The Rest Is History: Young Putin, the KGB and the Soviet Union

In our most recent episode, Alastair mentioned our sister podcast, The Rest Is History, and its recent mini-series on the Soviet Union, its fall, Putin's early life and his subsequent rise to power. Here's the first episode of the series on Brezhnev, Putin's formative years, his early KGB career and Gorbachev's descent into chaos. Was Putin a nationalist or a communist? What changed from Brezhnev to Gorbachev? What was Putin doing in East Germany during the Soviet twilight years? Find the next episode in the series here: Apple Spotify Elsewhere Or search 'The Rest Is History' wherever you get your podcasts. See you on Wednesday for our next episode of 'The Rest Is Politics'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there. Alastair Campbell here. And first of all, thank you from me and Rory Stewart for listening to The Rest Is Politics, which is back at number one, I see. Now, in this week's episode, you might remember I made reference to our sister podcast, The Rest Is History, who'd been discussing George Bush's famous quote about looking into Vladimir Putin's soul. Well, we thought we'd give you the chance to listen to the episode in full. It's the first of a four-part series on Russia, from the final days of the Soviet Union to today and Putin's violent kleptocracy. If you want to listen to the other episodes, the link is in the episode notes, or just search for The Rest Is History wherever you get your podcasts. Hope you enjoy it and hope you come back to us at The Rest Is Politics next Wednesday. All the best.

• 2:34Speaker 05

  Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History and we would like to go over to Crawford, Texas, where we are joined by a special guest.

• 2:41Speaker 06

  I'll answer the question. I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. The man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. There was no diplomatic chit-chat, trying to throw each other off balance. There was a straightforward dialogue. And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship. I wouldn't have invited him to my rants if I didn't trust him.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  That was my brilliant impression of George W. Bush, was it actually?

• 3:27Speaker 07

  No.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  That really was George Bush.

• 3:29Speaker 07

  That was George, that was our first presidential guest.

• 3:31Speaker 05

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

• 4:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. I think, Tom, there's that apocryphal saying by Napoleon, isn't there, that if you know the world, if you've studied the world when a man was 20, you know how his mind works. And

• 4:26Speaker 07

  Vladimir Putin, like any Russian of his generation, he's born in 1952, has lived through the most colossal, almost unimaginable, political, economic, kind of social changes in the former Soviet Union and Russia. And if we, and it's only by understanding what's happened to him and his country, I think that you can actually get, get into his, into his, well, attempt to get into his head and to understand why Russia is now as it is. So now it's becoming, you know, it appears to be becoming this pariah state, kind of shut off behind a new iron curtain of sanctions. How on earth has it got here? And that's what we're going to try and, try and investigate.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  I mean, Dominic, you're, of course, it's been an absolutely convulsive period of change, but there is also always the historians question change or continuity. And you could say, I mean, people have been saying that actually not that much has changed, that the Soviet Union was a political system founded on lies, founded on a profound suspicion of the outside, founded on an emphasis on military prowess over everything else. And you could say that Russia today is showing, you know, much of the same.

• 5:44Speaker 07

  Is the air of that. Yeah, I don't, normally I'm a great determinist in this podcast, but I don't think that's really true, actually. I think that misses, you know, obviously Putin himself is a product of the Soviet system, which we'll go into in a second. But I think when you actually go through the period of change, you see that there were alternative paths that Russia could have taken. And Russia isn't fated to be this sort of

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  violent, you know, and nationalistic kind of hellhole that, that so many people imagine. You know, what happened in the, in the USSR in the 1980s and then in Russia in the 1990s, there are all kinds of contingencies and twists and so on. And there were alternative futures for Russia, as we will see.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  But just, just before we go to look at the last decade of the Soviet Union.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  You talked about the idea that Russia wasn't fated to become what it is now. But that idea of fate, the idea that Russia has a particular destiny, I mean, that is something that is very strong in Russian culture and actually much older, of course, than communism.

• 6:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, the sort of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, well, I mean, they're two different things, aren't they, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy? But the sort of the idea of Russia having this almost, as you would say, Tom, this almost kind of sacral destiny, you know, the Third Rome, the home of orthodoxy, kind of on the edge of Europe, half in Europe, half out. I mean, that is very deeply rooted in Russia's sense of itself, the sense of embattlement, a sense, a distrust of the outside, but also a fascination with it. So yes, all those things are there. But there was a sort of slightly stereotypical way we talk about Russia. So we always talk about, I mean, even George Bush did it there when he talked about knowing Putin's soul.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  The soul, yes.

• 7:27Speaker 07

  The idea of the Russians having a soul that you must understand that is incredibly deep and dark. I mean, nobody says that about, you know.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Belgium.

• 7:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, Belgium. No, nobody says that about Belgium. Maybe Bart van Leeu, our previous guest, would say that.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  But also, I mean, people today, when you apply the word exceptionalism to countries, it's generally a pejorative. So people are very sniffy about the idea that there might be British exceptionalism or French exceptionalism.

• 7:53Speaker 07

  Or American exceptionalism.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Even though clearly, you know, I mean, they are all very exceptional countries. But in Russia, it seems to be something that is pretty fundamental to the way that not just Russian politicians, but large numbers of people within the country think of Russia. Would you say that's fair or am I stereotyping?

• 8:11Speaker 07

  I think it absolutely, no, I think it probably is fair. I think that's the way that a lot of Russians are told to think about themselves, that they have an exceptional, a unique past and a kind of exceptional destiny. And that, we do think of Russia typically as having an exceptional character. Outsiders do. And that's all that stuff about the Russian soul and about, you know, Russians are terribly kind of warm people, but they're, but they're also that the price of human life is lower and all that sort of thing that you hear so often. Yes. So I think there is a kind of exceptionalism, both projected from the outside, but also believed inside.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  I mean, it was expressed very unsettlingly by Putin, and I may be paraphrasing him here. And I, you know, this may be. Disinformation, but didn't he say something to the effect, talking with regard to nuclear weapons, that a world without Russia wouldn't be a world, you know, why should the, why should the world exist if it exists without Russia?

• 9:03Speaker 07

  Yes, and not only has he said that, by the way, but his kind of mouthpieces on Russian state television have used exactly the same line. So that's, yeah, a well-worn line, actually, in the sort of Putinist ideology.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Right, okay, so a bit unsettling, coming from people with the largest quantity of nuclear weapons on the face of the planet. But something that, as we said, can be traced back to the Tsarist period, but obviously gets a particular refinement under communism, where what had been the Russian Empire becomes the Soviet Union.

• 9:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 05

  And as the Soviet Union is one of two superpowers and sees itself charged with a historical destiny, it is the midwife of world communism. That has sustained it throughout decades of transformation and upheaval. By the seventies, when Putin is coming of age, that sense of purpose and of destiny perhaps is starting to fade. It's the age of Brezhnev, a man with kind of insanely huge eyebrows.

• 10:04Speaker 07

  And you're gonna mention eyebrows.

• 10:05Speaker 05

  And a kind of rigor mortis starts, isn't it? I mean, they're all kind of basically dead. They are constantly getting colds, but keep them in their beds for five years. They wear nothing but overcoats.

• 10:15Speaker 07

  They wear things under the overcoats, Tom.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Do they? I've never seen any evidence for that.

• 10:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're right. So.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  It's always snowing. So what's going on?

• 10:22Speaker 07

  So Putin is born in Leningrad, St Petersburg, in 1952, and he's from a working-class family. His parents work in a factory. And he goes to Leningrad State University in 1970, I think, and he's there for five years. And so, so he comes of age in the Brezhnev era, as you say. And it's an age of, it is not an age of revolutionary zeal at all. So you mentioned communism and, and a sort of sense of, of communism, but that really isn't what typifies the Brezhnev regime. The Brezhnev regime is all about stability and there's a kind of ordinariness to it. So for most people who are alive in the Soviet Union at that point, Soviet Union is all they've ever known.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  And everybody in the world, you know, in America and Britain, in Western Europe and in the Soviet Union thinks the Soviet Union is going to probably be around forever. You know, it is, as you say, one of the two superpowers. It's sclerotic. The economy is producing enough to keep people happy, so they're fed. They've actually got more consumer goods than ever before. You know, Robert Service in his History of Russia says, I think he uses the phrase, "Most Russian workers had never had it so good as they had it in the 1970s." So they've got fridges, they go on holiday there. You know, life's okay.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  But relatively, relatively, they've never had, I mean, they've never had it so good, but relative to the capitalist West.

• 11:44Speaker 07

  Of course, it's falling further.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Economically, they're starting to fall behind.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  And the prosperity, the apparent prosperity of the 70s is based on a fiction. So it's based on a sclerotic, incredibly complicated, top-down sort of system, you know, the sort of paradigms of sort of state planning and tractor statistics and all that stuff. They're all, they're all rooted in truth, but it's also rooted in high oil prices. So high world, they're almost living a bit of a, a bit of an illusion. Because when the oil price falls in the 1980s, that's going to pull the rug out from the, from the system. And Brezhnev, as you say, I mean, he's not Stalin, you know, he's nothing like Stalin. He's not, it's still a very autocratic system. It's one that represses dissidents and shoves them into psychiatric hospitals, but it doesn't kill lots of people.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  So life kind of, you know, goes on. And for a young man like Putin, his ambition is to join the KGB.

• 12:39Speaker 07

  Supposedly he applies to join and they say to him, "You don't apply, you know, we contact you." But they kind of make a note of him because they know that he's loyal and hardworking and all this sort of stuff.

• 12:50Speaker 07

  So for him, he thinks he's going to be, he thinks he's joining the intelligence service of one of, of, of, actually, the world's great power. Because the 1970s is a terrible decade for the kind of the United States, it's the decade of Nixon and Carter and Vietnam and this sort of introspection. And the Soviet Union, there's a sort of sense that the Soviet Union might even be winning the Cold War.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  Burying them.

• 13:12Speaker 07

  Burying them, as, yes, as Kristoff said to, said to Nixon. So there's this sort of false, false image, I think, that people have about their own society in the 70s. And there are some people at the top of the Soviet regime. So in particular, the man who's going to succeed Brezhnev, who's a man called Yuri Andropov, who is the head of the KGB. There are some people who know that there are deep problems, that Russia has, you know, I say Russia, the Soviet Union has huge problems with alcoholism, with absenteeism, that its birth rate is struggling, that, you know, high rates of corruption, all these kinds of things. But Putin doesn't see this as a young man, I wouldn't have said.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Well, two questions. First of all, Putin, is he a committed communist as a young man? Or is he a committed nationalist? What's the balance there?

• 14:00Speaker 07

  If you read sort of his semi-official biography, it says that he reads, you know, he enjoys reading Marxist-Leninist books when he's at, he's at school. I mean, I think it's a bit like Christianity, Tom.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Is it?

• 14:12Speaker 07

  It is, in this sense, in this sense. There's a difference between being a Christian in the second century A.D. and being a Christian in the 16th century, when everybody's a Christian. And, you know, you're not a radical, you're not a rebel, you're not necessarily-

• 14:25Speaker 05

  Well, you might be in the 16th century.

• 14:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you might not be, you might not, you might be a good Christian, but none of those things. You might just be an apparatchik. And I think he's a communist in the sense that he's listened to everything he's been told, and that provides his framework. But I don't think he's a, I don't think he burns with the zeal of social justice, or with revolutionary enthusiasm. I don't, actually, Tom, I don't think, I think a lot of the people who are running the show don't burn with revolutionary zeal.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Okay, that was my other question. But I think before I ask that, let's take a quick break.

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• 16:21Speaker 07

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  You were just saying before the break that a lot of the people at the top of the Soviet Union are not burning with kind of revolutionary communist zeal. And the question I asked you was on Andropov. He's the guy who notoriously has the cold. It lasts for what, kind of four years, three years or something? I mean, he's in, I mean, basically, he's incapacitated for the whole period of his term as general secretary.

• 16:46Speaker 07

  Of course, yes.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  And then he's succeeded by Chernenko, who is kind of, in many ways, even more moribund. Are these, are these guys people who, you know, so Andropov is a very smart guy. He recognizes the Soviet Union has huge problems. Is he a believer, though? He doesn't question the system. He just thinks that the system needs a bit of tinkering, you know, apply the spanner here, a bit of oil there, and it will tick along fine.

• 17:08Speaker 07

  He doesn't question the mission, I suppose, is what I would say. So, I mean, Chernenko, he's a hack. He's just a party hack. Andropov is clever. He was the Soviet ambassador, I think, in Hungary during the Budapest uprising. So he has taken from that a belief that you have to be, you have to be strong, you know, you have to suppress dissent. You can't let things, but he also has taken a belief that you have to get in ahead. So, you know, you can't let yourself get in a situation where thousands of people are in the streets. You have to keep changing the system. To make it work. So I don't think Andropov is in, he's very severe, he's very strict, he's

• 17:47Speaker 07

  very anti-corruption. And he's clever and he has read forbidden books and he, as Soviets, sort of the top brass are allowed to do, they're expected to do, to inform themselves. And he's surrounded himself with aides who are relatively free-thinking. But he's still, I mean, everybody there believes in them that their model must triumph. And they believe they're in a global competition with this, with the United States, absolutely.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so he is, you know, said he was head of the KGB. He's general secretary during the kind of the coldest days of the Cold War in the early eighties.

• 18:21Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  So he, he is the guy who's in charge when Reagan is lambasting the Soviet Union as evil.

• 18:26Speaker 07

  Evil empire, yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  And it's 99 red balloons and two tribes.

• 18:29Speaker 07

  Which is very frightening, by the way, for the Soviet leadership. They, they think the Americans are going to attack them. Well, I mean, we did a podcast about this with Taylor Downing, about nuclear war. They absolutely are terrified that the Americans are going to attack them first. But yeah, so Andropov takes over, Brezhnev dies. I mean, Brezhnev basically died multiple times and was literally brought back from the dead. You know, he's sort of resuscitated and dragged around as this sort of embalmed figure in the late 1970s. Andropov succeeds in November 82 and is there till February 84. And as you said, he's basically ill the whole time. I mean, they literally, you know, on one side of his bed, there'll be the man with the nuclear briefcase, the other side of his bed will be the nurse who's keeping him alive. And then he dies. Now, the person he wants to succeed him is the crucial figure

• 19:12Speaker 07

  in this podcast and for Putin, a figure of utter ignominy and shame in Russian history, as indeed he is for a lot of Russians. And that man is Mikhail Gorbachev. That's the man that Andropov wants to take over. But he doesn't, he's too young. So the other people in the Politburo, they bypass him and they get this old hack, Chernenko, who is another sort of, I mean, he's dying when he takes over. And he's there from February 84 to the spring of 85.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  So what was it about Gorbachev that Andropov had seen?

• 19:43Speaker 07

  That's a, that's a, that's a really good question. So Gorbachev is a generation younger. He's the youngest guy, I think, pretty much on the Politburo. He joins in 1918, he's 49, which is incredibly young by the standards of the Soviet leadership.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  And he has glamorous wife.

• 19:59Speaker 07

  He does, right. He's a very clever wife, who's a very important, I mean, hugely important figure for him, his chief advisor, I mean, his real, his real soulmate. So Gorbachev is from a place called Stavropol. He's from a little village called, what's it called Privolnoye, I think it's called. And he's from peasant stock. He's bright, he's super bright. He's gone to Moscow State University and I think he's read law.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  He's got a birthmark on his.

• 20:26Speaker 07

  On his head, he does indeed. He's travelled, so he's been abroad. He even went on a three week driving holiday in France with Raissa. And they sort of drove around France and said, and said, God, you know, this place is so much better than the Soviet Union. You know, this is the sort of classic thing that often happens when people are posted to the West. He actually, one of his chief aides, one of his chief advisers is a man called Alexander Yakovlev, who'd been ambassador to Canada and basically had exactly the same kind of crisis of confidence. You know, he got to Canada and like, oh my God, this place is great.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  But when Gorbachev becomes general secretary, he's still a believer. I mean, just because he's got nice camembert in France, it doesn't mean that he thinks.

• 21:06Speaker 07

  Right, absolutely, Tom. Absolutely, he's a believer. He is idealistic and this is one of the great problems with Gorbachev. Now, Gorbachev is a fascinating character because of course, everybody listening to this, by and large, will think, oh, Gorbie, nice guy, you know, Nobel Peace Prize winner, top man. Of course, in Russia, he is regarded with absolute contempt. And I have to say, when you start to dig into the story and you think about Gorbachev in a slightly more detached way. I mean, we've done a lot of weak and failed leaders on this podcast, although it pains me to say it because he's an admirable man in so many ways. I mean, but when he leaves office, he's only in there for six years and when he leaves, his country has completely and utterly fallen apart. Now, some people would say that's because the problems are too great.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  But I think Gorbachev, I think almost all historians actually who really work on this, people like Robert Service or Vladislav Zubok, who writes a brilliant book called Collapse, that came out last year, The Fall of the Soviet Union, they would just say Gorbachev is a complete and utter disaster. Why? He's idealistic, Tom. He's bright. He and Raissa have spent loads of time talking about the future of the Soviet Union. They like talking to other kind of intellectually kind of people. Gorbachev is also very canny. So he's been able to get up the kind of greasy pole. He's powerful patrons like Andropov think a lot of him. He says to Raisa when he joins the, I think it's when he joined the Politburo,

• 22:32Speaker 07

  he said, we can't live like this any longer and he's determined to fix the system. But he goes about fixing it in such a politically incompetent. I mean, again, it slightly pains me to say it, but he fixes it in such an inept way that absolutely everything gets worse. He does too much, too quickly, too many different areas and everything falls apart. And you said, was he a believer? He's absolutely a believer. So Vladislav Zubot brings this out really well in his book. He says, you know, Gorbachev is obsessed with Lenin. I mean, this is so much like your parallel with your Christianity stuff about people who, you know, people who would kind of Oliver Cromwell or somebody reading the Bible to guide them.

• 23:14Speaker 07

  Gorbachev has Lenin's sort of works on his desk and he will sort of dip into them in the way that people sometimes dip into the Bible. He will dip into them to try and get inspiration for what he needs to do. And he becomes convinced, he is convinced that the Soviet Union has taken a wrong turn since the 1920s and it needs to get back to Lenin's vision. He idealizes Lenin and he thinks Lenin had a vision, it's a more democratic, free, open, creative. And if I can get back to that, we'll establish true communism and then we'll turn this sort of sinking ship around, if you can turn the sinking ship around.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  So that's, that's quite a kind of abstract sense of mission. But I, maybe I've got this wrong, but I thought that he was also focused on a very specific problem, which was that the Soviet economy was massively distorted by defence spending. So they're spending what, 20, 25%?

• 24:07Speaker 07

  No, it's probably not, that's actually been exaggerated. It's about 15%, I think is the latest estimate.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Quite a lot.

• 24:13Speaker 07

  It is, but it's.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  If he's going to, if they're going to, you know, guns to butter.

• 24:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  Then they need to make things up with the West. So he does that very effectively. I mean, he's very good at that.

• 24:23Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  He definitely kind of removes the chill from the Cold War very effectively. So, which is why people in the West, you know, rate him so highly. But as someone who is ideologically committed to Marxist Leninism, I mean, isn't it a definition of the job that kind of trying to construct an economy that will provide Soviet citizens with all the kind of consumer durables and gizmos that you get in the West is bound to fail? I mean, there's just no way it can be done.

• 24:54Speaker 07

  No, I don't agree with that. I don't actually don't agree with either of those things. So first of all, the defence spending, that has become a very comforting myth that the West tells itself about the Soviet Union, particularly in America, that we crippled, we won the Cold War by increasing defence spending so much that they couldn't keep up. But most historians, I think, would now say they could keep up. I mean,

• 25:15Speaker 05

  With defence spending?

• 25:16Speaker 07

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

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Yes, but this is communism with Chinese characteristics, which basically means a kind of freedom to ignore aspects of communism that don't gel with with making money. But Leninism absolutely, I mean, Leninism was all about kind of collectivisation, it's all about suppression of private enterprise.

• 25:59Speaker 07

  But I think most historians would say, well, first of all, that's not what Gorbachev himself thinks. He thinks Lenin's new economic policy in the 1920s after the Russian Civil War did allow some space for limited private enterprise and that they can move towards a mixed economy. I think that one of the big problems with the Soviet Union is it's become so reliant on imports paid for with oil revenue, and it's completely failed to develop its own kind of consumer industries.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  So it's like Saudi Arabia with snow, a bit.

• 26:28Speaker 07

  Is that what the Saudi, what do they do? Do they spend their oil money on snow?

• 26:32Speaker 05

  No, but I mean, it's the sad, you know, notoriously economies that have lots of oil tend to be dysfunctional.

• 26:39Speaker 07

  Well, yes, Iran is a good example from the seventies. We talked about Iran a lot in previous podcasts. And I think, yes, it's incredibly dysfunctional. I mean, it's unbelievably complicated economy. No one, I mean, when Gorbachev is given, they're talking about this thing called the law of state enterprise, which is going to be this law that's going to allow a little bit of more freedom for factories to keep their money and to invest it and those sort of thing. Gorbachev says at one point, you know, I basically don't understand this. And nobody really understands.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Well, I feel sympathy. I mean, basically, he's trying to, he's trying to amend a machine for which there is no instruction manual.

• 27:15Speaker 07

  I think there's a degree of that. But I think he's also, you see, the thing is, he's trying to mend this machine, which has incredibly complicated kind of supply chain networks and, and it has this weird cashless system that enterprises use with each other, whereas citizens use cash and you can't change one to the other. I mean, it's completely mad. But that's the way, it's a bit like any massive sclerotic institution. Once you start to fiddle with it, it becomes very difficult to stop it from falling apart. But the other thing is, he combines this with a, so he has the perestroika, which is restructuring, which kind of has political and economic developments. But he combines it with glasnost, which is openness. And that's in the wake of Chernobyl. So Chernobyl, the explosion

• 27:56Speaker 07

  at Chernobyl is in April 1986. And after that, Gorbachev thinks, well, I need to, I need to increase the speed. We need to have more newspapers. We need to have more discussion.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  And why is it, why, why does Chernobyl have that effect on him?

• 28:08Speaker 07

  Because I think he's, he's shocked by the incompetence, by the cover ups, by the ineptitude of the managers, by the way the atomic industry has been run, by their lies, all of that kind of stuff. You know, Gorbachev, of course, he's complicit in covering it up a bit because he's the general secretary and he kind of feels like he has to. But he still thinks, okay, we need to, you know, we just need to be more. Open and we need to be more creative. Crucially, one of the things he does now, one of the things we haven't talked about at all, which is very important for understanding Putin, is the Soviet Union, and I know we have a lot of very, to us, young listeners, the Soviet Union is not anything like a nation

• 28:50Speaker 07

  state, and it doesn't even really see itself as an empire. So it's got 15 republics, going all the way from Estonia, I mean, it's a mad state in many ways, it's existed, you know, one form or another since the 20s, but it's got going all the way from Estonia to kind of Tajikistan. And the Russians are about roughly about 50% of that, you know, the Russian population. And there's always been the issue of nationalism, you know, there's always been tensions in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in the Baltics and so on. And Gorbachev has this idea that by basically devolving a lot of power to the republics, I mean, devolution, Tom, what could possibly go wrong?

• 29:32Speaker 07

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

• 30:17Speaker 07

  and all these kinds of things. So the seeds of trouble are there, even after he's only been there a year.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  And Dominic, do we know what Putin is doing?

• 30:23Speaker 07

  Yes, we do. So this is-

• 30:25Speaker 05

  He's in St Petersburg still, isn't he?

• 30:26Speaker 07

  No, this is the interesting thing, he's not. So around about the point where Chernenko gave way to Gorbachev, where Gorbachev came into power. Vladimir Putin has been, he's been working for the KGB since the late 70s and he has now been posted to Dresden, East Germany.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  Of course he has, yes, of course.

• 30:44Speaker 07

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

• 31:23Speaker 05

  And he's in East Germany, which has a higher standard of living relative to the Soviet Union.

• 31:27Speaker 07

  It does indeed, yes.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  So he is alert to presumably some of the problems that the Soviet economy faces.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  Yes, I don't think, you asked if Putin was communist. He's certainly not a communist now and has not been since the fall of the USSR. But what he is, is a believer in the Russian world, in the Russian sphere of influence. And I think that's what's going to trouble him as we get into the late 80s and early 90s, that that starts to fragment and fall apart.

• 31:55Speaker 05

  Well, I think that's enough for today. So that's the end of today's episode. Please join us tomorrow to hear about when things really start imploding for Gorbachev in the late 80s and in due course for the Soviet Union itself. We will see you tomorrow.

• 32:10Speaker 07

  So that was the first of four episodes in our mini series on the Soviet Union, Russia and Vladimir Putin. And in the next three episodes, we go from the fall of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, we look at the economic nightmare and basket case that was Russia in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, and we tell the story of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the consolidation of his power since the turn of the millennium. Now, if you enjoyed this, we are called The Rest Is History and we're a history podcast in which Tom Holland and I cover everything from Julius Caesar to Watergate, from Alexander the Great to Tony Blair. And you can find a link in the episode description or by searching for The Rest Is History wherever you found this podcast. Thanks for listening.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.