Masha Gessen on Putin’s 'Profoundly Anti-Modern’ Worldview

For Western audiences, the past few weeks have been a torrent of information about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. Daily updates of Russian military advances. Horrifying videos of buildings exploding and innocent civilians being killed. Announcements of increasingly severe economic sanctions and major corporate pullouts. Charts showing the collapse of the ruble. Story after story about the hardships facing the Russian economy. Most Russians, however, are living in an alternate reality. This week, the Russian government made it a crime for journalists to spread what it considers false information about the “special military operation” in Ukraine — information that would include calling the war a war. As a result, many Western news organizations, including The Times, have pulled their employees out of Russia. The Kremlin has made it nearly impossible for people in Russia to access independent or international news sources. Russian state media coverage of the conflict has been, in the words of my guest today, “bland and bloodless.” That raises some important questions: What do ordinary Russians know about the war being waged by their government? How are they interpreting the collapse of their currency and impending financial crisis? What are they being told to believe? And is the propaganda machine working? Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of many books on Russian history, politics and culture, including “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” and the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” And, perhaps most important, Gessen has been on the ground in Russia in recent weeks trying to understand how ordinary Russians are seeing and interpreting the world around them. This is a conversation that starts in Moscow, as Gessen describes what it was like to be there during the first days of the invasion. We talk about the eerie sense of normalcy in the city as the ruble crashed and the odd sense of calm in Pushkin Square as policemen in combat gear dragged protesters into a police bus. We then take a wider view on how Russians responded to economic sanctions in the past, how totalitarian societies make it impossible for people to form opinions, where Putin sees himself in a lineage of “brutal, expansionist dictators” like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, why Putin governs Russia as if it were a 19th-century empire, what we learn when we listen closely to Putin’s speeches and how this latest act of aggression is likely to play out. Mentioned: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt "How Putin Wants Russians to See the War in Ukraine” by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker The Future Is History by Masha Gessen First Person by Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov Book recommendations: The Last Empire by Serhii Plokhy Manual for Survival by Kate Brown Babi Yar by Anatoly Kuznetsov Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music and mixing by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Joanna Szostek.

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

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:16Ezra Klein?

  I'm recording this on Thursday, March 10th, this intro. And as of today, the two polls I've seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it's a war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It's a special military operation. And under a new law, to say anything that Putin's government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He's wiping out independent news operations. He's tightening access to social media.

• 0:59Ezra Klein?

  This is a country that already was filled with propaganda, where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition. And information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly. But if you don't know you're at war, then how do you understand war's consequences? What do Russians know of the sanctions that are beginning to destroy their economy and change their lives? How are they being understood? And importantly, how are they being narrativized? And then this separate but related question. What is it exactly that Putin is telling Russians? If you were to listen to him, to trust and believe him, what would you believe is happening

• 1:43Ezra Klein?

  in Ukraine? Masha Gessen covers Russia for The New Yorker and has been doing remarkable reporting from Ukraine and Russia alike. And Gessen has paid particular attention to what Russians are seeing and not seeing. This is an interest that goes way back in their work. They wrote A Biography of Vladimir Putin's Rise: A Man Without a Face, and then the National Book Award-winning The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which I cannot recommend more highly. It's both a remarkable book, but it's remarkably relevant now because a core question of that book, and that is a book partially about Putin, a core question of that book is how authoritarian regimes shape not just what a public knows, not just what a public believes, but how they think.

• 2:27Ezra Klein?

  The tools and information and raw material they have to order and understand their world. And that question is so horribly relevant right now. And it makes Gessen's perspective particularly essential right now. As always, my email, [email protected]. Masha Gessen, welcome to the show.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:52Ezra Klein?

  So you've been in Moscow in recent weeks. Paint the picture for me. What was it like to be there during the early days of the invasion?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  So I flew to Moscow, actually, on Thursday, the 24th. I got there on Friday, the 25th. So it was a bit more than 24 hours into the invasion when I got there. And every time I speak about what it felt like in Moscow for the week that I was there, I think I probably have to make a distinction between what you can see and feel and observe, even as a very informed observer, in the streets, and what you can see and hear and talk about in people's houses in private. It almost got to sort of a Soviet-level difference in that way, which is something

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I remember from my childhood, but I hadn't experienced in the many, many years that I lived there or that I have visited since I left. Were there two entirely parallel realities? And this, to me, was the most striking example, was actually the last night that I was in Moscow, which was last Wednesday night. So it was just less than a week into the invasion. And I was coming back to my hotel in Pushkin Square. And I should say, I actually chose to stay at a hotel in Pushkin Square because Pushkin Square is the central square in Moscow that is the traditional site of protests, going back to Soviet times. It's also the traditional site of all sorts of rendezvous.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And so I wanted to make sure that out of my hotel window, I could see if there were mass arrests or large protests that I could observe from the window. But this time, I was coming back to the hotel, and I saw, almost out of the corner of my eye, three policemen in full combat gear dragging a young woman into a police bus. And then behind them, another three policemen dragging another young woman.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  And then everything else was going on as normal, right? And imagine in the street in New York or anywhere else, right? That when you see three cops dragging somebody down the sidewalk, the first thing you would actually notice would be the onlookers. You'd rarely actually see the event itself. You'd see people observing the event. But nobody was noticing. Most of the people in the street were in one reality, where they were going about their regular business. This was happening right in front of a giant three or four story H and M store, which that night, H and M, like many other retailers, announced that they were pulling out of Russia. The next day, the store closed. But at that point, it was still illuminated.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  It still had the sort of all the gloss of the consumerist mosque of the last 20 years. And most of the people seemed to exist in that. And just these two young women and an entire army of cops that were posted all around the square existed in this other reality where there was a war and people protesting the war. So on the one hand, sort of on the surface, it felt like nothing had happened and nothing was happening. And on the other hand, every time I would go to somebody's house, there was like this incredibly speeded up sense of like something horrible has happened. Maybe we should consider leaving the country. We're leaving the country tomorrow. And by the end of my week long stay there,

• 6:23Speaker 01

  it was like this 36 hour leaving party where every house I went to, it was people with a stack of passports with their passport on top of the stack, saying goodbye to their friends.

• 6:38Ezra Klein?

  I assume that reflects, at least in part, that the people you know and see there. And it makes me wonder how bifurcated the both response and the understanding of what's happening is. I mean, if you're if you're an average Russian news consumer right now, what do you probably know about the war?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Well, if you're an average Russian news consumer, although I don't know that it's right to call an average Russian a news consumer, right? We already start getting into this tricky language territory. Very good point. But if you're an average Russian. A TV watcher. A TV watcher, yeah, or somebody who has the TV in the background all the time, right? So if you're one of those people, then you don't actually think there's a war going on. And you don't think there's a war going on for two very specific but distinct reasons. One is that the government has decreed that there is no war. It is, in fact, a crime now, as of last Friday, punishable by up to 15 years in prison,

• 7:42Speaker 01

  to call the war a war, or an invasion, or aggression. So on television, you hear that there's a special operation, that there's a peacekeeping operation, that there's an operation to stop the hostilities, they use various turns of phrase, but basically, the official name for it is the Special Military Operation. And you get the impression that that is led by these so-called separatist troops from eastern Ukraine and supported to some unknown measure by the Russian military. But I think that's not even the most important reason that you don't think much of anything is going on.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  The most important reason is that the actual tenor and flow of news hasn't changed, right? So this newscast, in which you learn about the special operation or whatever it is they're doing at the moment, lasts five minutes, right? It's the regular news at the top of the hour. It's not, you know, when I was flying to Moscow, that, 20 hours that I spent, because my flight was late and I was stuck in Paris for a while, 20 hours that I spent in airport terminals against those giant displays, you could tell, right, without even listening, without being able to hear what was being said, that something huge was happening in the world. You could tell that the flow of news had changed. You could tell that the picture had changed completely.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And it's the opposite in Russia. The picture hasn't changed, the tenor hasn't changed, the timing hasn't changed. And so the overall message is nothing much is going on, nothing huge is happening. And of course, you see the results of that in the street as well. On the Monday when the currency collapsed, there were some places, there were some lines on banks, but other places there weren't. There were no observable bank runs. People weren't rushing to stores to buy durable goods. One really interesting thing was a couple of days later, I was trying to buy some SSD drives. And I went to a whole bunch of electronics stores, one after another.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And they're all completely empty, right? And these like these huge chain stores that sell household appliances, washing machines, ranges, hair dryers, air conditioners and computers and computer accessories. So the stores were pretty much empty, but there were also out of SSD drives. So a very small portion of the population that was thinking, oh, we're about to lose like our access to cloud storage, our access to the larger world. We have to back everything up. But the larger population, the majority of people weren't thinking the ruble is worth two thirds of what it was worth yesterday. And, you know, I should go out and buy a washing machine. Right?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  So none of that stuff that happens in a normally communicating society when there's a currency crash, none of that was happening. It was another kind of bifurcated reaction.

• 10:54Ezra Klein?

  That gets to something that I've really been wondering, which is how much the average hides here. So I had asked you what an average Russian television watcher knows. But what does somebody who wants to know, know? What does somebody who has a sense, saw on social media, this is going on, saw a Russian tennis star or actor put up an anti-war message? What are they able to find out if they go looking?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Well, that's changing really fast. So.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  On Friday, one week and one day after the invasion, Russia basically blocked every single remaining independent media outlet. And by blocked, I mean blocked web access to it. And two of them, at least two of them, were also just forced to stop operating altogether. And they were the two main sources of information for people who aren't using, who aren't relying on official state media. And that's the Echo Moscow radio station and TV Rain, the independent web-based television channel. And Russia also blocked Facebook.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Now, that hugely reduces the amount of information readily available to people. The effect is a little bit delayed because people in Russia are still able to use VPNs. But with Visa and MasterCard pulling out of Russia, a lot of people who rely on Western paid VPNs are not going to be able to make payments anymore. So they're going to lose access over the course of the next few weeks. But now we're talking about vanishingly smaller numbers of people. People who really want to look for information, they still have access to Telegram.

• 12:44Ezra Klein?

  Telegram being the messaging service, not literal telegram.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Right, right. Thank you. Telegram, it's a little bit different than a messaging service. It's a weird little platform, or weird big platform that's very big in this part of the world, that is used for messaging, but it also has publicly available channels. So you can subscribe basically to a news stream. And a lot of independent and not so independent news media in Russian news media, Belarusian news media, maintain these Telegram channels. So people who want to are watching these Telegram channels. And they are seeing footage and photographs from Ukraine. They're getting more or less the same information that they would be getting from reading The New York Times. But that's a very small number of people.

• 13:34Ezra Klein?

  One thing I really appreciate about the way you lay all this out is it is disorienting even to listen to you talk about it. I can't imagine the disorientation of of living in it. But something that that occurs to me is an inversion of the experience that many of us are having in, let's say, the United States, which is, you mentioned the flow of news, and I think it's a really important distinction. There's what the news says, and then there's how much news there is, the volume of it, the loudness of it, the size of the type on the New York Times homepage. You know, my podcast, which typically does all kinds of things, is now it's only Russia-Ukraine episodes. But for most people in the West, with the exception of a modest rise in gas prices, they're not experiencing any difference

• 14:19Ezra Klein?

  in their day-to-day lives. But what you describe, it has this reversed quality, which is this normalcy in the news environment. But as much as maybe there aren't bank runs, I mean, you already talked about big chain stores closing, Visa and MasterCard, which are pretty important payment mechanisms pulling out of the country. A lot of players are pulling out of the country. The ruble is losing a lot of value. The number of sanctions are going to make it hard to get certain kinds of of goods that aren't produced directly in Russia, or require parts that don't directly come from China. Does it not feel to people like there's some difference between the world around them changing somewhat eerily?

• 15:03Ezra Klein?

  It almost sounds like the beginning of a of a zombie movie, right? Where everybody is acting normally, but but on the sides, you begin to see weird things on the on the headlines, and and all of a sudden, people are just walking in circles?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I wish I had watched a single zombie movie, because I've actually been wishing that for the last few days, because I realized that this is like an important point of reference. I mean, a small minority of people have a sense of absolute total catastrophe. When I was, I think I used, ill-advisedly used the word "party" earlier when I said "leaving party", but I mean, you know, these are like people saying goodbye to their entire lives, to their apartments, to everyone and everything they've ever known, packing their belongings, what they can pack into a suitcase or two in the course of often hours, right, not even days. But again, that's a small minority, and then the majority of the population sort of taking

• 16:00Speaker 01

  things in stride or pushing them out of their minds. And the question is, you know, what are the mechanisms that they're using to push them out of their minds? And I think the mechanisms have to do with adaptations that people have developed over the last thirty years. Things have changed drastically a lot in Russia.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And even things like having access to international payment mechanisms, losing access, having access to consumer goods, and then suddenly facing hyperinflation, not being able to afford them, and then being able to afford them again, right? People have gotten accustomed to a series of financial crashes and periods of hyperinflation and even periods of scarcity. And I think people have no idea about the scale of the catastrophe that they're facing. That is something that is much easier to see from the outside, or if you're one of those Russians who are reading the Telegram channels, then you realize this is not just

• 16:59Speaker 01

  your local H and M store closing, it is not just IKEA shutting down, it is not just a break in MasterCard and Visa being serviced, which, which happened in Russia in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea. For a while, there were shortages of some imported goods, and for a while, there was trouble accessing international payment mechanisms. And then it kind of sort of all leveled out and even got better than it had been before. And I think that's people's general expectation. They have a much higher tolerance for things changing suddenly, but also have an expectation of a return to a particular level of comfort. But of course, what makes that possible is the lack of any kind of circulation of information

• 17:44Speaker 01

  in society, right? You can't get a bigger picture than your own slice of experience.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Unless you're reading the independent media or Western media, you don't know just how overwhelming these sanctions are. If you kind of tune into the television, what you're actually hearing is a kind of reassuring buzz. Right? They mention Western sanctions, but then they say, but we're still going to have South Korean electronics. Not anymore, actually. South Korea is also joining sanctions. So all you have is your private experience. And maybe the private experience of a couple of people that you're communicating with, but you don't have the experience of a public sphere. And if you want to believe that things will probably get back to normal, it's easier to believe that, and you do want to believe that.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  But also, you have no way of of understanding the scale of catastrophe, right? And for example, you are not thinking about all the trains and planes and cars that are going to stop running in a few months because there will be no spare parts. You just don't have a way of knowing that.

• 18:59Ezra Klein?

  One of the things this implies is that you could see sanctions playing out in really divergent ways. So I think in the implicit model of how sanctions work in the minds of many policymakers, or at least we'll say in the minds of people commenting on them that I hear, is that sanctions put pressure on elites around Putin and also on the citizenry of Russia to want this to change, to try to push Putin to change what he is doing. But one version of this is that this is simply treated as some kind of roughly normal economic calamity, but things will be back soon.

• 19:41Ezra Klein?

  And that there's a push from state-influenced media to understand this is normal. The other that I've wondered about is the degree to which, as sanctions get worse, the narrative of the state will be that there is an offensive attack from the United States, from Europe, on Russia, that Russia is under a kind of assault. And then if the narrative around that can be sufficiently controlled, that far from

• 20:11Ezra Klein?

  Creating friction around Putin's regime, it will create a rallying around the flag effect, a sense that Russia is being almost economically invaded and that there needs to be unity in the face of it. I'm curious if you find one of those more persuasive than the other.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. The state narrative is already that, and in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea. The narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it's always us against the world. It's always us against the West, and the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia. But I also think that if we now sort of switch perspectives and think about sanctions from a Western perspective or particularly the US perspective, the way that the narrative of sanctions works is

• 21:17Speaker 01

  it matches the working definition of insanity, right? Sanctions is the thing that never works that the United States and other Western countries try over and over again, expecting a different outcome. At least that's true in relationship to Russia, right? The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin's behavior or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It's been tried over and over, and it doesn't work. Now, obviously, we've never seen sanctions on this scale, and it is mind-boggling.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  And part of me thinks, well, maybe, you know, maybe the change in quantity becomes qualitative change when life as people have known it in Russia. Is completely destroyed over the course of a few months, right? Realistically, the full impact of sanctions will be seen in a few months. But I still don't think that they can produce a revolt in the elites and even less than they can produce mass protest, especially in the face of a matching crackdown.

• 22:59Ezra Klein?

  This is a hard question to answer, probably. But something that I think a lot of this revolves around is a question of in extremis, how much power does Putin have over what Russians believe? And what I mean by this is that over time, the contradictions here between different narratives become deeper. One of the things sanctions are trying to do, and I agree with you, by the way, that sanctions do not have a awe-inspiring history of efficacy. But one thing they're trying to do is create a situation where, over time, normalcy is impossible to maintain.

• 23:43Ezra Klein?

  And you, in your really remarkable book, people should pick it up from a couple of years ago, "The Future is History," you talk about how the Soviet Union, at its core, had these deep contradictions that people had to believe simultaneously. And as the contradictions widened, one of the explanations for the regime's instability and ultimate collapse is they became unstable. And it seems to me that the theory here is that you're going to make the contradictions of what Putin is doing unstable, that on the one hand, he's promising normalcy, he's promising a stronger Russia, and on the other hand, what does success at this point look like for him in a realistic way? Military success is an occupation of a Ukraine that does not want to be occupied and is

• 24:27Ezra Klein?

  likely fighting back continuously and complete economic strangulation from the West.

• 24:36Ezra Klein?

  And the question I think that raises is you can maybe survive that if you can really convince people, your own people, that you're in the right. But it's very hard to survive if you can't. So how much do you think the willingness to believe media in Russia comes from a sense that Putin normally has things under control? And if that sense begins to falter, then that will change? Or how much does he really have the faith of the public? And between that and his control over the information channels, that will be enough over a long term, too?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words about the book. I mean, part of what I tried to think through in the future's history is the impossibility of knowing what people think in a totalitarian society and like the actual impossibility of it. Because it's not that you can't find out what people really think, it's that people can't really think. And so you can't find out what they can really think. And so there can be sudden and truly unpredictable shifts in what passes for public opinion in a society in which there's no public and no

• 25:52Speaker 01

  possibility of opinion, which is kind of what happened at the end of the Soviet Union. And it could happen again. The Putin regime and the Soviet regime before him rested on a kind of perceived legitimacy, right? And there's actually a piece I wrote for The New Yorker a little while ago, where I talked to this wonderful contemporary Russian sociologist and philosopher Grigory Yudin, who talks about the way that people are forced to manufacture signs of this legitimacy. Like, for example, this enormous bureaucratic apparatus is mobilized

• 26:31Speaker 01

  to herd people to the polls to vote for Putin, so that then Putin can lord the results of that vote over the bureaucratic apparatus.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  That has just been forced to manufacture this evidence of legitimacy that supports Putin. The reason that a totalitarian regime needs a perceived legitimacy is because it's the only thing that stands between it and losing control of its armed forces. Now Putin has put some other precautions in place. He's a true paranoid dictator. I mean, the worse people live, the more, up to a certain point perhaps, or perhaps indefinitely, and we don't know whether it's up to a certain point or indefinitely, the more people want to hang on to the illusion of stability. So, and this is something that Hannah Arendt wrote about, right?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  That totalitarian regimes hold out the carrot of stability while constantly manufacturing instability. And so when you're always on the edge of a precipice and your one true leader keeps telling you the only reason that you haven't fallen over the edge is because of me, then you are in some way simultaneously believing that the leader has led you to the edge of the precipice and that the leader is keeping you from falling onto the precipice.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  But you kind of have to hold on to both beliefs for dear life, or else the precipice opens up and swallows you.

• 28:04Ezra Klein?

  I want to hold on a point you made before, that this kind of regime makes it hard simply to think. This is something you talk about quite a bit in your analysis of the Soviet Union and in the future's history. And you talk about how the tools of self-understanding were withheld, everything from sociology to Freudian psychoanalysis, all of the different sciences that we use to create different lenses on our society, to say nothing of the empirical information that feeds into them, not Freudian analysis, but others, were withheld. But something you were just making me think about there in the way things changed is

• 28:43Ezra Klein?

  that for all of the internal horrors and killings and jockeying, a lot of what changed came as regimes changed, as somebody new took power and they had different views than the person before. And you know, from everything you're saying and from everything I have read, I don't think the hope of Putin being toppled is a very realistic one. And so in a regime like this, where you have withheld a lot of the substance that allows reasoning and societal planning away from people, and you have a dictator in control of this apparatus,

• 29:28Ezra Klein?

  are we really simply in a situation where what simply matters at the end of the day is what one man believes Russia should do? I mean, is it really that vertical in the power structure?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  That's a simple question, and it has a simple answer, yes. And we've never seen that more clearly than in the last couple of weeks. What has emerged is not only that Putin is unilaterally making decisions, but that those decisions are based, you know, those enormous decisions, the decision to wage a war are based on a, on a series of conjectures and fantasies that he seems to have created out of whole cloth. I think it's a combination of two things. One is actual physical and mental isolation, which apparently has been exacerbated by COVID.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  He had an extremely tiny circle of interlocutors before the pandemic, and he has apparently cut it down to something like zero since the pandemic begun, right? So we're, I mean, we're living in a world, a world, not just a country, but a world that is right now being shaped by a man who has been thinking alone, and not very well, but also most dangerously alone for two years.

• 31:01Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk then about the way he sees the world. And I'm trying to think of where to begin this, but I actually want to begin with the question of time. What time period is he mentally and metaphorically grounded in? And by that, I mean, right now, in the US, I think the metaphor and the time period governing a lot of thinking is the Cold War. I think a lot of people are reaching back either to a remembered past then or to a studyable past then. But I don't get the sense from reading Putin's speeches that that's really true for him. I think that it seems that his periods are different. So what time period is he using as his metaphorical and conceptual base?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  That's a great question. But actually, first, I would say that Russians in general, I think, are much less likely to see the Cold War as a distinct period in history. The Cold War was, perhaps from the Russian point of view, a specific, a particular example of the post-World War II period, which is characterized by the Soviet Union becoming a superpower. But Putin appears to be placing himself on a continuum of Russian history that he sees

• 32:26Speaker 01

  as a series of great leaders, beginning with Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was not an emperor that Russians particularly revered ever before Vladimir Putin's reign, but the first monument to Ivan the Terrible went up, I guess, six, seven years ago in Russia. So Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin. It's a very, it's a huge span. It's a series of great, brutal, expansionist dictators. He skips right over the great divide of the October Revolution.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  He doesn't see the Soviet period as distinct in Russian history. And so he gave a scary and rambling and ridiculous speech on February 21st by way of introducing this new invasion of Ukraine. But as a Putin text, it was quite remarkable. Because he laid out his vision of the entire Soviet period in more detail than he ever has before. And what he said was that, without using the word empire, but he said that that whole

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Soviet way of constituting the empire by nominally giving its constituent parts the rights of statehood and nominally making the Union voluntary was a fiction. That in fact, there is a continuous history from the Russian Empire to the present day, and that all the separations from Moscow's rule that have occurred over the period of the last 100-plus years are illegitimate. So he places himself in this really, really long period, but he also, I mean, he's profoundly anti-modern, right?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  He's a president of a European country in 2022, who's engaging in completely uncritical, unexamined imperial rhetoric and sort of saying everything that came after is bullshit.

• 34:43Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that is exactly what I'm getting at. And I want to talk about that speech in some detail, but what has been striking, reading him, listening is the wrong word because I need to read the translations, but there's been a tendency to call him irrational and unhinged, and I'm not here to make any judgments on Vladimir Putin's mental state. But what he seems to me mostly is somebody who has decided to act and think as if it's 1847. And that his logic works better and is more comprehensible under the rules of imperialism

• 35:22Ezra Klein?

  and great power expansion and so on, that were taken more or less for granted then. There were things you had to justify and things you didn't. And it all makes some sense. And he's also throwing back to the 19th century, the early 20th century for legitimacy of what he thinks Russia owns or what he thinks has always been Russian. But that there is something in him right now that has become, I think, confusing to a lot of onlookers because he simply refuses to accept the logic and norms of the international order that at least a lot of other countries believe they need to pretend to be following. And I think it is a fair thing to say America does not actually follow these rules, this order. But it tries to pretend to. But he doesn't.

• 36:07Ezra Klein?

  He just sort of brushes it aside, more or less, and has really thrown back to pre-modern logic of how a ruler should act and what it is right and reasonable for a ruler to do.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And, you know, I'm glad you actually mentioned this idea that Putin is unhinged and irrational. Because I don't think it's ever particularly useful to call somebody, a world leader or anyone else irrational. But it's much more useful to try to figure out in what world they're rational.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Putin is perfectly consistent in his thinking and his behavior. It's just that the universe he lives in is what he describes quite openly. We just have to listen, right? And it is the pre-modern, or if you do take into account that it is 2022, the anti-modern universe of imperial logic. And he looks at the West and I think thinks that the West is irrational. He's as aware, probably more aware than you and I are, of the hypocrisy of the norms proclaimed by the United States. But they seem totally absurd to him because they also don't make sense, right? So here's the United States that pretends

• 37:26Speaker 01

  to hold to ideas and values that make no sense. Whereas he, Putin, has ideas and values that are rooted in history and he acts in perfect accordance with them.

• 38:04Ezra Klein?

  Something that you've said is that to understand Putin, we should listen to what he's saying. So what I want to do is read you some things he said, both in that February speech and in some before it, and talk about what they may reveal. But before we do, I want to ask you one question, which is, how do you take the truth value to him of the things he says in public?

• 38:28Ezra Klein?

  Because sometimes I read what he's saying, and it reads to me like something he would probably think. And sometimes it reads like,

• 38:37Ezra Klein?

  "I cannot tell if he has a strange invented history meant to rationalize what he wants to do, or he has invented a history as a public relations campaign." Like, how do you understand if Putin believes the things he says in public? What do you think his level of commitment to his own words actually is?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, it's never that simple, is it? It's like, I know, I know your kids are little, but when they become teenagers, you're going to encounter this very interesting kind of interaction that every parent of teenager has always had, which is your teenager will lie to you and then get terribly upset that you don't believe them. And then the longer their argument goes on, the more attached they will be to the thing that they lied to you about, even though you both know that they were lying.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  But like, by the end of the conversation, they will be fully committed to the lie that they know started out as a lie, or they used to know, but maybe they don't know anymore. And that's, you know, that's a way of sort of trivializing these really tragic things that we're talking about. But I'm just trying to say that there isn't a simple way to separate what he believes from what he says, because the moment he says it, he believes it more. And again, if you think of him as somebody who's been sitting alone for two years, probably watching a fair amount of his own TV, how can you separate what he actually believes from what he invented? And then eventually came to believe because it's in his feedback loop?

• 40:12Ezra Klein?

  So let's talk about some of the things he says he believes. And I want to pull together a couple of statements he makes in his February speech about Ukraine. So he says, quote, "I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space," end quote. He says that, quote, "Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia," or to be more precise, "by Bolshevik Communist Russia," end quote. But then he says something weird. I mean, these are all weird things to say, but something that I thought was particularly telling. And after having given this long exegesis on the way that he understands Ukraine to

• 40:53Ezra Klein?

  have been a political construct by Lenin, he says, quote, "Personally, I can add that no political factors, however impressive or profitable they may seem at any given moment, can or may be used as the fundamental principles of statehood." What do you take him to mean by that? What is he saying about what makes a state?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Right. So I mean, I think he's doing a lot of things in that sentence. But mostly, he is devaluing speech and devaluing politics and devaluing legal arrangements. He's creating a kind of image of a natural, possibly even a mystical state, right? There's a thing that is, and he knows what that thing is. That thing is some sort of unity of Russians and Ukrainians. And in fact, when he says unity, he means the nonexistence of Ukrainians. It's just Russians. And we have piled a lot of things on top of that. We have piled a lot of language. We have created laws.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  We have drawn borders. We have elected parliaments and said things about what one country is called and what the other country is called and having bilateral relations or whatever it is we've done. But none of that matters because he knows what is. And what is isn't any of the things that we have named or drawn or put down on paper.

• 42:22Ezra Klein?

  There's a theme throughout the entire speech in which Putin is criticizing Soviet Union, criticizing communist period, keeps occasionally trying to say, "I understand things were complicated", but certainly rooting the divisions he is trying to rectify through force now in decisions made by Soviet leaders. But then he says this, and he's aiming this at the government in Ukraine. He says, quote, "You want decommunization? Very well. This suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunization would mean for Ukraine." And on some level, that is simply framed as a threat of invasion,

• 43:06Ezra Klein?

  which he, of course, follows through on. But what does he mean by decommunization here?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Let me just preface this with something that I was just thinking as you were asking this question, that I think we should be aware as we talk through interpreting his speech, which is one of my favorite, if depressing, activities. One of the reasons that it's rewarding to listen to what Putin says is that he's not a terribly knowledgeable man. So when he gave that speech, it was very informative because I thought, oh, he has gone and studied these couple of things. He doesn't know a lot of the context. He doesn't have a lot of knowledge of history, even though he fancies himself a historian these days. But we learn a lot from the little that he says

• 43:55Speaker 01

  because he kind of says that everything that he knows. And he delivers his a-day fix. And he gives a very clear reflection of what he is thinking about, what he's obsessed with and what he's going to be obsessed with for the foreseeable future and what is going to be the motivating force behind his actions. So clearly, he has been thinking a lot about the difference between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. And he has decided that the Russian Empire was the legitimate entity and the Soviet Union was fake. And when he said that Lenin created Ukraine...

• 44:38Speaker 01

  What he is saying is that Russian Empire was a unitary power. It's not exactly true. There were actually significant exceptions to that sort of unitarianism, like, for example, Finland, which, as part of the Russian Empire, had its own currency, it had its own parliament. But he may not know this. He thinks it was a single state with a single ruler and no meaningful borders. And then Lenin comes along, takes this empire, chops it up into a bunch of pieces, and says each of these is a state.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Kind of like, and I think Putin is thinking this, kind of like the European Union is now. That's a whole bunch of different countries that are in a voluntary union. The treaties on which the European Union is based are not dissimilar in substance from the constitution of the Soviet Union, which gave each of its 15 constituent republics full rates of statehood. And so he says all of that was completely false. It was a violence done to a country that existed. And so we illegitimize that, we go back to the empire. But when he is saying, do you want decommunization?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  He is also referring to something that Russia perceived as deeply offensive and even traitorous in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014. Which is, in Ukrainian and Russian, was called Leninapad, which translates as, I guess, the falling of the Lenins. Ukrainians all over the country dismantled the Lenin monuments. To Ukrainians, this meant a break with the Moscow hegemony.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  To them, Lenin monuments in every central square, in every big city and small town were a symbol of the empire. And so now Putin comes and says, okay, you dismantled the Lenin monuments to symbolize your break with the empire. But hey, the only claim you ever had to statehood was thanks to Lenin, who created this whole framework of Ukrainian statehood that I have now decreed is false. So if you dismantle the monument to the one guy in power in Russia who ever recognized your statehood, well, great. You don't get to have any statehood.

• 47:23Ezra Klein?

  Let me do two more here. The back half of the speech is very much about Russia's relationship with the US, with Europe, with NATO. There is a long list of grievances offered of a narrative of an endlessly reasonable Russia, making endlessly reasonable offers, being rebuffed, ignored, dismissed, humiliated, talked down to. At some point Putin says, in asking why Russia keeps being treated as an enemy, as opposed to a friend or an ally, quote, "There can be only one answer. This is not about our political regime or anything like that. They just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around. This is the answer to all questions.

• 48:08Ezra Klein?

  This is the source of America's traditional policy towards Russia, hence the attitude to all our security proposals." Is this how Putin sees America and the West? That we operate out of a constant and ongoing fear of Russian strength?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  I don't actually think that that particular sentence says that the United States operates out of ongoing fear of Russian strength. I think it says that the United States continues to insist on denying Russian strength and trying to humiliate Russia and diminish it.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And there's a specific reference point to this feeling and this narrative, which Putin has mentioned in other speeches, but which also is an integral part of sort of the distilled propaganda that's going into, for example, into schools or is being distributed to bloggers and TikTokers that government agents are hiring to spread propaganda to the non-TV-watching public, which is the 1999 air war in Kosovo, which to Putin is the kind of the focal point of Russian humiliation.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Now, what happened in 1999 was that the United States decided to intervene militarily in Kosovo, where there was a pattern of sustained ethnic violence perpetrated by Serbian police and military against ethnic Albanians. Kosovo was an ethnically Albanian province of Serbia that had strong linguistic and cultural ties to neighboring Albania and really wanted to secede from Serbia and join Greater Albania.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  I'm going into some detail because Putin has gone to a lot of trouble to create a perfect symmetry with Ukraine. In 1999, the United States decided to lead an air war over Kosovo without seeking the agreement of the UN Security Council and without consultation with Russia, or worse, explicitly rejecting the possibility that it would consult with Russia on a thing like this. Russia has only kind of an imaginary connection to Serbia because Serbia is also an Eastern Orthodox country.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  There weren't particularly strong economic or cultural ties, but it was an incredible experience of... Humiliation and powerlessness for Russian leadership, and I think for a lot of ordinary Russians, right? That idea that we wouldn't even be consulted, that they wouldn't even pretend to listen to us, right? The then-Russian Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov was actually on his way to Washington for talks with Al Gore about the Russian debt. And when he found out that the United States was refusing to even discuss the planned bombing campaign with Russians, so he turned his plane around, returned to Moscow.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And that was that was kind of a breaking point in Russian politics. And so Putin is referring to that, is saying, look, they don't take us into account. They wrote us off way back then in 1999. We have now come back. We're economically and militarily strong. And we're going to make it clear that we're not going to be in that place again. We're not going to be humiliated like that and diminished like that again.

• 52:00Ezra Klein?

  Let me do one more of these. This is from Putin's book, first person. It's a book of self-presentation, I think it's fair to say. And he says there something that struck me as relevant, which is, quote, "I think that there are always a lot of mistakes made in war. That's inevitable. But when you're fighting, if you keep thinking that everybody around you is making mistakes, you'll never win. You have to take a pragmatic attitude and you have to keep thinking of victory." You've talked a bit before about the pains Putin goes to in this early book, in this early self-presentation, to explain what kind of fighter he is, what his relationship towards fighting is,

• 52:42Ezra Klein?

  and how he acts within fights. How do you read that quote and the sort of broader self-conception he has of himself in these moments?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  That's so interesting. I don't remember that phrase. So this book was written in January, February 2000, during the second war that Russia waged in Chechnya.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  That's clearly his main preoccupation at the time when he's talking about war and his main reference point. And this is, you know, this is something I've been thinking a lot about in the last week and a half as Russia has become bogged down in Ukraine and it's made me very scared of what comes next. Because what happened when Russia started a war in one of its own breakaway provinces in Chechnya was eerily similar to what is happening in Ukraine. Yeltsin at the time was promised in 1994, he was promised a quick, you know, two-hour

• 53:49Speaker 01

  quick war where they would overthrow the elected government of Chechnya, install a puppet Moscow government, would be welcomed with the open arms and sort of solve the whole Chechen separatist crisis. It turned out that their coup design failed miserably and then their attempts to take Grozny with tanks and infantry failed miserably. And then they bombed the life out of Grozny, they carpet bombed Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. And still, they were confronted with popular resistance and guerrilla warfare for months

• 54:29Speaker 01

  and months and months until in 1996, they finally settled on a, basically a ceasefire that lasted for about four years until Putin came around and said, no, we have to finish the job. And finishing the job was basically a scorched earth approach to both Chechnya and Russian politics, right? There was not going to be any opposition tolerated to the war and there was not going to be any independent media coverage tolerated of the war. And what we've seen over the last week and a half in Ukraine is they planned a coup, the coup clearly failed miserably, their first attempts to get paratroopers into the

• 55:13Speaker 01

  country to just have some kind of quick military operation and their designs on the Ukrainian public, greeting them with open arms, all turned out to be completely deluded and fantastical. And so then they tried to take half the country at least with, with tanks and infantry, also doesn't go so well. And I think we know what comes next.

• 55:35Ezra Klein?

  I think then, before we do books, I want to end on something you said that relates to what comes next. This was in a recent interview you gave, and you said, quote, "Putin has staked his entire political future on this war. There is no way for him to exit it, to find a non-triumphant solution and retain power. And I don't think there's a way for him to survive not retaining power, to humanly, physically survive not retaining power. He is really cornered. And that's a terrifying situation for the world, not just for Ukraine." Rather than exactly having you expand on that, I want to ask what your... to the extent there is such a thing as an optimistic scenario here, right? And that requires a time machine, so optimistic may be the wrong word.

• 56:20Ezra Klein?

  But what is the least worst outcome you think realistic right now?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Um, you know, Ezra, I don't actually know. I am... I mean, least worst in the short term is still pretty awful. But it's pretty clear. He takes... He takes Ukraine up to, say, Kiev. He imprisons, or more likely kills Volodymyr Zelensky. The West sort of negotiates a cessation of the war in exchange for letting him take most of Ukraine. And then the optimistic part. I mean, that's sort of the best-case scenario in the short term, because at least the killing stops.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And then the optimistic part is he dies soon after. Because if he doesn't, it happens again and again and again.

• 57:16Ezra Klein?

  And you mean here in places like Moldova?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, Poland. They're all on notice.

• 57:29Ezra Klein?

  Well, that's a chilling answer.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  That's the best case scenario. In the worst case, I mean, the worst likely case, I think, is we're talking about a tactical nuclear weapon aimed at military airports in Poland.

• 57:47Ezra Klein?

  So there is, for you, no climb down here for him. There's no version where he takes a face-saving compromise as opposed to an actual territorial victory that is a real enough victory that he understands it to be a victory that he can build on in the future.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  I haven't conjured one. If someone else does, I will clutch onto it for dear life because what I'm looking at is absolutely terrifying.

• 58:19Ezra Klein?

  I'll leave it there, then. Always our final question. What are three books in this moment that you think people should read?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  So I was actually thinking of three of the books, best books about Ukraine. Well, actually, one is about the breakup of the Soviet Union, which I think is very accessible and very useful to read right now. It's Serhiy Plohe. He is a Ukrainian historian at Harvard. The Last Empire. It's a fairly short history of the dissolution of the Soviet Union from a kind of post-colonial perspective, right? There are different ways to think about what broke the Soviet Union apart, but this takes as a starting point the idea that this was a century when empires collapsed and this was the last one to collapse.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  I would also recommend Kate Brown's Manual for Survival, which is a book about Chernobyl. There was a small sort of explosion of, explosion is a bad word, but there was a few books that came out about Chernobyl a couple of years ago, and this is my favorite because it's a history from below. It's Kate Brown talks to a number of people, many of them women, which is something that other historians of Chernobyl didn't do. They very much looked at it as a history from the top. And I think it's an extraordinary book about not just what happened in Chernobyl, but about how totalitarian society worked. And there's an amazing book called Babayyar by Anatoly Kuznetsov.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Who was a little boy in Kiev in 1941, when the massacre at Babinyar, on the outskirts of Kiev, were tens of thousands of Jews and later, tens of thousands of people of other ethnicities were murdered by the Nazis. So it's a kind of meta read where you learn about Babinyar, but you also learn the bizarre ways in which Soviet censorship and Soviet repression of history worked.

• 1:00:28Ezra Klein?

  Moshe Kessin, thank you very much.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:00:42Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roche Karma, Annie Galvin, and Jeff Gald. This episode is fact checked by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music and mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin, Christina Samulovski, and Joanna Schostak.