Podcast: Putin's Russia

TRANSCRIPT: Putin's Russia

Bill Burns:

Putin's come to the conviction that the way to create space for Russia as a major power on the international landscape is to chip away at an American-led order.

Ian Bremmer:

He's the most powerful Kremlin leader since Stalin, and he's consolidated control and reasserted influence abroad while also facing troubles at home. Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, where you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'll get an inside look at Russian President Vladimir Putin, his motivations and what's next for the Kremlin. To help me do it is a veteran diplomat who's dealt with the Russian president directly. Former US Ambassador to Russia, Bill Burns. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Ambassador Bill Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Author of "The Back Channel." Bill, wonderful to see you here.

Bill Burns:

Thanks. It's great to be with you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to ask, talk a little bit, I mean, you've interacted with President Putin a fair amount, individually.

Bill Burns:

I have.

Ian Bremmer:

Tell me what that insight that has given you into where our relationship is with him right now?

Bill Burns:

Well, much of my gray hair came from my two tours over five or six years in the foreign service serving at Russia.

Ian Bremmer:

Well then that's a lot of gray hair.

Bill Burns:

Yeah, it is. First in the early nineties in Boris Yeltsin's Russia. And then when I was ambassador to Russia about a decade ago, 2005 to 2008. And I've actually always thought that if you want to understand Putin's Russia, it helps to have understood Boris Yeltsin's Russia. A Russia that was flat on its back. A sense of hope, surely with the end of communism, but also mixed with a sense of humiliation and uncertainty as well. Putin today is a combustible combination of grievance and ambition and insecurity all wrapped together. I vividly remember my first meeting with Putin as the newly arrived US ambassador at the Kremlin, which as you know, is built on a scale that's meant to intimidate visitors, especially newly arrived.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're saying since Putin is not.

Bill Burns:

Putin. No.

Ian Bremmer:

Built on a scale to intimidate visitors.

Bill Burns:

Not built on a scale. His persona is meant to intimidate.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes indeed.

Bill Burns:

So anyway, you know, you go into the Kremlin, you walk down through these huge halls, down long corridors. You come to the end of one huge hall, there are these two-story bronze doors. Kept waiting there for a few minutes just to let all this sink in. The door cracks open, out comes Vladimir Putin, who despite his bare chested persona is actually not that intimidating in the flesh, but he comes walking through the door with great self-assurance. Before I got a word out of my mouth, [he] said, "You Americans need to listen more. You can't have everything your own way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms."

Ian Bremmer:

That was a start.

Bill Burns:

Yeah, that was the opening-

Ian Bremmer:

That's welcome to Russia.

Bill Burns:

...of a relation as ambassador. But it was vintage Vladimir Putin. It was not subtle, it was almost defiantly charmless, but the message was clear that his Russia was going to push back. If he was convinced as many others in the Russian political lead are, that the United States and the West more generally took advantage of Russia's moment of historical weakness in the nineties. And I'm not trying to justify that. But that's the perception anyway.

Ian Bremmer:

You'd argue there's some truth to that.

Bill Burns:

Some, but I mean there's also some truth in the sense that Russians were never going to be comfortable with junior partner status, and were always going to look for ways to push back. But if that's his perception of the way in which Russia interacted with the United States in the nineties, when he saw a moment of weakness, dysfunction, polarization in our political system in 2016, he was quick to try to take advantage of it as well. He's an apostle of payback in that sense.

Ian Bremmer:

And do you consider him to be actively hostile in every arena with the US strategically, or do you think there are areas where cooperation with Russia can meaningfully be attempted?

Bill Burns:

I mean I think it's a pretty narrow band in dealing with Putin's Russia between the sharply competitive and the nastily adversarial. But even within that band, there's a need for guardrails. In arms control in particular, I mean, we're about to see the collapse of what's left of the old arms control architecture-

Ian Bremmer:

With the pullout of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces deal.

Bill Burns:

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement-

Ian Bremmer:

Which they were breaching.

Bill Burns:

Which they were. And this is as a result of Russian violations. And so in many ways, the INF treaty was on its last legs anyway.

Mike Pompeo:

Russia has refused to take any steps to return real and verifiable compliance over these 60 days. The United States will therefore suspend its obligations under the INF treaty effective February 2nd.

Bill Burns:

The bigger challenge, I think, is going to be the New START agreement reached in the last administration, which reduces and limits and verifies strategic nuclear weapons. That's going to expire unless Russian and American leaderships make a more serious effort to try to extend it. So you need to have those guardrails. But you have to also be realistic and operate without illusions about the many ways in which Putin's Russia and Putin himself are going to try to push back against American interests, in part because I think he's come to the conviction that the way to create space for Russia as a major power on the international landscape is to chip away at an American-led order. So I think it's extraordinarily important for the United States not to give in to Putin's aggressiveness. On the other hand, I think it's important for us not to give up on the Russia that lies beyond Putin, who's a middle class in Russia today that chafes at corruption-

Ian Bremmer:

And they're getting angrier. Yeah?

Bill Burns:

They are. Russians didn't like being the junior partner of the United States after the end of the Cold War. They're going to chafe at being China's junior partner as you look at over the next decade.

Ian Bremmer:

Why isn't Putin chafing more at that?

Bill Burns:

I think right now it's convenient in a lot of ways to make common cause with China again to chip away at an American-led order.

Ian Bremmer:

But he clearly gets that the Chinese are increasingly dominating economically his part of the world, in a way the Americans are not.

Bill Burns:

Yeah, no. And he's the ultimate realist. Putin is, if not the ultimate cynic. I mean, he understands very well that if you look at the vast expanse of Russia from the Ural Mountains all the way across Sub-Ural to the Russian Far East, there's only today about 40 million Russians. Sitting on just about everything in the periodic table of elements and looking across a very long border at 1,000,000,004 Chinese. And so there's a reason that Russians feel insecure sometimes. As a matter of American strategy, we need to be conscious of that because there's space for artful American diplomacy as you look out beyond Putin. In the short term, I think we have to be realistic about what we're dealing with.

Ian Bremmer:

In the short term were we right to unilaterally withdraw from the INF agreement?

Bill Burns:

I don't think we had much choice. I think we might have handled it in a way that tried to expose more publicly the ways in which the Russians were violating that made more of an effort to build allied support. But those are technical concerns. And in the end, I think we're right.

Ian Bremmer:

Talking to you is frequently a talk about calibration, about incremental steps, thoughtful coalition building, I mean career ambassador, you have the foreign policy mustache. It's better than some in foreign policy. But when the world changes a lot and when institutions change very slowly, at what point is it important not to do calibrated? How does one go and suddenly say, "Actually, we need to shake things up."

Bill Burns:

No, I mean, I think certainly, I go back to the early part of my career. Again, granted, at a moment of maximum American influence in the world in the Bush 41 administration. In hindsight, German reunification less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall with a unified Germany remaining in NATO, in hindsight, that looks foreordained. It didn't look that way at the time.

Ian Bremmer:

Usually threatening to the Europeans at the time.

Bill Burns:

Exactly right. And many of those European leaders contained their enthusiasm for that prospect at the time. And it was certainly not a sure thing with Gorbachev or Shevardnadze or others around them as they were watching their own country, the Soviet Union collapse. Nor did it seem a sure thing at the time when Bush and Baker and Scowcroft mobilized a quite impressive international coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. So those are examples in my experience, of people being willing to take bold steps rather than incremental steps because they understood what was at stake in that moment.

Ian Bremmer:

Trump has no shortage of bold, but is there a bold thing out there right now that the US isn't doing as the world's still largest superpower that it needs to be?

Bill Burns:

Oh, sure.

Ian Bremmer:

What's the bold thing?

Bill Burns:

Well, I mean I think the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 was an incremental step in many respects.

Barack Obama:

We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

Bill Burns:

But if there's one area in which bold American leadership is really required right now, I think it's in terms of climate and the threat that it poses to the world.

Ian Bremmer:

What would that look like? I mean, what's the German reunification support equivalent of that?

Bill Burns:

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what that is. I think it has to do with a bolder approach to the way in which we deal with the climate consequences for our own economy. I'm not an advocate of a Green New Deal necessarily, but I mean, I think thinking in very ambitious terms about what we need to do at home and then being able to mobilize a coalition of countries that share that same sense of urgency is really important.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, I guess I would argue that'd be the place where you'd want to see boldness in the US-China relationship.

Bill Burns:

Yeah, I think that's right.

Ian Bremmer:

Because they're the big emitters.

Bill Burns:

They're the big emitters. We have a bigger stake almost than anybody else, and we have a bigger impact on the way in which climate change is going to affect the rest of the planet. So there's an opportunity, I think, but in the context of the current US-China relationship, that gets a lot harder to do.

Ian Bremmer:

So what gives you most cause for hope for the future of US diplomacy going forward?

Bill Burns:

Oh, I mean, I end the book by talking about the fact that I'm still a long-term optimist. I mean, and optimistic about the resilience of American society, optimist in the sense that I think reality imposes itself on us and we are operating on a landscape in which diplomacy really is more important, even than it was at the moment of paramount American influence 30 years ago at the end of the Cold War. It's going to take, I think, strong American leadership to drive that home to people.

Bill Burns:

Because the truth is, as you know very well, Ian, there's a pretty big domestic disconnect in our country right now between people like me, card-carrying members of the Washington establishment, who preach the virtues of disciplined American leadership, armed with diplomacy in the world, and lots of Americans who don't need to be persuaded so much, in my experience, at least, of the value of active American engagement in the world. But they're skeptical about the disciplined part. Because they've seen too many instances in administrations of both parties, but most graphically in Iraq in 2003, in the global financial crisis, of indiscipline on the part of the United States. So you got to recognize that disconnect and be honest with people and then try to explain the significance of American diplomacy smartly applied as a way not only to advance our interests and our values in the world, but also to start to bridge that disconnect a little bit.

Ian Bremmer:

Ambassador Bill Burns. In a world of 140 characters, he speaks in well-formed paragraphs. Great to be with you.

Bill Burns:

It's great to be with you, Ian. Thanks so much.

Ian Bremmer:

Thanks, Bill.

Ian Bremmer:

So that's a look at Putin as a leader, but what is life like for the people of Russia today who for so many years have been under his rule? That's the focus of New Yorker Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa's reporting.

Alex Kliment:

Most of what you read, see and hear about Russia these days in the West is about three things. Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin, and Vladimir Putin. But a new book on Russia by the New Yorker magazine's Moscow correspondent, Joshua Yaffa, takes a different approach. His book explores the many ethical compromises that Russians have to make in order to get ahead. I'm happy to be here with Josh at the famous Russian Samovar restaurant in New York, drinking some tea, having some borsch, and maybe a little vodka. Josh, thanks for being here.

Joshua Yaffa:

Thank you.

Alex Kliment:

Let's just start with the title of the book. What are the two fires that the title refers to?

Joshua Yaffa:

It comes from the Russian saying, "между двух огней," which quite literally means, "Between two fires." Which is roughly the same as the American idiom "Between a rock and a hard place." It's about this existential moment of being between two forces larger than yourself. On the one hand, it might be the state, which is omnipresent and yields great power over your life and fate, and you must keep its interests and demands in mind at all times. And the other is your conscience, your ambitions, your understanding of what you want to achieve from your own life.

Alex Kliment:

One concept that you bring up in the book is that of the 'wily man,' as a way of explaining Russia today. Who or what is the 'wily man?'

Joshua Yaffa:

The 'wily man,' essentially, is a person who professes outward allegiance or outward obedience to the rules of the game while constantly trying to subvert those very rules for his or her own benefit. It's someone for whom 'double think' is a kind of mother tongue.

Alex Kliment:

This feels like a good opportunity to take a shot of vodka.

Joshua Yaffa:

зa компромисс! за встречу!

Alex Kliment:

So just so you know, Josh's Russian is so fluent that he's actually dared to go on Russian television, evidently for the explicit purpose of being screamed on by angry Russian nationalists on what amounts to a sort of political version of the Jerry Springer show in Russia today. So I was always very impressed by that.

Joshua Yaffa:

That's very generous of you, but the truth is, in order to be screamed at on live television, you don't necessarily need a high degree of language fluency, but I'll take your compliment all the same.

Alex Kliment:

One of the most, I think, poignant portraits in the book is of a woman named Elizaveta Glinka. Tell us a little bit about her?

Joshua Yaffa:

Dr. Liza, [as] she was known, came to prominence for many Russians for her work with the terminally ill and the homeless, and became a really beloved, as you say, charity worker and someone who really changed the whole idea of charity work in Russia in the 2000s. After 2014, in the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, she felt compelled to do what she could to help the victims of that conflict, specifically sick and injured children who were stuck in the war zone. And she used her relationships with key people from the Putin state to extract those people from the war zone to help them get out. And she did all of that out of her basic universal humanitarian impulse. There were people in need. She had the means to help them, and there was really no dilemma beyond that, but she really suffered for that choice, especially in the eyes of a lot of Russian liberals, people she knew and respected, who supported her earlier work, but who couldn't countenance the fact that she was appealing to the very people who helped start the Donbas war for help in aiding the victims of that very war.

Alex Kliment:

One of the things that strikes me in the book is that there's so much absurdity in how people deal with this state and how the state deals with people. Is this one story about... You should tell the story.

Joshua Yaffa:

Yeah. There's this really colorful, delightful zookeeper named Oleg Zubkov who has two zoos in Crimea. And this is back in the nineties when Crimea was part of Ukraine. The Ukrainian tax inspector showed up before opening and essentially made it known that they were looking for a bribe, and if he didn't give it to them, there might be some troubles at his new zoo. And so what he does is he gets rid of the tax inspectors that day and shows up the next day with a bunch of monkeys.

Alex Kliment:

At the tax inspector's office.

Joshua Yaffa:

Yes. Comes to the municipal tax inspector's office with a bunch of monkeys, and the monkeys are holding signs like "Down with the corrupt tax inspectors." "Save Oleg Zubkov."

Alex Kliment:

And it worked, right? It worked.

Joshua Yaffa:

I think that the tax inspectors were so surprised to, put it mildly, that someone brought monkeys holding political signs that, yes, they were so freaked out or confused by this that at least for a while, they left him alone.

Alex Kliment:

Not long ago, Vladimir Putin proposed some changes to Russia's political system that look like they are intended to keep him in power indefinitely. He's been in power already for 20 years. There is now an entire generation of Russians who has never known any leader other than Putin. Is there a sense that the generational change in Russia might be what tips the politics in a different direction?

Joshua Yaffa:

Previous Russian generations have been shaped by two important traumas. One is the slow motion collapse of the Soviet Union, and the other is the period of anarchy and hardship that followed in the nineties. And those traumas led to exactly this personality type of the 'wily man' that we talked about earlier. This Putin generation didn't experience those traumas, came of age in an entirely different era, and so far, they seem to show lower degrees of cynicism, higher degrees of trust, and actually expect and want the state to deliver in ways that previous generations never really had any illusions or expectations about what the state could really offer them.

Alex Kliment:

To deliver in a transparent, on the up-and-up, rather than via the 'wily man' sort of corrupt seeking favors. Monkey at the tax office.

Joshua Yaffa:

Correct, correct. This younger generation thinks that, exactly, you shouldn't have to solve a problem by bringing monkeys to a tax office.

Ian Bremmer:

If there's one thing that you want Western audiences to get from your book, what is it?

Joshua Yaffa:

I think how ultimately recognizable, even universal, these dilemmas of compromise are. There's a lot in the book that is uniquely Russian, and I think the book hopefully comes off as an educational and interesting tale of what Putin's Russia is like. But I think it also can be read as what this experience of compromise feels like, and that experience is much more a part of our lives than we might think. Of mine, of yours, of people in America today. There's nothing uniquely Russian about wanting to achieve something with your life, about wanting to put your expertise and education and experience to use, while also keeping in mind forces that are larger than yourself. It could be the state, it could be the corporation you work for. It could be the Twitter mob online, but nonetheless, there are other interests that you have to keep in mind, as you said about realizing those ambitions. And I think that experience is something that's much more recognizable and universal than people might think they're getting in a book that's nominally about Russia.

Alex Kliment:

Joshua Yaffa, Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker Magazine and author of the new book "Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia." Let's take a final shot and get out of here. зa компромисс!

Alex Kliment:

That's it for the podcast this week. We'll be back in your feed next week. Check out full episodes of GZERO World on public television or at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first, by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.