But he doesn’t. He just sort of brushes it aside more or less and has really thrown back to pre-modern logic of how a ruler should act and what is right and reasonable for a ruler to do.
- masha gessen
That’s exactly right. And, you know, I’m glad you actually mentioned this idea that Putin is unhinged and irrational because I don’t think it’s ever particularly useful to call somebody — a world leader or anyone else — irrational. But it’s much more useful to try to figure out in what world they’re rational. Putin is perfectly consistent in his thinking and his behavior. It’s just that the universe he lives in is what he describes quite openly — we just have to listen — and it is the pre-modern, or if you do take into account that it is 2022, the anti-modern, universe of imperial logic.
And he looks at the West — and I think thinks that the West is irrational. He’s as aware — probably more aware than you and I are — of the hypocrisy of the norms proclaimed by the United States. But they seem totally absurd to him because they also don’t make sense, right? So here’s the United States that pretends to hold to ideas and values that make no sense, whereas he, Putin, has ideas and values that are rooted in history and he acts in perfect accordance with them.
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- ezra klein
Something that you’ve said is that to understand Putin we should listen to what he’s saying. So what I want to do is read you some things he said, both in that February speech and in some before it, and talk about what they may reveal. But before we do, I want to ask you one question, which is, how do you take the truth value to him of the things he says in public?
Because sometimes I read what he’s saying and it reads to me like something he would probably think, and sometimes it reads like I cannot tell if he has a strange invented history meant to rationalize what he wants to do or he’s invented a history as a public relations campaign. Like, how do you understand if Putin believes the things he says in public? What do you think his level of commitment to his own words actually is?
- masha gessen
I mean, it’s never that simple, is it? It’s like I know your kids are little, but when they become teenagers, you’re going to encounter this very interesting interaction that every parent of a teenager has always had, which is your teenager will lie to you and then get terribly upset that you don’t believe them. And then the longer their argument goes on, the more attached they will be to the thing that they lied to you about even though you both know that they were lying. But by the end of the conversation, they will be fully committed to the lie that they know started out as a lie, or they used to know, but maybe they don’t know anymore.
And that’s a way of trivializing these really tragic things that we’re talking about. But I’m just trying to say that there isn’t a simple way to separate what he believes from what he says, because the moment he says it, he believes it more. And, again, if you think of him as somebody who’s been sitting alone for two years, probably watching a fair amount of his own T.V., how can you separate what he actually believes from what he invented and then eventually came to believe because it’s in his feedback loop?
- ezra klein
So let’s talk about some of the things he says he believes. And I want to pull together a couple of statements he makes in his February speech about Ukraine. So he says, quote, “I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” End quote. He says that, quote, “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik communist Russia.” End quote.
But then he says something weird. I mean, these are all weird things to say, but something that I thought was particularly telling. And after having given this long exegesis on the way that he understands Ukraine to have been a political construct by Lenin, he says, quote, “Personally, I can add that no political factors, however impressive or profitable they may seem at any given moment, can or may be used as the fundamental principles of statehood.” What do you take him to mean by that? What is he saying about what makes a state?
- masha gessen
Right. So I mean, I think he’s doing a lot of things in that sentence. But mostly, he is devaluing speech, and devaluing politics, and devaluing legal arrangements. He’s creating a kind of image of a natural, possibly even a mystical, state, right? There’s a thing that is and he knows what that thing is. That thing is some sort of unity of Russians and Ukrainians. And in fact, when he says unity, he means the nonexistence of Ukrainians. It’s just Russians.
And we have piled a lot of things on top of that. We have piled a lot of language. We have created laws. We have drawn borders. We have elected parliaments, and said things about what one country is called and what the other country is called and having bilateral relations, or whatever it is we’ve done. But none of that matters because he knows what is. And what is isn’t any of the things that we have named or drawn or put down on paper.
- ezra klein
There’s a theme throughout the entire speech in which Putin is criticizing the Soviet Union, criticizing the Communist period, keeps occasionally trying to say I understand things were complicated but certainly rooting the divisions he is trying to rectify through force now and decisions made by Soviet leaders. But then he says this — and he’s aiming this at the government in Ukraine.
He says, quote, “You want de-communization? Very well. This suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real de-communization would mean for Ukraine.” And on some level, that is simply framed as a threat of invasion, which he, of course, follows through on. But what does he mean by de-communization here?
- masha gessen
Let me just preface this with something that I was just thinking as you were asking this question that I think we should be aware as we talk through interpreting his speech, which is one of my favorite, if depressing activities. One of the reasons that it’s so rewarding to listen to what Putin says is that he’s not a terribly knowledgeable man.
So when he gave that speech, it was very informative because I thought, oh, he has gone and studied these couple of things. He doesn’t know a lot of the context. He doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of history even though he fancies himself a historian these days.
But we learn a lot from the little that he says because he kind of says everything that he knows. And he delivers his idée fix. And he gives a very clear reflection of what he is thinking about, what he’s obsessed with, and what he is going to be obsessed with for the foreseeable future, and what is going to be the motivating force behind his actions.
So clearly he has been thinking a lot about the difference between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. And he has decided that the Russian Empire was the legitimate entity in the Soviet Union was fake. And when he said that Lenin created Ukraine, what he is saying is that, you know, Russian Empire was a unitary power.
It’s not exactly true. There were actually significant exceptions to that sort of utilitarianism, like, for example, Finland, which, as part of the Russian Empire, had its own currency. It had its own parliament. But he may not know this. He thinks it was a single state with a single ruler and no meaningful borders.
And then Lenin comes along, takes this empire, chops it up into a bunch of pieces and says each of these is a state. Kind of like — and I think Putin is thinking this — kind of like the European Union is now. That’s a whole bunch of different countries that are in a voluntary union. The treaties on which the European Union is based are not dissimilar in substance from the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which gave each of its 15 constituent republics full rights of statehood.
And so he says all of that was completely false. It was a violence done to a country that existed. And so we illegitimize that. We go back to the empire. But when he’s saying, do you want de-communization, he’s also referring to something that Russia perceived as deeply offensive and even traitorous in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014, which is what in Ukrainian and Russian was called “Leninopad,” which translates as, I guess, the falling of the Lenins.
Ukrainians all over the country dismantled the Lenin monuments. To Ukrainians, this meant a break with the Moscow hegemony. To them, Lenin monuments in every central square, in every big city and small town, were a symbol of the Empire.
And so now Putin comes and says, OK, you dismantled the Lenin monuments to symbolize you break with the Empire. But hey, the only claim you ever had to statehood was thanks to Lenin who created this whole framework of Ukrainian statehood that I have now decreed is false. So if you dismantle the monument of the one guy in power in Russia who ever recognized your statehood, well, great, you don’t get to have any statehood.
- ezra klein
Let me do two more here. The back half of the speech is very much about Russia’s relationship with the US, with Europe, with NATO. There is a long list of grievances offered of a narrative of an endlessly reasonable Russia making endlessly reasonable offers being rebuffed, ignored, dismissed, humiliated, talked down to.
At some point, Putin says, in asking why Russia keeps being treated as an enemy as opposed to a friend or an ally, quote, “There can be only one answer. This is not about our political regime or anything like that. They just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around. This is the answer to all questions. This is the source of America’s traditional policy towards Russia. Hence, the attitude to all our security proposals.”
Is this how Putin sees America and the West, that we operate out of a constant and ongoing fear of Russian strength?
- masha gessen
I don’t actually think that particular sentence says that the United States operates out of ongoing fear of Russian strength. I think it says that the United States continues to insist on denying Russian strength and trying to humiliate Russia and diminish it.
And there’s a specific reference point to this feeling and this narrative, which Putin has mentioned in other speeches, but which also is an integral part of the sort of distilled propaganda that’s going into, for example, into schools or is being distributed to bloggers and TikTokers that government agents are hiring to spread propaganda to the non-T.V. watching public, which is the 1999 air war in Kosovo, which to Putin is kind of the focal point of Russian humiliation.
Now, what happened in 1999 was that the United States decided to intervene militarily in Kosovo where there was a pattern of sustained ethnic violence perpetrated by Serbian police and military against ethnic Albanians. Kosovo was an ethnically Albanian province of Serbia that had strong linguistic and cultural ties to neighboring Albania and really wanted to secede from Serbia and join greater Albania. I’m going into some detail because Putin has gone to a lot of trouble to create a perfect symmetry with Ukraine.
In 1999, the United States decided to lead an air war over Kosovo without seeking the agreement of the U.N. Security Council and without consultation with Russia, or worse, explicitly rejecting the possibility that it would consult with Russia on a thing like this. Russia has only an imaginary connection to Serbia because Serbia is also an Eastern Orthodox country. There weren’t particularly strong economic or cultural ties.
But it was an incredible experience of humiliation and powerlessness for Russian leadership and I think for a lot of ordinary Russians. That idea that we wouldn’t even be consulted. That they wouldn’t even pretend to listen to us. The then Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was actually on his way to Washington for talks with Al Gore about the Russian debt when he found out that the United States was refusing to even discuss the planned bombing campaign with Russia. And so he turned his plane around, returned to Moscow, and that was kind of a breaking point in Russian politics.
And so Putin is referring to that. He’s saying, look, they don’t take us into account. They wrote us off way back then in 1999. We have now come back. We’re economically and militarily strong. And we’re going to make it clear that we’re not going to be in that place again. We’re not going to be humiliated like that and diminished like that again.
- ezra klein
Let me do one more of these. This is from Putin’s book, “First Person.” It’s a book of self-presentation, I think it’s fair to say. And he says there something that struck me as relevant, which is, quote, “I think that there are always a lot of mistakes made in war. That’s inevitable. But when you are fighting, if you keep thinking that everybody around you is making mistakes, you’ll never win. You have to take a pragmatic attitude and you have to keep thinking of victory.”
You’ve talked a bit before about the pains Putin goes to in this early book, in this early self-presentation, to explain what kind of fighter he is, what his relationship towards fighting is, and how he acts within fights. How do you read that quote and the sort of broader self-conception he has of himself in these moments?
- masha gessen
That’s so interesting. I don’t remember that phrase. So this book was written in January, February 2000 during the second war that Russia waged in Chechnya. That’s clearly his main preoccupation at the time when he’s talking about war and his main reference point. And this, you know, is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last week and a half as Russia has become bogged down in Ukraine, and it’s made me very scared of what comes next.
Because what happened when Russia started a war in one of its own breakaway provinces in Chechnya was eerily similar to what is happening in Ukraine. Yeltsin at the time was promised — in 1994 — he was promised a quick two-hour quick war where they would overthrow the elected government of Chechnya, install a puppet Moscow government, would be welcomed with open arms, and solve the whole Chechen separatists crisis.
It turned out that their coup design failed miserably. And then their attempts to take Grozny with tanks and infantry failed miserably. And then they bombed the life out of Grozny. They carpet bombed Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya. And still they were confronted with popular resistance and guerrilla warfare for months and months and months until, in 1996, they finally settled on basically a cease fire that lasted for about four years until Putin came around and said, no, we have to finish the job.
And finishing the job was basically a scorched Earth approach to both Chechnya and Russian politics, right? There was not going to be any opposition tolerated to the war. And there was not going to be any independent media coverage tolerated of the war.
And what we’ve seen over the last week and a half in Ukraine is they planned a coup. The coup clearly failed miserably. Their first attempts to get paratroopers into the country to just have some kind of quick military operation and their designs on the Ukrainian public greeting them with open arms all turned out to be completely deluded and fantastical. And so then they tried to take half the country at least with tanks and infantry. Also doesn’t go so well. And I think we know what comes next.
- ezra klein
I think then, before we do books, I want to end on something you said that relates to what comes next. This was in a recent interview you gave. And you said, quote, “Putin has staked his entire political future on this war. There’s no way for him to exit it, to find a non-triumphant solution and retain power, and I don’t think there’s a way for him to survive not retaining power — to humanly physically survive not retaining power. He is really cornered. And that’s a terrifying situation for the world, not just for Ukraine.”
Rather than exactly having you expand on that, I want to ask what your — to the extent there is such a thing as an optimistic scenario here — and that requires a time machine, so optimistic may be the wrong word. But what is the least worst outcome you think realistic right now?
- masha gessen
You know, Ezra, I don’t actually know. I mean, least worst in the short-term is still pretty awful. But it’s pretty clear he takes Ukraine up to say Kyiv. He imprisons or more likely kills Volodymyr Zelensky. The West sort of negotiates a cessation of the war in exchange for letting him take most of Ukraine. And then the optimistic part — I mean, that’s the best case scenario in the short-term because at least the killing stops — and then the optimistic part is he dies soon after. Because if he doesn’t, it happens again and again and again.
- ezra klein
And you mean here in places like Moldova?
- masha gessen
Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, Poland — they’re all on notice.
- ezra klein
Well, that’s a chilling answer.
- masha gessen
That’s the best case scenario. In the worst case — I mean, the worst likely case I think is we’re talking about a tactical nuclear weapon aimed at military airports in Poland.
- ezra klein
So there is, for you, no climb down here for him. There’s no version where he takes a face-saving compromise as opposed to an actual territorial victory that is a real enough victory that he understands it to be a victory that he can build on in the future?
- masha gessen
I haven’t conjured one. If someone else does, I will clutch onto it for dear life, because what I’m looking at is absolutely terrifying.
- ezra klein
I’ll leave it there then. Always our final question — what are three books in this moment that you think people should read?
- masha gessen
So I was actually thinking of three of the best books about Ukraine. Well, actually one is about the breakup of the Soviet Union, which I think is very accessible and very useful to read right now. It’s Serhii Plokhy. He is a Ukrainian historian at Harvard. “The Last Empire.”
It’s a fairly short history of the dissolution of the Soviet Union from a post-colonial perspective. There are different ways to think about what broke the Soviet Union apart. But this takes, as a starting point, the idea that this was a century when empires collapsed and this was the last one to collapse.
I would also recommend Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival,” which is a book about Chernobyl. There was a small explosion of — explosion is a bad word — but there was a few books that came out about Chernobyl a couple of years ago. And this is my favorite because it’s a history from below.
Kate Brown talks to a number of people, many of them women, which is something that other historians of Chernobyl didn’t do. They very much looked at it as a history from the top. And I think it’s an extraordinary book about not just what happened in Chernobyl but about how a totalitarian society worked.
And there’s an amazing book called “Babi Yar” by Anatoly Kuznetsov, who was a little boy in Kyiv in 1941 when the massacre at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews and later tens of thousands of people of other ethnicities were murdered by the Nazis. So it’s a kind of meta-read where you learn about Babi Yar, but you also learn the bizarre ways in which Soviet censorship and Soviet repression of history worked.
- ezra klein
Masha Gessen, thank you very much.
- masha gessen
Thank you, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]
- ezra klein
“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Rogé Karma, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. This episode was fact-checked by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Joanna Szostek.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Putin is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World.
The Russian American journalist on how Putin’s war in Ukraine is playing out inside Russia’s highly controlled media environment.
transcript
Putin is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World.
The Russian American journalist on how Putin’s war in Ukraine is playing out inside Russia’s highly controlled media environment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- ezra klein
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I’m recording this on Thursday, March 10 — this intro. And as of today, the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It’s a special military operation.
And under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He’s wiping out independent news operations. He’s tightening access to social media. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.
But if you don’t know you’re at war, then how do you understand war’s consequences? What do Russians know of the sanctions that are beginning to destroy their economy and change their lives? How are they being understood? And importantly, how are they being narrativized? And then this separate, but related question — what is it exactly that Putin is telling Russians? If you were to listen to him, to trust and believe him, what would you believe is happening in Ukraine?
Masha Gessen covers Russia for The New Yorker and has been doing remarkable reporting from Ukraine and Russia alike. And Gessen has paid particular attention to what Russians are seeing and not seeing. This is an interest that goes way back in their work. They wrote a biography of Vladimir Putin’s rise, “The Man Without a Face,” and then the National Book Award-winning, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which I cannot recommend more highly.
It’s both a remarkable book, but it’s remarkably relevant now because a core question of that book — and that is a book partially about Putin — a core question of that book is how authoritarian regimes shape not just what a public knows, not just what a public believes, but how they think — the tools and information and raw material they have to order and understand their world. And that question is so horribly relevant right now. And it makes Gessen’s perspective particularly essential right now. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Masha Gessen, welcome to the show.
- masha gessen
Thank you.
- ezra klein
So you’ve been in Moscow in recent weeks. Paint the picture for me. What was it like to be there during the early days of the invasion?
- masha gessen
So I flew to Moscow actually on Thursday the 24th. I got there on Friday the 25th. So it was a bit more than 24 hours into the invasion when I got there. And every time I speak about what it felt like in Moscow for the week that I was there, I think I probably have to make a distinction between what you can see and feel and observe, even as a very informed observer, in the streets, and what you can see and hear and talk about in people’s houses in private.
It almost got to sort of a Soviet-level difference in that way, which is something I remember from my childhood, but I hadn’t experienced in the many, many years that I lived there or that I have visited since I left, right, where there are two entirely parallel realities. And this to me was the most striking example was actually the last night that was in Moscow, which was last Wednesday night — so it was just less than a week into the invasion.
And I was coming back to my hotel in Pushkin Square. And I should say, I actually chose to stay at a hotel in Pushkin Square because Pushkin Square is the central square in Moscow that is the traditional site of protests going back to Soviet times. It’s also the traditional site of all sorts of rendezvous. And so I wanted to make sure that out of my hotel window I could see if there were mass arrests or large protests that I could observe from the window.
But this time I was coming back to the hotel and I saw almost out of the corner of my eye three policemen in full combat gear dragging a young woman into a police bus. And then behind them another three policemen dragging another young woman. And then everything else was going on as normal, right.
And imagine in the street in New York, or anywhere else, that when you see three cops dragging somebody down the sidewalk, the first thing you would actually notice would be the onlookers. You’d rarely actually see the event itself. You’d see people observing the event. But nobody was noticing. Most of the people on the street were in one reality where they were going about their regular business.
This was happening right in front of a giant three or four-story H&M store, which that night H&M, like many other retailers, announced that they were pulling out of Russia. The next day the store closed. But at that point, it was still illuminated. It still had the sort of — all the gloss of the consumerist Moscow of the last 20 years. And most of the people seemed to exist in that. And just these two young women and an entire army of cops that were posted all around the square existed in this other reality where there was a war and people protesting the war.
So on the one hand, on the surface, it felt like nothing had happened and nothing was happening. And on the other hand, every time I would go to somebody’s house, there was like this incredibly speeded up sense of something horrible has happened. Maybe we should consider leaving the country. We’re leaving the country tomorrow. And by the end of my week-long stay there, it was like this 36-hour leaving party where every house I went to it was people with a stack of passports, with their passport on top of the stack, saying goodbye to their friends.
- ezra klein
I assume that reflects, at least in part, that the people you know and see there. And it makes me wonder how bifurcated both response and the understanding of what’s happening is. I mean, if you’re an average Russian news consumer right now, what do you probably know about the war?
- masha gessen
Well, if you’re an average Russian news consumer — although I don’t know that it’s right to call an average Russian a news consumer. We already start getting into this tricky language territory.
- ezra klein
It’s a very good point.
- masha gessen
But if you’re an average Russian —
- ezra klein
A T.V. watcher.
- masha gessen
A T.V. watcher, yeah. Or somebody who has the T.V. in the background all the time. So if you’re one of those people, then you don’t actually think there’s a war going on. And you don’t think there’s a war going on for two very specific but distinct reasons. One is that the government has decreed that there is no war. It is, in fact, a crime now, as of last Friday punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to call the war a war, or an invasion, or aggression.
So there is on television you hear that there is a special operation, there’s a peacekeeping operation, that there’s an operation to stop the hostilities. They use various turns of phrase, but basically the official name for it is the “Special Military Operation.” And you get the impression that it is led by these so-called separatist troops from Eastern Ukraine and supported to some unknown measure by the Russian military.
But I think that’s not even the most important reason that you don’t think much of anything is going on. The most important reason is that the actual tenor and flow of news hasn’t changed. So this newscast in which you learn about the special operation, or whatever it is they’re doing at the moment, lasts five minutes, right. It’s the regular news at the top of the hour.
It’s not — when I was flying to Moscow, that 20 hours that I spent because my flight was late and I was stuck in Paris for a while — 20 hours that I spent in airport terminals against those giant displays, you could tell, without even listening, without being able to hear what was being said, that something huge was happening in the world. You could tell that the flow of news had changed. You could tell that the picture had changed completely.
And it’s the opposite in Russia. The picture hasn’t changed. The tenor hasn’t changed. The timing hasn’t changed. And so the overall message is nothing much is going on, nothing huge is happening. And of course, you see the results of that in the street as well. On the Monday when the currency collapsed, there were some places there were some lines on banks, but other places there weren’t. There were no observable bank runs. People weren’t rushing to stores to buy durable goods.
One really interesting thing was a couple of days later, I was trying to buy some SSD drives. And I went to a whole bunch of electronic stores one after another. And they were all completely empty. And these huge chain stores that sell household appliances, washing machines, ranges, hair dryers, air conditioners, and computers, and computer accessories — so the stores were pretty much empty, but they were also out of SSD drives.
So a very small portion of the population that was thinking, oh, we’re about to lose our access to cloud storage, our access to the larger world, we have to back everything up. But the larger population, the majority of people weren’t thinking the ruble is worth two-thirds of what it was worth yesterday and I should go out and buy a washing machine. So none of that stuff that happens in a normally communicating society when there is a currency crash, none of that was happening. It was another kind of bifurcated reaction.
- ezra klein
That gets to something that I’ve really been wondering which is how much the average hides here. So I had asked you what an average Russian television watcher knows. But what does somebody who wants to know know? What does somebody who has a sense, saw on social media this is going on, saw a Russian tennis star or actor put up an anti-war message, what are they able to find out if they go looking?
- masha gessen
Well, that’s changing really fast. So on Friday, one week and one day after the invasion, Russia basically blocked every single remaining independent media outlet. And by blocked, I mean blocked web access to it. And two of them — at least two of them — were also just forced to stop operating altogether. And they were the two main sources of information for people who aren’t using — who aren’t relying on official state media. And that’s the Echo Moscow radio station, NTV Rain, the independent web-based television channel. And Russia also blocked Facebook.
Now, that hugely reduces the amount of information readily available to people. The effect is a little bit delayed, because people in Russia are still able to use VPNs. But with Visa and Mastercard pulling out of Russia, a lot of people who rely on Western-paid VPNs are not going to be able to make payments anymore. So they’re going to lose access over the course of the next few weeks. But now we’re talking about vanishingly smaller numbers of people. People who really want to look for information, they still have access to Telegram where —
- ezra klein
Telegram being the messaging service not literal telegrams.
- masha gessen
Right, right. Thank you. Yeah, Telegram — it’s a little bit different than a messaging service. It’s a weird little platform, or weird big platform, that’s very big in this part of the world that is used for messaging but it also has publicly-available channels. So you can subscribe basically to a news-stream.
And a lot of independent, and not so independent, news media in — Russian news media, Belarusian news media maintain these Telegram channels. So people who want to are watching these Telegram channels and they’re seeing footage and photographs from Ukraine. They’re getting more or less the same information that they would be getting from reading The New York Times. But that’s a very small number of people.
- ezra klein
One thing I really appreciate about the way you lay all this out is it is disorienting even to listen to you talk about it. I can’t imagine the disorientation of living in it. But something that occurs to me is an inversion of the experience that many of us are having in, let’s say, the United States, which is you mentioned the flow of news. And I think it’s a really important distinction. There’s what the news says and then there’s how much news there is, the volume of it, the loudness of it, the size of the type on The New York Times home-page. My podcast, which typically does all kinds of things, it’s now it’s only Russia-Ukraine episodes. But for most people in the West, with the exception of a modest rise in gas prices, they’re not experiencing any difference in their day-to-day lives.
But what you describe, it has this reversed quality, which is this normalcy in the news environment. But as much as maybe there aren’t bank runs, I mean you already talked about big chain stores closing, Visa and Mastercard, which are pretty important payment mechanisms, pulling out of the country. A lot of players are pulling out of the country. The ruble is losing a lot of value. The number of sanctions are going to make it hard to get certain kinds of goods that aren’t produced directly in Russia or require parts that don’t directly come from China.
Does it not feel to people like there’s some difference between the world around them changing somewhat eerily? It almost sounds like the beginning of a zombie movie where everybody is acting normally, but on the sides you begin to see weird things on the headlines and all of a sudden people are just walking in circles.
- masha gessen
I wish I had watched a single zombie movie —
— because I’ve actually been wishing that for the last few days, because I realized that this is an important point of reference. I mean, a small minority of people have a sense of absolute total catastrophe. When I was — I think I used — ill-advisedly used the word party earlier when I said leaving party. But I mean, these are people saying goodbye to their entire lives, to their apartments, to everyone and everything they’ve ever known. Packing their belongings, what they can pack into a suitcase or two in the course of often hours, not even days. But again, that’s a small minority.
And then the majority of the population taking things in stride or pushing them out of their minds. And the question is, what are the mechanisms that they’re using to push them out of their minds? And I think the mechanisms have to do with adaptations that people have developed over the last 30 years. Things have changed drastically a lot in Russia.
And even things like having access to international payment mechanisms, losing access, having access to consumer goods, and then suddenly facing hyperinflation, not being able to afford them, and then being able to afford them again. People have gotten accustomed to a series of financial crashes and periods of hyperinflation and even periods of scarcity. And I think people have no idea about the scale of the catastrophe that they’re facing. That is something that is much easier to see from the outside or if you’re one of those Russians who are reading the Telegram channels.
Then you realize this is not just your local H&M store closing. It is not just IKEA shutting down. It is not just a break in MasterCard and Visa being serviced, which happened in Russia in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea. For a while, there were shortages of some imported goods and for a while there was trouble accessing international payment mechanisms. And then it kind of sort of all leveled out and even got better than it had been before. And I think that’s people’s general expectation. They have a much higher tolerance for things changing suddenly, but also have an expectation of a return to a particular level of comfort.
But of course, what makes that possible is the lack of any kind of circulation of information in society. Right? You can’t get a bigger picture than your own slice of experience unless you’re reading the independent media or Western media. You don’t know just how overwhelming these sanctions are. If you tune into the television, what you’re actually hearing is a kind of reassuring buzz. They mention Western sanctions. But then they say, but we’re still going to have South Korean electronics. Not anymore, actually. South Korea is also joining the sanctions.
So all you have is your private experience and maybe the private experience of a couple of people that you’re communicating with. But you don’t have the experience of a public sphere. And if you want to believe that things will probably get back to normal, it’s easier to believe that and you do want to believe that. But also, you have no way of understanding the scale of catastrophe, right? And for example, you are not thinking about all the trains, and planes, and cars that are going to stop running in a few months because there will be no spare parts. You just don’t have a way of knowing that.
- ezra klein
One of the things this implies is that you could see sanctions playing out in really divergent ways. So I think in the implicit model of how sanctions work in the minds of many policymakers, or at least let’s say in the minds of people commenting on them that I hear, is that sanctions put pressure on elites around Putin and also on the citizenry of Russia to want this to change, to try to push Putin to change what he is doing. But one version of this is that this is simply treated as some kind of roughly normal economic calamity but things will be back soon. And that there’s a push from state-influenced media to understand this is normal.
The other that I’ve wondered about is the degree to which as sanctions get worse, the narrative of the state will be that there is an offensive attack from the United States, from Europe on Russia. That Russia is under a kind of assault. And that if the narrative around that can be sufficiently controlled, that far from creating friction around Putin’s regime, it will create a rallying around the flag effect, a sense that Russia is being almost economically invaded and, you know, that there needs to be unity in the face of it. I’m curious if you find one of those more persuasive than the other.
- masha gessen
Well, I mean, you’re absolutely right. The state narrative is already that — and, in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea — the narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it’s always us against the world. It’s always as against the West. And the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia.
But I also think that if we now switch perspectives and think about sanctions from Western perspective, or particularly the U.S, perspective, the way that the narrative of sanctions works is it matches the working definition of insanity. Sanctions is the thing that never works, that the United States and other Western countries try over and over again expecting a different outcome. At least that’s true in relationship to Russia. Right?
The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin’s behavior, or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It’s been tried over and over and it doesn’t work. Now, obviously we’ve never seen sanctions on this scale and it is mind-boggling.
And part of me thinks, well, maybe the change in quantity becomes a qualitative change when life as people have known it in Russia is completely destroyed over the course of a few months. Realistically, the full impact of sanctions will be seen in a few months. But I still don’t think that they can produce a revolt in the elites and even less than they can produce mass protests, especially in the face of a matching crackdown.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- ezra klein
This is a hard question to answer probably. But something that I think a lot of this revolves around is the question of in extremists, how much power does Putin have over what Russians believe? And what I mean by this is that over time, the contradictions here between different narratives become deeper. One of the things the sanctions are trying to do — and I agree with you, by the way, that sanctions do not have a awe-inspiring history of efficacy — but one thing they’re trying to do is create a situation where over time normalcy is impossible to maintain.
And you, in your really remarkable book — people should pick it up — from a couple of years ago— “The Future Is History” — you talk about how the Soviet Union at its core had these deep contradictions that people had to believe simultaneously, and that as the contradictions widened, one of the explanations for the regime’s instability and ultimate collapse is they became unstable. And it seems to me that the theory here is that you’re going to make the contradictions of what Putin is doing unstable. That, on the one hand, he’s promising normalcy. He’s promising a stronger Russia. And on the other hand, what does success at this point look like for him in a realistic way? Military success is an occupation of a Ukraine that does not want to be occupied and is likely fighting back continuously and complete economic strangulation from the West.
And the question I think that raises is, you can maybe survive that if you can really convince people — your own people — that you’re in the right. But it’s very hard to survive if you can’t. So how much do you think the willingness to believe media in Russia comes from a sense that Putin normally has things under control? And if that sense begins to falter, then that will change? Or how much does he really have the faith of the public? And between that and his control over the information channels that will be enough over a long-term, too?
- masha gessen
Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words about the book. I mean, part of what I tried to think through in “The Future Is History” is the impossibility of knowing what people think in a totalitarian society. And like the actual impossibility of it, because it’s not that you can’t find out what people really think. It’s that people can’t really think. And so you can’t find out what they can really think.
And so there can be sudden and truly unpredictable shifts in what passes for public opinion in a society in which there’s no public and no possibility of opinion, which is kind of what happened at the end of the Soviet Union. And it could happen again. The Putin regime and the Soviet regime before him rested on a perceived legitimacy.
And there’s actually a piece I wrote for The New Yorker a little while ago where I talked to this wonderful contemporary Russian sociologist and philosopher, Grigory Yudin, who talks about the way that people are forced to manufacture signs of this legitimacy. Like, for example, this enormous bureaucratic apparatus is mobilized to herd people to the polls to vote for Putin so that then Putin can laud the results of that vote over the bureaucratic apparatus that has just been forced to manufacture this evidence of legitimacy that supports Putin. The reason that a totalitarian regime needs a perceived legitimacy is because it’s the only thing that stands between it and losing control of its armed forces.
Now, Putin has put some other precautions in place. He’s a true paranoid dictator. I mean, the worse people live, the more, up to a certain point perhaps or perhaps indefinitely — and we don’t know whether it’s up to a certain point or indefinitely — the more people want to hang on to the illusion of stability. And this is something that Hannah Arendt wrote about — that totalitarian regimes hold out the carrot of stability while constantly manufacturing instability.
And so when you’re always on the edge of a precipice and your one true leader keeps telling you the only reason that you haven’t fallen over the edge is because of me, then you are in some way simultaneously believing that the leader has led you to the edge of the precipice and that the leader is keeping you from falling into the precipice. But you have to hold on to both beliefs for dear life or else the precipice opens up and swallows you.
- ezra klein
I want to hold on a point you made before that this kind of regime makes it hard simply to think. It’s something you talk about quite a bit in your analysis of the Soviet Union in “The Future Is History.” And you talk about how the tools of self-understanding were withheld, everything from sociology to Freudian psychoanalysis. All of the different sciences that we use to create different lenses on our own society — to say nothing of the empirical information that feeds into them — not Freudian analysis, but others — were withheld.
But something you were just making me think about there in the way things changed is that for all of the internal horrors, and killings, and jockeying, a lot of what changed came as regimes changed, as somebody new took power and they had different views than the person before. And, you know, from everything you’re saying and from everything I have read, I don’t think the hope of Putin being toppled is a very realistic one.
And so in a regime like this where you have withheld a lot of the substance that allows reasoning and societal planning away from people, and you have a dictator in control of this apparatus, are we really simply in a situation where what simply matters at the end of the day is what one man believes Russia should do? I mean, is it really that vertical in the power structure?
- masha gessen
That’s a simple question and it has a simple answer. Yes. And we’ve never seen that more clearly than in the last couple of weeks. What has emerged is not only that Putin is unilaterally making decisions but that those decisions are based — you know, those enormous decisions, the decision to wage a war, are based on a series of conjectures and fantasies that he seems to have created out of whole cloth.
I think it’s a combination of two things. One is actual physical and mental isolation, which apparently has been exacerbated by Covid. He had an extremely tiny circle of interlocutors before the pandemic. And he has apparently cut it down to something like zero since the pandemic began. So we’re — I mean, we’re living in a world — a world — not just a country, but a world that is right now being shaped by a man who has been thinking alone, and not very well, but also, most dangerously alone for two years.
- ezra klein
Let’s talk then about the way he sees the world. And I’m trying to think of where to begin this, but I actually want to begin with the question of time. What time period is he mentally and metaphorically grounded in? And by that I mean right now in the U.S., I think the metaphor and the time period governing a lot of thinking is the Cold War. I think a lot of people are reaching back either to a remembered past then or to a studiable past, then. But I don’t get the sense from reading Putin’s speeches that that’s really true for him. I think that it seems that his periods are different. So what time period is he using as his metaphorical and conceptual base?
- masha gessen
That’s a great question. But actually, first, I would say that Russians, in general, I think are much less likely to see the Cold War as a distinct period in history. The Cold War was, perhaps from the Russian point of view, is specific — a particular example of the post-World War II period, which is characterized by the Soviet Union becoming a superpower.
But Putin appears to be placing himself on a continuum of Russian history that he sees as a series of great leaders beginning with Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was not an emperor that Russians particularly revered ever before Vladimir Putin’s reign. But the first monument to Ivan the Terrible went up, I guess, six or seven years ago in Russia. So Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin.
It’s a huge span. It’s a series of great, brutal, expansionist dictators.
He skips right over the great divide of the October Revolution. He doesn’t see the Soviet period as distinct in Russian history. And so he gave a scary and rambling and ridiculous speech on February 21 by way of introducing this new invasion of Ukraine. But as a Putin text, it was quite remarkable because he laid out his vision of the entire Soviet period in more detail than he ever has before.
And what he said was that — without using the word empire — but he said that that whole Soviet way of constituting the empire by nominally giving its constituent parts the rights of statehood and nominally making the union voluntary was a fiction. That, in fact, there is a continuous history from the Russian Empire to the present day and that all the separations from Moscow’s rule that have occurred over the period of the last 100-plus years are illegitimate.
So he places himself in this really, really long period. But he also — I mean, he’s profoundly anti-modern. He’s a president of a European country in 2022 who’s engaging in completely uncritical, unexamined, imperial rhetoric and sort of saying everything that came after is bullshit.
- ezra klein
Yeah, that is exactly what I’m getting at. And I want to talk about that speech in some detail. But what has been striking reading him — listening is the wrong word because I need to read the translations — but there’s been a tendency to call him irrational and unhinged.
And I’m not here to make any judgments on Vladimir Putin’s mental state. But what he seems to me mostly is somebody who has decided to act and think as if it’s 1847 and that his logic works better and is more comprehensible under the rules of imperialism and great power expansion and so on that were taken more or less for granted then. There were things you had to justify and things you didn’t. And it all makes some sense.
And he’s also throwing back to the 19th century, the early 20th century for the legitimacy of what he thinks Russia owns or what he thinks has always been Russian. But that there is something in him right now that has become, I think, confusing to a lot of onlookers because he simply refuses to accept the logic and norms of the international order that at least a lot of other countries believe they need to pretend to be following.
And I think it is a fair thing to say America does not actually follow these rules, this order, but it tries to pretend to. But he doesn’t. He just sort of brushes it aside more or less and has really thrown back to pre-modern logic of how a ruler should act and what is right and reasonable for a ruler to do.
- masha gessen
That’s exactly right. And, you know, I’m glad you actually mentioned this idea that Putin is unhinged and irrational because I don’t think it’s ever particularly useful to call somebody — a world leader or anyone else — irrational. But it’s much more useful to try to figure out in what world they’re rational. Putin is perfectly consistent in his thinking and his behavior. It’s just that the universe he lives in is what he describes quite openly — we just have to listen — and it is the pre-modern, or if you do take into account that it is 2022, the anti-modern, universe of imperial logic.
And he looks at the West — and I think thinks that the West is irrational. He’s as aware — probably more aware than you and I are — of the hypocrisy of the norms proclaimed by the United States. But they seem totally absurd to him because they also don’t make sense, right? So here’s the United States that pretends to hold to ideas and values that make no sense, whereas he, Putin, has ideas and values that are rooted in history and he acts in perfect accordance with them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- ezra klein
Something that you’ve said is that to understand Putin we should listen to what he’s saying. So what I want to do is read you some things he said, both in that February speech and in some before it, and talk about what they may reveal. But before we do, I want to ask you one question, which is, how do you take the truth value to him of the things he says in public?
Because sometimes I read what he’s saying and it reads to me like something he would probably think, and sometimes it reads like I cannot tell if he has a strange invented history meant to rationalize what he wants to do or he’s invented a history as a public relations campaign. Like, how do you understand if Putin believes the things he says in public? What do you think his level of commitment to his own words actually is?
- masha gessen
I mean, it’s never that simple, is it? It’s like I know your kids are little, but when they become teenagers, you’re going to encounter this very interesting interaction that every parent of a teenager has always had, which is your teenager will lie to you and then get terribly upset that you don’t believe them. And then the longer their argument goes on, the more attached they will be to the thing that they lied to you about even though you both know that they were lying. But by the end of the conversation, they will be fully committed to the lie that they know started out as a lie, or they used to know, but maybe they don’t know anymore.
And that’s a way of trivializing these really tragic things that we’re talking about. But I’m just trying to say that there isn’t a simple way to separate what he believes from what he says, because the moment he says it, he believes it more. And, again, if you think of him as somebody who’s been sitting alone for two years, probably watching a fair amount of his own T.V., how can you separate what he actually believes from what he invented and then eventually came to believe because it’s in his feedback loop?
- ezra klein
So let’s talk about some of the things he says he believes. And I want to pull together a couple of statements he makes in his February speech about Ukraine. So he says, quote, “I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” End quote. He says that, quote, “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik communist Russia.” End quote.
But then he says something weird. I mean, these are all weird things to say, but something that I thought was particularly telling. And after having given this long exegesis on the way that he understands Ukraine to have been a political construct by Lenin, he says, quote, “Personally, I can add that no political factors, however impressive or profitable they may seem at any given moment, can or may be used as the fundamental principles of statehood.” What do you take him to mean by that? What is he saying about what makes a state?
- masha gessen
Right. So I mean, I think he’s doing a lot of things in that sentence. But mostly, he is devaluing speech, and devaluing politics, and devaluing legal arrangements. He’s creating a kind of image of a natural, possibly even a mystical, state, right? There’s a thing that is and he knows what that thing is. That thing is some sort of unity of Russians and Ukrainians. And in fact, when he says unity, he means the nonexistence of Ukrainians. It’s just Russians.
And we have piled a lot of things on top of that. We have piled a lot of language. We have created laws. We have drawn borders. We have elected parliaments, and said things about what one country is called and what the other country is called and having bilateral relations, or whatever it is we’ve done. But none of that matters because he knows what is. And what is isn’t any of the things that we have named or drawn or put down on paper.
- ezra klein
There’s a theme throughout the entire speech in which Putin is criticizing the Soviet Union, criticizing the Communist period, keeps occasionally trying to say I understand things were complicated but certainly rooting the divisions he is trying to rectify through force now and decisions made by Soviet leaders. But then he says this — and he’s aiming this at the government in Ukraine.
He says, quote, “You want de-communization? Very well. This suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real de-communization would mean for Ukraine.” And on some level, that is simply framed as a threat of invasion, which he, of course, follows through on. But what does he mean by de-communization here?
- masha gessen
Let me just preface this with something that I was just thinking as you were asking this question that I think we should be aware as we talk through interpreting his speech, which is one of my favorite, if depressing activities. One of the reasons that it’s so rewarding to listen to what Putin says is that he’s not a terribly knowledgeable man.
So when he gave that speech, it was very informative because I thought, oh, he has gone and studied these couple of things. He doesn’t know a lot of the context. He doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of history even though he fancies himself a historian these days.
But we learn a lot from the little that he says because he kind of says everything that he knows. And he delivers his idée fix. And he gives a very clear reflection of what he is thinking about, what he’s obsessed with, and what he is going to be obsessed with for the foreseeable future, and what is going to be the motivating force behind his actions.
So clearly he has been thinking a lot about the difference between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. And he has decided that the Russian Empire was the legitimate entity in the Soviet Union was fake. And when he said that Lenin created Ukraine, what he is saying is that, you know, Russian Empire was a unitary power.
It’s not exactly true. There were actually significant exceptions to that sort of utilitarianism, like, for example, Finland, which, as part of the Russian Empire, had its own currency. It had its own parliament. But he may not know this. He thinks it was a single state with a single ruler and no meaningful borders.
And then Lenin comes along, takes this empire, chops it up into a bunch of pieces and says each of these is a state. Kind of like — and I think Putin is thinking this — kind of like the European Union is now. That’s a whole bunch of different countries that are in a voluntary union. The treaties on which the European Union is based are not dissimilar in substance from the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which gave each of its 15 constituent republics full rights of statehood.
And so he says all of that was completely false. It was a violence done to a country that existed. And so we illegitimize that. We go back to the empire. But when he’s saying, do you want de-communization, he’s also referring to something that Russia perceived as deeply offensive and even traitorous in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014, which is what in Ukrainian and Russian was called “Leninopad,” which translates as, I guess, the falling of the Lenins.
Ukrainians all over the country dismantled the Lenin monuments. To Ukrainians, this meant a break with the Moscow hegemony. To them, Lenin monuments in every central square, in every big city and small town, were a symbol of the Empire.
And so now Putin comes and says, OK, you dismantled the Lenin monuments to symbolize you break with the Empire. But hey, the only claim you ever had to statehood was thanks to Lenin who created this whole framework of Ukrainian statehood that I have now decreed is false. So if you dismantle the monument of the one guy in power in Russia who ever recognized your statehood, well, great, you don’t get to have any statehood.
- ezra klein
Let me do two more here. The back half of the speech is very much about Russia’s relationship with the US, with Europe, with NATO. There is a long list of grievances offered of a narrative of an endlessly reasonable Russia making endlessly reasonable offers being rebuffed, ignored, dismissed, humiliated, talked down to.
At some point, Putin says, in asking why Russia keeps being treated as an enemy as opposed to a friend or an ally, quote, “There can be only one answer. This is not about our political regime or anything like that. They just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around. This is the answer to all questions. This is the source of America’s traditional policy towards Russia. Hence, the attitude to all our security proposals.”
Is this how Putin sees America and the West, that we operate out of a constant and ongoing fear of Russian strength?
- masha gessen
I don’t actually think that particular sentence says that the United States operates out of ongoing fear of Russian strength. I think it says that the United States continues to insist on denying Russian strength and trying to humiliate Russia and diminish it.
And there’s a specific reference point to this feeling and this narrative, which Putin has mentioned in other speeches, but which also is an integral part of the sort of distilled propaganda that’s going into, for example, into schools or is being distributed to bloggers and TikTokers that government agents are hiring to spread propaganda to the non-T.V. watching public, which is the 1999 air war in Kosovo, which to Putin is kind of the focal point of Russian humiliation.
Now, what happened in 1999 was that the United States decided to intervene militarily in Kosovo where there was a pattern of sustained ethnic violence perpetrated by Serbian police and military against ethnic Albanians. Kosovo was an ethnically Albanian province of Serbia that had strong linguistic and cultural ties to neighboring Albania and really wanted to secede from Serbia and join greater Albania. I’m going into some detail because Putin has gone to a lot of trouble to create a perfect symmetry with Ukraine.
In 1999, the United States decided to lead an air war over Kosovo without seeking the agreement of the U.N. Security Council and without consultation with Russia, or worse, explicitly rejecting the possibility that it would consult with Russia on a thing like this. Russia has only an imaginary connection to Serbia because Serbia is also an Eastern Orthodox country. There weren’t particularly strong economic or cultural ties.
But it was an incredible experience of humiliation and powerlessness for Russian leadership and I think for a lot of ordinary Russians. That idea that we wouldn’t even be consulted. That they wouldn’t even pretend to listen to us. The then Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was actually on his way to Washington for talks with Al Gore about the Russian debt when he found out that the United States was refusing to even discuss the planned bombing campaign with Russia. And so he turned his plane around, returned to Moscow, and that was kind of a breaking point in Russian politics.
And so Putin is referring to that. He’s saying, look, they don’t take us into account. They wrote us off way back then in 1999. We have now come back. We’re economically and militarily strong. And we’re going to make it clear that we’re not going to be in that place again. We’re not going to be humiliated like that and diminished like that again.
- ezra klein
Let me do one more of these. This is from Putin’s book, “First Person.” It’s a book of self-presentation, I think it’s fair to say. And he says there something that struck me as relevant, which is, quote, “I think that there are always a lot of mistakes made in war. That’s inevitable. But when you are fighting, if you keep thinking that everybody around you is making mistakes, you’ll never win. You have to take a pragmatic attitude and you have to keep thinking of victory.”
You’ve talked a bit before about the pains Putin goes to in this early book, in this early self-presentation, to explain what kind of fighter he is, what his relationship towards fighting is, and how he acts within fights. How do you read that quote and the sort of broader self-conception he has of himself in these moments?
- masha gessen
That’s so interesting. I don’t remember that phrase. So this book was written in January, February 2000 during the second war that Russia waged in Chechnya. That’s clearly his main preoccupation at the time when he’s talking about war and his main reference point. And this, you know, is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last week and a half as Russia has become bogged down in Ukraine, and it’s made me very scared of what comes next.
Because what happened when Russia started a war in one of its own breakaway provinces in Chechnya was eerily similar to what is happening in Ukraine. Yeltsin at the time was promised — in 1994 — he was promised a quick two-hour quick war where they would overthrow the elected government of Chechnya, install a puppet Moscow government, would be welcomed with open arms, and solve the whole Chechen separatists crisis.
It turned out that their coup design failed miserably. And then their attempts to take Grozny with tanks and infantry failed miserably. And then they bombed the life out of Grozny. They carpet bombed Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya. And still they were confronted with popular resistance and guerrilla warfare for months and months and months until, in 1996, they finally settled on basically a cease fire that lasted for about four years until Putin came around and said, no, we have to finish the job.
And finishing the job was basically a scorched Earth approach to both Chechnya and Russian politics, right? There was not going to be any opposition tolerated to the war. And there was not going to be any independent media coverage tolerated of the war.
And what we’ve seen over the last week and a half in Ukraine is they planned a coup. The coup clearly failed miserably. Their first attempts to get paratroopers into the country to just have some kind of quick military operation and their designs on the Ukrainian public greeting them with open arms all turned out to be completely deluded and fantastical. And so then they tried to take half the country at least with tanks and infantry. Also doesn’t go so well. And I think we know what comes next.
- ezra klein
I think then, before we do books, I want to end on something you said that relates to what comes next. This was in a recent interview you gave. And you said, quote, “Putin has staked his entire political future on this war. There’s no way for him to exit it, to find a non-triumphant solution and retain power, and I don’t think there’s a way for him to survive not retaining power — to humanly physically survive not retaining power. He is really cornered. And that’s a terrifying situation for the world, not just for Ukraine.”
Rather than exactly having you expand on that, I want to ask what your — to the extent there is such a thing as an optimistic scenario here — and that requires a time machine, so optimistic may be the wrong word. But what is the least worst outcome you think realistic right now?
- masha gessen
You know, Ezra, I don’t actually know. I mean, least worst in the short-term is still pretty awful. But it’s pretty clear he takes Ukraine up to say Kyiv. He imprisons or more likely kills Volodymyr Zelensky. The West sort of negotiates a cessation of the war in exchange for letting him take most of Ukraine. And then the optimistic part — I mean, that’s the best case scenario in the short-term because at least the killing stops — and then the optimistic part is he dies soon after. Because if he doesn’t, it happens again and again and again.
- ezra klein
And you mean here in places like Moldova?
- masha gessen
Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, Poland — they’re all on notice.
- ezra klein
Well, that’s a chilling answer.
- masha gessen
That’s the best case scenario. In the worst case — I mean, the worst likely case I think is we’re talking about a tactical nuclear weapon aimed at military airports in Poland.
- ezra klein
So there is, for you, no climb down here for him. There’s no version where he takes a face-saving compromise as opposed to an actual territorial victory that is a real enough victory that he understands it to be a victory that he can build on in the future?
- masha gessen
I haven’t conjured one. If someone else does, I will clutch onto it for dear life, because what I’m looking at is absolutely terrifying.
- ezra klein
I’ll leave it there then. Always our final question — what are three books in this moment that you think people should read?
- masha gessen
So I was actually thinking of three of the best books about Ukraine. Well, actually one is about the breakup of the Soviet Union, which I think is very accessible and very useful to read right now. It’s Serhii Plokhy. He is a Ukrainian historian at Harvard. “The Last Empire.”
It’s a fairly short history of the dissolution of the Soviet Union from a post-colonial perspective. There are different ways to think about what broke the Soviet Union apart. But this takes, as a starting point, the idea that this was a century when empires collapsed and this was the last one to collapse.
I would also recommend Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival,” which is a book about Chernobyl. There was a small explosion of — explosion is a bad word — but there was a few books that came out about Chernobyl a couple of years ago. And this is my favorite because it’s a history from below.
Kate Brown talks to a number of people, many of them women, which is something that other historians of Chernobyl didn’t do. They very much looked at it as a history from the top. And I think it’s an extraordinary book about not just what happened in Chernobyl but about how a totalitarian society worked.
And there’s an amazing book called “Babi Yar” by Anatoly Kuznetsov, who was a little boy in Kyiv in 1941 when the massacre at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews and later tens of thousands of people of other ethnicities were murdered by the Nazis. So it’s a kind of meta-read where you learn about Babi Yar, but you also learn the bizarre ways in which Soviet censorship and Soviet repression of history worked.
- ezra klein
Masha Gessen, thank you very much.
- masha gessen
Thank you, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]
- ezra klein
“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Rogé Karma, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. This episode was fact-checked by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Joanna Szostek.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For Western audiences, the past few weeks have been a torrent of information about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. Daily updates of Russian military advances. Horrifying videos of buildings exploding and innocent civilians being killed. Announcements of increasingly severe economic sanctions and major corporate pullouts. Charts showing the collapse of the ruble. Story after story about the hardships facing the Russian economy.
Most Russians, however, are living in an alternate reality. This week, the Russian government made it a crime for journalists to spread what it considers false information about the “special military operation” in Ukraine — information that would include calling the war a war. As a result, many Western news organizations, including The Times, have pulled their employees out of Russia. The Kremlin has made it nearly impossible for people in Russia to access independent or international news sources. Russian state media coverage of the conflict has been, in the words of my guest today, “bland and bloodless.”
[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]
That raises some important questions: What do ordinary Russians know about the war being waged by their government? How are they interpreting the collapse of their currency and impending financial crisis? What are they being told to believe? And is the propaganda machine working?
Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of many books on Russian history, politics and culture, including “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” and the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” And, perhaps most important, Gessen has been on the ground in Russia in recent weeks trying to understand how ordinary Russians are seeing and interpreting the world around them.
This is a conversation that starts in Moscow, as Gessen describes what it was like to be there during the first days of the invasion. We talk about the eerie sense of normalcy in the city as the ruble crashed and the odd sense of calm in Pushkin Square as policemen in combat gear dragged protesters into a police bus. We then take a wider view on how Russians responded to economic sanctions in the past, how totalitarian societies make it impossible for people to form opinions, where Putin sees himself in a lineage of “brutal, expansionist dictators” like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, why Putin governs Russia as if it were a 19th-century empire, what we learn when we listen closely to Putin’s speeches and how this latest act of aggression is likely to play out.
Disclaimer: This episode contains explicit language.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music and mixing by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Joanna Szostek.
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