Full Comment - Putin is fighting to stave off Russia’s looming collapse

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00:01:58.740 Vladimir Putin is one of the most fascinating people of our times.

00:02:03.540 For good or for bad, mostly for bad, he has held sway over much of the political, geopolitical issues that we've been facing in the 21st century.

00:02:12.840 Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.

00:02:14.860 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:02:16.260 And today, a look at Russia under Putin.

00:02:19.400 That is, in fact, the name of a book that is edited by academic Andrew Natsios.

00:02:24.000 He brought together a series of people who are experts in the area to write essays about the Russian leader and his impact.

00:02:31.240 A leader that Stephen Harper, at a recent conference in Saskatchewan, referred to as a Bond villain.

00:02:38.100 Vladimir Putin is a real-life Bond villain.

00:02:41.360 Like, he really is.

00:02:42.320 Now, calling Putin a Bond villain is funny, but it's also a bit of a caricature.

00:02:46.820 How should we, in the West, look at him?

00:02:49.200 There are far too many people, in my view, that view Putin as a savior, someone who is standing up for Western values or traditional families.

00:02:58.340 That's not the case, says Andrew Natsios.

00:03:00.660 Here is our conversation.

00:03:02.180 So, Professor Natsios, you've edited this book.

00:03:06.900 You've contributed to it.

00:03:09.420 Let me ask you, off the top, what should the average Westerner think about Vladimir Putin?

00:03:17.100 You know, there's a lot of opinions that make him out to be a boogeyman, a lot of opinions that make him look out to be a defender of Christian Western culture.

00:03:28.460 And where do you fall at the end of all of this?

00:03:32.180 Well, just to clarify, I am not in the left.

00:03:37.480 I am right of center, not a populist, traditional Republican.

00:03:42.760 Two, I'm an Orthodox Christian, so I am certainly not hostile to the Orthodox Church.

00:03:48.000 I'm very serious about my faith.

00:03:50.220 So, it pains me to say this, but I think he's used the Church to appeal to Westerners.

00:03:57.120 According to the website of the Russian government, 2% of Russians go to church.

00:04:02.720 If you look in Greece, it's 60% of the population goes to church.

00:04:06.680 So, the Russians are not churchgoers. 0.74

00:04:08.700 And I think the reason is, is because Putin has used the Church, and people have been quite cynical about the hierarchy, because they go out and bless tanks and missiles and stuff like that, which I think is extraordinarily inappropriate.

00:04:22.000 But what to think of him, he is a traditional Russian autocrat.

00:04:27.820 So, Stephen Kotkin is the biographer of Joseph Stalin.

00:04:33.540 He's working on the third volume of each volume is 900 pages long.

00:04:38.680 It's the definitive study of Stalin.

00:04:41.640 And he was asked to comment on who Putin was and why Putin invaded Ukraine.

00:04:47.580 And he said, he is just in a long line of Russian autocrats that go back to the 19th century.

00:04:52.740 This has nothing to do with NATO.

00:04:54.500 It has to do with the Russian Empire, which he is attempting to reconstruct.

00:04:58.600 And he has a big problem on his hand, which I describe in the book and through my chapter, which is the demography of Russia is a catastrophe.

00:05:08.180 Now, all advanced countries...

00:05:11.260 Just before you go on, in what ways do you mean that?

00:05:14.460 Well, the population is in decline.

00:05:17.840 And it's true that fertility rates across the world are in decline, particularly in the industrialized country.

00:05:24.580 In fact, everywhere in the world except Africa, the fertility rates are in decline.

00:05:28.880 We are now in the United States, and I think in Canada as well, well below what's called population stability, which is an average of 2.1 children.

00:05:39.440 Oh, we are well below that in Canada.

00:05:42.040 And you're higher than us, but still below.

00:05:44.620 And we're making it worse by making this an uncomfortable place for immigrants, because that's what's saving us.

00:05:51.540 It's saving Canada and the United States to have immigrants. 1.00

00:05:54.200 That's another subject.

00:05:55.540 But Western Europe has the same problem.

00:05:57.320 That's not the only problem Russia has.

00:06:01.920 People don't live as long.

00:06:03.700 The men die 10 years earlier because the suicide rate, the drug addiction rate, the alcoholism rate, the accident rate in Russia, and the cardiovascular disease rate in Russia is astronomically high.

00:06:22.040 The life expectancy rate in Russia is the highest for an advanced industrial educated society in history.

00:06:30.340 There's a whole chapter in the book by a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute who is one of the experts on the subject, Nick Eberstadt.

00:06:40.500 And my essay is an extension of his.

00:06:44.300 His just focuses on the demography.

00:06:46.220 My question is that I look at is, is that affecting Russian foreign policy?

00:06:52.940 The answer is most definitely because Putin is obsessed with it.

00:06:56.500 I don't know why scholars haven't noticed this before, but Putin, like other Western leaders, gives an annual address to what he calls the National Security Council.

00:07:07.900 And it's all of the Solubiki, the intelligence services of which there are 17 or 18 in the Russian system.

00:07:15.600 And it goes through what he thinks are the big issues of the day.

00:07:19.460 And it's not private.

00:07:20.620 I mean, it's publicized.

00:07:21.720 You can get the transcript of what he said.

00:07:24.920 And his position has evolved over, since he became president 25 years ago, on this issue of population.

00:07:35.480 At the beginning, he talked about it as a serious problem.

00:07:40.440 It's an economic problem, a military problem, and what he calls it a humanitarian problem.

00:07:46.940 The closer they got to the first invasion of Ukraine, the more apocalyptic language he uses.

00:07:52.740 And then, just before the second invasion, he says 40% of his speech is on this issue of demography, of the collapse of Russia.

00:08:03.400 One Russian demographer at Moscow State University estimates that by the end of this century, Russia will decline from 145 million people to 70 million people.

00:08:17.880 This is by the end of this century.

00:08:20.700 Now, that is astonishing.

00:08:23.220 It means it will basically be the largest country in the world, by far, geographically, that's empty.

00:08:29.860 They're predicting that Siberia will go from 40 million to 20 million.

00:08:36.940 And Siberia contains two-thirds of the mineral and oil and gas wealth of the entire planet.

00:08:44.700 And there's not going to be anyone there.

00:08:47.060 Look, part of the reason Russia was able to take over Siberia, because it wasn't originally part of it, was because it was empty.

00:08:55.080 And it's going to be empty again, which means somebody else could take it over.

00:09:00.420 Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the Russian intellectuals, quietly, and some of the intelligence services are saying, the West is not our enemy.

00:09:11.100 We should not be pursuing this war on Ukraine.

00:09:14.480 The risk to Russia is China. 0.99

00:09:16.960 China, you know, also is losing population, but they have 1.4 billion people.

00:09:21.900 Russia almost went to war with China in the 1960s, as you may know.

00:09:29.700 They have a very long and contested border with China.

00:09:35.400 And that's where he should be focusing his attention, but it's not.

00:09:38.440 He's made this supposed alliance with Xi Jinping.

00:09:41.480 But the reality is, below that level of senior leadership, there's a lot of animosity between the Chinese and the Russian elites.

00:09:51.660 The Chinese elites look down at the Russians as basically a corrupt dictatorship that, I mean, China is a dictatorship, but they've been putting corrupt people in jail.

00:10:01.220 Russia doesn't do that.

00:10:02.260 I'm sorry for laughing at that, but we're talking, you know, folks are debating which level of dictatorship is worse.

00:10:12.860 Before we get too much deeper into the book, I want to thank you for raising what you did right off the top about the way that Putin has used the Russian Orthodox Church and his supposed, you know, defenses of, you know, things like traditional family.

00:10:35.340 I've heard from so many young men, one of my own sons included, about, oh, well, Putin is standing up for what matters.

00:10:44.040 It's like, no, no, I think he's using and abusing that.

00:10:47.940 And he really has on so many fronts.

00:10:52.160 And yet he's got a following in Western society as a result of his posturing, doesn't he?

00:10:59.740 Oh, he most definitely does.

00:11:01.540 And I hear this from people who don't know a lot about what's actually happening.

00:11:05.340 Look at the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

00:11:09.320 He's a tobacco merchant.

00:11:11.100 He's making millions of dollars in a tobacco monopoly.

00:11:16.200 Look at their photographs with him with a $50,000 watch in his arm.

00:11:20.760 I mean, the hierarchs in the Orthodox Church are supposed to be celibate and live lives of poverty.

00:11:26.540 He is not doing that.

00:11:27.900 And there is a huge war now between the patriarch of the entire Orthodox Church, Bartholomew, whose seat is in Istanbul, and the patriarch in Moscow.

00:11:44.520 And they are at war with each other rhetorically because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been under Moscow.

00:11:54.000 And Bartholomew gave, and he has the authority under canon law to do that, he gave Ukraine independence from Russia.

00:12:04.060 And the Russian Orthodox Church is very hollow.

00:12:06.840 And as a result, there is this war.

00:12:10.220 They condemn each other in the liturgy on Sundays.

00:12:13.400 I don't think we condemn him, but he condemns us.

00:12:17.060 So I think they're making a big mistake.

00:12:20.280 They're believing the propaganda that Russia is an Orthodox country.

00:12:27.040 2% of the people go to church all the time.

00:12:29.020 That's not an Orthodox country.

00:12:30.880 Now, what about the domestic politics?

00:12:35.960 I used to work with a camera operator when I was in the TV business who would describe what it was like going back to visit his family in Russia.

00:12:46.800 And, you know, as someone who had left Russia, come to Canada for reasons because he, you know, did not like his economic opportunities there, but also because he didn't like the oppression.

00:13:02.360 And he could see it from the outside, but he would go back to Russia, and his family would just tell him how great Putin was.

00:13:09.740 There is, I mean, he has a stranglehold over not only how the legislature works out of the Kremlin, but over the media, and a lot of the public still buys into what he's selling, don't they?

00:13:27.360 Well, that's because he's destroyed in independent media.

00:13:30.100 Almost all Russians, or I shouldn't say all Russians, 90% of Russians, the non-intelligentsia, get their news from electronic media, which is true in the West as well.

00:13:41.180 And he has basically taken over all the electronic news media, and they feed them propaganda.

00:13:46.620 And the most damaging thing that happened is when this, I think it was under President Obama, or I can't remember which president, but the CIA released the photograph of this massive palace that was built on the Crimea for Putin.

00:14:04.120 And it's hundreds of billions of millions of dollars to build this.

00:14:11.080 They just showed a photograph of it and released it.

00:14:13.640 It caused widespread anger in Russia because it was not released in the news stations, but virtually through the Internet.

00:14:23.280 And the younger people, the younger people, by the way, hate Putin and the polling data.

00:14:28.320 He has a 20% approval rating of people under 30 years old in Russia.

00:14:33.080 He used to have an 80% approval rating for older people, but that is now in decline because the casualty rates are so high in Russia from the war in Ukraine, and the abuse and the repression is so bad that he's losing that support.

00:14:52.160 And they are now tightening up on any information.

00:14:55.620 We used to get a lot of data.

00:14:56.720 Is this kind of like his Vietnam, to put it in an American context?

00:15:00.680 Oh, yes, it is.

00:15:02.640 Absolutely.

00:15:03.400 And the reason he's increasing the repression is the elites, the Soloviki, which is the term for all these intelligence services, are all saying, why do you keep pursuing this?

00:15:14.340 This is disastrous for us.

00:15:15.940 We are not winning this war.

00:15:17.900 We're doing a lot of damage to the Ukraine. 0.99

00:15:19.740 But we've made Ukraine into a permanent enemy of Russia. 0.56

00:15:24.940 And now, you know, when Westerners say, well, you know, they're one country, they're not one country.

00:15:30.180 They're two different countries, and their languages are similar, but Spanish is similar to Portuguese, but they're two different countries.

00:15:38.380 You don't say, you'd ever tell a Spaniard or a Portuguese that they're the same country.

00:15:42.560 But the Ukraine, the Ukraine, part of Ukraine, East Ukraine...

00:15:48.060 Try going to Glasgow and telling someone that they're English.

00:15:51.500 I know, exactly.

00:15:52.280 Same thing.

00:15:54.520 Exactly.

00:15:55.320 But the thing is that Eastern Ukraine used to be more oriented toward the East, toward Moscow, and Western Ukraine was more oriented toward Europe.

00:16:06.120 That is no longer the case.

00:16:07.680 Putin maybe has about 6%, 7% of the population, Ukraine, that remains pro-Russian, but the rest of the population now absolutely hates the Russians.

00:16:19.520 And I point out to people, they don't realize what the Russians did to the Ukrainians in the 1930s during the forced collectivization.

00:16:28.700 They killed, through starvation, Stalin did, 3 to 4 million Ukrainians.

00:16:34.340 It's the worst famine in Europe in the century and a half, and it was orchestrated out of Moscow. 1.00

00:16:44.320 And they deliberately exterminated the Orthodox Church leadership, the cultural leadership of the country, intellectual leadership, the universities.

00:16:55.720 They targeted them for starvation to kill off the leadership of Ukrainian society so that Stalin could have his way with the forced collectivization.

00:17:07.900 And we know now from the records of the Russian archives, they did it deliberately. 0.82

00:17:12.900 We know now from Stalin actually admitted he knew what was going on. 0.96

00:17:16.620 He said, let them die.

00:17:17.540 So there's a lot of Ukrainians that say, we remember what happened during the 30s. 0.99

00:17:23.920 We don't trust the Russians, and we don't want them running the country. 1.00

00:17:27.140 But you say that he has, you know, Eastern Ukraine was more aligned with Russia.

00:17:33.440 He's alienated them.

00:17:35.240 And then within Russia, you know, your book points out that they, he launched this war in part, you know, we've seen this in movies.

00:17:49.680 We've talked about it, you know, Wag the Dog or whatever you want to talk about, where leaders will launch wars or conflicts to try and bolster domestic support.

00:18:02.180 That's no longer the case in Russia, though, you're saying.

00:18:05.240 No, it's changed because of the level of casualties, as it did during the Afghan war when Russia invaded Afghanistan.

00:18:14.060 They lost far fewer people.

00:18:17.220 But the interesting thing is, who is dying in the war?

00:18:20.080 While Russian troops are dying, they're killing, the Ukrainians are killing a lot of Russian generals and senior officers. 0.98

00:18:28.480 They have evolved into the strongest military in Europe now.

00:18:32.680 So what's happening?

00:18:35.640 The Ukrainians have evolved into that? 1.00

00:18:37.640 Oh, yes.

00:18:38.560 Their military is one of the strongest militaries in Europe now.

00:18:42.240 And it's because they realize if they lose this war and Russia takes over the Ukraine, I point out in my chapter that they're likely to start resettling the population to demolish Ukraine as a society. 0.85

00:18:57.500 They've already done that in the areas they've conquered.

00:19:00.940 They've moved, according to the minister of who I know, I know, show you.

00:19:06.500 He's been removed since of defense minister.

00:19:09.000 But he was head of their FEMA, their emergency management agency, 35 years ago.

00:19:15.560 And they came to the United States. 0.54

00:19:17.220 And I had a dinner for them at my house when I was the head of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in USAID.

00:19:23.860 And he was in the delegation.

00:19:25.600 He was in his late 30s.

00:19:27.660 He was very quiet.

00:19:29.180 But he later became defense minister for much of the early part of this war.

00:19:33.240 Shoigu said publicly in a press statement that they've moved 1.37 million Ukrainians out of the Concord area into Siberia or into the Ural Mountains.

00:19:47.460 Some of them, according to Human Rights Watch, have been moved to the Sakhalin Islands in the Pacific.

00:19:54.040 It is outrageous.

00:19:56.800 You look at the UN reports on this.

00:19:59.840 There's also a Yale Observatory on armed conflict, and they're reporting the same thing.

00:20:05.480 Hundreds of thousands of children who are really not orphaned are being moved into Siberia to repopulate that area.

00:20:13.140 We've got protest after protest about the idea that, you know, in the war between Hamas and Israel, that people would be moved or that populations would be shifted.

00:20:26.100 And the entire world is upset about that.

00:20:28.720 But it's actually happening between Russia and Ukraine.

00:20:32.920 And I hear crickets.

00:20:35.460 You're absolutely right now.

00:20:36.840 The U.S. ambassador under Biden to the U.N., she brought it up.

00:20:43.120 And the Secretary of State brought it up.

00:20:45.780 And it was on the State Department website.

00:20:47.480 It's been since taken down.

00:20:49.040 But it's not a secret.

00:20:50.700 It's just no one said anything about it.

00:20:52.760 Stalin did the same thing, by the way, in the late 1930s.

00:20:56.540 You know, the Greeks, and I'm a Greek-American, have been in the Crimea since 700 B.C.

00:21:04.380 He moved all the Greeks out because he was suspicious of them.

00:21:07.360 He moved the Tartars out, who have been there since 1300, and moved them to what's now Kazakhstan. 0.93

00:21:14.180 Hundreds of thousands of these ethnic groups that Stalin moved or died during the transport.

00:21:21.580 They were just dumped.

00:21:23.700 And Putin's doing the same thing Stalin did. 0.63

00:21:26.440 And again, the world is not saying anything about it.

00:21:29.060 So I think what's going to happen, if they lose, they know Ukraine will cease to exist.

00:21:37.220 And if you talk to the Poles, we have delegations at the Bush School at Texas A&M where I teach,

00:21:44.160 and we hear that these are Polish intellectuals, they're city councilors, they're mayors, they're parliamentarians.

00:21:50.140 They think they're going to be next.

00:21:52.540 The Baltic states are arming now.

00:21:55.440 And the interesting thing is that Finland has now withdrawn from the Landmines Convention

00:22:01.000 because they're mining the whole 800-mile border with Russia.

00:22:06.600 The Swedes are in war mode now.

00:22:09.540 They're actually doing exercises in the schools for air raid drills to prepare people for a war.

00:22:21.480 So Europe now realized the Germans finally have woken up and are beginning to arm. 0.92

00:22:27.520 But I think this is exactly the opposite of what Putin intended.

00:22:32.200 He thought he was going to go in, just take things over, and he'd be welcomed as a hero.

00:22:36.680 And that's not what's happened.

00:22:38.540 So he's dug himself into a hole and does not know how to get out of it.

00:22:43.020 And I think he's in a dictatorship.

00:22:45.780 You know, you make up your own reality.

00:22:49.140 We've had Canadian forces in Latvia, and I believe perhaps Lithuania as well, for about a decade now

00:22:57.740 as part of Operation Reassurance, just trying to say, yeah, we've got your back.

00:23:03.240 Because, you know, we all believe, anybody that's looking at this objectively believes that Vladimir Putin wants to get the band back together.

00:23:12.160 He wants the old Russian Empire to be resurrected.

00:23:16.220 Yes, he does.

00:23:17.360 That's exactly right.

00:23:18.360 And we have a chapter in the book by Jim Corum, who was – he's an American.

00:23:24.040 He served with me in the Army Reserves.

00:23:26.960 I think we were in the Gulf War together.

00:23:29.020 He was a colonel.

00:23:29.880 I was a lieutenant colonel.

00:23:30.880 And I was a civil affairs officer, interestingly enough.

00:23:34.620 But he was the dean of the equivalent of our West Point, our senior army school in the United States,

00:23:44.580 our senior officers in the Baltic states.

00:23:47.740 And he wrote a chapter on that experience and whether or not the Baltic republics are at risk, because they know they are.

00:23:57.240 And then his wife, Lynn Corum, translated three books, four books, I think, called Project Russia,

00:24:05.920 which is very disturbing to read, because it is a best-selling book.

00:24:09.120 It sold two million copies in Russia.

00:24:11.700 It is – it's the closest thing we have to an ideology for the Russian regime.

00:24:16.080 I had a student who wrote and translated Russian fluently one summer, translated the whole thing for me.

00:24:26.140 He said, this is really weird to read this stuff, because it's all into conspiracy theories,

00:24:31.900 how the West has designed this whole effort to destroy Russian culture.

00:24:36.760 We spent Canada, the United States, Western Europe, a fortune, billions of dollars,

00:24:42.840 trying to reconstruct Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:24:46.440 We helped them enter the international economy and the other European countries, Eastern European countries,

00:24:53.500 that became liberated from Russia. 0.61

00:24:57.520 In Eastern Europe, it worked.

00:24:59.280 It didn't work in Russia because of the level of corruption and the fact that the KGB

00:25:04.760 basically took control of the country politically.

00:25:08.020 And that's what's – that's the other thing that we pointed out in the chapter.

00:25:12.720 Anders Aslan is a Swedish development economist who's the expert in Russian corruption.

00:25:18.740 He has a whole chapter on the circles around Putin.

00:25:24.040 There are three levels of circles of people who run the country who looted the economy.

00:25:29.920 Putin himself is worth about $125 billion, according to his – Anders' calculations.

00:25:36.960 He's at the Atlantic Council.

00:25:38.860 But he has written widely on this subject.

00:25:43.860 There's the first chapter of the book by – she's a professor at Stanford.

00:25:50.200 And she is an expert in Catherine Stoner on the Russian political system.

00:25:57.760 And she's pointed out that essentially the KGB, the old secret police, now called the FSB,

00:26:04.260 have taken over, politically taken over, and economically taken over,

00:26:08.740 both the economy and the political system and run it into the ground.

00:26:12.460 It is – it's not just a matter of a concentration of wealth.

00:26:18.640 In the West, in Canada, the United States, Europe, we have billionaires.

00:26:23.600 But they've created something.

00:26:25.020 Bill Gates created it.

00:26:26.540 Microsoft.

00:26:27.420 These guys didn't create anything.

00:26:29.060 They looted something.

00:26:30.340 They create jobs.

00:26:32.080 They create wealth for the rest of us.

00:26:35.300 Exactly.

00:26:35.740 You know, I'm sure there's going to be somebody screaming that, oh, well, you're just a chattel.

00:26:40.380 You know, why would you ever believe that?

00:26:43.400 But, no, they do create jobs. 0.70

00:26:45.040 In Russia, it's very different.

00:26:46.880 One of the things I love about your book, Professor Natios, is that it is a bunch of chapters written by different people.

00:26:55.260 When we come back, we have to take a quick break now.

00:26:58.040 But when we come back, I do want to talk about your chapter on the West misreading Putin's intentions and what he's trying to do.

00:27:08.140 Back in moments.

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00:27:24.560 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?

00:27:27.060 where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.

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00:27:45.900 So, Professor Natios, you know, I think back to when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Iron Curtain fell,

00:27:52.140 when, you know, we were expecting glosnos for people to remember that term.

00:27:59.000 And we suddenly fell away from that.

00:28:03.820 You know, we went from Boris Yeltsin, for all his faults, showing up in Washington, showing up in Ottawa.

00:28:12.020 He was a great friend of Brian Mulroney, our late former prime minister, would, you know, show up and regale him with stories.

00:28:24.480 They were very close.

00:28:25.940 And then we go from that to Stephen Harper, Canada's former prime minister, showing up shortly at a G8 meeting, shortly after the invasion of Crimea, saying,

00:28:37.320 I only have one thing to say to you, and that is get out of this country.

00:28:41.280 Get out of Crimea. 0.76

00:28:43.000 How did we go from things are opening up to we're shutting down relations with Russia?

00:28:50.460 I think Russia, that Putin bided his time when he first took over.

00:28:56.340 You know, he took over.

00:28:57.320 He was not expecting to be the head of state of Russia.

00:29:02.980 This happened very quickly.

00:29:04.660 He had been involved, actually, with the mafia in St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt governments in the country.

00:29:15.360 And then he went to Moscow.

00:29:16.940 Hold on, hold on, I've got to pause you there.

00:29:21.520 Explain that, because I think a lot of our listeners will not know that and will not know anything about it.

00:29:27.060 So, you know, expand on that just for a minute or two.

00:29:30.000 He was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, the secret police, in East Germany.

00:29:34.400 And he went from there back to Russia, and he got a job as one of the deputy mayors in St. Petersburg, the second largest city, cultural capital of Russia in many respects.

00:29:50.000 And the evidence from some of the reformers in Russia is he got involved with the criminal mafia in the city.

00:29:58.120 And he moved from there to Moscow, and he was known for being very efficient and fanatically loyal to his bosses.

00:30:04.800 And he was briefly put in charge of the new KGB called the FSB, I think for just eight or ten months.

00:30:13.380 And then he went on to other positions, and then finally Yeltsin chose him to be his successor, just like that.

00:30:20.620 I mean, no one was expecting.

00:30:21.880 No one even knew who he was.

00:30:23.140 And for the first ten years, he was seen as a reformer.

00:30:28.700 If you read his PhD dissertation, which some people say he didn't actually write, he hired someone to write it.

00:30:36.900 It was a classical liberal document about joining the Western democracies in terms of market economy.

00:30:46.420 There was a lot of optimism about him.

00:30:49.160 I think what happened is he realized that communism had done enormous damage to Russia because it had been in place since 1917.

00:30:58.640 Eastern European communism wasn't as deep because, for example, there was no collective farming system in Poland.

00:31:06.600 They did not collectivize the farms the way they did in Russia.

00:31:10.380 And the Eastern European communism was resisted on a massive scale by the Solidarity Union in Poland and the Catholic Church.

00:31:20.360 And so there was a lot of nationalism.

00:31:22.740 That was not true in the Soviet Union as much.

00:31:26.120 And so I think it did more damage.

00:31:30.640 And what happened is the chaos of the 1990s, because there was massive economic chaos in the transition to a capitalist economy or supposedly a free market economy.

00:31:42.080 And people's pensions weren't being paid.

00:31:44.880 There was a lot of suffering, economic suffering in Russia.

00:31:47.620 And he was brought in to reconstitute the Russian state, which had collapsed as an apparatus of governance.

00:31:55.520 And he did that by basically seizing control of all of the natural resources of the country, particularly oil and gas, and giving them out control of these resources to former KGB agents. 0.58

00:32:12.360 In fact, a number of studies have been done showing that a large percentage of the people running Russia now in all of the major institutions are former KGB agents who are colleagues of Russia.

00:32:27.420 Many of them were generals in the KGB, and they converted, became business people.

00:32:31.940 They're not really business people.

00:32:33.680 They're looters.

00:32:35.120 But that's what they did.

00:32:36.180 And I think at the beginning, in the 1990s, these people were basically telling the government what to do, and Putin said, no more of this.

00:32:48.120 So he started arresting them, and some of them had accidents, died, and eventually…

00:32:57.980 Falling out of windows or running into an umbrella.

00:33:01.660 By the way, that's what's happening now, that I think was the Minister of Transport just supposedly committed suicide just before he was arrested for corruption.

00:33:09.600 And he didn't commit suicide.

00:33:13.080 And a lot of the oligarchs who were opposed to what he's doing in Ukraine are falling out of windows, as you point out.

00:33:19.320 So some people are comparing this on a much smaller scale to Stalin's purges in the late 1930s, to suppress any dissent within the ruling elite.

00:33:32.520 But what Putin did eventually was seize control from these oligarchs who had taken control of the economy.

00:33:38.820 He arrested them, forced them out of the country, confiscated their wealth, put them in jail, taxed them to death, or they had accidents.

00:33:47.700 And then he gave it to a network of people he created, all this wealth, of people who were loyal to him.

00:33:54.840 Catherine Stoner says in her chapter that this is basically what is called a cliental estate or a patrimonial estate,

00:34:01.160 which is a complex set of personal relationships, because the institutions of Russia are so weak that it's all based on personal connections.

00:34:13.460 The reason the West is relatively stable economically and politically, despite all our problems,

00:34:18.920 we have an orderly system for deciding who governs over a couple of centuries.

00:34:26.020 And that is not the case in Russia.

00:34:28.140 When Putin dies, no one really knows who's going to take over.

00:34:32.000 The process in the Constitution is probably not going to be followed.

00:34:35.800 And there's going to be a period of chaos and instability, because all regimes change because all people eventually die.

00:34:42.820 And so their system is fragile in a political sense.

00:34:47.080 And that is its great weakness.

00:34:49.400 The institutions are corrupted or they're very weak.

00:34:52.680 And Russia could fly apart.

00:34:55.580 And that's what people are afraid of.

00:34:57.200 It would be a disaster because they have nuclear weapons. 0.87

00:35:00.180 They have biological weapons.

00:35:02.180 And we don't want Russia descending into chaos, because if it does, it will be a disaster for the whole world. 0.99

00:35:09.760 But that could happen.

00:35:11.260 It could happen.

00:35:11.840 So how did the West so badly misread Hootin?

00:35:20.500 Not to pump Stephen Harper's tires, but Harper read it pretty quickly.

00:35:27.000 And, you know, sitting in a room with, you know, news conference with both Obama and Harper, and Harper just seemed to have the ability to look at what other world leaders were doing and assess it quickly that Obama didn't have.

00:35:47.260 And so, you know, some of this happened under Obama, but it also happened under Trump, it's happened under Biden, and now we're into Trump 2.0.

00:35:56.960 You're absolutely right.

00:35:57.860 I think, how did it happen?

00:36:02.100 I think some Westerners, Western political leaders in all of our countries were living or hoping for a new Russia, hoping for a Russia that looked more like Europe, Canada, or the United States, or other industrialized democracies, when, in fact, the opposite was happening.

00:36:21.920 And I think it was just naivete.

00:36:25.160 If you look at the academic literature during this period, many of the scholars of Russia were dismissing.

00:36:32.140 I had arguments with some of them who knew far more about Russia than I did, and they would sit and say, oh, no, Putin is a pragmatist, he's moving the country.

00:36:41.820 This was relatively 10 years ago that they were saying this.

00:36:45.720 I said, that's complete nonsense.

00:36:47.120 Look at what he's actually doing.

00:36:48.420 He's destroying civil society.

00:36:51.060 The Duma has become a rubber stamp.

00:36:53.940 The Russian Orthodox Church is simply an appendage of the government, and the news media is being shut down, particularly the electronic news media, and they're using propaganda to mislead the public as to what's really going on.

00:37:08.760 The interesting thing is...

00:37:10.420 I was seeing this 15 years ago as a general observer.

00:37:15.260 However, how did the academics and the think tanks and the bureaucrats not see this?

00:37:24.480 I think it's naiveness.

00:37:27.380 Mike McFaul was the ambassador to Russia, I think, under Obama or Biden.

00:37:33.400 He was a professor at Stanford, and when he left to go to Russia to be ambassador, he was much more naive.

00:37:39.840 When he came back, he was quite militant and hostile to Putin because he said he's not what we all thought.

00:37:47.200 So McFaul, you can see a change in McFaul's attitude once he went to Moscow to be ambassador, and he's written about this widely.

00:37:54.600 And, I mean, he's a Russia scholar.

00:37:56.340 So most of them are admitting now they made a mistake.

00:38:01.780 The problem is some people are blaming the West, which I listen to all the time.

00:38:05.340 I'm fed up with listening to it.

00:38:07.500 Stephen Kotkin says this is nonsense to blame the West for what happened.

00:38:11.480 This is Russian autocracy from the 19th century reemerging in modern form. 0.97

00:38:19.400 That's what this is.

00:38:20.340 And unless we stop them, he's just going to keep going.

00:38:25.160 The notion that he's going to stop with Ukraine is naive.

00:38:29.300 We heard this once before in the 1930s with someone else.

00:38:32.560 I don't want to start drawing some parallels.

00:38:34.760 But, you know, the interesting thing is Putin, when he's on the air, he goes on the air all the time, or he used to before the war.

00:38:41.040 He used to quote a guy named Ivan Ilyin, who was one of his favorite thinkers.

00:38:46.340 Ilyin Ilyin was a Russian Nazi.

00:38:48.740 He, in the 1920s, he left Russia and went to Europe and lives in Switzerland.

00:38:56.280 He was a voluminous writer.

00:38:58.120 He embraced Mussolini and then eventually worked in Goebbels' propaganda ministry in the Nazi Reich in Berlin.

00:39:08.180 He died eventually, and Putin had his remains brought back to Moscow and reburied with an Orthodox bishop standing there.

00:39:20.860 This is not a neo-Nazi Nazi.

00:39:26.440 What are the chances that Vladimir Putin believes anything the Orthodox Church says? 0.79

00:39:31.760 I think they, that he's quite dope.

00:39:34.840 He goes to Mount Athos, which is the monastic center of Orthodox Christianity, and he prostrates himself from in front of the icons.

00:39:43.040 And they do this on TV all the time.

00:39:45.240 I used to be taken 20 years ago when I saw this, and I said to some of my Greek friends, I said, look, he's one of us.

00:39:54.100 He said, no, he's not, Andrew.

00:39:55.460 You guys in America are so naive.

00:39:57.260 And eventually, I remember these business people telling me, don't be taken in by this guy.

00:40:04.260 He's not what he appears to be.

00:40:06.560 I think the Europeans are a little bit more realistic sometimes than the Europeans and Americans and Australians who are.

00:40:15.440 They want to believe better things of other leaders, and so they get taken in sometimes.

00:40:23.440 And Harper was not one of the people that got taken in.

00:40:25.720 I will say this as someone who has spent time in Eucharistic adoration, who has prostrated themselves before the real presence, all of that.

00:40:38.320 And this is a ruse.

00:40:41.800 This, like, I don't believe anything he's saying about this.

00:40:46.600 I don't either.

00:40:48.660 No one who, any form of Christian. 1.00

00:40:55.720 And to go through the slot that he has presided over.

00:40:59.800 And the human rights atrocities.

00:41:02.360 Yes.

00:41:02.880 I mean, the execution of children in point-blank range in Bukha, in Ukraine.

00:41:10.120 I mean, and this was, and then it's one thing to have soldiers out of control.

00:41:14.280 That happens in wars.

00:41:15.240 I understand it.

00:41:16.060 He gave awards to all the soldiers that killed those children.

00:41:19.460 Andrew, I want to ask you about this.

00:41:22.540 You said at the start that you are from the right.

00:41:26.480 You are from the conservative side, as am I.

00:41:30.480 But there are some people on our side who want to believe everything that Russia and Putin put up there.

00:41:39.680 And it's not just Tucker Carlson.

00:41:43.160 This is a real movement within the right in North America that I don't understand.

00:41:51.100 I've been trying to, and I don't understand it.

00:41:54.020 Do you?

00:41:54.460 Well, I'll tell you, my church, the Orthodox Church, I was a Protestant for much of my life.

00:42:02.280 Twenty-five years ago, I went back to the Orthodox Church that I was in.

00:42:05.880 I had been a Presbyterian that I was baptized in.

00:42:10.880 And, you know, we have a little church in the city in Texas that I live in.

00:42:15.560 And it's, you know, 50 people.

00:42:19.580 We now have 150 people in the church, and it's mostly young men.

00:42:24.760 And I've gone up to them and said, and these are not ethnic Russian or Greek or Romanian people whose family, these are mostly Baptists.

00:42:34.620 They come from evangelical backgrounds.

00:42:36.740 And I thought this was just our church.

00:42:39.220 It's happening across the country.

00:42:41.220 And I asked them, why are you joining our church?

00:42:44.380 We're welcoming you.

00:42:45.380 We're so happy.

00:42:46.120 He said, we need to reach back to the past, which the Orthodox Church embraces, because we don't trust anything in the modern world. 0.97

00:42:55.380 We don't think it's genuine.

00:42:57.100 And we want a world from the third century, which is what the Orthodox Church is in some ways. 0.62

00:43:04.560 But the disciplines, you have to, in my church, you have to stand up for two hours, and there's severe fasting.

00:43:12.060 That's not very modern.

00:43:13.360 Yeah, well, like as a Catholic, I'm looking at our stand up, kneel down, stand up, kneel down, and that's bad enough. 0.62

00:43:22.420 And then you guys are worse. 0.64

00:43:23.920 Yes, we are worse.

00:43:25.100 And the fasting, you used to do the fasting, and then Vatican II said not so much anymore.

00:43:30.860 Our fasting regime is like five months out of the year.

00:43:34.340 We have a vegan fast, essentially.

00:43:37.480 But anyway, I said, are you attracted to this?

00:43:40.540 He said, yes, because it's hard.

00:43:42.060 We want something that's hard.

00:43:44.800 And Putin has convinced everyone that the answer to the West's ills is to go back to the ancient church.

00:43:55.020 Well, the problem is he's not following the ancient church.

00:43:57.680 And the regime is so corrupt, and the violence, the abuse in the regime is so horrible, even before the invasion of Ukraine, that it's not believable.

00:44:10.420 They're using the church for their own purposes, and I find it contemptible myself.

00:44:15.080 Where do we go from here in terms of trying to push back against Putin in the West?

00:44:22.760 Because, you know, as we've discussed, there's a bunch of young men who think that this is the answer.

00:44:28.240 You and I would argue that, you know, clearly it's not.

00:44:33.860 But how do we push back against that and say, look, this guy is not who you think he is?

00:44:40.480 Yes. Well, I think the first thing is we have to make sure that Ukraine doesn't fall, because I am certain they're going to go after Moldova, the Baltic states, Poland, and who knows, they're threatening Finland now and Sweden for joining NATO.

00:44:58.220 So I think we're going to have a European war. We already have one. I think it's the early stages of another European war. 0.92

00:45:06.460 The way to deal with this is through properly arming the Ukrainians, despite the weaknesses in their government and corruption and all that. 1.00

00:45:16.060 The Russian, the Ukrainian military is making a very, very strong effort to defend the country, and we need to support them.

00:45:23.220 And this naive, it's not naive, this U.S. change of policy every two weeks is, I think, disastrous.

00:45:36.300 We need to take a firm stance. Most of the Republicans in the Congress...

00:45:42.180 What do you mean by that, this change of policy every two weeks?

00:45:46.420 The president, one week, wants to make... He said during the campaign that he was going to be able to settle this, and no, he exaggerates, so let's just put the exaggeration aside, that he was going to have this settled at $48.

00:46:00.720 Yes, which is nonsense.

00:46:02.320 He did just settle Cambodia and Thailand by saying, if you don't stop fighting, you can't trade with us.

00:46:10.740 Right. But that doesn't work with Putin.

00:46:15.760 And he settled the Pakistan-India thing, too, and he wanted a Nobel Peace Prize for that.

00:46:23.080 I think he's being naive, or he was.

00:46:26.160 So, Andrew, let me ask you this.

00:46:29.460 What would you say to the folks who are, you know, devotees of Andrew Tate, or devotees of Tucker Carlson, who are sitting there and saying, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

00:46:44.400 Vladimir Putin is the best person ever.

00:46:46.480 Well, first, a lot of the lines that they use, Tucker Carlson and the rest of these guys, are straight out of Russian propaganda.

00:46:57.180 You can get the stuff on the Russian official lines that they put to their propaganda mediums.

00:47:07.380 They're not thinking for themselves when they talk this way to the public.

00:47:10.700 And I just want to point out that you and I are both coming at this from the right.

00:47:17.120 Yes, exactly correct.

00:47:18.540 I'm not a right of center.

00:47:22.620 The interesting thing is there was a study done by data scientists at the business school at George Washington University before COVID,

00:47:31.940 about where the anti-vaccine messaging was coming from.

00:47:37.560 50% of it was coming from Russian intelligence.

00:47:39.960 They're trying to drive up the death rates among our children by, and this is before COVID now, before all of this controversy.

00:47:49.420 And Tucker Carlson was repeating the propaganda from the Russian intelligence service.

00:47:58.460 I find it odd that we're being so naive where these guys are getting this stuff from.

00:48:04.660 And it's disturbing.

00:48:10.260 I don't know how else to do it.

00:48:12.220 I pointed out earlier, Putin, in public ceremonies, has brought back Russian fascists, 0.92

00:48:22.660 Ivan Ilyin, from his remains from Switzerland to Moscow to be—and he was there at the ceremony.

00:48:34.660 He quotes him on the air all the time.

00:48:36.940 Look up the name online.

00:48:39.100 Who is this guy?

00:48:40.620 He's a Russian intellectual from the 1920s who hated the communists,

00:48:44.640 but he worked in the Nazi Reich in Berlin in Goebbels' propaganda ministry.

00:48:53.000 Why is his remains being moved from Switzerland back to Moscow?

00:48:58.600 It's a little disturbing when you think about it.

00:49:01.480 Well, absolutely.

00:49:02.620 But all of this is something that a lot of young men will not look at and just say,

00:49:10.540 no, Putin is the man.

00:49:13.400 Putin is the guy that is looking out for us.

00:49:17.620 Well, they're wrong, and they are being misled.

00:49:21.840 And I think some of them are just naive.

00:49:25.020 They're not doing the research as to who this guy is.

00:49:28.800 They're saying, hey, read our book.

00:49:31.280 You finish our book, and you conclude that Putin's great.

00:49:35.560 You have to be living in a dream world.

00:49:39.320 All right, Andrew.

00:49:40.500 Thanks so much for the time today.

00:49:42.640 Thanks so much for your book.

00:49:44.500 And I recommend that everyone sit down, take the time to read it.

00:49:48.940 Thanks so much.

00:49:49.660 Thank you, Brian.

00:49:50.300 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:49:52.880 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:49:54.620 This episode was produced by Andre Proulx.

00:49:56.780 Theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:49:58.520 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

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00:50:10.140 Thanks for listening.

00:50:11.260 And until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

00:50:13.240 Here's that clip from Canada Did What?

00:50:20.480 I promised you.

00:50:24.600 Imagine yourself inside a Boeing 767 operated by Air Canada.

00:50:30.160 It's July 1983.

00:50:32.300 You're traveling between Montreal and Edmonton, and a couple hours into the flight, the comforting

00:50:37.340 roar of its two jet engines suddenly stop, and most of the power cuts out.

00:50:42.560 Good evening.

00:50:43.520 It was a metric mix-up.

00:50:45.640 Air Canada has confirmed the plane that landed at Gimli, Manitoba last Saturday ran out of

00:50:51.480 gas because of an error in metric conversion.

00:50:53.880 I regret to inform you that you're inside the Gimli Glider, one of history's only incidents

00:51:00.100 of a civilian airliner running out of gas in the middle of the sky.

00:51:04.860 And this happened because someone didn't know how to properly measure out enough jet fuel.

00:51:09.600 Now, I mention the Gimli Glider only to note that systems of measure are not just numbers

00:51:15.400 on a page.

00:51:16.540 They're cultural objects.

00:51:18.300 They might not be on par with language or religion, but they're ways of understanding

00:51:23.320 the world around us.

00:51:24.780 And if you screw with them, even with the best of intentions, you might get the occasional

00:51:29.960 airliner falling out of the sky.

00:51:31.580 Fortunately, in this instance, it miraculously worked out fine.

00:51:36.940 The pilots in control of this particular Air Canada flight just happened to be two of the

00:51:41.620 only people on Earth perfectly suited to safely bring down a crippled full-size airliner

00:51:47.760 in the middle of Manitoba.

00:51:50.160 One of them was an experienced glider pilot.

00:51:52.740 The other one was a former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who just happened to have served

00:51:58.160 at a Manitoba airbase that was now directly underneath them.

00:52:03.580 If you want to hear the rest of the story, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?

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Full Comment - August 11, 2025

Putin is fighting to stave off Russia’s looming collapse

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