In this episode of Review Area, I sit down with the distinguished Russian-American political writer and academic, Vladimir Putin expert, Dr. Boris Johnson. Dr. Johnson has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, The New York Review, and The Weekly Standard, among other publications, for over twenty-five years. In this episode, we discuss how he became interested in Putin and his ideas, and how he developed a pro- and anti-Putin perspective.
00:06:07.400In any event, I'm glad that we're here now and all organized and ready to do the show.
00:06:12.800I mean, I think that this is a subject that is talked about an enormous, enormous amount, both by yourself for a very long time, but by other parties because it's so topical.
00:06:21.280And there's a huge amount of debate back and forth kind of between these pro and anti-Putinist positions.
00:06:27.400And I think it would be very – it is very important is what we're doing today is to sit down and kind of have a long-form discussion and lay everything out on the table in a kind of cogent, one-piece narrative, so to speak.
00:06:39.560Now, before we begin, Dr. Johnson, you've been talking about Vladimir Putin and writing about him, both from a geopolitical and scholarly standpoint, for the last 20 years.
00:06:54.440Yeah, I was talking about him when he was working for the mayor of Moscow's office, yeah.
00:06:58.440So I think that it would be fair to say that, especially in the English-speaking world, on a scholarly level, you basically pioneered the – I guess you could say pro-Putin perspective.
00:07:16.640By the end of 2000, again in 2001, I was together at the Barnes Review, and Vladimir Putin was seen by the right wing as a communist, as a KGB agent.
00:07:29.980He was seen universally as a hostile force, and I was the only one that I know of in the English language.
00:07:37.880And since being at the Barnes Review in the spotlight, American Free Press, I knew of pretty much everyone, began – I took a different view.
00:08:38.120And some of those very people now are on the bandway.
00:08:43.600So I take credit for this entire thing.
00:08:45.560And the research at that time began and then it culminated in the publication of my book, Russian Populist, The Political Thought of Vladimir Putin, which came out in 2011, which was prior to the Syrian stuff.
00:08:59.500So – but ideologically speaking, nothing has changed there.
00:09:03.240It's a treatment of his political ideas.
00:09:05.640And it's the only one in the English language.
00:09:28.760Now, I know that a lot of listeners to this podcast in particular don't share your perspective that many people, especially on the far right, still have a kind of anti-Putin worldview.
00:09:39.720And so this has become, I think, a very, very contentious issue, especially since the 2014 coup in the Ukraine and the rise of the various paramilitary factions there.
00:09:50.040I think that we've seen a huge kind of political and geopolitical focus on Russia as this kind of center for conflict.
00:10:02.760And so there's a lot of people who kind of, I think, believe Putin is just Eastern Zog, is the way I've heard it described.
00:10:09.940Now, I don't want to get into that now because I think it will be more useful to discuss some of these talking points after we, I think, concretely laid out the context and the history of Putin and his rise to power and his actual policies.
00:10:23.140But I think that kind of that just highlights why the subject is as important now as it was back in 2000 or 2012.
00:10:32.280Well, so I'm very, very glad that we can be sitting down and doing this today.
00:10:37.820So I think that basically the best place to start would be with the Russian Revolution.
00:10:42.880Now, I guess you probably have a much better idea of where to begin in terms of tracing the shift of the political worldview and ideas from the Russian monarchy through the Soviet Union into the Russian federal state.
00:11:02.500Well, I guess the place to begin, for our purposes, is probably the 1970s.
00:11:12.380I'm sure I've said this on this show before, my own show, Million and One Other Places, that Russian industrial capital really began to decay substantially.
00:11:22.700And the money, the willpower, even the ideological foundation wasn't there to be built, to switch this over into a more modern, light industrial foundation.
00:11:35.580And the heavy industry power centers were just too powerful in Russian politics, in Soviet politics, I should say.
00:11:42.440And that's when the Jews divested themselves and began the massive movement to Israel.
00:11:51.640And then in the U.S., they passed the Jackson-Vanek Amendment, which for the first time placed sanctions on the Soviet Union for forbidding Jews to immigrate to Israel.
00:12:01.980Finally, it became fashionable to be anti-communist.
00:12:50.820A Soviet patriot doesn't make any sense.
00:12:52.300But they viewed themselves as national Bolsheviks in one vague sense or another.
00:12:56.220And religion came back, and the church began to slowly rebuild.
00:13:00.740The Jewish pressure was simply off by 1980.
00:13:06.920But then, of course, the explosion of 1989 to 1991, when the dictatorship collapsed very rapidly, there simply was no money.
00:13:16.160And the most important thing, there was just no political will to back Soviet tanks in East Germany or wherever.
00:13:24.680And it was just a domino effect, as Solzhenitsyn had predicted, but very few others.
00:13:30.760So the fact is that the early 90s, the first five years of the 1990s, I was in college, and following this stuff every single day, were far worse than the Stalinist era.
00:14:11.600There was no military chain of command.
00:14:14.920There was no political chain of command.
00:14:18.280The – essentially, it was local strongmen and Jewish oligarchs in different regions and different sectors of the economy that had taken over.
00:14:27.480And you've got to remember that when Russia defaulted in 1997, the country was in the process of disappearing.
00:14:33.300And that's where it really should begin.
00:14:36.860And you understand Putin's counter-revolution in 2000 in that backdrop, that Russia almost disappeared.
00:14:54.860And so that's probably – that dynamic is really where we have to begin because people, as they condemn and attack Putin, forget just how bad Russia was in the mid-1990s.
00:15:07.180And the place was disappearing in every sense of that word.
00:15:09.680So this is the backdrop of this term used, disappearing, but yet rapidly degenerating Russian society.
00:15:20.280So I guess there's a couple of different questions that we have to answer.
00:15:25.800I mean, so you believe that the Russian – not the Russian – the Jewish economic influence over the Soviet life after its max exodus in the 1970s decreased dramatically.
00:15:38.340But what was the quality of the lingering Judaic influence within the Soviet system after this time?
00:15:48.720And what enabled the merciless predatory liquidation of the Russian economy in the 1990s?
00:15:57.080Was it the wholesale collapse of the state and the lack of capital controls?
00:16:01.100Or was there already an economic block in place prepared to engage in that kind of looting?
00:16:08.340Well, there's a million theories there.
00:16:12.240One of the more important ones is nationalism in the republics, in the Baltics or Ukraine or Georgia or whatever.
00:16:18.140And the lack of will for Mikhail Gorbachev to smash that.
00:16:23.620He did very briefly in Georgia and then pulled back again.
00:16:27.460The lack of – the lack of any political will, the lack of any real ideology behind the Soviet Union.
00:16:35.740People weren't going to die for something they didn't even understand.
00:16:38.320And the battle was between these people who actually believed in Lenin, which were like five or six people, mostly from the West, and the rest of the party who were essentially patriots of one form or another.
00:16:50.500So – and this is also an era where the church is regenerating itself slowly but surely.
00:16:57.880A lot of the old guard is retiring and things like that.
00:17:00.580So now I think the other part of your – the first part of your question is lingering Jewish influence when, in the 80s, 70s and 80s?
00:17:09.000Yeah, the 70s and 80s because obviously the early years of the Soviet Union were extremely Jewish, disproportionately Jewish.
00:17:16.340And so I think that most people are simply ignorant of the level of Judea control and influence over the Soviet Union and make the assumption that it basically continued at 1920s, 1930s levels until its eventual collapse.
00:17:34.160And what changed my mind on this issue was when I first did research on the Russian mafia, which of course is almost exclusively Jewish.
00:17:40.340And that the foot soldiers, the Jewish foot soldiers, the thugs of this – and then the leaders of the Russian mafia were exclusively Jewish, and all of them came from the prison camps.
00:17:51.240And I was shocked to hear this, but it's true, and there's no getting around it.
00:17:56.300The prison camps were packed full of Jewish anti-Soviet agitators.
00:18:04.640Some were Zionists who wanted this mass exodus to Israel, and they weren't allowed.
00:18:08.140And ultimately, it comes down to the fact that there's simply no more profit.
00:18:16.980The depreciation, once it gets started, really begins to snowball exponentially over time.
00:18:24.300And everyone knew this, especially in the oil industry and the mining.
00:18:27.040The average mine is almost 1,000 meters deep in Ukraine, which isn't profitable.
00:18:34.300And the investment cash, the liquidity wasn't there to improve this stuff.
00:18:39.800The oil infrastructure, mining, steel, and especially given competition from the West, that was clearly blowing the Soviet economy out of the water.
00:19:03.000The Shabad movement, for example, was growing in the Soviet Union.
00:19:06.140And I think some of these nationalist ideas were a way to remove themselves from the Soviet system.
00:19:12.320We've gotten everything we could here.
00:19:13.660It's now a system of the goyim again, and we need to skip town.
00:19:19.920And that became really the only time, as I said before, there were any sanctions in the Soviet Union from the U.S., and that was the Jackson-Bannock Amendment because the Soviets didn't want Jews leaving in huge numbers and going to Israel.
00:19:32.160So finally, like I said, it became fashionable to hate the Soviet Union only on that ground.
00:19:38.160And that's also where you get the silly ideology that Stalin was an anti-Semite because it gave Jews good reason to hate the USSR.
00:19:47.300They were searching for – the Jews had been so heavily invested in the country emotionally and ideologically.
00:19:53.520And the big reason that they gave themselves for that was that, oh, Stalin was an anti-Semite too.
00:19:58.200He was just like Hitler, just a Russian Hitler, a Georgian Hitler.
00:20:00.080And so all of a sudden, it became very fashionable to hate Stalinism, and that's really all the USSR was, just a legacy of Joseph Stalin, and it was unreformable.
00:20:14.120The prison camps were packed with Jews, and it just was – these were mid-level managers and stuff like that who had joined the Zionist movement or were just criminals.
00:20:23.680And this is where the Russian mafia came from.
00:20:26.080This is where the thugs that took over parts of the economy in the 90s came from.
00:20:30.080Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for.
00:20:35.460And so with the destruction of the state apparatus in the early part of the 90s, these figures, these organizations,
00:20:44.620were kind of given free reign and control over the – to loot and plunder the economy in the 90s.
00:20:50.120I don't know how – I don't think we have to get into technical details, and I think everybody to a certain degree is aware of the disgusting social and ethical conditions that existed in Russia during this time period, most of all Russia's.
00:21:05.120But, I mean, do you want to say a few more things on this just to maybe express for people who might not be particularly familiar with the situation the extent of the collapse of the state apparatus, the liquidation of the industrial life of the country,
00:21:19.960and the broad social and moral degeneration that accompanied both of these things?
00:21:25.060Well, the one thing I want to mention, and I think it really encapsulates everything here.
00:21:30.760I think it was 2011, Harvard University, the Department of Economics, and the Institute for Transition Economies, which was also at Harvard, was sued by the Justice Department.
00:21:42.300The main economist there was, I believe, Andrei Schliefer, Jewish, of course, and very much one of the architects of privatization.
00:21:54.300And they were sued by the Justice Department for fraud, among other things, that they were using and misusing federal money because they were sent over by the CIA to help privatize the economy, introduce them to market economics.
00:22:09.500And Professor Schliefer, who's still there, hasn't lost his job in all this, was, of course, as corrupt as they can get.
00:22:18.320He was using federal money to help privatize companies, and he was personally investing in the economy, knowing full well it was going to be privatized, which it wasn't.
00:22:31.420So it was essentially very, very vulgar insider trading for him and his friend.
00:22:37.320And, furthermore, the Justice Department said, you know, you've humiliated the American way of life, which is now hated by Russians because of what you and your friends did.
00:22:49.440Of course, you know, the U.S. federal government was a big part of this.
00:22:51.660But using tax money to go over there and enrich yourself and to destroy an entire economy, and the president of Harvard at the time, Lawrence Summers, was also a part of this, eventually led to – he was convicted.
00:23:05.800He had to pay – I don't know, I guess he's still paying about $100 million in restitution.
00:23:10.840Lawrence Summers was not involved, even though he was involved in the privatization scheme.
00:23:15.420There were several other professors whose names that don't come to me now all had CIA connections.
00:23:23.580But Schleifer was the main one, and he was convicted, and he's continually defended by the university to this day.
00:23:31.020In fact, the university paid all his fines, like $100 million worth.
00:23:34.320And the Institute for Transition Economies was shut down.
00:23:36.900And the Economic Department at Harvard was humiliated.
00:23:42.440And that was in the press, but it was buried.
00:23:46.180And it was just a very powerful testament to what the federal government eventually thought.
00:51:38.200I remember being in college and early grad school watching the 60 minutes and 2020 reports on
00:51:44.480is Russia going to survive the decade or if there are going to be Russians left
00:51:48.440is Chechnya going to destroy the whole army I mean you know these were the kind of TV shows I was watching when I was 20
00:51:54.58021 22 so that's what we have to compare all this to so keep the 1990s in mind then you'll understand why the Soviet Union is popular today
00:52:03.220excellent so before we go to the break maybe we can come back to what we discussed at the beginning of your book Russian populist and we can go into some of the practical ideological foundations of Vladimir Putin and of his regime and administration in Russia