Alexei Navalny: Putin's Enemy Explained - John Sweeney | Modern Wisdom Podcast 273

John Sweeney is an investigative journalist and a writer. There is a fascinating and incredibly dangerous poker game going on in Russia at the moment. The establishment versus the newcomer. Alexei Navalny Expert to learn why Navalny is galvanising such support, how he survived poisoning with novichok, how he convinced one of his own assassins to admit to trying to kill him and why he once nearly became a pirate... Sponsors: Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Navalny's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAw3WynQJMm7tMy093y37A Buy Useful Idiot - https://amzn.to/3936FEz Listen to Hunting Ghislaine - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hunting-ghislaine-with-john-sweeney/id1539949999 Follow John on Twitter - https://twitter.com/johnsweeneyroar Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #navalny #russia #putin - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating and incredibly dangerous poker game between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny. The odds are against Navalny. Inside Russia, inside a prison right now, is the future of Russia, the Russian soul at its best. The most interesting place to be right now is in prison with Alexei Navalny.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  Alexei Navalny is a guy who's been poisoned, imprisoned multiple times, had acid and green paint thrown on him, called Vladimir Putin a poisoned toad and flown drones over his mansion on YouTube and somehow not died. This reads, sounds like a spy novel.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  It's actually, I'm thinking of a poem by Lomontov, A Hero of Our Time. Actually, it's a novel. Whenever I get into this, I want to drink vodka and annoyingly I'm on gin. But he is a hero of our time, Alexei Navalny. You know, I've met him twice and the first time I properly engaged with him is in 2016. And this guy is challenging the Kremlin in a way which is extraordinarily brave, Chris. And people who say, you know, what are you doing? You know, he's been poisoned. Why on earth is he going back to Russia?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  People who say that haven't been paying attention. In very simple terms, I met, I've been going to Russia since 92. I did Russian O level at school. I scraped through it. I don't speak Russian, but I love it. I love the culture. And when I used to work for the BBC, I would go there every two years, do something that would annoy the Kremlin. They would follow us around and then I'd leave. And the last time I did a film called Taking On Putin and I met Navalny for that twice. And he really is a hero. But here's the background, is that I met three Russians who were all critical of Putin.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  At a time when the West was still trying to rub along with Putin, one of them was Anna Politiev Skaya, the second Natasha Estamarova, they were both great journalists, and the third was Boris Nemtsal, he was a journalist and a politician. Shot, shot, shot. So these three people who had the balls to stand up to Putin and to be critical of them were all shot dead. And Navalny knows this, he knows the history, and basically he's been challenging Putin's, you know, the poisoned toad's lock on power, lock on the Kremlin for the past decade.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  And he knows that if you do that, you may well die.

• 3:00Chris Williamson?

  The backlog doesn't look very good for him, does it?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  No, but he's doing it because I think it's perfectly possible for him to live a life in exile in Germany or the States or here. And then for one day a cement mixer to sort of cross over the road and knock him out.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  That isn't, so what he's doing is, I mean, I think, you know, why the timing? I thought the timing was absolutely amazing because what he's done is he's got himself locked up on the day that Donald Trump, who was far too uncritical of Vladimir Putin, has gone. And Joe Biden is now in place. And then the moment he's locked up, up pops the video. And the video is about Vladimir Putin's fancy new palace. It's a billion pound house and it's disgusting.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  You know, the detail I tweeted was that there's some kind of hookah bar, hookah, H double O K A H, but also E R, you would imagine, and I say that with a fair bit of evidence because there's a stripper's pole in it. Now, it's...

• 4:21Speaker 00

  The other thing is if you go to Russia, so I did a film, whenever it was, two thousand and five, six for the BBC, about vodka poisonings. What happened was that Putin hiked up the price of vodka, and, um, threefold, putting it out of, out of reach of a lot of ordinary Russians who were very, very poor, and the mafia moved in and started flogging, um, hand sanitizers, alcohol-based, and basically, um, you have to put in a colorant, nobody cares, people with alcohol problems didn't care, and this caused an epidemic of liver disease, and people

• 5:04Speaker 00

  turned yellow, and I went into the hospitals and the sticks, and, God, it was bleak. So what you've got to realize is that Russia is far crueler and far more unfair, and wealth is divided far more unequally than anywhere in, in Western Europe, or other states, unfair as the States is. So that the idea that, you know, that there, um, there are ordinary people really suffer in Russia, but the idea that the, what Navalny calls the czar of

• 5:41Speaker 00

  corruption, has built himself a new mansion, a new palace, is disgraceful. So, it's a fascinating, an incredibly dangerous poker game between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny, and, you know, the poison toad in the Kremlin, he's got the killing machine, machinery, the FSB, which is the new name for the KGB, he's got his lock on this monstrous corruption engine, the Russian economy, and he's got the oligarchs. And Navalny's in prison, uh, he's in Roman

• 6:24Speaker 00

  prison at the moment, facing trial, he can get locked up again. So the odds are really, really against him.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  However, Putin has been in power for 20 years and good Russians, I mean, there are, there's a new generation of Russians who've only known Putin in power, who are now 20, who've got the vote, who've got energy, they've got belief. And at some point, the poisoned toad is gonna, is gonna run out of supporters, of money, of people willing to do the killing. So it's, the bets very much, you know, it's not a, the odds are against it, but my money isn't on the poisoned toad, my money's on Navalny.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  How would you define Navalny's political approach, his stance, and why is he important? Why is he popular?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  He's enormously charismatic. I mean, you're a bit charismatic. I can shout, he'd knock us dead. He's got kind of intense blue eyes. The only person, actually, there are three, there are two other people I'm thinking about, who I've met in my time. One of them is the Dalai Lama, the god king of Tibet, who by the way, has got a fantastic laugh, like Sid James, when Barbara Windsor used to pop her bra. And so that's the Dalai Lama. But he, he's got a real commanding presence and a beautiful way. The other person is Bill Clinton. When he walks into a room, Bill Clinton can command a room.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  The third person is Alexei Navalny. So he's got a real commanding presence. He's also, he's got a wit. If you watch the video, which is, how many people have seen it now?

• 8:22Chris Williamson?

  26 million people have watched the YouTube video he put up last night. So we're recording this on Wednesday, the 20th of January, last night, on the 19th, he puts this two hour long video up. So it's not like something that feeds the algorithm to go viral. It's not just a short little clip. It's a full blown documentary. And you're totally right, like the level of- The level of charisma that he's got, I can't work, I almost want to chalk it up to the translations, the captions, because I'm like, you can't speak this precisely with this much wit just on command. It must be the closed captions making him look cool.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  He's, so he's got charm, he's got fire, he's got wit, and it's for real. I mean, I've done a podcast called Hunting Jellem, which I've just heard it's now hit 2 million downloads.

• 9:23Chris Williamson?

  Link in show notes below, go and listen to it, it was awesome.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Blah, blah, blah. This bastard, Alexei, has got 13 times as many hits as that I've got 2 million. And my stuff in a day, fuck off, sorry, can we swear?

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fire away, mate. Yeah, you're on the gin.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  But he, and he was really funny, really intense, and sticking it, sticking it to the Russian, the then Russian Prosecutor General Chyka, saying, all concerned in irony, wrongdoing, but pointing out the evidence that the Prosecutor General and his family had benefited from corruption, and the victim of the corruption who complained ended up dead. So Navalny's been doing this, you know, to my personal knowledge, from 2016, but

• 10:24Speaker 00

  actually he's been doing before that. And there's almost something monkish, in the sense of, there's a religious fervour that he's bringing this war against corruption.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  So Navalny is a dissenter, he appears to not really care about the powers that be, and he's just happy to continue on his path. I like how you said that he seems almost monkish, he's got this kind of religious fervour behind him that's compelling him, but really, all that is, is just values and integrity in a place where there isn't much.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Many of your listeners might start falling off their chairs, but they're going to say it: "He's a lawyer, and he believes in the truth of the law." And he kind of reminds me of Sir Thomas More in the bit in "Man for All Seasons." I love Robert Bolt, who wrote that. He was just a fantastic writer. And there's a bit in Thomas More, "Man for All Seasons," where Richard Rich says, "Oh, you know," and paraphrasing, "Screw the law, doesn't matter."

• 11:44Speaker 00

  And Thomas More says, "No, you're wrong, because the law is... The law of England, or England is planted thick with laws, and they're there to protect us. And if we knock them down, the devil can come for us. That's what the law's for." And so what Navalny does very cleverly, both in his videos and in his defenses, he says, "No, that's unlawful." And he uses the information that's available to him to nail Putin's illegality again and again and again. And anybody who knows Russia knows how crooked the regime is and how crooked the Russian state is.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  The Soviet Union was crooked too, but it had some sense of equality. I'm a little bit Soviet nostalgic in relation to the late 70s, because there was so much hope then. I wasn't old enough to properly understand this, but I've heard this from older Russians, that they had some hope that what replaced the nonsense, the great big lie of Soviet communism, would be better. And it's turned out that, yes, economic life has been better, but actually, in reality, political life is somehow darker,

• 13:13Speaker 00

  because there's no hope and it's more joyless. I make a distinction. I've written a novel called "The Useful Idiot," which is about Stalin's time, about fake news in 1933.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Boom boom. And that's, that time was really dark and Stalin looked good because Hitler was so bad. But Stalin was bad too. And, and, and what's happened is that Putin, Putin is more of an heir to Stalin than people think. Not for nothing, the other day when he was arrested in the police station, and there's a trial taking place in the police station, on the wall was a picture of this man, Beria, Levrentiy Beria. Beria was Stalin's secret policeman. He was a mass murderer. He killed, occasion the death of millions of people

• 14:10Speaker 00

  who, who died in the Gulag. Um, so there's a continuity of darkness, of, of evil empowered, which, which certainly Gorbachev and Yeltsin broke. Both of those men were good men, wrestling with all the contradictions of Russian power. Um, Gorbachev ineffectually, Yeltsin, good to begin with, and then he drank himself into, into, into being a useful gibberish. Wasn't good enough. And the problem is, there's this awful dark moment of succession, when nobody quite knows who's going to take over from Yeltsin. And then this, the poison toad,

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Putin appears.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  So, is Navalny, is Navalny juxtaposing his extreme integrity and extreme virtue, at least publicly, to create a contrast with Putin? Is that part of his appeal, do you think?

• 15:11Speaker 00

  He always does it with a joke. So the downside to Navalny and some of my Russian friends.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Are worried about him if he does get power is that around about two thousand seven, eight, nine, he dallied with the Russian right, the nationalist right. Now, Russia is, for a whole series of reasons, it is, it, the centre of its politics are almost like ten or twenty degrees to the right than they are in the west.

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, the extreme right in Russia must be really, really right.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  No, they're Nazis, and, and, and he wasn't one of them. But he was, he said, he used language in code, but the code wasn't very, wasn't very good, which was talking about, effectively, the purity of Russian-ness, about Russian roots, and, and this was politics of the other, and the other here being the mainly Muslim people

• 16:28Speaker 00

  from the south, people like the Chechens, who, who weren't, who many Russians don't see as Russians. What happened was, Navalny got locked up, and going to prison was the making of him, because he started doing well, he became too well, he was too, he was on telly, and people could see his charisma, and they switched off the telly and they locked him up for a short while. But while he was locked up in prison, he, he really got to know the liberal opposition, and he listened to their arguments and beliefs, and when he left prison, he, he had absorbed

• 17:11Speaker 00

  the arguments and beliefs of the liberal opposition, and allied himself with them again and again and again. And since then, he has dropped the nationalist rhetoric, and you haven't heard that kind of language from him for a decade. So I think he's through that point, and, and that's in the past. Since then... He's done two particular things in that he's, I forget the details of it, but he's, his family is mixed up Russian and Ukrainian, as many, many Russians and Ukrainians are.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  And he learnt to speak Ukrainian, he's got, obviously had or has Ukrainian grandpa and grandma, and loved them, opposed Putin's war against Ukraine. Now, that's big potatoes, because the Russian right doesn't like that. And then the other thing is, he has, he's the only serious figure in Russian politics who stands up for same-sex relationships, same-sex marriages. And that's super non-right. So the idea, which the Kremlin put out, that he's a racist, I don't think that's, that's true, and hasn't been true for a decade.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  May not have been true back then, but I'm uneasy about the language he used back then. He doesn't use it anymore.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the wars that he's got into over the last decade? Because there's been, his brother's in jail in solitary confinement, and then he was getting locked up himself every five days because he didn't have a permit to campaign, and some with green paint, and then embezzling and all sorts. Take us through some of those stories.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  So, um, the, by the way, I'm a bit wired because Donald Trump has, has left and Joe Biden has come. And so you're hitting me with asking me details, so I'm apologizing to your listeners in that I can be better than this, but I'm too excited about what's happening in America. I'm also excited because of this queasy relationship between Vladimir Putin.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  And Donald Trump, that's over folks, and Navalny knows it, that's why the timing. So, in a rough and ready way, what happens is that Putin has been ineffective, the boss of Russia for two decades. And that's against the constitution because borrowing from the American constitution, you can only do two terms. I think four years, four years, which got due to 2008. At that point, it's out of the dirt sheet, Mr. Putin, you're out. What he does is, he does a switch with this guy called, I'm gonna, what's his name? Dmitry, I've got the wrong name stuck in my head, but he's the, he becomes the president

• 20:20Speaker 00

  and Putin is the prime minister. The reality is, all the power sticks with Putin. There's a wonderful friend of mine who's written this great book, Stalin and His Hangman. And I've forgotten his name too, but never mind, it'll come back to me, memory pops up in a wonderful way. And he described the president, it's Dmitry, damn, I keep on wanting to say Levadov, but it's not Levadov, Dmitry, it means the bear in Russian.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Dmitry the President, described by my friend, Donald Rayfield, Professor Donald Rayfield, author of Stalin and His Hangman, as Al Capone's lawyer. So, Al Capone's lawyer is the president of Russia for four years until 2012, and then in 2012, guess what? The constitution is rewritten and Vladimir Putin pops back up again, this time running for president. He wins, but the whole thing is a joke, it's a lie, it's an undermining of the true spirit of democracy. And Navalny... Coming as he is from the right of politics, allies with the liberals.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  And they start a big series of demonstrations, a big in the two great cities, St Petersburg and Moscow. But there are shadow demos across the country. Remember, it's huge nine time zones. And it's a big threat to Putin's power. Eventually, what happens is the demonstrations die out. People, they can see that power isn't shifting, Putin's there to stay. And also, once the, the big noise on the streets has quietened, then the regime starts locking people up. And one of the people they lock up is of course Navalny,

• 22:26Speaker 00

  who gets locked up inside, and he gets to know people like Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov is fantastically funny and would have been a wonderful president of Russia. I interviewed him for the Russian Olympic, Winter Olympics. And Putin's cronies had built a road between Sochi, which is on the coast, and the ski resort up in the mountains. And it cost five billion dollars, which was more than the Mars lander NASA put on Mars. And it was so expensive.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Navalny said to me, it would have been cheaper to pave the road with Louis Vuitton handbags. He was from Sochi, he was born in Sochi, Nemtsov. And, which is kind of like Russian Brighton, and lots of gay bars. So there's an issue in that will gay Olympians, when they come to compete, will they get persecuted because the law in Russia is fabulously and is disgracefully anti-gay?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  And I interviewed the Putinist mayor of Sochi, who says it's not a problem in Sochi, because there are no gays in Sochi. And I put this to Nemtsov, and he said, "What?"

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure that's a solution.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  There are no gays in Sochi? Why are there so many gay bars? And actually, it's a point I made to the mayor of Sochi, because, well, that's funny, because I went to a gay bar last night, kind of deliberately. Anyway, that was the kind of lovely humour that Nemtsov had. And then he shot dead, 100 metres from the Kremlin. And, of course, he's a big friend of Navalny. Navalny knows this. Navalny knows, "You challenge Putin, you may die." But he carries on. Then the Kremlin bring a case of embezzlement, that

• 24:36Speaker 00

  he's got a corrupt business with his brother. And what happens is, his brother is put inside the slammer, and he's held in horrible solitary confinement. And I've interviewed prisoners who've been tortured cruelly in all sorts of awful places: Algeria, Syria, the dark bits of Africa, all sorts of ghastly places, Iraq. The worst thing is solitary confinement, where you don't talk to anybody, and they kept Alexei's brother in solitary confinement.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  He's still there now, right?

• 25:12Speaker 00

  No, he's out. He's out. He's out.

• 25:14Chris Williamson?

  Is he really?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  So part of the game, he's out, part of the game with Putin is that Putin affects to be a Democrat who follows the law. But in reality, the system is rigged. It's a joke democracy. It's a veiled tyranny, a tyranny with gloves on. The gloves are fine, they're made of the best goat's leather, but nevertheless, it's a tyranny. And in particular, Angela Merkel, the West more feebly, but Angela Merkel, who was brought up in East Germany, who spoke Russian, as you had to as a little girl, she speaks good Russian. And...

• 26:01Speaker 00

  She pushes Putin on stuff and every now and then Putin um sort of backs down when Angela gets on the phone and says, what are you doing about this? So anyway, he got done for embezzlement. I think part of the aspect of that trial ended up him going to Strasbourg, winning his case. That's where I met him in 2018. So this is a constant background hum to this. Now, the other thing that happened was that he was, you know, he's let out and he pushes and he he set up this wonderful clever thing, which is basically the policy of the opposition

• 26:41Speaker 00

  is to unite in opposition to Putin's party, which he calls the party of thieves and crooks. And he he is Russian is really, it's really beautifully and powerfully expressed. And if people can remember the plays of Dennis Potter, where one of the characters speaks so beautifully, that's kind of the force, you can hear the force of Navalny's rhetoric. He talks so beautifully and so powerfully. And what you've got then is Navalny never stops and he's a bit like a a Duracell bunny.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  And and there is, I mean, there is this kind of monkish belief in him, but said against that, there is a sense of humour. So for example, Putin has made a policy never to refer to Navalny by name.

• 27:40Chris Williamson?

  Calls him the blogger, the vlogger, doesn't he?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, the blogger. And so I said to, when I'm finally caught up with Navalny properly and interviewed him in Moscow in 2018.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  I called him, so you know Putin never calls you by name. Ah, you mean Lord Voldemort never calls me by my name. I like, and so it's bang in there. So, um, but it's funny. I mean, like, I would, you know, um, we can't because of lockdown, but if the three of us were in a pub, Navalny would be fascinating. His English is, is good. It's way.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  I'll tell you my favorite, the favorite thing that I found from him. So he is doing a march somewhere or doing one of his parades, one of his speeches. And someone comes up to him and throws green paint in his face, right? This happens twice. First time it happens, it's green paint. And the second time, I think it's green paint with acid in it. And he's sat there and the doctor's saying to him, Mr. Navalny, you may need to accept that you might not get eyesight back in this eye. And he's recalling this tale in English to someone in this interview I watched today. And he says, so he tells me I may not get my eye back. So

• 28:53Chris Williamson?

  what I think is, is not so bad. Maybe I become like a pirate, you know, I can wear a patch. And I just thought, fuck me. The same as before this flight that he's just been arrested getting off the other day. Someone says to him, uh, Mr. Navalny, like, are you not worried about being arrested? And he says, me? Arrested? No. And you're like, okay, like this guy, this guy really understands humor.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yes, he, he, he's, um, so I, a worry for my Russian friends because of this dalliance with the far right a decade ago. He ends up in some kind of, some kind of new Putin figure. I don't think so. Because of something I've observed. I, as people may know, I fell out with the Church of Scientology when I did a panorama with them. And I got interested and fascinated by cults. There is a cult of personality in Putin. And there's a wonderful professor, Robert Lifton, who's a great American military psychiatrist, who first of all, treated American GIs who'd been brainwashed by the Chinese communists during the Korean War.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  When they'd been caught in North Korea, these are American GIs who became prisoners of the Chinese communists and they brainwashed them. And it's the origin, he wrote a book which became the origin of, um, The Manchurian Candidate. The novel was based on this guy's research. And he said, the enemy of the authoritarian mind of the cult. Is tolerance of mockery and a sense of humour. And, and so I treasure Navalny's humour because it's proof to me that he has got inside his head, somebody who's taking the piss out of him. And he plays with that. And it's also his shield as well.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  And so I, that's why I think he won't become, if he gets power, he won't become another Putin. Prove me wrong. But I think he's, a sense of humour, a sense of rhythm, of the ridiculous saves you from believing, from doing what I think Crump's ended up doing.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  You can't, you can't believe you're on bullshit, can you?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, but, and if you do, I mean, it's a problem because in power, there are a lot of people out to afflict you all the time. So you have to have some belief, but to have inside your, your sense of mission, which he's got, no question, something that's, that's mocking and funny and aware of irony. Then that's, that's, that's a fantastic and beautiful safety valve and he's got that in spades.

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  So we roll the clock forward, he's doing these marches, he's getting a lot of young people to go along with him. And then he was poisoned last summer and survived. And then gets one of the assassins to admit to the poisoning on the telephone and then posts it to his YouTube channel. What's going on?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  So what happens is, um, so the way Russia works is none of this could happen without Putin.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Who's responsible? And, and I'm going to take you a little bit back, um, too, because we talked about the blinding in the eye, because I met the group that did that for this film I did, um, called, uh, Taking on Putin. And I met these people and they went along and after themselves, who I knew and admired very much was shot. Local people who lived in his apartment block put up a, a shrine to him, a little, a little, um, a plaque and there's a reef over it. And they came along and took the reef down, threw it away, put it in the bin. Because he actually lived in the next building along, but the owner of the next building along wouldn't allow the plaque, so it was the nearest thing the locals could

• 32:44Speaker 00

  find. And these are, anyway, what happens next is that, um, that we are detained and sent to the Moscow, um, police station, we're inside the Moscow police station, when the Kremlin media said that I had desecrated Nemtsol shrine. Our cameras and our tape can prove what happened. So that gives you a, and lo and behold, stories about us appeared in the Moscow media, and then my passport, my cameraman's passport, appeared on Russian social media. And, and we've obviously given our passport to the police. Hello, how did that happen? It gives you a flavour of it.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  So what we heard was that there, and there was a wonderful couple, Andrei Soldatov and his missus Irina, and they, they've written a fantastic book called The Compatriots, blah, blah, blah. But he told me that the work here is done by an organisation called Centre E, which is the counter-terrorism police. But the group that, um, one of the members of the group threw the green dye with something like acid, it was the thing that, that scarred his eye. We don't know what it was exactly, but whatever that was, was effectively controlled by Group E, by the counter-terrorism police.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  And they're the same people, so what happened to me was, after we got detained, my passport was, um, taken by these police officers, and go, and bang, up it goes on social media, and, and I had to cancel the passport because of that. You get some flavour. What's happening here is that Putin's goons are using administrative law to deny that natural justice, again and again and again. And the Vali being a lawyer is fighting them all the time, all the time, all the time. The poor man is blind, you know, half-blinded, he was gonna lose his sight, and he makes a joke of it. So there's something about his courage which is exceptional, really exceptional.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  So last summer, he's on a plane, he's in, what he's doing is, he's going to the sticks. The way it works is that most people in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, if there was a free and fair election, would vote against Putin, they would vote for Navalny. The problem is in the sticks.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  You get people who don't get the internet properly, who just watch state TV, who believe the nonsense that it's Putin or the devil. So, he's going to the sticks on a regular basis. He was in Tomsk or Omsk, I forget where, and he's doing a thing. And what happens is the goons get into his hotel room, and they put Novichok, which is the poison that was used in Salisbury, which killed Dawn Sturgis, meant to kill Skripal, and almost killed that poor police officer in Salisbury. The same nerve agent, and by the way, you cannot buy this in a shop.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  This is something that's made in a poison factory. And the wonderful people at Bellicat have dug and found pretty damning evidence of where that poison factory will be. It's a state-owned poison factory. And what happened the next morning, Navalny put on a fresh pair of blue underpants. We know this because, I'll get there. And he's flying in the plane, it's whatever it is, a five-hour flight from Tomsk or Omsk to Moscow, and suddenly he feels violently ill. Screams in pain, knocks out.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  The pilot heads the plane down, he's gonna save the guy's, and he saves the guy's life. And there's some nonsense about the airport being closed and the pilot doesn't take it, he lands the plane. The moment the plane lands, the emergency people jab him with the stuff that you give to somebody who's got some kind of, um, and give it to, to, to junkies, it's kind of standard for a state, but it's good. And actually work, and exactly the same effect happened in Salisbury. So, really quite quickly, the immediate people in Russia did the right thing. The pilot and the emergency people straight away. Then he's in the hospital, they keep him there for slightly too long.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  The point being for the Novichok to die away so they can't see it. And then he's flown to Germany. In Germany, the best, um, um, doctors and scientists in Germany, find the, um,

• 37:53Speaker 00

  find Novichok. And then that's, I think there are, it's tested by other labs. I think one is in, uh, France, one was in Switzerland or something like that. So, three separate state level labs find Novichok poisoning. The same thing, the same incredibly rare nerve agent used in Salisbury, used against Navalny. Navalny then, um, gets in bed with Bellincaut, which is this wonderful organisation of British nerds. Or it's led by a British nerd. Um, and it beautifully, they, they use various holes and opennesses

• 38:34Speaker 00

  inside the Russian system to identify everybody who was on that plane, flying with Navalny to and from as he was on his travels around Siberia. And they see the same names coming up again and again and again, and then they track them back three years. And they uncover an assassin's crew of the same FSB. And then they find that they're FSB and they all work for the FSB and some of them are connected to the poison factory. Then they find their telephone numbers and they give this information to Navalny and Navalny goes down the list of like 20 possible people in the assassin's crew.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And on the last call, he gets to some goon. I said, you know, hi, it's... And then Navalny's pretending to be a high up in the security people. And I said, what went wrong? And the guy said, well, boss, everything went wrong. And the guy talks for about an hour on tape to Navalny, explaining what happened. I said, so we put it on his underpants? And Navalny didn't know that because... And so what happened beautifully. I mean, it was like, Chris, it was like following a burglar's footsteps in the snow. You know, like guilty, guilty, guilty.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Now, what I would have done is to have stopped there and just waited until Putin goes. But Navalny knows that if he's not in Russia, he's not, he's no longer a player. He's just been sidelined. He's out of the game. So he sticks this out. He flies back to Russia, he's arrested and bang, he pops up the video, which he's been doing while he's in recuperation in Germany, of Putin's latest palace. It's an extraordinary fuck you.

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  The guy is, the guy is super rigorous. Like you can't, you can't fault the level of precision that his team is going through this. So he had this two hour video done about a billion pound palace of Putin's with the hookah and hookah bar in and...

• 41:00Speaker 00

  You're from the northeast, own it.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  Hookah, hookah, it's a hookah bar.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  He's using, this is the thing, right? This is, I've only looked into it this week ahead of our episode today. And the sense that I get is he's kind of like a sort of a 21st century jokey trickster using modern technology, using drones and YouTube's against this sort of old clunking behemoth of the Russian state. And they're sort of playing whack a mole with this, the sort of the old tools of the old world. Whereas Navalny made this YouTube video about the new mansion by getting drones and literally flying drones over the top of 63 hectares of land.

• 41:47Chris Williamson?

  And then there's 3D CGI imagery that shows you this is where the tunnel goes. This is where he can have his coffee on a morning because this is where the mezzanine level is that looks out over the beach. Like, it really does feel like two worlds kind of colliding. Do you get that sense?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Very much so. And there's something beautiful about it too, because what this is, is it is Russia's cruel past fighting Russia's potentially brilliant future. Now, when I made the film, when I met Navalny, I met some of the people around him and they're astonishingly brave. And as I said, the three critics I spoke about earlier, shot, shot, shot. These are Navalny supporters. One man was tasered, then stabbed. Another man was beaten senseless, beaten unconscious by thugs who never once said anything. That's special forces.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  When you beat somebody up, you say fuck you, whatever, you swear. These people beat him up in total silence. What he was doing, by the way, was monitoring an election with a video, watching, I think, either an election or a demonstration from a video in real time from the Navalny people. And they sourced him because it was in real time. They found him videoing and then they beat him senseless, almost until he was in a coma and they never said a word. And then Navalny's office manager.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Was hit over the head with an iron bar by an assailant. And then um he put in a um uh uh quite properly. He uh made a um a complaint so that his um uh the man who attacked him would be charged. And he was accused of wasting police time. Now, I've been there in the. I filmed somebody taking a reef off Nemtsov Shrine and then I was accused by her and I and I suffered to a limited extent. I understand what's going on. I.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  I am very moved by Navalny's courage. And by the people who will support him. So this Saturday. People will come out in the streets. He's asked them to do so. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Russia's numbers have been uh faked, but they're bad. Um it's freezing cold. And I'm gonna be fascinated to see how many people turn up. He's inside for fifteen or thirty days. Then he he will be tried for because they're saying he didn't comply with the terms of his previous release. And therefore um um the uh uh they can hit him with a long sentence.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  That's very likely. But the world has changed, Chris, because uh Trump has gone. And Biden is, I think, in no mood to play Mr. Nice with a man who he believes, with evidence along with the CIA, interfered with America's democracy.

• 45:14Chris Williamson?

  Are you gonna have at at this stage, though, this is something I was thinking about increasingly as I read this story and it reminded me of the, I can't pronounce it, Uyghur Muslims in China, like.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  We go.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  We go, that's it, sorry.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  We go, yeah.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  If someone commits a crime against a citizen of their own country. There's no one else to step in if the state doesn't do it. Like, America isn't coming to the aid of Muslims in China and Germany isn't coming to help Navalny. Is it realistic to expect that the American president would say, "I don't like how you're running your country over there, even though it's not affecting your relation with us"? Is that realistic to see that happening?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Well, I think the idea of a nation-state can do what it damn well pleases went out with the Holocaust, that went out with the Nazis. The virus, you know, underlines the point. We live in the same world. So, the rule of law, respect for life, a fair trial, is a right for all of us, not just people who live in the happy and relatively happy and safe and prosperous democracies. And Navalny is pushing it. Now, I'm, I mean, it's another conversation for another day about what's happening for the Uyghurs.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  I've done a film about them when I was at the BBC, talking to a couple of people in Istanbul who've managed to get out, and that story's grim.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  For the moment, fingers crossed, I hope he's going to be okay. But Navalny's story gives me tremendous hope. It's also, it's a kind of von Stauffenberg thing, Chris.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  When people, people say, "Hey, you know, the Germans, they were all Nazis." No, they weren't. Von Stauffenberg tried to blow up Hitler. So, he didn't succeed, but he tried. And he got killed and all of his friends were treated horribly, but they tried. There were good Germans who tried to kill Hitler.

• 47:31Chris Williamson?

  What's your prediction? What do you think happens? You've got 30 days, the next 30 days where he's potentially back in Russia, he's in jail, he had this fake mock trial thing in the police station.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  I think, I mean, all of that pantomime will continue and it will be cruel. Meanwhile, ordinary and extraordinary people, in particular young people, the kind of people who are watching this, they're, will come out on the streets and they'll get beaten up and bashed and they might lose their jobs. And I think it's our duty to stand by them and to do something to help them. And Navalny's put out, his people have put out a thing, they're saying, we should have, the West should, should act against some of the oligarchs who've ended up here, all concerned in any wrongdoing, but we've heard some of them.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Roman Abramovich, the guy owns Chelsea, Alischa Usmanov, who was a part owner of Arsenal, who's still a big player in Britain, Navalny doesn't mention them, but I will, the Levdevds, they own the Evening Standard and the Independent, Evgeny Levdev has just been made a lord by Boris Johnson. They're striking people because they, you know, you would appear, it would appear that they're, they're independent, they don't do what the Kremlin does. None of them has said a word about this, not a word. Evgeny Levdev, Lord Levdev, Baron Siberia, has not said anything about it. And he's a British lawmaker, is he beholden to a foreign

• 49:07Speaker 00

  power? But essentially, our bit, what we should do, if I was in Parliament, if I was in the House of Lords, Lord Sweeney of Gilmour right now would say this, that, that we should, we should, that Putin is there, he's been there for far too long, he has rigged our elections and he's locked up the effective leader of the opposition, his goons having poisoned him, and his goons having poisoned Dawn Sturgis in Salisbury, let us cut convertibility between the ruble and the pound and the ruble and the dollar. That makes life... Much more difficult for the rich people in Russia to run their lives like they have.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Because they don't want to spend their money in Siberia, they want to spend it in London and in Rome and in the south of France. But if you make that much more difficult for them, then the calculation, if you're a Russian oligarch, my life is better with Putin in charge, isn't so clear and obvious.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  So that's the the leverage that needs to be used is to make the status quo, which is being maintained by a careful structure of money and power and enforcement. You need to make the world that potentially could be offered by Navalny, like genuine democracy, more attractive than the current situation with all of these restrictions in.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what you say, and there is there are sanctions on at the moment. They're not really hurting and they're not hurting the rich people. So, you know, you you zap the oligarchs wallets and their calculation. Putin is our man, may change. And that's that's something that we could do and we should do, and that's what I'm arguing here. All concerned, deny any wrongdoing. I mean, when I, the last time I was in Russia, when I came back, my neighbours said to me, no, that was great, John, but we're not going to accept any of your Amazon parcels anymore.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, especially not if it's a pair of blue pants. What's it gonna take, what's it gonna take for Navalny to get into power? Like, is there, there's no chance that you're gonna be able to, with some eighteen to twenty four year olds, like TikToking in the street and doing a few parades with some signs. There's no way that you're gonna knock down Putin with that, is there?

• 51:41Speaker 00

  As I said towards the start, the odds are against him, but my money is with the challenger, not with the poisoned toad. I think behind the 18 and 24 year olds is a whole bunch of middle aged and old people who get it that he's been in power too long, who've seen Trump's in power, now Trump's gone. That's the benefit of American democracy. It changes. The tone will change. They will see all sorts of stuff about Biden, who's plainly a decent man. Well, why can't that happen in Russia? It can't happen in Russia because Russia never changes. I don't think that is sustainable over time. So I think Putin's in trouble. He's in trouble

• 52:26Speaker 00

  number one because oil and gas are boring and they're damaging the planet. The other day, I started listening to David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet, and it was so good and yet so depressing.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  He's pulling on some heartstrings at the moment, man. David, every single time. He goes on Instagram and he's making everybody cry and he's saying, I don't have long left for this world. And he wants to try and just think.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Well, I listened to the man and my, okay, we don't need Russian oil and gas. We actually don't. We're not flying. The amount of, I mean, it's lovely to see people on their crazy e-scooters. I mean, I used to see cars. I don't see cars outside my place in London. I see people on e-scooters and bikes. We don't need Russian oil and gas. So Putin's got a problem in that he's a political dinosaur sitting on a dinosaur economy. Still strong, still massive, still frightening and cruel, but there are limits to it. And there are

• 53:36Speaker 00

  limits to the loyalty of his people, but we've got to work harder at doing that. But the odds are against Navalny. But what he is doing is the idea that Russia is a kind of boring far-right authoritarian stasis where no one is challenging.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  The Kremlin, that's not true. Inside Russia, inside a police station, inside a prison right now, is the future of Russia, the Russian soul at its best. The most interesting place to be right now is in prison with Alexei Navalny, if I was Russian. I'm kind of, I can't because of lockdown, but if I could, I'd fly straight out there, get into a fight, get locked up.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm a chap with him next door.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, what a pleasure. And say, hello, I mean, it's been quite a while, but here's your first inside jail interview. And somebody would smuggle it out, because remember, even the palace stuff, the hooker room, say it again in your funny North East accent.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Hooker, hooker.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  In the hooker room, there is, somebody has given that to Navalny. So that, so that, and that is the thing about Russia, is that it's got, it's got proper soul. There is a proper sense of the people in, around him, that this is a war they're fighting. And it's a war where truth and justice and the law is on their side, and the people in power are rigging the thing again and again and again. And what Navalny is doing is proving that in a way which is, it's kind of beautiful.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  I want everybody who's listening to this nonsense, it's not nonsense, to watch the Navalny video.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  It'll be linked, it'll be linked in the show notes below. Can you just give us the, what's the, the Cliff Notes on this new mansion video and why is it important?

• 55:42Speaker 00

  It's disgusting. It's disgusting.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  But is, is that, is, is the, is the issue that he, President, Lord of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has no class and style? Is that the issue? Or is it the issue that he's spent so much money? Is it where it is? What's going on?

• 55:59Speaker 00

  The primary issue is...

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Everybody is suffering because of the because of the virus, also in Russia too.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  And for him to squander a billion pounds on this absurd palace, when he's got plenty of other palaces. Beautiful ones, historical ones, he doesn't need this, he doesn't need this at all. And yet he's he's squandered this money, and that is the fruit of his corruption. And that is a criminal waste of money. So what it shows is that is that Vladimir Putin is the Al Capone of Russia. He's the Gambino crime family, and he has his his family who've got richer and richer of Russia.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  He is the Ronnie and Reggie Cray of Russia, two ghastly twins in one unwholesome, poison-toed body.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  I mean, another thing I haven't talked about, but I will.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  I did a report for Panorama about MH seventeen. This was the plane that was shot down by a Russian rocket launcher.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Lent to the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels. And they thought it was the Ukrainian fighter jet, but they shot it down. Two hundred and ninety-eight people died, and I went out there.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  For Panorama, we and I did a piece to camera in the dying of the light. Surrounded by engine oil and broken engines and broken plane and the nose. And other people's luggage. And the worst thing is, Chris, is that those little... Things that kids, the little mini suitcases with little wheels that a toddler sits on while mum and dad run them along. And they were in the fields, the airplane oil burnt fields of the middle of nowhere in Ukraine.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  And whenever I go through Gatwick or Heathrow and I see one of those and I start welling up, I start to cry because it triggers that. Ten Britons died in that, a ton of Australians, lots of Dutch people, Malaysian people, 298 people. And the person ultimately responsible was that because you cannot buy a rocket launcher in a shop was Vladimir Putin. And he got away with that. Dawn Sturgis died of Novichok in Salisbury. It feels like Putin's got away with that. And, and you know, there's a certain point at which we've got to stand up to this man.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  And also, we should help this beautiful, brave, slightly crazy guy called Alexei Navalny. Watch his stuff, writes your MP, push it.

• 59:11Chris Williamson?

  What is your opinion or what is your estimate for the next 10 years in Russia? Where do you think it's heading? I know where you want it to head, but given the realism and the power and the money and the state and all that stuff, what do you think's going to happen?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Right, so most likely Navalny, there's some accident happens to him in prison. One of the other psychos kills him, there's a trial.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Putin stays in power.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  How old is Putin now? He can't stay in power for that much longer.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  He's, um, he's seven, he can stay in power for as long as he bloody wants.

• 59:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, as long as he's alive.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, but that's the thing. If, if, so that's the most likely. What I'm hoping for, what I want to happen is that, that the soul of Russia wakes from its slumber.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Sparked by Alexei Navalny's heroism, people get out in the streets and at the same time, uh, Joe Biden, who's seen his country defiled by Donald Trump, but also apart by Russian interference in American democracy, does stuff. Um, I'm skeptical whether Boris Johnson would do anything. He's the man who's a noble, one of Vladimir Putin's oligarchs. I feel that, I, but I feel that change is in the air and that, and as I said at the beginning,

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  my money is on the challenger, not the poison toad. It's, I said this about my, about, uh, Ghislaine Maxwell, that story that was a dark fairy story, and this is too, but I'm, I, it is a dark story and you've got the, you've got the charismatic guy who's gone into the lion's den. He's gone back into prison, knowing he's going into prison. And it, it's kind of like,

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Steve McQueen in um uh in The Great Escape, that he's sitting in the cooler. But boy, boy, you know, if you've got a heart and soul, whose side are you on? You've got to be on the side of the prisoner. There's one more thing is that in in eighty eight, as a a young reporter for The Observer, I went to South Africa when Mandela was still in prison. And I got, you know, gassed by the um South African apartheid police apartheid was still in power. But you could tell that they were more afraid of the prisoner, that there somehow the politics,

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  the the shape of power had been switched so the prisoner was more trouble in prison. And they were they were finding a way of getting him out. Now, that the the problem is that Putin is different. But if Putin has a stroke or Putin drinks the wrong cup of tea, then who knows what happens? So, once again, my money is on the challenger, not the poisoned toad.

• 1:02:47Chris Williamson?

  Anyone that can deliver twenty six million YouTube views in the space of twenty four hours shouldn't be messed with. Absolutely not. That's dangerous, man. I mean, it's it's I was looking at I did a little bit of crunching on the stats on the back end. His YouTube channels had a quarter of a million subscribers added in a day. It's absolutely terrifying. And then when you look at the total plays across his channel, the trickle down from people finding that one video, which is probably trending across Russia and Eastern Europe, has trickled into everything else as well. So, I mean, if there's any aspiring YouTubers listening and you want to go and look at some ridiculous stats, just go on Social Blade and search for Navalny's account because it's absolutely terrifying. But I this is the most interesting time.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  I can't imagine what it's like to be inside of I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to be inside of Putin's head most of the time, but I certainly can't imagine what it's like now when you have.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  This this new weaponry rhetoric and charisma that's being utilized and promulgated through a channel which you don't use and you're fighting with sticks and clubs and this person's come in with like a laser sword and has decided to use that, it very much does feel like David and Goliath, old against new. There's definitely some archetypes going on, which I think is what makes it so interesting. What I found fascinating, and you may have noticed this if you watched one of Navalny's videos, is that he's got some hardcoded adverts partway through. And this, it's this young guy who hosts the

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  channel and he's letting him speak, same way as we've been tonight. And he goes, but first, like a word from our sponsor, and it cuts to him talking about the sponsor. The first thing he says is 50% of people aged between 18 and 24 in Russia say that they want to leave to go and work somewhere else. And his campaign is, don't leave, you don't need to leave Russia, you can work for these different countries, companies from within Russia, but you need to learn English. And I learned English with this particular company. 50% of the population aged between 18 and 24 don't want to be in that country

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  anymore. Like that, the fact that you have that, you don't think of Russia, I know that there's jokes made about it being a dictatorship, but you don't think of Russia in the same league as North Korea. But when you think that half of the people who are probably the most up to date, the most informed about what's going on, and also have sufficient time left to be able to make a choice, given the freedom without the restrictions of family and debt and all the rest of it, and they don't want to be there anymore. That's pretty terrifying.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Yes, well, but it's a logical consequence. The number doesn't surprise me, that if you want to

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  If you apply for a permit to do something, you have to pay somebody off again and again and again. If you annoy somebody in power or, you know, like you've got a relationship. And then you're in love with somebody, but then somebody else who's in power, who's a policeman or worse, an FSB officer fancies your woman. Then you could get locked up, you could get into trouble because of this. But those are real world things there. So crazy. It's a dark, dark place. Now, I've been to North Korea.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  And, you know, I'm telling you the truth. When I got to Beijing, I thought, thank God, I'm just in a Somewhat tolerant. Yeah, there were people with pink hair. I thought, thank God, I'm in only slightly fascist China as opposed to that place. Because, by the way, left and right, in places like North Korea and China and Russia, they kind of fuse, but actually, these days, Russia is way more. It was under Stalin. The story of, I try and tell my thriller, The Useful Idiot, is that Stalin's Russia was

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  close to Nazi Germany long before the Midnight Pact of thirty nine. They were doing deals, the Nazis and the Nazi sympathizers and the Soviet states from thirty one onwards. So, and also remember that the Russian state has been funding the far right. It helped, it helped Trump get elected. It's been helping the far right in Britain and across Europe. That is what the Kremlin is doing. That's where the money is doing. So in part, what we should be doing in helping the Val, at least watching his videos and becoming

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  centivized to his heroism, is also we're trying to defend our common democratic values. Which is, that's a universal thing. The other thing I'd say to you, everybody who's watching, when we can travel again is go to Russia. Go to, by the way.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  Go via Belarus, um, take a copy of a 1984 Animal Farm, leave it in a bar. Um, go, you know, if you can, if Navalny is still doing it, um, I hope he is, go on a demo. Um, if you're, um, if your family's got money and your dad's got access to fancy lawyers, get arrested.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds like a wonderful holiday. I'm actually going to Ukraine, Lvov, uh, and then going St. Petersburg and Moscow this summer with my friend Michael Malice, who is a podcaster and a media personality in his own right, but he's born in, born in Lvov and is going, going back to his homeland for the first time ever. I'm going with him. We're gonna do a full video series.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  It, it's fantastic. Weirdly, um, because I lost my temper with the Church of Scientology and I did this panorama rubbishy Scientology, I'm a pinup for psychiatrists the world over. And when there was a, um, uh, the Royal College of Psychiatry threw an international symposium for psychiatrists. I was the, uh, the funny man before the drinks at the Excel Centre and I got 5,000 psychiatrists to dance to, uh, Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta, who is of course a famous Scientologist. And I got the, the then head of the Royal College of Psychiatry, Sir Simon Wesley,

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  to pretend to be John Travolta and dance. And he's a terrible, anyway, never mind this. What happens is as a result of that, I got an invite to give a talk at the Ukrainian College of Psychiatry in Lvov.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  And they flew me out there and it's a wonderful place. Formerly Ossha Hungarian, then um um then um then Soviet. But was always a centre of resistance, the Soviet group think. And it's a fantastic place, but so is Russia. I mean, it is an incre- I mean, the thing that gets my goat is when I'm accused of being restophobic. I love Russia. I love Russian culture, Russian books, Russian poetry. There's a wonderful phrase by Lamentov, "The restless, he begs for storms, as though in storms there is rest." Incredibly beautiful culture, fantastic alcohol.

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  Vodka, freezing cold in the snow. You won't get that, but you can, anyway. Eat, you'll have the time of your life.

• 1:10:57Chris Williamson?

  I'll ask you, I'll ask you for some recommendations, John. You can send me some of the.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  But, but Chris, if there is, if you don't go to an Avonlea demonstration and don't get arrested, then I'm on your case.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, fair enough. Well, that looks, that looks like it's gonna be, look, man, we're gonna do, um, we're gonna do a round two. I'm gonna get you back on to talk about one of my favourite podcasts from last year, which was your Hunting Jelaine series. If anyone wants to go and learn about the Jelaine Maxwell scandal and where everything's up to now. And that's a really interesting arc as well, which we're gonna get into on the next one. But I implore everyone to go and have a listen to that. Also, Useful Idiot and.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  Yep, the useful, I've done an audiobook as well and there's a twist, I had to do a bit of Welsh in it.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  And my, my mispronunciation of the Welsh is you have to listen to it to get it.

• 1:11:50Chris Williamson?

  You're just, you're just causing bother with every different country that you can find, aren't you? Where else should people check out your stuff? Where do you wanna direct them?

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  But, so I'm on Twitter, um, I don't use Facebook, but I'm on Twitter at John Sweeney Roar, R O A R. And I've got a website, um, johnsweeney.co.uk and I'm on Amazon. I've written 12 books. Some of them are good, some of them are a bit rubbish frankly, but you can work that out.

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. John, thank you so much for today.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Pleasure.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

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