Vladimir Goldstein, a professor at Brown University, joins me to discuss his views on the Ukraine crisis and the censorship of alternative voices in the pro-Western media. Professor Goldstein has been an outspoken critic of the propaganda barrage and censorship aimed at delegitimizing the opposition to the Putin regime in Ukraine, and he shares his misgivings with me about the role of the media and its role in creating a "Black or White" narrative about the situation in Ukraine. He also shares his thoughts on the current state of relations between the United States and Russia, and why he thinks Putin should be seen as an enemy of the West, not a friend, not as a partner, and a threat to the West as a bulwark against the West's interests in the face of Russia's influence in Ukraine and its annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Additional audio mixing and mastering was done by Matthew Boll. The show was mixed and produced by Patrick Muldowney. It was mixed, edited, and mixed by Evan Handyside. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was provided by Mark Phillips and our mixing engineer, Matthew Boll, and our mastering and mastering assistance by Matthew Keyser, and additional editing was made in part by Ben Koppel, with additional engineering assistance from Matthew Boll and Matthew Kuchta, and Andrew Kucht, and some additional mixing and editing by Patrick McElroy, and music production by Matthew Coughlan, and Alex Blomberg. Music: "The Good, the Bad Vibes" by Ian McKirdy and Matthew McElveen Art: "Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Goldstein" -- "The Bad, the Good, The Bad, The Evil, The Beautiful, the Beautiful, The Great, the Great, The Good, and the Beautiful" -- by Kevin McElvington -- is a production of the Electric Light Orchestra -- "Good, the Evil, the Wrong, The Wrong, the White, The Dark, The Purple, The White, the Purple, the Blue, The Green, The Black, the Green, the Red, the Black, The Blue, the Brown, The Red, The Brown, the Dark, the Pink, The Pink, the Gray, the Deep, the Gold, The Gold, the Blues, The Deep, and The Purple and the Purple
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, my guest today is Vladimir Goldstein, who is a professor at Brown University.
00:00:07.000Professor Goldstein grew up in Moscow.
00:00:10.000He got a master's degree from the Moscow Institute of Management.
00:00:14.000He got a BA In philosophy from Columbia University and a PhD in the Slavic language and literature from Yale University, Professor Goldstein has taught at Oberlin College at Yale University and at Brown, where he teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses that explore Western and Russian literary traditions he has written.
00:00:41.000Numerous books and articles on 19th and early 20th century Russian authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and others.
00:00:54.000And he regularly appears or publishes on popular news sites, including Al Jazeera, Nation, Forbes, etc.
00:01:03.000I wanted to have Professor Goldstein on this show because he's been an outspoken I would say, I guess, critic of the propaganda barrage and the censorship of information about the Ukraine Russian conflict.
00:01:25.000And I've shared your misgivings just about that aspect of it without taking any position because I'm not really an expert on Ukraine or on Putin.
00:01:37.000But I feel a deja vu that I, from 2001 to 2003, during the roll-up to the Iraq War, when it became impermissible To express any kind of ambiguity about whether or not we should be going to war with Saddam Hussein,
00:01:59.000who had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks in 2001, who had nothing to do with 9-11, and who was not a sponsor of one of the rare countries in the Middle East that were not actively sponsoring external terrorism.
00:02:17.000And yet, it seemed that a lot of our oil, somehow, God put it underneath his country and the neighboring country of Kuwait in a great act of mischief, and that a lot of the propaganda was directed towards creating, justifying a war that certain sectors of our society wanted.
00:02:40.000And there was really no debate on that.
00:02:44.000Is that how you feel about what's happening here?
00:02:48.000I felt it even before in the late 90s when there was again something similar vis-a-vis dismantling Yugoslavia and, you know, the bombing campaign of Serbia.
00:03:02.000These are all complicated issues, complicated countries, you know, Yugoslavia, all these republics, all this complicated history, all sort of, you know, kind of mixed loyalties.
00:03:12.000However, out of the blue, it was decided that Serbs are bad and we have to sort of organize NATO campaign.
00:03:19.000And it was before 58 days, Belgrade was bombed and Serbia was bombed.
00:03:25.000And, you know, again, alternative voices.
00:03:27.000You know, I remember I was at Yale then, and once in a while, somebody will try to say something.
00:03:33.000Somebody will try to organize something.
00:03:35.000But mostly, I remember I was not very happy with what was going on.
00:03:38.000I sent articles or papers, letters here and there.
00:04:46.000I was on TV shows just to say that things are much more complicated.
00:04:49.000And I think we as the United States, working into this very complicated situation, making commitments, which are very frequently anti-US interests.
00:05:00.000They're just getting us more and more involved.
00:05:02.000Maybe some people in some people's interests, maybe military-industrial complex interests, they are selling more weapons.
00:05:08.000But is it in a good interest in the long run?
00:05:11.000Do we really, as a country, United States need to sort of always have Russia as an adversary?
00:05:56.000So there in Ukraine, there are a fair amount of Russian speakers, ethnic Russians, primarily located in the East, people who kind of feel loyalty to sort of old Soviet Union, to Russia, to Russian language.
00:06:10.000I remember I was traveling through Crimea, through Odessa.
00:06:13.000They were complaining that why are they forcing us to speak Ukrainian, where Russians want to speak Russian.
00:06:18.000So this population in Ukraine have their relatives, friends, they came from Russia.
00:06:25.000So Putin has tremendous pressure to support and protect these people.
00:06:29.000As any politician, he has to do something.
00:06:32.000Had he been just washing his hands out of this sizable minority, big group of people in Ukraine who are just being ostracized, second-rated, mistreated, there will be real agitation against him in Russia.
00:06:48.000He probably could have lost his position.
00:06:51.000So he basically, as any politician, feels obliged to respond.
00:08:18.000Some people say that those who were, like, shooting, they were provocateurs, they were organized.
00:08:22.000But the fact is, it was a legal coup, because legally elected president, Yanukovych, was immediately kicked out, and some kind of a government, you know, very rapidly was patched in, and this government, which was patched in, was organized by Victoria Newland, who was, at that moment, very big shot in the State Department, American ambassador in Ukraine, and there's a recording of them talking and saying, once we sort of got rid of Yanukovych, we'll put these people sort of in place.
00:08:53.000Okay, and so let me then interrupt you again.
00:08:56.000So you have Victoria Nuland, who is a very solid member of what we call the neocons.
00:09:04.000And she is, following the coup, a very pro-Western government It is erected in the Ukraine, and that triggers what I would say is a kind of a civil war in Donbass,
00:09:23.000where the ethnic Russians immediately feel that one of the first acts of the new government is to attack the Russian language and go from a double-language country to a single-language country.
00:09:37.000And take a number of other very public steps that were anti-Russian.
00:09:41.000The Russians in Dumbass have peaceful protests.
00:09:46.000And it's the beginning of what essentially is a civil war in which 14,000 ethnic Russians are killed.
00:10:09.000I wouldn't call it genocide, but it's like for, I agree with you, there was like, that's estimation, 40,000 people killed, shelled, displaced, about 1 million displaced.
00:10:20.000So this was just a real mistreatment, and, you know, not genocide, but definitely some kind of, you know, racist attitude toward Russians.
00:10:30.000And what I should be stressed, and this is like I'm referring to Western studies, I've got a presentation by some professor from Colombia, that up until 2014, people in Donbass actually wanted to be part of Ukraine.
00:10:43.000After this coup, when Yanukovych, who comes from Donbass, from this area, is overthrown, we have different pro-Western government, but this government not only pro-Western in terms of the West, United States, and France, it's pro-Western like it supports Western Ukraine against Eastern Ukraine, against Donbass.
00:11:00.000It starts sort of banning the language, starts mistreating them.
00:11:04.000They think that Donbass is still very much in Russian hands, and they turn against them.
00:11:09.000And immediately, if you follow the public polling in Donbass, their mood goes kind of east, if you wish.
00:11:16.000They used to want to be part of Ukraine.
00:12:12.000Do you have any feeling about where this is going?
00:12:15.000The consensus in the present in this country is that Putin is losing this war.
00:12:21.000No, that's absolutely sort of based what, again, what troubles me a great deal.
00:12:27.000You know, every time I turn on NPR, listen to BBC, they basically ask questions from people in Kiev, from people in Lviv, which are very frequently removed from the actual battlefield, and they just play their interpretation.
00:12:43.000So, you know, Ukrainians are spinning, then BBC has additional spinning, and they keep on saying that, you know, yeah, Rush, what we know for sure, It's a long campaign.
00:12:53.000Russians probably expected to move quickly and Ukraine will collapse.
00:13:18.000They don't want to indiscriminately bomb.
00:13:20.000So they subject their soldiers to, like, door-to-door fighting.
00:13:24.000As a result, a lot of Russian soldiers are dying, are being killed, besides Ukrainians being killed, too.
00:13:30.000But what we see is that Russia is advancing.
00:13:33.000And once they advance, the local population, those who survived all this, they still remember how poorly they were treated by Ukrainian government.
00:14:52.000Maybe they would use this Black Sea access as a bargaining chip to put an end to that, but they're not backing off from Donbass, Lugansk, this area, and they're not backing off from this corridor between Russia and Crimea.
00:15:06.000I think it's for all intents and purposes it's going to stay Russian.
00:15:09.000When people try to tell this part of the story on the American news media, it's called fakeness, and it is fact-checked, and it is debunked.
00:15:23.000Basically, we see people, you know, there is an endless amount of interviews.
00:15:27.000I have friends all over the country, and they report to me.
00:15:30.000Some actually were so much traumatized by war, by bombardment, they say, we just don't care Under whom we live, under Ukraine, under Russia.
00:15:51.000And if you look at the map slowly, including even those who kind of begrudgingly don't want to agree with it, They look at the map, and the Russians are making advancements.
00:15:59.000Mariupol was a central city on Azov Sea, which gave access to Ukraine, to all these trade routes, and so on.
00:16:20.000It should have been avoided had Ukrainian leaders, American leaders, Russian leaders sat down, said, No NATO in Ukraine, and Donbass can be autonomous.
00:16:31.000We would have saved so much money, so much lives, just only because Americans couldn't enter any compromise and wanted to present Putin as some kind of Hitler of today.
00:16:43.000Because of that, how much lives, property, and things are destroyed and will be destroyed?
00:16:48.000We're witnessing now total explosion of inflation.
00:16:52.000Economists predict very, very serious downturn in general economy without Russian oil, Russian gas.
00:16:59.000You know, this is a total mess only because diplomacy somehow was sent sort of down the drain.
00:17:06.000What do you think, in terms of the stability of the region and the relationships with China, What is this war doing to those important considerations?
00:17:20.000China is very important here, because I think ultimately, if you ask, like you refer to neocons here on Washington, they They have pretty good intelligence.
00:17:30.000They know that Russia, strong as it is, rich as it is, it's probably not a match to the United States, at least not economically.
00:17:38.000Maybe they're a match in terms of amount of nuclear warheads, but that's about it.
00:17:44.000While China is totally different to the ballgame.
00:17:46.000China is a powerhouse, and basically Neocon's target is somehow The ability to reign in China.
00:17:58.000They're watching it, and it's their interest that Russia will be there, because psychologically and even militarily, Russia will be some kind of a buffer between China and the United States.
00:18:08.000So China will do all it can to keep Russia afloat, to work as a kind of guarantor of peace and negotiator.
00:18:17.000I'm sure they would support Russia economically, They will support Ukraine economically because they want to be like the top dog in this area and use all their kind of connections, economic connections and so on, as a sort of bulwark against the United States.
00:18:33.000Because people talk about Ukraine being a proxy war between Russia and the United States, but I think it's also a proxy war ultimately between the United States and China.
00:18:44.000So China is very important there because they kind of felt that if Russia falls, collapses with this war, China will be next.
00:18:51.000What do you think about the reports that Putin is very sick and maybe dying?
00:18:58.000I would say there was some extra activity on the part of Putin before this military operation, this war started.
00:19:10.000He was trying to talk to all European leaders.
00:19:15.000Somehow I wonder what provoked this agitation, whether he felt that his health is not good, And, you know, we know, look at sort of Soviet Union history, once Brezhnev and others began to die, then the whole country collapsed.
00:19:31.000Then, you know, Gorbachev was pushed out.
00:19:33.000So each new successor starts from the position of weakness.
00:19:38.000So I suspect Putin, if he sensed that A, he's aging, B, his health is not good, he probably wanted to negotiate the best possible way to provide stability in the region.
00:19:50.000So I wouldn't discount the fact that he was thinking about his own mortality, if you wish, and wanted to And this festering wound, because for eight years, this was a festering wound.
00:20:02.000What we witness here in the United States in terms of propaganda, watching Ukraine being, you know, bombarded by Russia, Russians for eight years were watching this news about Donbas, day in, day out.
00:20:47.000You know, that's another kind of naive idea of the West.
00:20:50.000If we impose sanctions on Russian people, so if Russians cannot travel, if Russians cannot draw dollars from their accounts and pay for some goods from Amazon, they will turn against Putin.
00:21:07.000This actually shows unbelievable ignorance about human psychology in general and Russian psychology in particular.
00:21:15.000When he started it, his popularity was in the area of 65%.
00:21:22.000Because Russians, every Russian, and I read, I have a lot of friends in Russia who were not sympathetic to the war, to this kind of violence, to bloodshed.
00:21:33.000But now they say, oh, we now realize that Putin might have a point.
00:23:15.000It was interesting, like, you know, when the whole 2014, for example, war started, I was approached by Al Jazeera to write my kind of different take.
00:23:24.000But then at a certain moment, I suspect Al Jazeera got a phone call.
00:24:13.000So, for some reason, there is some kind of a pressure to present a unified view.
00:24:18.000And if you don't argue it, if you try to sort of widen the horizon, if you try to humanize somebody whom we try to demonize, this is a no-go.
00:24:30.000How about at the faculty lounge at Brown University?
00:24:34.000I mean, what I have to give a credit to Brown, and I'm really sort of happy about it, whatever.
00:24:40.000Once in a while, I remember I gave an interview to England, I think, as they have Channel 4.
00:24:45.000It's kind of more or less like CNN. And I, after Zelenskyy addressed Parliament, they asked me and I said, this is propaganda.
00:24:54.000The same unanimity of English Parliament was in 1914 before they embarked on the most idiotic, self-destructive First World War.
00:25:04.000So unanimity of the Parliament doesn't tell me anything.