Putin, Russia, and the End of History

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These days, Russia is ubiquitous in American news.

Yet for all the focus on Russia, the country itself remains something of a cipher, and misimpressions about it abound.

Within the country at this moment, America, the world, and the past century look very different than outside its borders.

What preoccupies Russia's ordinary citizens?

And what does Vladimir Putin really want?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic, and over in New York is my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Alex, hello.

Greetings and salutations, friends.

And salutations to you.

We return this week, and in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, to a place that has preoccupied the American attention for a solid year now, Russia.

In the latest cover story of the magazine, our staff writer Julia Yaffe gave us a vivid picture of Russia at this moment, en route to answering the question: what does Vladimir Putin really want?

And Julia joins us today.

Welcome, Julia.

Hello.

Welcome.

Or should we say, priviette?

Strastoitio.

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Przalsto.

Because I'm just throwing all everybody.

You got this.

You and Roy Moore.

Rounding out our round table is the Atlantic's Brilliant Global Editor, Kathy Gilson.

And Kathy, at long last welcome to the table.

Oh, thanks.

Hi, guys.

Welcome, Ni Hao, as they say in China.

Just to be global about it.

Ciao, ciao.

I'm trying to come.

Nope.

I've got no welcomes.

I've got no other language.

Got no welcomes in other languages.

Got no welcomes in other languages.

I am a veritable IHOP of welcomes.

An IHOP of welcomes.

Awesome.

I hope that's the official collective noun for welcomes.

Wouldn't that be IHOW?

International House of Welcomes.

Sure.

International House of Welcomes.

You're nothing if not exact, Julia, and we applaud you for that.

You all are just making me goofy.

Back in September, we spoke all about Russia's influence in the 2016 U.S.

election, about the latest turns in Robert Mueller's related investigation, all that jazz.

If you haven't listened to that episode, I recommend it.

Today, though, we're going to talk about Russia itself, the modern history of the country, and what it tells us about the world.

Julia, I want to start with an event that's thought of very differently in the U.S.

and in Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Here in America, it's a great shining moment.

It's the end of the Cold War.

It's the rise of global democracy.

But as Vladimir Putin- The end of history.

End of history, as they say.

But Vladimir Putin famously called it the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

What lessons did Putin take away from 1991?

This is an image, a scene that has been talked about a lot recently.

But the more important moment for him wasn't 1991, but 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell.

And he found himself, he was a middling KGB officer stationed in Dresden, in East Germany, in the KGB Residentura.

And there were protesters

storming the compound.

He didn't know what to do.

He called back to headquarters to Moscow and they said Moscow is silent.

And he had had to kind of ad-lib the thing by himself to kind of

tell the protesters that they were going to open fire to kind of intimidate them away so that he had time to shovel sensitive documents into the furnace.

So to him and actually to a lot of Russians, it was a moment of chaos and humiliation.

And the 90s were a time of chaos.

So you know, the generation that was born in the 90s remembers that their parents didn't always have enough to eat, that there wasn't money, that it was a very chaotic, sometimes violent time.

And that is often associated with 1991, that it wasn't this great shining moment.

For America, it was as often as the case with America.

It was this great shining moment.

And then we turned our attention elsewhere and

left the Russians to clean up the mess.

And there was a huge mess because you can't go from a totalitarian society to a democracy overnight.

You can't go from a rigidly controlled command economy to an open market economy economy overnight.

When you don't have the institutions in place, the culture in place, the habits in place, the enforcement mechanisms in place.

So I think a lot of 1991, even if people were happy to get rid of brutal totalitarian Soviet rule, it's often colored by what happened afterwards in the 1990s, especially because Vladimir Putin and the

Kremlin TV have focused on the 1990s and made them seem even worse than they actually were.

So there's constant depictions on TV, in movies and popular culture, and the political discourse that the 90s were basically, you know, this dark age, this time of troubles, and it was Putin that saved us from it.

So the collapse is intimately correlated to the chaos of the 90s, and Putin very much accentuates that for

his own political goals.

Yeah.

That kind of tees up the subtext that courses through your piece.

These catastrophic revolutionary moments and what they touch off.

Here in the US, we have this kind of bright and sunny view, no matter how often history slaps us across the face for it, that these big revolutionary moments are always wellsprings of promise and potential.

Democracy finally is going to take root.

But in Russia, That moment and these other moments that have happened since, that have happened recently, the Arab Spring are remembered very, very differently.

And that kind of potential naivete and pessimism is this divide, this balance that I hear through your piece.

Well, this is, I think, that's an excellent point.

And I think this is one of the things that is

one of the problems at the root of the inability for Russians and Americans to understand each other.

Russians don't understand how Americans can be so naive and idealistic because Russians are so deeply cynical, which we don't understand.

So they think that our idealism is itself cynical, that it is a weapon and a fig leaf.

So when we talk about democracy promotion, when we talk about

democratizing authoritarian regimes, what we're talking about is regime change and that we're talking about getting rid of not just Muammar Gaddafi, but we're getting rid of Vladimir Putin.

The point about revolutions is an important one because our revolution was maybe one of the few successful revolutions ever.

It wasn't, it didn't lead to massive, massive bloodletting and social chaos.

You know, as people far smarter than me have said, it wasn't necessarily a revolution as it was like an anti-colonialist struggle, but whatever.

And that was hundreds of years ago.

Nobody is around who experienced it.

Russia in the last

hundred years has had two revolutions, and they were accompanied by a complete collapse of the state.

and all the things that happened with that.

91 was relatively bloodless.

There wasn't a civil war that followed it, like in 1917.

But it was, like I said, nonetheless chaotic and hungry and

violent and confusing.

So

what Russians associate with revolution isn't hope and a betterment of their lot and more freedom.

They associate with revolution darkness and hunger and violence, and that that freedom is in and of itself a breeding ground for these things.

That freedom is not freedom from something, but a freedom to do whatever you want, including rape, kill, murder, pillage, etc.

Aaron Powell, Julia, I wonder how much that holds true across the generations, because one of the distinctions you make in the piece is Putin's base of support is largely older Russians, pensioners, you call them.

And you talk at the beginning of the piece about young hackers who are participating in a hackathon.

And they basically, I mean, at one point, you write, was he motivated by any feelings of patriotic conviction?

And the young hacker finished your sentence and started to chuckle.

And he says, no, I don't care what government I work for.

If the French Foreign Legion takes me, I'll go.

There doesn't seem to be the same sort of Russia first, if you will, mentality

in terms of the younger generation.

And I wonder if

that extends to attitudes about the West and maybe even to attitudes about revolution and innovation.

So

two things there.

One is there are different generations of young people.

There are generations, there's the generation that, like I said, was born in the 90s and remembers the 90s and the hunger and the chaos of the 90s, and they crave stability.

And so they actually really like Putin even more than the pensioners.

But that's because they just associate...

economic well-being with him, that things aren't going to change.

The stagnation under Putin is actually good because they can get a mortgage and a car and start a family and have the kind of sedate bourgeois lives that their parents weren't able to provide them.

Then there are the kids who are under 18, some of whom are going to be voting for the first time in March, and who don't know anything but Putin.

And that gives rise to this weird paradox where

they can't imagine anything but Putin, but they also

and you know, and they're not immune.

No human is immune from propaganda, especially when it's around you all day, every day, for years and years at a time.

So they have the same kind of

ideological smorgasbord in their heads that they like Joseph Stalin and they liked Tsar Nicholas II and they like the church and they like the NKVD.

All these things that don't go together whatsoever, they are all good in their heads.

But at the same time, they're less scared because this is not that brutal and bloody of a regime compared to Russian history.

And they're young and they're stupid and they don't understand consequences.

And also, they don't remember 1991 and they certainly don't remember 1917.

And they definitely don't remember the pro-democracy protests of 2011, 2012.

What didn't make it into the story is I found myself at these protests that Alexeya Navalny, this opposition leader, had in March in Moscow.

And I found myself standing next to these two young boys, and they had, and they were boys, they had these kind of light wisps of mustaches starting.

Yeah, I've got to say, the kids in your piece, they totally stick out.

The voices of the younger russian boys especially kind of well because they were mostly boys at these protests and as we know from looking at world events it's the young boys who are you know fearless and don't understand consequences and they're the ones who go into the streets for better or for worse their light feathery mustaches their light feathery mustaches and um

One of them, I was talking to them and one of them was 14, one of them was 16, and I was asking them, you know, why did you come out?

And what do your parents think of the fact that you're here?

Because usually the parents are more conservative and more scared that the state's going to crack down on their kids, which it did.

And I was like, well, do you guys remember the pro-democracy?

It was called Balodne for the square where it started.

Do you remember those protests?

Because after them, what I was...

wanted to get at was do they have the fear that the slightly older generation associates with those protests because there was a massive crackdown after those protests several dozen people went to jail people they're still jailing people for that five years later.

So I wanted to get at, like, are you scared to be out here?

Which is, I think, very important.

And they were like, oh,

yeah, that was,

that was February 1917, right?

And the other guy's like, you idiot.

It was October 1917.

So I was, and it might as well have been 1917 for them, which is why they're not scared.

They don't remember any crackdown.

They don't remember any revolution.

And they they don't remember anything other than Putin, so they're less scared of trying something new.

This is sort of a subtext of your piece, I think.

I'm just wondering, to the extent that a major source of Putin's support, as you describe it, is the perception that he can deliver stability, which is better than chaos, and the chaos we see all around the world, to include the United States now.

How long do you think he can deliver stability?

You know, you draw this great contrast in the cover story and in a lot of your other work between the image we have in the West of Putin, this master strategist, and the chess master or whatever.

Also, Beck Bennett on SNL.

Yes, totally.

As laid against the actual severe structural weaknesses underlying his rule and the real fear underlying some of the measures he's taken and the weakness of the economy.

I guess, what do you see as the possibility of another collapse?

Could it happen again?

I think it could totally happen again.

And it's,

you know, it's the dictator's dilemma.

You

are afraid of a collapse.

You do everything in your power to avert a collapse.

And so you're, you personalize institutions.

You take kind of micromanagerial control over things to prevent a collapse.

But inevitably, the collapse comes because either you're ousted, because that's what happens in these kinds of regimes, or you die, because that's what happens when you're a Homo sapien.

And

then all those institutions that you've kind of

so

brutally personalized don't work without you.

And that one of the weirdest things about the Soviet Union was that it didn't collapse in 1953 when Stalin died because he personalized the state even more.

The cult of personality was even stronger and even more brutal.

There was a fear in the Soviet Union after 53 when he died that, you know, we've equated Stalin with the state and now he's dead, so does that mean the state is dead?

But there were other things, there were other institutions in the Soviet Union, like the Communist Party, for example, that were real institutions

that

held the thing together.

Well, and just like fear and repression.

Putin's rule is a lot more toothless, and there are no other institutions other than

the institutions that use force, the police, the army, the secret services.

So, I don't know.

I just keep thinking back.

I reference it in a lot of pieces.

I just keep thinking back to what the guy who helped Putin win his first presidential election said.

When this system collapses, it will collapse in a day.

And the system that will replace it will be exactly the same.

And I think that's generally, if you look back at the

last two collapses, that's generally what happened.

Although the Soviet Union seemed very different because it had,

you know, it was socialist, it had a command economy, in many other ways it was very similar.

It was like this weird Tsarist regime 2.0.

The gulags, for example, were first started by the Tsar.

They were just improved upon by the communists.

Putin's regime is in many ways

harkening back to both the Soviet era and the Tsarist era.

So it's kind of, it's always, it's variations on a theme.

The system keeps, it keeps going going from, actually, the historian Jeffrey Hosking said this.

It seems, on one hand, that Russia keeps shuttling back between extremes, back and forth between extremes, but weirdly reproducing the same thing over and over again.

Hey, Julia, how obsessed is Putin with his own mortality, given how much is riding on his life and survival?

Good question.

Is he doing like life extension drugs?

Well, yeah.

I mean, I would think he'd be into all.

I mean, he's always on shirtless shirtless on horseback he's that shirtless on horseback and at least in one photograph but he's he's he's into sort of like flaunting his physique but beyond that do we know if he's taking you know like hormone therapy or is he doing holistic medicine but yeah

well and you point out that he's already well past the life expectancy of a russian man yeah that's why when a lot of russian uh for example when people around the doping olympic doping scandal started turning up dead they were men in their early 50s or or mid-50s, and everybody was like, well, it's kind of suspicious, but he is a 55-year-old Russian man.

So

hard to tell.

They kind of dropped like flies around that time.

But Putin is,

he actually has been a major advocate and propagandist of what is called zosh, which is an acronym for a healthy way of life, zdarova obrzrizni, which means no drinking, lots of sports and physical activity.

It's very Soviet, very kind of quasi-fascist.

It's weird.

But he's famously a teetotaler.

He eats healthy.

He shows us that he works out.

But I think, Alex, you were and Kathy, you guys were right on the money.

There's a reason that we see all these shirtless photos of Putin, him, you know, putting out forest fires, shooting a whale from a crossbow, which he actually has done.

It's to show us that he is superhuman, that he is not like other humans, that he will live longer, that he's stronger.

And also because a lot of the people who vote for him are older women whose husbands dropped dead around, you know, 52.

And,

I mean, there are no grandfathers around in Russia.

It's striking.

When you walk around, you only see old women.

You don't see old men.

And he's the kind of the man that none of them ever had.

He doesn't drink.

He's strong.

He's in shape.

The Atlantic photographs.

He's going to be around for money.

Judo, judo.

Judo, sorry, judo.

The Atlantics photo editor Alan Taylor has this

kind of delightful gallery of images of Putin being an international man of action.

We'll drop it in the show notes if you haven't seen it.

So wait, just one more thing about that.

So we find those images really funny, and we think of them as kind of Austin Powers-esque.

But Russians, it has the desired effect on Russians.

Russians look at that, except for the people in the opposition who are a lot like us and who are like, that's absurd.

But most Russians see that and they're like, wow, our leader is awesome.

I was actually, when I was covering the Olympics in Sochi, I found myself on one of the shuttle trains and across the aisle from me was an, were two women.

One was in her 60s and one was probably in her 20s.

And the one, the younger one was, they were chatting about how America was.

evil and making fun of them and humiliate trying to humiliate them all the time.

And then the younger woman reached into her bag and was like, look what I got.

And they were magnets that I would probably get as a gag gift for Kathy, for example, if I go to Russia.

Thanks, Julia.

I would like you to.

Okay, I'd like you to.

You don't even know what's on the magnet yet.

Okay, so I know

you had me at magnet.

You had me at magnet

because it's magnetic.

Anyway, so the magnet was, you know, pictures of Putin shirtless on a horse.

And, you know, I kind of stifled a laugh looking at this, but they were like, man, he looks so

good.

Yeah.

Not like their

not like their

bleep racist expletive with big ears who is super weak and terrible.

Our guy is strong.

Like, that's what a leader looks like.

That's, you know, a leader rides a horse shirtless.

Right.

Then you pulled out your Obama kite surfing magic.

Matt Smittens

of no part of your clique, Alex.

This is actually a big question that struck me reading here.

Is there the equivalent of a Beck Bennett Putin within Russia?

Is he parodied?

Does he have fictitious representations anywhere on Russian television?

So that's a sore spot because one of the first things he did on coming to office in 2000 was go after the channel that hosted the show Kukle, which means puppets.

And it was like a funny Muppet show,

but a political Muppet show.

And Putin was just eviscerated on there.

He just looked...

weak and terrible and unsure of himself.

And this just drove him nuts.

So he shut down the entire channel.

so now when people parody him they do it very very carefully yeah you had one of the most vivid vignettes from your piece um concerned this television show uh these two tv well-known kind of tv prankster dudes vovin and lexis yeah talking to um pranking you know playing uh

what's that show oh basically doing jack jerky boys or jerky boys on um u.s congressman u.s democratic uh congressman adam shiff tell us about that story tell us

so these guys to me were very kind of emblematic of what russia did in 2016.

they're these two guys uh one's 29 one's 31

they prank call people

but they're they're not prank calling you know the indian neighbor next door like the jerky boys they're prank calling the president of turkey you know they're prank calling erdogan on his cell phone.

They have a better Rolodex, obviously.

Well,

that's the thing,

or the president of Ukraine, whom the Russians hate on his cell phone, or they're prank-calling Mitch McConnell or John McCain or Rick Perry.

And they somehow just get their number.

How much are they paid?

Can we get them as bookers?

We'd like to, yeah, we'd like to call Mitch McConnell or

President Erdogan.

Well, it's also striking.

This is also a good example of

the Russian hackers and Russian pranksters using what we perceive as strength against us.

You have this great quote that one of them says, like, yeah, U.S.

congressmen are really easy to get on the phone.

Yeah, they were like, we actually would love to prank some Hollywood actors, but they're harder to reach than senators.

And that tells you all you need to know about America.

Yeah, but what's interesting is that they always get them right when they're in the news, and they end up either because they're trying to bring them down or they're trying to elicit information from them.

So they, you know, they called Mitch McConnell and John McCain last February to find out if there would be more Russia sanctions, less Russia sanctions.

So they're kind of, in some ways, doing the work of an intelligence agency.

They prank called

no-name guy, I'm sorry if you're listening, but a not well-known guy who was on Obama's National Security Council, who helped craft the anti-Russia sanctions.

Then he was named a consul or vice consul in Yekutsirinburg in Siberia, and they prank called him.

And when they prank call, they then give the audio to pro-Kremlin media, which then blasted and make fun of these people, but in order to try to get him removed from the post because he was anti-Russian, according to them.

So it was, it's like this, well, they're just pranksters, right?

There's plausible deniability.

They're just two guys on their own, crowdsourcing, getting these phone numbers, and just having fun with it.

But they're also, you know, prank calling all the right people at all the right time, getting sensitive information from them, or trying to bring them down.

So

it's both harm, it seems funny and harmless, but also very potent.

The other thing I love about this part of the story,

I mean, A, it's just really vivid and it is kind of funny, but B, it's emblematic in so many ways.

It's emblematic of what we've been talking about in terms of the murkiness of, well, who actually is, who actually does have Kremlin connections?

What does that mean?

Like, do you have to be best friends with spies to have Kremlin connections?

But also, there's another great quote in your piece

from one of the young men.

I love this podcast.

It's all about great, great, great.

They've actually renamed it.

It's called Julia Atlantic.

It's called Great Quotes from Your Piece.

From one of the young men whose name eludes me for the moment, sorry.

But

in the prank called Adam Schiff, he's talking about this compromise or whatever that he has on Trump naked, doing naked things.

And he describes it as, well, you have to make it so that it's just so that it's part of what the conversation is that's already taking place.

It's just a more extreme version of it, so it's plausible.

But similarly, in other parts of your piece, you know, you're talking to intelligence agents that say, yeah, like the reason, the reason Russian, the Russian influence campaign worked to some extent is not because it was creating societal fissures, but was playing on stuff that already existed.

So, again, it's this way of using what Americans naively perceive to be their strength against them.

Totally, totally.

Because they don't see it as a strength, also.

They see our openness as a weakness, they see our transparency, our naivete, our idealism as a weakness,

which it sometimes is, but that's the cost of being a democracy.

But yeah, these guys,

they're crazy.

Your point was very well taken.

I have nothing to add.

Do you think isn't it?

I love this podcast too.

Oh, my God.

I thought it was interesting also that the satirists, you know, in the U.S., we think of satirists as fundamentally critical of power,

that these satirists align themselves with Putin, who's a strongman, right?

Usually this sort of peanut gallery has, you know, is all about poking holes in authoritarian figures.

But these guys, it sounds like Julia, we're totally fine with Putin.

Yeah, they quite like him.

But that's the thing is

they

like him, but they also want to be on TV.

They want, and you can't be on Russian TV if you're not permitted to be on Russian TV.

So there are satirists who are very anti-Kremlin.

They're just not allowed to be on anything.

And so nobody hears their voice except for maybe online.

So they're marginalized or they are under pressure from the Kremlin.

Like two of my friends who ran this amazing, very bitterly satirical Twitter feed,

whoever it was, tracked them down, tracked down their car, when they were going to be in it, when they were going to be at home, and then they strapped or they chained a giant seven-foot tall wooden penis onto their car.

Wait, wait a second.

I'm sorry, that's

eyes

just became dinner plates.

Wait.

That is,

I mean, that just makes Russia's form of retribution way more focused than ours, doesn't it?

Like, someone had to construct a seven-foot penis and then

fair we're onto the right car at the right time on the right day.

Exactly.

That is impressive.

James O'Keefe has a seven-foot tall penis hanging out somewhere in the house.

Just somewhere.

Yeah, just kind of drop it on the left.

Yeah, but then like, but then what do you, Julia, were your friends intimidated by that?

Were they like, you got to keep this commemorative seven-foot

penis?

It was kind of the perfect retaliation.

It was both funny and threatening, right?

Because that's how you retaliate against satirists.

So they,

you know, for a while they kind of just stood there

scratching their heads as all these cars kept passing by and slowing down or backing up to see it more.

Because they were like, what the hell do we do with a giant

detailed, very detailed carved wooden penis?

And then they were,

then they had to call a tow truck to get it off.

And then they were like, what is this?

Then they put it up in their apartment, but their car was damaged.

You know, it was a heavy thing and there were metal chains chaining it to the hood and the roof of the car.

Oh, my.

And then it's like, how did they know?

Draftsmanship alone?

Well, also, how did they hadn't advertised that they were a couple?

Nobody knew where they lived.

And these people knew that.

They figured out where they lived.

They had just actually

come back from being abroad the night before.

So they picked up their car at the parking lot in the airport, drove it home, and just in time, somebody was there.

So

it's hilarious, but it's kind of scary.

Yeah.

Imagine what I could do if I had a worse sense of humor.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

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The Putin, and in some respects, the Russia that emerges from

your portrait is a country that's on its heels, weak but daring,

starved for resources in some respects, but willing to take often extreme risks to bring about

not necessarily well-planned out goals, but in some cases, chaos.

But yet Russia is a significant power.

It has a seat on the Security Council.

It has vast influence in the world.

What do you think is the best possibility for that influence?

But so that influence, too, has been clawed back by Putin.

That Security Council seat was not Putin's doing.

It was because the Soviet Union fought the Nazis.

And it's all

former Soviet stature

that Putin keeps referring to and saying, well, we deserve to be at the table because we've always been at the table because we used to be a big power and why aren't we now?

And a lot of that influence has been achieved through these weird actions, right?

So, like, so- Let me ask a different question, though.

What do you think will be Russia's influence now looking forward?

Well, it's really grown in the Middle East because we've given them a lot of room to maneuver there, starting with the Obama administration basically ceding Syria to the Russians.

When President Trump announced that he recognizes Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, a lot of people in the region freaked out.

And Putin was right there with a Middle East tour a couple days later saying, we're steady.

We're not going to pull crazy shit on you like this.

Sorry, am I allowed to say that?

We're not going to pull crazy stunts on you like this.

You can count on us.

We don't just talk about values and then do nothing.

We actually stand by our allies.

Look what we did for Bashar al-Assad.

So,

you know, I don't think it was a coincidence that when Jared Kushner landed in Tel Aviv a couple months ago, Bibi Netanyahu was in Moscow meeting with Putin.

You make a really great metaphor.

Here's another great quote from your piece, Julia.

But no, you do talk about, you say, people ask whether Putin's playing chess or checkers, but he's actually playing blackjack in terms of the risk he's willing to take on.

You know, just to bring this back home a little bit, when you think of Trump's character, I mean, Trump may not be a master manipulator, but he is a manipulator and he is willing to take on a fairly high amount of risk.

Do you see any common threads connecting them in terms of that sort of embrace of risk and kind of governing by the gut, if you will?

Definitely.

I would say, though, that Putin's more careful.

He's been at it longer.

And, you know, he's really evolved in power.

He knows he's become a much better speaker than our president and than he used to be when he first came to power.

He

is much more subtle about how he balances, and he's also dealing dealing with a different landscape and he has more power than trump so he in some ways he's the blackjack player and the blackjack dealer i'm so sorry this is a terrible metaphor kathy's gonna kill me but um

this is another um

Russian, a Russian oligarch actually put it to me this way, that, you know, he is always making sure that nobody gets too high up or falls too low.

So he's constantly balancing out the different interest groups and the different institutions.

So like if one part of the Silviki, the strongmen in the secret services, get a little too strong, he'll split their ministry into two.

Or

one oligarch gets too big for his britches and he'll

seize part of his assets or arrest him so that the other ones know not to go past a certain threshold.

Trump is kind of

He's not quite that sneaky and manipulative.

But there are common elements to the way they rule, this kind of populist, anti-elitist, you know, pitting the street against the elite, using religion and social values as a wedge issue, which the Russians, frankly, learned from us.

Yeah, there are some similarities.

After reading your piece, Julia, I went back to a piece from the July 1918 issue of The Atlantic.

Oh, that was a smoke out of the street.

As one does.

As one does.

As one does.

Two of Piece.

As one does.

Because I wanted to know, what were we writing about the Russian Revolution right after it happened?

It got scooped, Julia.

Sorry.

I came to this piece from Madeleine Doty called Revolutionary Justice, where she paints a picture of Russia in the aftermath of the revolution as this country where essentially the classes have merely switched sides, where she finds all these images of folks who had previously been quite deprived, considering themselves, even if they don't have any real resources, considering themselves having been elevated by the revolution and the folks who previously held power having been brought low.

There's this one quote, this passage where she says, it will take time to see the Russian revolution in just proportions.

But one thing grew apparent.

That is that in a bloody revolution, where force is the basis, as in bloody war, everything fine gets pushed to the wall.

Art, science, and social welfare vanish.

The working class fought for power and became dictators.

They ruled not by the vote, but by force.

They pulled existence down to the conditions of the poorest working man.

They failed to live up to their ideals of beauty, brotherhood, fair play, and freedom.

A government by the people and for the people, and inspired by ideals of brotherhood and freedom is the only true foundation.

The themes in that piece echo in reverse, in some ways, the themes in yours, this American hunger for revolution and this Russian hunger for stability.

And I'm curious from you both, Kathy, especially from you, who has the better of that argument?

When we look around, it seems America does, despite time and time again, getting kind of punched in the gut for it,

have this

real idealistic and perhaps naive fervor for revolution.

Should we?

Should we be a little bit more Russian in our thinking?

Oh, gee.

I, well, I want to go back to the end of history discussion we were having earlier.

And this, this sort of presages that end of history discussion in its,

in its confidence, you know, in its confidence that government of by and for the people is the only way.

And this is, and everybody else's experiments are doomed to fail unless they follow our template, right?

And I think that this kind of attitude is, at least in everything I know about Russia, I know from Julia, in the conversations that we've had about it, this kind of attitude is exactly the thing that through the Russian lens seems to get curdled into

might makes right the Western way.

You know, when you talk about values, what you're really talking about is American hegemony.

When you talk about universal wants and hopes, what you're talking about is American meddling.

And specifically,

the Russians have felt

Before we were worried about Russian meddling, they were worried about American meddling, right?

Even back, if I'm remembering correctly, back as far as the 90s when

it was American economists that were designing the shock therapy that plunged that country into chaos all while we were having this epic boom in the 90s at home.

So I think I would say as a naive American, I can't get that out of my blood.

I do believe in democracy and universal values.

I definitely think that there are ways to implement principles in different ways that can often be mistaken.

And I think the lesson of the past several years, I think even some of the most gung-ho pro-democracy proponents

would look at the second and third order effects of things like the Libya intervention and say, hey, maybe we need to think this through beyond the level of universal values to implementation.

Aaron Powell, yeah, I think

the American

idealism kind of glosses over how difficult democracy is, how much work it takes, how much vigilance and literacy it takes.

And we tend to think of it as,

you know, tantamount to breathing or riding a bike.

And it's not.

And

when either we behead these regimes or they behead themselves, democracy isn't necessarily what follows because

it's not like those things.

You need to know how to do it.

People get tired of it.

Look at our own country.

Look at our vote turnout.

Look at our media literacy.

But the other thing is, I don't want to give the Russian argument too much credence because it comes from a place of fear and it comes from a place of deep cynicism.

I don't think that Putin and the people around him, I mean, I think they've come to believe it because they've been drinking their Kool-Aid, their own Kool-Aid for 20 years.

But

the reason they don't like democracy is because it would mean that they're not in power anymore.

It's not because they think it's antithetical to Russian culture or that it would necessarily bring chaos.

I think Russians would be better off under a free and democratic government.

And it's a kind of, I always get accused by Russians of being russophobic,

of

kind of like racist toward Russians.

But the thing is that I encounter it the most in Russia from people who are high up in the Russian elite, in the government, or close to the government.

They are very afraid of their own people, which is kind of what...

preceded the 1917 revolution.

They're afraid of their own people.

And case in point, when the pro-democracy protests broke out in 2011, I called a guy who features in this piece, who is a high-ranking member of Putin's party.

And I said, how are you guys seeing these protests?

And he said, Julia, do you have any pets?

And I said, yes, I have a cat.

He's like, well, imagine you've had this cat.

for a decade and you feed her and you give her water and you give her affection and then all of a sudden she starts speaking and demanding things.

That's how we see it.

So, you know, like when you see your people like that, it's not that you crave stability.

It's that you fear your own people.

And the other thing, the third thing I'll say is when you were reading this piece about the revolution, what kept going through my head was America 2016.

This,

you know, angry white working class triumphing over the eggheads and the experts and the elite.

And now let us turn to Keepers, our closing segment.

As always, what have you read, heard, watched, listened to, seen, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

Kathy Gilson, why don't we start with you?

Okay.

My keeper comes from an excellent colleague of mine who, as I was scrambling to prepare for this, gave me the keeper that I want to keep.

It is an egg corn.

Do you know what an egg corn is?

I feel like when you tell me, I'll know.

I've never heard of this thing before, but as I wrote down the definition she gave me, it is a word or phrase that results from a mishearing or misinterpretation of another, an element of the original being substituted for one that sounds very similar or identical.

So, what this means is that, okay, so egg corn,

somebody misheard acorn and was like, and it sounds like it sort of makes sense why you would think that.

Yeah.

And hers that she gave me was that when she was a child, she thought the Pulitzer Prize was bullet surprise.

So

you did a good thing.

It's not that.

So I I didn't.

The Bullet Surprise.

What did you think it was?

The Bullet Surprise.

So I didn't ask.

How does the Peace Prize figure into all of this?

I don't know.

I did not ask follow-up questions about her childhood or anything.

But the other thing, this is a keeper within a keeper because my other keeper is great colleagues who tell me stuff like this.

So it's really like the Matruskadala keepers, if you will.

The Eggcorn is sort of a sibling.

to the Mondegreen.

Oh, my goodness.

Which is the word for a misheard lyric.

Short.

There's a bathroom on the back of the bag.

Oh, like my back is white, which is what my friend's brother thought the Michael Jackson anthem, Black or White, was.

My favorite.

My back is white, which may actually factually be true if you're talking about Michael Jackson, but no one knows.

I think my best personal Mandigrene comes from Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise, which the refrain of which I, for several days when that song was popular, thought went, been standing most alive, living in the rafters, paralyzed.

I don't know.

Totally.

That's like how we're poetic.

Get out of the rafters.

Wait,

I don't know.

Matt Thompson, maybe you should be a songwriter because that's like beautiful and very Haversham-esque.

Right?

Like that could be Miss Haversham's, like her paradise or that, or not, not actually, but that's very

so literary.

Coolio.

Should use that.

Yeah.

My favorite.

If Coolio is a listener, we can get him to re-record Rafters Paralyzed.

My favorite comes from Jimi Hendrix, Excuse me While I Kiss This Guy, versus Excuse me While I Kiss This Guy.

I mean, really, you made more sense than Jimmy.

Yes.

Can we just make this the episode?

Alex, what is your keeper?

My keeper is pretty mundane.

It's very pedestrian, but it is something that I watched this week, and I was reminded of its brilliance.

The Crown Season 2.

Yes.

And this is not a spoiler alert.

It begins with the crisis over the Suez Canal.

And it reminded me of the incredible history of the Suez Canal, which I write about a little bit in my forthcoming book, Shameless Book Plug.

But the Suez Canal opened up

the Asian markets to Europe in a way that we sort of discount in the era of globalization.

And it's actually a very romantic, it's a very romantic little passageway.

And by romantic, I mean, you know, it took like years of decades, perhaps, of back-breaking labor and deaths and so forth, and was the a subject of much political back and forth.

But it's a fascinating part of history.

And it's great to see it play out in a show as rich and textured as The Crown.

So go watch that and go think about the Suez Canal.

I have not yet started season two, but you have just spoiled part of my weekend.

And

my keeper is, I, is, again, my favorite type of keeper, something I was reminded of recently that I now want to keep.

I had occasion the other day to think about a blogger who I have not thought about in several years.

The blogger's screen name, her handle, was Hillzoy.

She was a blogger at Obsidian Wings.

Her real name and identity is known, but I will just tell you to Google Hillzoy.

She was much loved in the blogosphere when she hung up her pajamas nearly a decade ago.

But she was known most of all for writing really empathetically and perceptively about political ideologies different from her own.

And she was the type of writer that could just pull you into a perspective that you might not hold very engagingly, grippingly, smartly, and as I said, empathetically.

I looked up just an example of her writing just to give you a flavor of it.

And the thing that turned up was a post that she wrote on domestic violence, on the phenomenon of domestic violence.

So difficult topic.

and I'll just quote a little bit of it now.

She said,

imagine yourself in love with someone on your honeymoon or pregnant, when suddenly this guy just goes ballistic, often for very little reason, and hits you.

For a lot of women, this is profoundly shocking and disorienting.

There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they're rare, like having your car stolen.

And then there are things that are unexpected, in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes.

Things that make you wonder whether whether you're completely crazy.

Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.

What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her.

And it's not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place.

She questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.

She's a touching writer, and even just that passage right now feels relevant and resonant, like something to remember.

Like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes.

I miss Hilzoy, but I have had occasion to go back through her writing, and I hope our listeners get the chance.

I write it down.

Oh, man.

I've written it down.

Well, I just didn't.

I was like, what, what?

What do I even say?

What awkwardly glib comment should I make?

What do I even say?

See, when we do Keepers from Russia, they're always a little grim.

So here we go.

This past weekend was the premiere of Nuriev, which is a ballet based on the life of Rudolf Nureev, who was a very famous ballerino

from Russia who fled to the West in 1961 and

was gay.

He died of AIDS in 92.

The ballet about him was directed by a young, brilliant, very

daring theater director named Kiril Sidyabrinikov,

who is

really out there.

And he was asked to direct this ballet at the Bolshoi Theater.

It was delayed once because it had homosexual themes, which, as we know, Russia has banned homosexual propaganda.

And then Sidyabrinikov's independent theater, small theater, everybody was arrested.

His accountant is in jail, and he's now under house arrest for embezzling money, which I doubt he did.

But he is under house arrest, but the ballet went on without him.

And it premiered at the Bolshoi on Saturday.

And it still had those homosexual themes.

It was about a man who had defected from the Soviet Union and had said that a country that doesn't value its heroes at the time is a really tragic country.

And in the audience giving the play a standing ovation was the entire Russian elite, Putin's spokesman and his wife, Putin's old buddies from the KGB from Leningrad, who are old dudes, very scary guys.

And the director was at home under house arrest.

And if that's not

a perfect embodiment, a tragic embodiment of what Nudiev's life was about, where

when he died, somebody said about him that he never could have done in Russia what he was able to do in the West.

And I think that still holds true today.

Russia is still brutal when it comes to people in creative professions.

And then when they die, they name air flot airplanes out of for them.

So, oof, what a story.

Russia really sucks in that way.

Well, here's to homosexual themes.

Amen.

Yes.

Thank you, everybody.

Alex, as always, a pleasure.

Always a pleasure.

And as the Russians say, spasiba.

You say that almost as fluently as Roy Moore.

Kathy and Julia, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Thanks.

And as the Midwesterners say, thanks, Miat.

And as the Atlanticians say,

back in 1904.

Just kidding.

We'll see you next week.

And so concludes another week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Thanks again to Julia Yaffe and Kathy Gilson for joining us, and thanks as always to my co-host Alex Wagner for our theme song, The Battle Hymn.

Eternal thanks to John Batiste, the one and only.

What are the best or most fascinating or most challenging ideas you've encountered this year?

Leave us a voicemail with your answers to that question and your contact information at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description, and you know we love us some ratings and reviews in Apple podcasts, and especially if you subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Snostopayashem.

We'll see you next week.

Hi, I'm so sorry.

I thought it was 3:15.

I'm sorry.

I bet you were in Russia, weren't you?

Well, she was Russian, am I right?

That was brilliant.

Oh, man, that's going in the episode.

That's going in the episode.