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Putin Unmasked

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 138

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Andrew Weiss, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reveals how Vladimir Putin rose from mediocre KGB officer to Russian leader through a series of accidents and opportunities rather than strategic brilliance or espionage expertise.

• Putin was a mid-level KGB officer who never achieved high rank before being chosen as Yeltsin's successor precisely because he seemed controllable
• The image of Putin as a master spy was deliberately created as propaganda but has been mistaken for reality by many in the West
• Russia's centralized governance and territorial expansion tendencies predate Putin by centuries
• Putin's relationship with oligarchs transformed them from independent powers to dependent vassals
• After 2014, Russia actively cultivated relationships with fringe political groups across Europe and America
• The 2022 Ukraine invasion backfired by strengthening NATO and Ukrainian resolve
• Putin believes he can outlast Western support for Ukraine by exploiting political divisions
• Understanding Putin as he truly is rather than as he portrays himself is critical for formulating effective policy
• The book uses graphic novel format to make complex Russian history and politics accessible to wider audiences

Visit bookclues.com for more information and commentary on this interview and other book discussions.


Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon, your host. We have something brand new today. We are going to talk to Andrew Weiss, who has written the Accidental Czar the Life and Lives of Vladimir Putin, and it's actually a graphic historical book about the man of the moment unfortunately, vladimir Putin. So I hope you enjoy this, and the book is actually really cute. You hate to say that something's cute about Putin, but how they display the information is phenomenal and it really is worth reading at this time in this point of history.

Michele McAloon:

You want to know more information about me? Go to bookcluescom, and I've just added a new section about where I'm commenting on books that I'm reading. I'm commenting on the interviews that I am making, so hopefully you will join me on my website. If you ever want to get in touch with me, I'm at bookcluescom. Happy listening, keep talking. God bless, okay, folks, we have a book that we have not done before and that is a graphic novel. I have to tell you, this is the first graphic novel I have ever even picked up, but it is a good one, and it is the Accidental Czar the Life and Lives of Vladimir Putin and it's by Andrew Weiss Life and Lives of Vladimir Putin and it's by Andrew Weiss and he actually does the writing and the research, but it's Brian Box Brown who does the cartoons. I love the cartoons, they're very charming, and it is put out by FirstSecondBookscom. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Weiss:

Thanks so much for having me.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, this is exciting because, like I said, this is the first graphic novel I've read. So Mr Weiss is the James Family Chair and Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. He has served in various policy roles at the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, during both Democratic and Republican administrations. His writings have appeared in all the important newspapers in America the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and other publications. He and his wife, Kate Jillian, have two children. Andrew, tell me something. Why would you write this as a graphic novel? Why would you write about a subject like this as a graphic novel?

Andrew Weiss:

a lot of questions or a lot of interest in him over the course of what now is a quarter century right, and there are different ways to reach audiences. I have this great, very privileged existence. I work at a think tank, and so I get to write and sort of hopefully have some of my work end up in the policy or analytical community right In different governments or in the US government or in opinion maker circles. Those are the kind of bread and butter of what working at Think Tank entails. Beyond that, though, I felt that a lot of the work we do at this Think Tank, the Carnegie Endowment, tends to speak to a predetermined audience, like we're sort of talking to ourselves or we're speaking within a fairly narrow segment of society, and so what I was really impressed by about graphic novels in general is that they just reach vastly wider and different segments of our society.

Andrew Weiss:

You can be a career government person and pick this book up and hopefully enjoy it and maybe learn something from it. You can be one of my kids' fifth grade classmates and pick it up and get a lot out of it. So it has a kind of wide appeal as a format, but it's no less serious in its payoff, and so I'm not sure that if someone were to go to the bookstore, they would want to buy the 2,000-page biography of Vladimir Putin, but they can definitely pick this up and come away learning something new about what makes Putin tick, why Russia is Russia and why we're in such a really bad spot dealing with him right now.

Michele McAloon:

Well, absolutely, and I tell you going through the book, it is the presentation, the material is so clear and that really helps. And the cartoons I guess they're called cartoons are really charming. How did you hook up with Brian Box Brown?

Andrew Weiss:

So when I first started talking to the editor at Macmillan, mark Siegel, who's a graphic novel writer himself as well as the leader of this imprint for a second, he showed me a bunch of different types of books written by different people books written by different people, and what was striking is my sensibility. I could never generate the graphic sensibility or the aesthetic idea Like I needed somebody who was really smart to do that. But a lot of graphic novels have very literal, kind of like Dick Tracy style art where the pictures are pretty one dimensional I'm sorry two dimensional because they're on a page but they're predictable. And the editor, mark Siegel, gave me a bunch of different people to look at and see the stylistic spectrum. And Brian Brown, of all the people he showed me, was the most out out there and he has the most sort of unique style and sensibility.

Andrew Weiss:

And for people who haven't looked at the book, there's a lot of this kind of very stark use of color. Each chapter has its own colors. There's a yellow chapter, there's a turquoise chapter, there's a red chapter. But he also has a kind of minimalist style where it leaves the reader trying to kind of fill it in on their own and use their own kind of minimalist style where it leaves the reader trying to kind of fill it in on their own and use their own kind of imagination to kind of get the idea or the image to kind of fuse together.

Andrew Weiss:

And so when Siegel showed me Brian's books, I was like wow, this guy is really different and this guy does something that's very unique. And then when Mark came back to me, the editor, and said Brian wants to do your book. He's never drawn someone else's book, he's only drawn his own books, but he's willing to work with you, I was totally blown away in terms of feeling like I had a partner in this who was going to be totally different, who was going to be 100%, 50-50 with me in terms of giving this book a unique look and feel, but then who was going to be able to push me into directions that I would never go on my own.

Michele McAloon:

You're exactly right. I don't know. You call them graphics or cartoons. They really are. They're very charming and even if you know a little bit about Russian history, they're very, very good. Like I'm looking at the page right now where President Yushchenko, where he was poisoned, and they show how he's and he and Brian has written his, how his face was disfigured. I mean it's very fun, it's. I mean that's not funny, but it's, it's very charming how he did it.

Michele McAloon:

You write something at the very conclusion of this book and I think this is what this book is about. You say make no mistake, the world definitely has a big Russia problem to confront, but seeing Putin as he wants us to see him rather than as he is, only makes that problem worse. That is really interesting. He's not 10 feet tall, he's not three feet tall either. So let's start with his life as a KGB. I mean, this is just a mid-level KGB agent, really a nothing guy. How did this happen? What happened when? How did he get the start in life? I mean, he goes to some backwater in Dresden, right? I mean, he's not a super spook, he's not a super spy. How did that come about?

Andrew Weiss:

You put the finger really on the big motivation for this book, which is that Putin has inhabited a larger-than-life place in the American imagination and people have bought into an image of him as a super James Bond covert operative, someone who's going toe-to-toe with the United States, and that makes him seem like something he's not, which is, you know, he was a mid-level KGB officer who essentially washed out and barely made it to lieutenant colonel. So he was never a high flyer, he was never deep selected for greatness and he was an accidental pick to replace Boris Yeltsin at the end of Boris Yeltsin's tenure as Russia's first president. And he was picked in part by the Yeltsin entourage because they thought he was kind of a nobody and he would be very malleable and they would be able to sort of behind the scenes keep him in check and sort of keep Russia the way that Boris Yeltsin had been running it. In the end Putin sort of amassed a lot more independence and power and outfoxed a lot of those people and they're now no longer influential behind the scenes.

Andrew Weiss:

But at the very beginning, when Putin was being sort of brought out to the Russian public as a replacement for a president who'd been an absentee embarrassment, who'd had an intense drinking problem and who'd been very erratic on the world stage, they deliberately created an image for him and when they were introducing to him, of super spy, of a kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger type, you know movie action hero, it was a big relief to the Russian people that they would have a president who would seem normal and who would be sober and would show up for work. But they also were kind of in on the joke and I think just to get to the crux of what the book was trying to show people is, at some point the joke became the reality or people assumed that there'd never been a joke in the first place about all this cartoonish super spy stuff. And then, as Putin got more audacious, it was easier to say oh, actually, maybe he is super scary, formidable super spy because he's doing all of these incredibly audacious and in some ways outperformed even his own wildest expectations.

Michele McAloon:

Here's where I have a little bit of confusion. He goes from failed KGB officer not failed, but I mean nothing spectacular out of Dresden and then he gets into basically the government scene in St Petersburg. Right, and how did this nothing guy actually come in to know the Yeltsin family?

Andrew Weiss:

So it was a quirk of history. So it was a quirk of history. So there were a group of reformist figures around, the reformist charismatic first mayor of St Petersburg, who was a former law school professor and someone that Putin knew from law school in Leningrad, and the people who were the sort of backbone of the reformist team. Putin had a different role. He was kind of in charge of foreign relations for the city. A lot of those people were plucked out by Yeltsin and given very important jobs in Moscow as part of his brain trust, and so at some point, when the mayor Subchak was run out of town on a series of corruption accusations, putin thought he could end up driving a cab. He thought he was going to end up being a personal trainer at a martial arts studio, and one of these people that he'd worked with in the St Petersburg mayor's office said I think I can get you a job in Moscow, and there's actually footage. It's kind of amazing. You can see Putin going through airport security with his closest aide and longtime colleague, igor Sechin, who's now the CEO of Russia's state-owned oil company, rosneft. You can see them going through security at the airport and they have these kind of low-quality suits on and they're carrying their bags and they're putting them on the security scanner.

Andrew Weiss:

He lucked into a job in the Kremlin property office, which, given the way the Kremlin was the inheritor of the Communist Party, which owned all the juiciest things that Russia possessed when the Bolsheviks took over.

Andrew Weiss:

He became part of the apparatus that monitored the vast holdings of the Russian presidency, which stretched across the entire country, and he sort of was brought in to be kind of like a minder or an inspector general type person, and then from there was promoted into a series of roles. He was briefly the national security advisor. He became the head of the security service, the FSB, that he'd only barely made to the mid-levels of, and it was in that role as director of the FSB that the Yeltsin family used him to validate a series of salacious accusations against their version of the attorney general who was investigating the Yeltsin family for corruption. And so they set him up with some prostitutes, or they created a video with someone who looked like him, and Putin went out on national TV and said that's the guy, that's the attorney general. I tell from this video that he's up to no good, and that really endeared him to the Yeltsin family. And then the last part.

Andrew Weiss:

I know I'm going on at length here, but it gets to the weirdness of Russia is that when that disgraced first boss, the former mayor of St Petersburg, was in the crosshairs of Russian prosecutors, putin, while working in the Kremlin, worked out a way to get him out of the country secretly on a chartered plane and let him fly to Paris. I believe it was in the job of national security advisor. He arranged exfiltration of a person who was under investigation for corruption and allowed that person to escape the country, and again that endeared him to Yeltsin's family as someone who would never sell them out.

Michele McAloon:

Now you, have you ever met Putin? You worked under. It was Ronald Reagan, right, and then Bill Clinton, so Right, no no, so I was in the.

Andrew Weiss:

I'm too young to have worked for Ronald Reagan.

Michele McAloon:

Sorry, yeah, my apologies.

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, no, it's okay.

Andrew Weiss:

I worked in the first Bush administration at the Pentagon and then, by the time I was in my early 30s, I was working at the White House as the Russia person on the NSC staff as director for Russian Ukrainian Eurasian affairs, on the NSC staff, as director for Russian-Ukrainian Eurasian Affairs, and Putin was the counterpart for the part of my tenure there as national security advisor and was someone the United States was working closely with on a handful of very sensitive issues.

Andrew Weiss:

And then from there he was sort of catapulted in short order through a series of senior jobs FSB director, prime minister, and then the president designate and then the actual president, and so I had a ringside view of this guy in his earliest senior level roles and, you know, had a sense that like there was something here that was just kind of weird that he was. He was such a classic KGB officer type person who tells you what he wants to hear, who makes it seem like he knows something about you or knows something about the United States, and it was a very different Vladimir Putin than the one we have today, who's been around a very long time, who's very experienced, who's very cunning and who should feel like he's. He's one of the luckiest men on the planet and I don't think he's wrong about that.

Michele McAloon:

Well, you have a cartoon or you have a. I don't know what. Should I call it a cartoon or a graphic?

Andrew Weiss:

Whatever you want to call it, it's great. I think, brian, you know Brian's a genius, and the more times we can say that, the better.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, all right, very good, okay, well, there's a picture. How about that of Bill Clinton?

Andrew Weiss:

I think it was Bill Clinton hearing that in three weeks that he had been made prime minister and everybody was shocked by this as Russia's leader, that the collective gasp in the White House was the picture that you're referring to in the book, because all of us had seen. You know, boris Yeltsin helped, you know, end the Soviet Union. He'd presided over these huge, weeping changes in Russian society and Russia's foreign policy, and he then went and picked Vladimir Putin to replace him. There was something totally incongruous about that, and my agent had a funny alternative title for this book, which we didn't end up using, which was the spy who came in from middle management, and so I think that sort of captures how a lot of us felt when we were being told that this historic Titanic figure was going to be replaced by someone from middle management. It just didn't make sense.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. One of the things I did not know is that Putin was one of the first people to call. He was the first leader to call after the attacks of 9-11. And from there he kind of starts trying to become chummy with all the leaders of Europe. This is sort of a time when we start thinking we can have. We can have detente I don't know if detente is the word but we can be partners with Russia. Is that correct?

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, it was an interesting choice on Putin's part, but it was not unselfinterested and so Putin's very calculating, he doesn't do things just on the spur of the moment. And in this case Russia had had a violent separatist insurgency that had been dealing with for the previous seven or eight years in Chechnya, which is largely Muslim enclave in this North Caucasus region, and there'd been two wars that had been fought. The second one was still going on when 9-11 happened and the United States had been really critical of Yeltsin's and Putin's handling of the war, the gross human rights violations, and a lot States had been really critical of Yeltsin's and Putin's handling of the war, the gross human rights violations and a lot of this. You know it looks very similar to what we've now witnessed all of us in Ukraine, I mean just the whole disregard for human life and very brutal tactics, and that had really put US-Russia relations into the freezer at the end of Bill Clinton's time in office. And I think there was always a question in Putin's mind of how to get out of that penalty box and I think 9-11 was the ideal way to do that because it made in his mind a couple things possible against Chechen separatism and the US fight against transnational terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, and it could also allow the United States, if Russia, were to provide certain things the United States really wanted. When our foreign policy got totally redirected towards dealing with post-9-11's new transnational terrorism threats, there were things he could extract from us and he could try to kind of sideline some of the pressure he'd been facing for the United States over Russia's behavior in Chechnya. And that's indeed what George W Bush's administration ended up doing. So his desire to make common cause and be seen pousing around with George W Bush had real benefit to Russia. It didn't work out the way Putin wanted in the end, but it certainly kind of bought him a lot of breathing space.

Andrew Weiss:

No-transcript so there's a couple of levels yes and a couple of levels no.

Andrew Weiss:

So on the levels yes, there is deep-seated insecurity about being the leader of a country that doesn't have natural boundaries, that has this intense national memory of being invaded by Napoleon and Hitler and the massive loss of life that Russia has experienced due to these.

Andrew Weiss:

You know, whether it was the Mongol invasion or things that happened in the 20th century or the collapse of the Soviet Union, like all, these were traumatic experiences that I think made Vladimir Putin always suspicious that foreigners are double-dealing him and that if they're unhappy with him they would try to usher him out.

Andrew Weiss:

Part of this was crystallized by a wave of grassroots uprisings across the Balkans and then that spread into the former Soviet Union in the 90s and into the 2000s and the Russian label for those grassroots uprisings was calling them color revolutions and they built a whole view in their minds that this was all orchestrated by the US national security apparatus and that there's a line in the book like there's a dial on the president's desk and he can kind of turn these things up or down at his whim. So I think that was a very real perceived threat and source of insecurity. Perceived threat and source of insecurity that has animated Putin to make some really hugely impactful and bad decisions, like getting involved in Ukraine when the revolution of dignity happened in 2014. He believed it was some US-orchestrated effort to kind of set the scene for his eventual demise. So he has pushed back really hard, thinking that that's how you warrant evil US designs on his ability to stay in power.

Michele McAloon:

He really believes that, then, andrew, it's not just a propaganda machine for him. That I find interesting, yeah.

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah. So in his mind, that stuff was really orchestrated by the United States the downfall of Milosevic in Yugoslavia and Serbia, revolutions that swept various autocrats out of power in countries like Kyrgyzstan and Georgia. The series of revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014. He has this kind of conspiratological view, including the Arab Spring, that this is US-led and US paid for, with Google and the National Endowment for Democracy. All these evil institutions, in his mind, are all mobilized at the behest of the State Department.

Andrew Weiss:

Anyone who's worked at the State Department, like myself, would tell you that that is a very fanciful and exaggerated view of the State Department's capabilities. It's quite a distortion. But and then part of what's interesting about all this is the way that, as I said earlier, putin is very cunning and he instrumentalizes a lot of things. So right now, vladimir Putin is not worried about being thrown out of office. He has no domestic political opponents. He has no elections on the horizon that he has to worry about. The rule of law doesn't matter, but it's useful to portray this big foreign threat as a way of justifying his own authoritarianism, his own brutality, and to kind of tell the Russian people we need to rally around me, because I'm the guy holding up this very fragile and vulnerable state, and if not, for me, russia will be finished. So again, it just creates its own self-sustaining argument for keeping him in power.

Michele McAloon:

Andrew, when you talk about this, there's something, though, I think really needs to be explained and your book actually does explain that and that is the Russia mentality. They are not and I think we continually make mistakes in the West. We try to mirror image Russia, and Russia is not a Western people, they are not people of the West, they're not European people, and you kind of you really demonstrate how they really are. They have a unique heritage of their own and that forms their mentality today. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because because I think that's as key to understanding Putin and Russia today as anything else- yeah, so it's a big country.

Andrew Weiss:

Right, it's 140 odd million people. So a lot of conflicting things can be true at the same time and there can be groups of people who have different visions for Russia over the last couple hundred years. And it's been a player, part of Europe and I think it views itself, you know, in terms of its elites image of itself as part of Europe before the war in Ukraine started and that's a separate story where they feel now like that Europe has rejected them. But the core question which I think a lot of us didn't understand in the 1990s was that this period of great reform and partnership with the United States, that that was aberrational and that there was a lot about it that was sort of our expectations were too high. The ability of Russia to deliver on those expectations was very low. So there's been a lot of disappointment and a lot of, you know, mutual estrangement that unfolded as a result of that period.

Andrew Weiss:

But the thing which I and I sort of found writing in the book that really illuminated a lot to me that's never, I think, front and center in the way we talk about Russia is two things is a very vast territorial entity. The czarist instinct was always to centralize authority as much as possible. And there's a great line in the book from a wonderful Harvard professor, ned Keenan, who talks about the extent of that. Centralization was such that even small real estate transactions in the Arctic Circle would need to be recorded in and approved in Moscow at a time when the journey to Moscow would take an entire year. So that just gives you a sense of how deep that centralizing instinct is.

Andrew Weiss:

This is not something that the commissars in the Soviet era or Vladimir Putin cooked up. This is something that's been embedded in Russian governance and political life for centuries. The other part of this which I think is also really important is the key insight that you see in the work of Stephen Kotkin, who was at Princeton for a long time and who's now at the Hoover Institution in California, which is that the way Russia dealt with its chronic insecurity was to expand and to sort of push the geographical expansion of Russia as the best tool for holding enemies at bay. And there's another quote in the book from Kotkin that says on average, the Russian empire expanded by I believe the number is 50 square miles a day for hundreds of years. So again, it just gives you a sense that these were bigger drivers in Russian political life and geopolitical reality that are not about, like who's in power in Kiev or who's the president of the United States. These are really deeply encoded in their view of themselves and the way to keep themselves safe.

Michele McAloon:

We see it play out, don't we? We see it played out today. Let me ask you what is his relationship and you also brought this up with the oligarchs, the men I think they're mostly men that became fabulously wealthy, basically taking the state's resources and capitalizing on them? What is that relationship? Because that's also, I think, very Russian too, right.

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, I mean again, there's levels of this. One is that you know, in the czarist era the introduction of private property happened, I think, about 200 years after it was introduced in Great Britain. So private property has always been a more iffy concept in Russia, where it's at the discretion of the state to allocate property and influence to people and then to take it away when they're disloyal or there's a change of priorities at the top. So that creates a level of churn and worry in the minds of the Russian elite that has not gone away, and that people around Putin today continue to worry about the fact that they are sitting in charge of something doesn't necessarily mean they'll get to keep it or that they'll be able to pass it on to their kids, even if they're fabulously wealthy or fabulously well-connected.

Andrew Weiss:

There was a group of people who were audacious in the 1990s, who jumped on the carve-up of the Soviet economy and took the juiciest pieces for themselves and became very flamboyant and they called themselves oligarchs and they had a big profile in the outside world as well as in Russia itself. They were very grandiose and self-confident and Putin has kind of systematically chipped away at almost all of those people's independence and their ability to have sway and has turned them much more into vassals than owners. And in the meantime he's also reallocated lots of lucrative parts of the Russian economy toward people he has more confidence in and who go way back with him. There's like nothing better than to have been Putin's buddy when he was sitting in this tiny little KGB outpost in Dresden. Literally the person who was sitting there with him is now the leader of Russia's largest defense industrial conglomerate, rostec Sergei Chemezov. He's not the head of that conglomerate because he's a really smart industrialist. He's there because you know he made his bones with Putin in the late 1980s with the West.

Michele McAloon:

And you know where I'm going with this, with how he was able to kind of propagate this message of Russia to some of the far right extremists and then basically, I mean, become sort of a force in the 2016 election.

Andrew Weiss:

So in 2014, when the war in Ukraine started, russia suddenly found itself being turned into a pariah and the strategy of the Obama administration was to try to remove diplomatic and other forms of business as usual and in the way that people with a lot of money behave. And Russia at that time had a ton of money because it's a very successful petro-state that rakes in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from selling oil and gas on global markets. Vladimir Putin did not like being a pariah. Part of his first wave of efforts as Russia's president when he took over in the early 2000s was trying to be kind of an international joiner and partner of the United States, of European countries, of Asian countries, and to find that door slammed in his face was unpleasant. But so then his people did.

Andrew Weiss:

What people with a lot of money do is they bought friends, and the friends who were most gettable and viable were on the political fringes and the Russians were convening meetings in 2014, on the political fringes and the Russians were convening meetings in 2014, 2015, with a lot of arch-nationalist, populist figures who were largely obscure and far from power in that period, and they put a lot of effort into people on the left. So, if you remember, back then, there was an anti-globalization effort that had been triggered by the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and I'm losing track. I think it would have been 2000 when those meetings happened so, like Russia was spreading its tentacles, of trying to, like, give people free trips, putting people on TV, of just trying to kind of create a sense that Russia is not alone and also that there are these other voices that people in power in countries like the United States or in European capitals are ignoring, and there was a lot of, I think, happy accident to this. I don't think any of this was foreordained, but you had the global financial crisis in 2008, which really created intense anger towards elites in the United States and in Europe, and so we've seen this populist surge that took over. It culminated in Donald Trump's election in 2016,.

Andrew Weiss:

But it's not done right. There's still a very intense set of cleavages in Western societies, and the Russians are no slouches when it comes to studying our vulnerabilities. Like Russians are no slouches when it comes to studying our vulnerabilities. Like they can kind of see things that make American or European politicians squirm and they stick their finger on it. So right now, just to compare it to the current moment. You have a wave of protests in Los Angeles, my hometown, and you have this whole flashpoint of dispute about what the role for the Trump administration should be, or for immigration authorities in California should be. The Kremlin's envoy to the White House is tweeting on his personal account pictures of the protests in California over the weekend. So you know again like the Russians just have nothing better to do with their time than to live online and to kind of create these ideas or narratives that they're connected to these things, even if they have nothing to do with it at all.

Michele McAloon:

They're good at hacking, aren't they? They are very good.

Andrew Weiss:

I mean, they're really good at getting in our heads and I think that, you know, has been something that the communists were really good at and sort of created the sense that communism was, you know, conspiratorial. It was a conspiratorial form of global subversion, but they also made themselves seem bigger and better and smarter than they actually were. That's been true of, you know, the Russian leadership under Putin. It was true under previous Russian and Soviet leaders as well. They tend to kind of plant ideas in our heads and we then have our own ecosystem of media or elites or universities or online vehicles that just kind of transmit that stuff and it takes on a life of its own and it sometimes has a kernel of truth to it, which gives it extra you know valence and helps it embed itself in our, in our societies.

Michele McAloon:

Duncan Village came from them, so of course that's that's interesting One. I just kind of want to go back real quickly on the Russian collective conscious of having some kind of special path right, and one of the things you brought up that is very interesting is that you said Russians are more comfortable defining themselves through negative identity anti-Soviet or anti-US, anti-west, anti. Why is that?

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, no, this is the finding of a wonderful Russian sociologist named Len Glukhov, who ran one of Russia's independent public polling institutions, the Levada Center, for many years. And what he tries to say is that, precisely because it was hard in history to put your finger on what a Russian is because it was an empire, it had all sorts of different nationalities and linguistic groups under its big rubric it was always really hard to define what a Russian is, and in the Soviet period Russian nationalism and Russian national identity were suppressed by the communists. So there was always a kind of like inchoate or unformed identity. And so since the end of communism, since 1991, there's been a lot of effort by Russian leaders to say we need a new idea of what Russia is, we need a national idea and we need a project or a competition to write the national idea. I mean, there've been these big debates going on, but in in Glutkov's analysis he says it's a lot easier to say what we're not.

Andrew Weiss:

You know, we're not like Europe. We don't support multiculturalism, we don't support LGBTQ equality, we don't have desire to meddle in other countries' affairs. I mean it's preposterous, right? Because Russia meddles in European, us and Ukrainian affairs, you know 24-7. But it's easier to rally people in Russia around some of those negative ideas than it is to say you know, mom, apple pie things that the US and other countries have been able to do to identify for their publics what it means to be a German, what it means to be French, what it means to be an American.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting, okay, so where is Putin now? So 2022, the tanks roll into Ukraine and, by all accounts, it has not gone well for Putin. I mean, they're still fighting, they've taken a considerable chunk of land and they're still probably 50-50 how this is going to come out, but where is Putin now? And where is Putin in relation to not only the war, but in relation to his society? And is he more fragile than he has been or is he stronger?

Andrew Weiss:

Putin's work from home, self-isolation in the pandemic, and it almost worked. The audacity of this, the fact that Ukraine didn't have a strong national defense. It was a poorly formulated plot but even nonetheless it still came close to succeeding. But almost immediately we ended up in the worst case outcome for Russia Up till 2022,. There'd been a lot of bad blood, there'd been this war that started in 2014, but the Ukraine problem was largely benign. Ukraine was not super well-governed. It had a very divided society, historically starting in 1991. Historically, starting in 1991.

Andrew Weiss:

So what he's done on so many levels is consolidate Ukraine. He's made it full of intense fear of what Russia's intentions are, due to the unspeakable war crimes and atrocities and mass killing, the genocidal nature of this war, the desire to kind of pretend that Ukraine is not a real country and that it needs to be wiped out, that it's an accident that Ukraine even exists. He's reanimated the NATO alliance, which was also in the greatest of all shape before 2014. And definitely that sort of sense of NATO being a little bit without a clear mission was continuing up to February 2022, when the war started, the full-scale invasion happened. So he's done these things that have made Russia less secure, that have created a real, imminent threat right across the border. Ukraine is not going to forgive and forget. There will be generations of Ukrainians who want revenge for the horrible things that Russia has done on their territory. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Nato's more focused on the Russian threat today than it was 2022 or 2014. So I mean, all these things are horrible own goals in the soccer terminology. But and here's the unpleasant but Vladimir Putin sort of feels he can outweigh us and he feels that we have short attention spans, that our defense industrial base is not mobilizing the kind of resources that it would need to defeat Russia.

Andrew Weiss:

Russia is a very big country, so the idea of defeating Russia is something that you know was way out of probably the West or Ukraine's realistic set of outcomes in the first place. And then, lastly, he just thinks that there's enough division and he can play on that division to make the West policies of support for Ukraine, support for US close cooperation with Ukraine, support for close US cooperation with Europe, that he can just pick all that stuff apart. And the current administration in Washington is aggravating a lot of those cleavages, like they're making them worse. So there's no pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war and there's certainly no pressure on him from below or from within the Russian elite to go on a different trajectory.

Andrew Weiss:

So I think the safest assumption is that this war will continue and that we're going to have a very self-confident Russia. We're going to have a Russia that feels that it's prevailed at the best the West could throw against it and it's going to be totally unrepentant. And it's going to feel that you know there are powers in the West, including some of the voices you hear from the current administration, that actually agree with what it was trying to do, that Russia should have a sphere of influence, that it's inappropriate for Ukraine to have these aspirations to join NATO or the European Union, that Ukraine is just as responsible for the war as Russia was. All these things are, you know, I fundamentally disagree with. The Russians are feeling that, you know, the headwinds are gone and, if anything, there's now some wind at their backs.

Michele McAloon:

Insanity. Yesterday I think it was the Telegraph, the Ukraine latest was reporting that over a million Russians are dead. I mean in three years. It seems like they can absorb it, which is tragic on so many levels tragic on so many levels.

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, I'm less persuaded by the body count analysis. Like I feel like there's a tendency in the West to try to say that, oh, this thing is going to undermine Putin's hold on power, or this thing is going to cast Putin in such a bad light that the Russian people will rise up, or the Russian elite will rise up, like. The reality we know is that people are scared, people are risk averse. The most, you know, unhappy people in Russia have all left the country, so they sort of kept the door open to get rid of the least happy members of their society. And then the people who've died.

Andrew Weiss:

It's definitely short of a million. I mean it's like maybe 150,000, 250,000 people. I don't have the exact number at my fingertips, but the average age of the people who've died is 36 or 38. So none of these people is somebody's high school kid who was drafted before they had the chance to live their lives. So these are people who signed up for the money, who thought that this was going to be a good payout for themselves or for their families in terms of higher wages or possible benefits and death benefits if things didn't work out. But this is not a conscription army that's fighting. These are people who saw the money on the table and took it.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, yeah, I mean some cold hard realities there, Andrew. Any predictions for the future?

Andrew Weiss:

I mean, I am very confident that things in Ukraine are going to morph in ways that surprise us Absolutely.

Andrew Weiss:

The technology and everything yeah, absolutely. There's far fewer ways to understand the place, just given how little there is travel or, you know, western-based journalists and others on the scene kind of helping explain day-to-day stuff. And then there's generational change. There's going to be a whole generation of Russians for whom this period after 2014 of Russia being at odds with the West is their formative period with the West is their formative period, and they're going to have an intense sense of grievance and anger and hostility towards the West. And, as my former boss, ambassador William Burns, put it, the Biden era of CIA director Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback, and so I just think it's foolish for us to think that we can work out a new amicable relationship with Russia. There's too much grievance that has accumulated on both sides, but particularly on the Russian side, and they're going to try to pay back the United States for having dealt Russia such an intense blow as a result of its own aggressive, belligerent behavior.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, wow, yeah, good times ahead. Wow, dark picture there, but I tell you what is not a dark picture your book, the way it delivers this information that we just talked about. It's so clear, it's very prescient and actually it's a dark subject, but it's kind of a fun read and I love the graphics in it. Readers, if you get a chance, this is a great book and it's probably good from middle school on up, with very serious adult themes. Adults can learn a lot from it, but I think teenagers can learn a lot from it too. And it's an important book because it is the truth about someone we don't understand. And actually we've seen some things in some of the political sectors of our country and you think what in the heck are they talking about? Because they don't understand Putin. They want to see him, as you know, just another political leader, and he's far more than that. It's amazing how both he and President Trump have just sucked the imagination of the human mind in pretty much worldwide. So I don't know. It's true, we've got.

Andrew Weiss:

Wow, thanks. Thank you so much and I really hope that when people look at the book they'll see things that help them see the current moment more clearly. They'll understand why Russia invaded Ukraine. They'll understand why there's kind of a bogus idea out there that Russia has strong family values and is a natural ally of you know, political conservatives or social conservatives, like all these things are largely mythological and self-serving and people. If you just kind of do the digging and you just kind of read for yourself, you'll see that the Russians have bamboozled a lot of people in the outside world and the book is about peeling away that set of myths. And I still think the myths are unfortunately quite pervasive. The more people can look at that critically and independently, the better.

Michele McAloon:

Perfect. All right, andrew. Where can we get the book? Anywhere, okay, yeah.

Andrew Weiss:

Yeah, the book is in print, easy to find, and you know, I'm just delighted to have been with you, michelle, today. This is just a great conversation.

Michele McAloon:

Well, thank you, andrew. Thank you really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule, so hopefully maybe there might be a second book or we will get some more updates on Russia from you later in the year. How does that sound?

Andrew Weiss:

Absolutely be delighted to do it.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, thank you.