Vladimir Putin is one of the most fascinating people of our times. For good or bad, mostly for bad, he has held sway over much of the political, geopolitical issues that we ve been facing in the 21st century.
00:01:58.740Vladimir Putin is one of the most fascinating people of our times.
00:02:03.540For 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.
00:02:12.840Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.
00:02:42.320Now, calling Putin a Bond villain is funny, but it's also a bit of a caricature.
00:02:46.820How should we, in the West, look at him?
00:02:49.200There 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.
00:02:58.340That's not the case, says Andrew Natsios.
00:03:09.420Let me ask you, off the top, what should the average Westerner think about Vladimir Putin?
00:03:17.100You 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.
00:03:28.460And where do you fall at the end of all of this?
00:03:32.180Well, just to clarify, I am not in the left.
00:03:37.480I am right of center, not a populist, traditional Republican.
00:03:42.760Two, I'm an Orthodox Christian, so I am certainly not hostile to the Orthodox Church.
00:04:08.700And 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.
00:04:22.000But what to think of him, he is a traditional Russian autocrat.
00:04:27.820So, Stephen Kotkin is the biographer of Joseph Stalin.
00:04:33.540He's working on the third volume of each volume is 900 pages long.
00:04:54.500It has to do with the Russian Empire, which he is attempting to reconstruct.
00:04:58.600And 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.
00:05:17.840And it's true that fertility rates across the world are in decline, particularly in the industrialized country.
00:05:24.580In fact, everywhere in the world except Africa, the fertility rates are in decline.
00:05:28.880We 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.
00:06:03.700The 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.
00:06:22.040The life expectancy rate in Russia is the highest for an advanced industrial educated society in history.
00:06:30.340There'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.
00:06:46.220My question is that I look at is, is that affecting Russian foreign policy?
00:06:52.940The answer is most definitely because Putin is obsessed with it.
00:06:56.500I 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.
00:07:07.900And it's all of the Solubiki, the intelligence services of which there are 17 or 18 in the Russian system.
00:07:15.600And it goes through what he thinks are the big issues of the day.
00:07:21.720You can get the transcript of what he said.
00:07:24.920And his position has evolved over, since he became president 25 years ago, on this issue of population.
00:07:35.480At the beginning, he talked about it as a serious problem.
00:07:40.440It's an economic problem, a military problem, and what he calls it a humanitarian problem.
00:07:46.940The closer they got to the first invasion of Ukraine, the more apocalyptic language he uses.
00:07:52.740And then, just before the second invasion, he says 40% of his speech is on this issue of demography, of the collapse of Russia.
00:08:03.400One 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.
00:08:23.220It means it will basically be the largest country in the world, by far, geographically, that's empty.
00:08:29.860They're predicting that Siberia will go from 40 million to 20 million.
00:08:36.940And Siberia contains two-thirds of the mineral and oil and gas wealth of the entire planet.
00:08:44.700And there's not going to be anyone there.
00:08:47.060Look, part of the reason Russia was able to take over Siberia, because it wasn't originally part of it, was because it was empty.
00:08:55.080And it's going to be empty again, which means somebody else could take it over.
00:09:00.420Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the Russian intellectuals, quietly, and some of the intelligence services are saying, the West is not our enemy.
00:09:11.100We should not be pursuing this war on Ukraine.
00:09:16.960China, you know, also is losing population, but they have 1.4 billion people.
00:09:21.900Russia almost went to war with China in the 1960s, as you may know.
00:09:29.700They have a very long and contested border with China.
00:09:35.400And that's where he should be focusing his attention, but it's not.
00:09:38.440He's made this supposed alliance with Xi Jinping.
00:09:41.480But the reality is, below that level of senior leadership, there's a lot of animosity between the Chinese and the Russian elites.
00:09:51.660The 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.
00:10:02.260I'm sorry for laughing at that, but we're talking, you know, folks are debating which level of dictatorship is worse.
00:10:12.860Before 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.
00:10:35.340I've heard from so many young men, one of my own sons included, about, oh, well, Putin is standing up for what matters.
00:10:44.040It's like, no, no, I think he's using and abusing that.
00:11:27.900And 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.
00:11:44.520And they are at war with each other rhetorically because the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been under Moscow.
00:11:54.000And Bartholomew gave, and he has the authority under canon law to do that, he gave Ukraine independence from Russia.
00:12:04.060And the Russian Orthodox Church is very hollow.
00:12:30.880Now, what about the domestic politics?
00:12:35.960I 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.
00:12:46.800And, 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.
00:13:02.360And 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.
00:13:09.740There 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?
00:13:27.360Well, that's because he's destroyed in independent media.
00:13:30.100Almost 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.
00:13:41.180And he has basically taken over all the electronic news media, and they feed them propaganda.
00:13:46.620And 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.
00:14:04.120And it's hundreds of billions of millions of dollars to build this.
00:14:11.080They just showed a photograph of it and released it.
00:14:13.640It caused widespread anger in Russia because it was not released in the news stations, but virtually through the Internet.
00:14:23.280And the younger people, the younger people, by the way, hate Putin and the polling data.
00:14:28.320He has a 20% approval rating of people under 30 years old in Russia.
00:14:33.080He 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.
00:14:52.160And they are now tightening up on any information.
00:15:03.400And 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?
00:15:17.900We're doing a lot of damage to the Ukraine.
00:15:19.740But we've made Ukraine into a permanent enemy of Russia.
00:15:24.940And now, you know, when Westerners say, well, you know, they're one country, they're not one country.
00:15:30.180They're two different countries, and their languages are similar, but Spanish is similar to Portuguese, but they're two different countries.
00:15:38.380You don't say, you'd ever tell a Spaniard or a Portuguese that they're the same country.
00:15:42.560But the Ukraine, the Ukraine, part of Ukraine, East Ukraine...
00:15:48.060Try going to Glasgow and telling someone that they're English.
00:15:55.320But the thing is that Eastern Ukraine used to be more oriented toward the East, toward Moscow, and Western Ukraine was more oriented toward Europe.
00:16:07.680Putin maybe has about 6%, 7% of the population, Ukraine, that remains pro-Russian, but the rest of the population now absolutely hates the Russians.
00:16:19.520And I point out to people, they don't realize what the Russians did to the Ukrainians in the 1930s during the forced collectivization.
00:16:28.700They killed, through starvation, Stalin did, 3 to 4 million Ukrainians.
00:16:34.340It's the worst famine in Europe in the century and a half, and it was orchestrated out of Moscow.
00:16:44.320And they deliberately exterminated the Orthodox Church leadership, the cultural leadership of the country, intellectual leadership, the universities.
00:16:55.720They targeted them for starvation to kill off the leadership of Ukrainian society so that Stalin could have his way with the forced collectivization.
00:17:07.900And we know now from the records of the Russian archives, they did it deliberately.
00:17:12.900We know now from Stalin actually admitted he knew what was going on.
00:17:35.240And 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.
00:17:49.680We'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.
00:18:02.180That's no longer the case in Russia, though, you're saying.
00:18:05.240No, it's changed because of the level of casualties, as it did during the Afghan war when Russia invaded Afghanistan.
00:18:38.560Their military is one of the strongest militaries in Europe now.
00:18:42.240And 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.
00:18:57.500They've already done that in the areas they've conquered.
00:19:00.940They've moved, according to the minister of who I know, I know, show you.
00:19:06.500He's been removed since of defense minister.
00:19:09.000But he was head of their FEMA, their emergency management agency, 35 years ago.
00:19:29.180But he later became defense minister for much of the early part of this war.
00:19:33.240Shoigu 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.
00:19:47.460Some of them, according to Human Rights Watch, have been moved to the Sakhalin Islands in the Pacific.
00:19:59.840There's also a Yale Observatory on armed conflict, and they're reporting the same thing.
00:20:05.480Hundreds of thousands of children who are really not orphaned are being moved into Siberia to repopulate that area.
00:20:13.140We'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.
00:20:26.100And the entire world is upset about that.
00:20:28.720But it's actually happening between Russia and Ukraine.
00:22:45.780You know, you make up your own reality.
00:22:49.140We've had Canadian forces in Latvia, and I believe perhaps Lithuania as well, for about a decade now
00:22:57.740as part of Operation Reassurance, just trying to say, yeah, we've got your back.
00:23:03.240Because, you know, we all believe, anybody that's looking at this objectively believes that Vladimir Putin wants to get the band back together.
00:23:12.160He wants the old Russian Empire to be resurrected.
00:27:24.560This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?
00:27:27.060where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:27:35.600Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:27:40.060If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?
00:28:25.940And 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,
00:28:37.320I only have one thing to say to you, and that is get out of this country.
00:29:16.940Hold on, hold on, I've got to pause you there.
00:29:21.520Explain that, because I think a lot of our listeners will not know that and will not know anything about it.
00:29:27.060So, you know, expand on that just for a minute or two.
00:29:30.000He was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, the secret police, in East Germany.
00:29:34.400And 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.
00:29:50.000And the evidence from some of the reformers in Russia is he got involved with the criminal mafia in the city.
00:29:58.120And he moved from there to Moscow, and he was known for being very efficient and fanatically loyal to his bosses.
00:30:04.800And he was briefly put in charge of the new KGB called the FSB, I think for just eight or ten months.
00:30:13.380And then he went on to other positions, and then finally Yeltsin chose him to be his successor, just like that.
00:31:30.640And 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.
00:31:42.080And people's pensions weren't being paid.
00:31:44.880There was a lot of suffering, economic suffering in Russia.
00:31:47.620And he was brought in to reconstitute the Russian state, which had collapsed as an apparatus of governance.
00:31:55.520And 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.
00:32:12.360In 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.
00:32:27.420Many of them were generals in the KGB, and they converted, became business people.
00:32:36.180And 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.
00:32:48.120So he started arresting them, and some of them had accidents, died, and eventually…
00:32:57.980Falling out of windows or running into an umbrella.
00:33:01.660By 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.
00:33:13.080And a lot of the oligarchs who were opposed to what he's doing in Ukraine are falling out of windows, as you point out.
00:33:19.320So 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.
00:33:32.520But what Putin did eventually was seize control from these oligarchs who had taken control of the economy.
00:33:38.820He arrested them, forced them out of the country, confiscated their wealth, put them in jail, taxed them to death, or they had accidents.
00:33:47.700And then he gave it to a network of people he created, all this wealth, of people who were loyal to him.
00:33:54.840Catherine Stoner says in her chapter that this is basically what is called a cliental estate or a patrimonial estate,
00:34:01.160which is a complex set of personal relationships, because the institutions of Russia are so weak that it's all based on personal connections.
00:34:13.460The reason the West is relatively stable economically and politically, despite all our problems,
00:34:18.920we have an orderly system for deciding who governs over a couple of centuries.
00:35:11.840So how did the West so badly misread Hootin?
00:35:20.500Not to pump Stephen Harper's tires, but Harper read it pretty quickly.
00:35:27.000And, 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.
00:35:47.260And 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.
00:36:02.100I 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.
00:36:25.160If you look at the academic literature during this period, many of the scholars of Russia were dismissing.
00:36:32.140I 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.
00:36:41.820This was relatively 10 years ago that they were saying this.
00:36:53.940The 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.
00:40:06.560I think the Europeans are a little bit more realistic sometimes than the Europeans and Americans and Australians who are.
00:40:15.440They want to believe better things of other leaders, and so they get taken in sometimes.
00:40:23.440And Harper was not one of the people that got taken in.
00:40:25.720I will say this as someone who has spent time in Eucharistic adoration, who has prostrated themselves before the real presence, all of that.
00:43:44.800And Putin has convinced everyone that the answer to the West's ills is to go back to the ancient church.
00:43:55.020Well, the problem is he's not following the ancient church.
00:43:57.680And 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.
00:44:10.420They're using the church for their own purposes, and I find it contemptible myself.
00:44:15.080Where do we go from here in terms of trying to push back against Putin in the West?
00:44:22.760Because, you know, as we've discussed, there's a bunch of young men who think that this is the answer.
00:44:28.240You and I would argue that, you know, clearly it's not.
00:44:33.860But how do we push back against that and say, look, this guy is not who you think he is?
00:44:40.480Yes. 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.
00:44:58.220So 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.
00:45:06.460The way to deal with this is through properly arming the Ukrainians, despite the weaknesses in their government and corruption and all that.
00:45:16.060The Russian, the Ukrainian military is making a very, very strong effort to defend the country, and we need to support them.
00:45:23.220And this naive, it's not naive, this U.S. change of policy every two weeks is, I think, disastrous.
00:45:36.300We need to take a firm stance. Most of the Republicans in the Congress...
00:45:42.180What do you mean by that, this change of policy every two weeks?
00:45:46.420The 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.
00:46:29.460What 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.
00:46:44.400Vladimir Putin is the best person ever.
00:46:46.480Well, first, a lot of the lines that they use, Tucker Carlson and the rest of these guys, are straight out of Russian propaganda.
00:46:57.180You can get the stuff on the Russian official lines that they put to their propaganda mediums.
00:47:07.380They're not thinking for themselves when they talk this way to the public.
00:47:10.700And I just want to point out that you and I are both coming at this from the right.