Putin, Russia, and Trump

Masha, very recently,

there was this incredible series of videos

that was kicked off

by a video that was like a parody

of an Italian music video some years ago.

Which was also a parody.

Exactly.

And it took Russia by storm, and it went international.

What was this all about, and what did it mean?

First of all, this is the best,

most inspiring story that I have written

that originates in Russia in so many years.

And these are like 17, 18-year-old boys,

who were studying to be civilian pilots

at an air transport academy in Ulyanovsk,

which is a small town in Russia,

shot a video in which,

it's a spoof of a video called Satisfaction

made by Benny Benassi who is an Italian DJ.

It's a homoerotic video.

Yeah, but it's a homoerotic video

that is not, that is very, sort of,

culturally grounded, weirdly.

It was an outrage.

This is a country where the propaganda of homosexuality

is against the law.

What was the basis for the outrage?

Why, it's corrupting the morals

of young Russian boys and men and women,

or was it something deeper politically?

You know, I think they had a lot of trouble sort of

quite putting their finger on it.

Why pay attention to it at all?

Why would the official media deign to give it attention?

Isn't that self-defeating? Well, because

the local officials were in a tizzy,

and they wanted these boys either suspended

or otherwise disciplined and the Ministry got involved.

It went up to a high level.

So after that video came out

and after the television coverage

and after the governor said

that they had to be disciplined,

that's when suddenly all these people started making videos

in support of these students.

So they weren't just spoofs, they weren't just take-offs.

They were actual, this was organized.

This was people showing that. So what is that telling you?

We think of Russia today

as in the midst of a conservative wave

led by Vladimir Putin.

And it's not just conservative vis-a-vis the United States

or democracy or anti-democracy.

We think of it in terms of a kind of

Russian version of what used to be known

as the moral majority.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

And Putin uses that language.

He talks about traditional values and family values

and all that sort of thing,

some directly imported from the United States.

So you saw this proliferation of videos

as a sign of a kind of dissidence in a way.

Yes.

It's also a really inspiring show of solidarity.

To paint some contrast,

you wrote about for The New Yorker at a certain point

the fact that in Chechnya, a region of Russia,

gay men and women who were imprisoned,

sequestered in the cruelest way possible.

This is reality on the ground in Russia today too.

They were rounding up the gay men,

a few lesbians, but mostly gay men,

and lesbians, not because

they're more lenient toward lesbians

but because generally it's enough to just tell the family

to take care of the problem and they will kill the women.

In Russia in general or in Chechnya

in particular? In Chechnya.

They're rounding up gay men, torturing them,

getting them to give up names of other gay men,

and then usually releasing them to their families

with the orders to those families to kill them.

And on a number of occasions,

it appears that those murders were carried out.

Now you see these videos as a kind of,

in a way, a protest against this kind of cruelty,

against this kind of politics,

and yet we're about to have an election in Russia in March

in which Putin is, as it were running for president

and with really no opposition in sight

and absolutely no chance of his losing, am I right?

Opposition, it depends on what you mean by opposition.

So no one can get on the ballot without Putin's permission.

So there are several people on the ballot,

most of them no one has ever heard of.

And then there's Ksenia Sobchak,

who's a very interesting project.

She's a young woman who, I think,

is really trying to use the campaign

to talk about things

that are not normally talked about in Russia

and has been quite brave about doing this stuff.

What issues does she raise that don't get?

Well, she went to Chechnya

and spoke up about political murders in Chechnya,

which is something that no Russian politician has done

in more than a decade.

That took incredible guts.

She also has talked about the fact that Alexey Navalny

who. He's the great

anti-corruption campaigner.

The great anti-corruption campaigner

and probably the man who would

have the best chance of beating Putin

if he were actually allowed to be on the ballot

and if he were actually allowed to campaign,

which, of course, he is not. His brother has been thrown

into prison, and he, from time to time,

is arrested, one demonstration or another.

And has lost most of the sight in one of his eyes

because he has been physically attacked,

and he has charges pending against him

and all sorts of stuff.

It's amazing the man is still walking around,

and it's even more amazing that he is still doing his work.

In an open election,

I mean, this is a lot of if's about to come,

in an open election,

would Navaly have a chance to beat Putin

if he had access to media,

if there were actual debates?

If they were debating on the substance of political issues,

would Putin be truly vulnerable?

All the media are dominated by Putin.

There are debates, but Putin doesn't show up for debates

because that's beneath him.

There's never any conversation

about actual political issues,

so there would actually have to be sort of major

structural and cultural shifts

even to enable a free and open and fair election.

So first they have to consider

what would bring about those shifts

so that an election like that could happen.

And then yeah, I think Putin would be incredibly vulnerable.

In some sense, the Russian election

is not about who will win it

but about what comes after Putin.

There's a lot of discussion in Moscow and beyond

about what comes after Putin

because he's, how old now?

So he'll be 66 this year.

And this term is another six years and so on.

I always tell people to go read Joshua Rubenstein's book

Last Days of Stalin, which is a wonderful book,

but it also describes the absolute disarray

that occurred after Stalin died

and how there was no succession plan.

Stalin clearly also believed

that he was going to live forever.

It's going to be absolute chaos.

And at that point, probably very briefly,

anything will be possible.

Now, we are under the impression that,

or many of us are under the impression that

Putin was delighted that Donald Trump won the election

and had some kind of influencing hand in it.

To what degree, we don't know.

What the exact nature of it is, we don't know exactly,

but certainly some involvement or another.

But there's also the sense that Putin's view of Trump has

shifted in the year since he's in office.

How is that the case and why?

First of all, I think he was tickled that Trump had won,

and I think that the idea. Does he love Trump so much

or Trump is indebted to him in some way

or because he loathed Hillary Clinton?

Because he loathes Hillary Clinton,

and also because it was funny

to consider that Trump could win.

Putin has always said that he was a clown.

That famous quote Trump interprets as Putin saying

that he is brilliant, Putin actually said he's colorful.

(speaks in Russian), yeah.

Yeah, and he meant he's a clown, he's a joke.

Now, the thing is that Putin doesn't actually believe

that there is such a thing as an election

with an unpredictable outcome,

so it's particularly hilarious

that everyone was planning, including Putin,

was planning for a Clinton victory and Trump won.

And the fact that it was attributed to Putin,

making him the most powerful man in the world,

was really fun.

But of course, I think he would have had a much easier time

dealing with somebody more predictable like Hillary Clinton.

Has been Trump been bad for Putin in some way?

Putin has been quite frustrated with Trump.

And if you watch Russian television,

you will see that they're talking about

how Trump has failed to lift sanctions

that are related to Ukraine,

how they're still very much portraying

the War in Syria as a war that Russia is fighting

against the United States in Syria.

And yeah, they're not happy with Trump.

He's unpredictable.

He doesn't actually let Putin flex his muscle as much

as Hillary with her confrontational stance

would have let him do it,

and he's hard to deal with.

Is there any winking acknowledgment

in Russian political elites

that in fact the Special Services

had anything to do with the election?

No, I think that. Is it a point of pride

or a point of denial?

So Putin actually, in December of last year,

during his annual press conference for that year,

he had a question tossed at him,

you know because all the questions are scripted.

He had a question tossed to him

about how what it felt like

to be credited with having won the US election.

Which, in spy novel terms, would be the ultimate coup

for a Special Service.

Of course.

That's what he always dreamed of,

to the extent that he's talked about himself,

he's always said that he wanted to be

the guy who changes the world behind the scenes.

And I think he's much more comfortable in that role

and finds it much more gratifying

than the public role of the presidency,

even though he's kinda gotten to like that as well.

But at the same, I mean, officially of course,

Russia denies everything, and they ridicule it.

But they sort of fan the flames of the conversation

in Russia itself because it is terribly flattering.

Over and over again, we are told by knowing voices

that Putin's popularity rating hovers around 90%.

Is that about right?

85, 86, yeah.

Pretty good. Oh yeah.

Little lower than. Trump can only

dream of those.

Lower than some dictators but higher than most.

What accounts for that rating?

What does it mean and what does it not mean?

This is where it gets really difficult

to talk about Russia in western terms.

It already gets difficult when we use the word election

to describe something that's not an election.

But when we're to use the words public opinion

to describe something that's not an opinion

in a place where there's no public,

it becomes really hard.

What does that mean, no public?

Well, there's no public sphere.

There's no exchange of information that happens

through the media or other means.

There are tiny little pockets of atomized conversations

that do not intersect and do not cross-pollinate.

In other words, I can,

if I turn on a television in Moscow

or any Russian town or city,

I will not see any opposing voice

except for one that's mocked or undermined in some way.

I go to a bookstore, I can find an enormous wealth

of literature and some political writing

that during a Soviet period, certainly,

you would never have seen.

In other words is there a seeding to the intellectual class,

a certain room to move a certain amount of freedom

so that they behave?

I think of it more as a sort of economy of repression.

And I think that was developed throughout

the entire late Soviet period,

the Soviet Union was sort of experimenting with that.

It turned out that you don't have to jail

millions of people

to keep everybody in line. It's expensive.

Gulag is expensive.

When you think about it, you read the

news reports here,

all the analytical work.

What's your sense if Putin has

has something on the President of the United States?

Well, considering that this president

doesn't seem to be capable of embarrassment,

I'd take that with a grain of salt.

So what?

I mean, Stormy Daniels has something

on the President of the United States.

So what? Yes, and when that came out,

that was the fourth most read story of the day,

not the most read.

Barack Obama had done it, I think he'd be in Guantanamo.

What is your sense of the way the

Mueller investigation for Trump is going to go?

Do you think he will be tripped up in some way

by this whole saga that we loosely call

the Russia scandal?

I fear that we have inflated expectations for that

because I think that in a magical future

in which the whole picture is laid out in front of us,

I think it's not going to be

quite as definitive and quite as clear

as we hope.

But also, there's no path from that to impeachment,

even if it were definitive,

which I don't think it's going to be.

We're just going to be sitting here thinking,

really?

And he's still president?

And he will be.

Masha, thank you.

Thank you.