TRIGGERnometry - The Russian Mindset and Where it Comes From - Historian Sir Antony Beevor

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00:01:00.000 There is a very important debate of why Russia is the way that it is, why it is so different,

00:01:08.240 if you like, to Western Europe. Some will say that it goes back to the Mongol invasions of

00:01:13.280 the 13th century. Russia has to be 200 years behind Western Europe. To protect Russian tradition,

00:01:20.960 to protect Russian culture, this time lag was essential. People in the West look at their

00:01:26.480 attitude to casualties and are quite frankly horrified. There has always been this case

00:01:31.580 whereby the attitude of meet the cannon, I mean the whole notion, the Russian steamroller, etc.,

00:01:38.900 the idea that simply out of sheer weight of numbers they can crush any enemy. But the real

00:01:44.360 problem is that they have often treated their own people as badly as the enemy. This is a form of

00:01:52.000 inhumanity, which, obviously, in the West, we find incomprehensible.

00:01:59.680 So, Anthony Biver, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:01.920 Very bad to be with you.

00:02:02.960 Oh, it's great to have you back.

00:02:04.340 I was just saying to you before we started,

00:02:06.340 our first conversation with you,

00:02:08.180 I think it did over a million downloads,

00:02:09.820 if you include video and audio, about the Russian Revolution.

00:02:13.240 Today, you've obviously got a book about Rasputin out,

00:02:16.340 which we'll touch on.

00:02:17.380 But what we really wanted to talk about is Russia,

00:02:19.900 the history of Russia.

00:02:20.700 and actually to help unpack for people why Russia and Russians are the way they are today.

00:02:27.480 And I think as someone who comes from Russia, I think a lot of history is really valuable for understanding that.

00:02:33.740 So can you just take us through the history of Russia, starting at the very beginning?

00:02:37.780 Well, I wouldn't have said that I was a sufficient Russian expert on the earlier periods at all to be able to do that.

00:02:43.480 But there is a very important debate of why Russia is the way that it is,

00:02:49.860 why it is so different, if you like, to Western Europe.

00:02:52.660 And even within Russia itself, one sees this tremendous split 0.86

00:02:56.360 between the Western and Slava-filled traditions, 0.63

00:03:00.300 this great mixture of Europe and Asia.

00:03:03.980 And as a result, one needs to understand some of these contradictions.

00:03:08.420 They'll never necessarily be resolved.

00:03:11.060 Many argue that in the case of Russia,

00:03:14.840 that the whole idea of conspicuous cruelty as a necessary weapon of war 1.00

00:03:20.940 came from the Mongol invasions, and there may well be a lot of truth in that. 0.99

00:03:25.840 Certainly the idea of encirclement and some of the element of Russian paranoia, 1.00

00:03:31.200 I think, came from that particular era.

00:03:34.700 So, Antti, sorry to bother you.

00:03:35.880 There'll be people listening who don't know what conspicuous cruelty means, that term.

00:03:39.560 Or the Mongol invasions, frankly.

00:03:41.640 So we need to get into both of those.

00:03:43.340 Well, there's been a considerable debate, obviously, amongst historians about where the Russian method of warfare has originated.

00:03:51.740 Some will say that it goes back to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, with the sweeping in from the Stiep, from coming from the Far East and the way that the original Rus settlements were then attacked.

00:04:08.740 And in many ways, this was the start of a continual warfare, which lasted for a long time. 0.76

00:04:16.980 The Mongols certainly were the ones who believed that fire and sword, laying waste, mass rape was an element, a natural element of warfare. 0.74

00:04:29.480 And this actually became almost a central element in the Russian view of warfare, of conspicuous cruelty, I think one can call it. 0.78

00:04:41.860 And the interesting thing is, of course, Europe was just as bad in the 17th century. 0.68

00:04:47.560 One thinks of the horrors of the wars of religion, as bad as anything that had happened in Russia up till that time.

00:04:54.080 But the difference came really because afterwards there was the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century.

00:05:00.680 There was also in the 19th century very much more a codification of warfare,

00:05:06.460 which attempted to make it not necessarily more civilized, but at least following certain rules.

00:05:11.740 And then the invention of the Red Cross and Geneva Conventions and so forth.

00:05:16.800 That did not affect Russia nearly so much, specifically in its expansion towards the east and towards the south. 0.67

00:05:24.080 into the Caucasus, and above all, the conquest of Siberia, which was savage. So there is this

00:05:31.560 difference very much between the Russian attitude and the European attitude, which has gone on.

00:05:39.540 But Russia itself is this extraordinary mixture. And one of the reasons of writing about

00:05:44.640 Rasputin was that he summoned up so many of these contradictions himself. And I found it

00:05:52.200 fascinating the way that, for example, in the 19th century, the great poet George Kutchev saying

00:05:57.720 Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. There 1.00

00:06:03.920 is all of these elements, as I say, contrasting themselves. In the case of Azhar Putin, the deep

00:06:09.800 spirituality mixed in with lasciviousness, corruption mixed in with incredible generosity,

00:06:17.360 all of these sort of coming together in the same person 0.96

00:06:22.800 very much sort of represented not so much an archetypal Russian

00:06:27.660 but if you like the potential conflicts within what might be talked about

00:06:35.420 as say the Russian soul, the Russian mind

00:06:37.840 and I think it's intriguing one can, there is no DNA, a national DNA

00:06:43.500 but there is a certain self-image in all countries I think

00:06:46.960 that they try to live up to a certain reputation, a certain tradition.

00:06:55.820 And this is what one can not necessarily generalize about,

00:07:00.380 because certainly with Russia, with so many different nationalities,

00:07:03.680 you cannot say that a Buryat is the same as somebody from the extreme Far East

00:07:12.140 or from Moscow or anything like that.

00:07:15.560 And it is part of the fascination of Russia itself.

00:07:19.100 And I think all of that's very true.

00:07:22.540 And you can't understand Russia with the mind alone

00:07:26.040 is a very good and accurate, well-known observation.

00:07:29.960 But coming back to the history,

00:07:31.440 because I really want to just pause on the Mongol invasion first,

00:07:34.580 because at this point, there is no Russia exactly.

00:07:38.380 There's a few principalities, as they're called.

00:07:41.140 Kievan Rus and so forth.

00:07:42.520 And then you effectively have something like being invaded by ISIS, basically, right?

00:07:49.400 En masse, on a huge scale. 0.53

00:07:51.680 But not just invaded, you were kept under what the Russians called the yoke, 0.86

00:07:55.800 the Tata-Mongol yoke, for centuries. 0.74

00:07:58.860 What is the impact of that sort of subjugation and the way that it was done 0.98

00:08:04.160 for that period of time?

00:08:06.300 I mean, I try to explain this to Americans sometimes.

00:08:08.900 the Russian people were subjugated by a force like ISIS

00:08:12.800 for about as long as America has been in existence.

00:08:16.640 What is the impact of that on the psyche, on the mindset,

00:08:20.340 on the way that people behave and think about things?

00:08:23.240 Well, that's an extremely good question,

00:08:25.880 and it's certainly a very important one.

00:08:30.200 I don't think there's an easy answer because there are those

00:08:35.380 who very much reacted against it, of course.

00:08:38.760 And this led to the extraordinary sort of intellectual flowering

00:08:43.620 and artistic development in Russia,

00:08:46.720 which one sees particularly in the 18th century and onwards.

00:08:50.780 I mean, when one goes to the Tretiakov

00:08:54.460 or some of the great galleries in Moscow,

00:08:59.660 you see a sudden development which comes.

00:09:04.140 And I think this is very much more when Russia started to escape from being the prisoner of its own past. 0.54

00:09:10.980 And it was a prisoner of its own past.

00:09:13.500 And as you say, it was an occupied, oppressive past for many centuries indeed.

00:09:21.740 But it was also something which is still to this day, they cannot quite escape. 0.98

00:09:26.980 So although the Orthodox Church, the whole idea of holy, slavophil Russia, was a vital element in escaping from that Tatar, non-Christian past, 0.85

00:09:45.280 It's become so deeply embedded that we see today that Vladimir Bedinsky, Dugan, some of the ideological influences on President Putin have this reaction of believing that, you know, Europe should be come under basically an orthodox Russian orthodox influence all the way from Vladivostok to Dublin, they even said, which is sort of an astonishing idea.

00:10:13.180 But it is somewhere sort of deep, again, in the Russian psyche,

00:10:18.360 the old Russian psyche, if you like,

00:10:20.980 that only this Russian spirituality deserves to spread and expand.

00:10:29.080 But this, again, is very much a reaction to the idea

00:10:32.060 of having been crushed by the Tata yoke.

00:10:37.200 And others of history as well.

00:10:39.480 But it's interesting you say something,

00:10:40.780 because I've been thinking about this for a long time.

00:10:43.180 How much is it just like a time lag between where the West is and where Russia is in the sense that, you know, 150 years ago, there's quite a lot of countries around the world who thought, actually, you know, we have the right idea and we should spread this idea around the world.

00:10:57.620 The British Empire did it and lots of others. Is it just maybe that Vladimir Putin is acting in an 18th century way in the 21st century world? Is that what's happening here?

00:11:06.040 Well, I was very struck. I was very struck by when the Duke of Marlborough went to, I think this was in 1902, went to Moscow and Petersburg and at a reception with the Tsar, with Nicholas II, his wife asked Nicholas II, you know, why is democracy not possible in Russia?

00:11:28.640 And he said Russia has to be 200 years behind Western Europe.

00:11:32.960 And this was very much of an idea that to protect Russian tradition, to protect Russian culture, this time lag was essential.

00:11:43.640 But it was also part of the idea that, you know, as soon as you loosened the chains, then chaos would break out.

00:11:50.920 And in a sense, when you have such a landmass, such a vast landmass, how do you maintain control?

00:11:58.900 So you could say that the expansion in some ways is also the element slightly of the anxious billionaire mentality.

00:12:10.900 You know that unless I get more money, I'm going to lose the whole lot.

00:12:14.320 And this is very much, again, the attitude of seeking more external, near abroad territory all the way to the Far East.

00:12:26.400 And even then, the Tsar was interested in the disastrous Japanese war of 1904, 1905, of again, seizing more territory there.

00:12:37.400 Now, part of that is an expansionist mentality, like, as you rightly say, with other European colonial powers expanding.

00:12:46.440 But at the same time, there is this sort of arrière pensée of fearing that, you know, unless you keep expanding, you're going to contract.

00:12:56.700 And this has obviously been one of the problems of warfare with, as Paul Kennedy, the rise and fall of the great powers.

00:13:05.800 If you keep on pushing and expanding too much, you're going to overstretch.

00:13:09.940 And, Seranti, we've seen the history of Russia, and we're talking about it at the moment.

00:13:16.580 And people in the West look at their attitude to casualties and are, quite frankly, horrified. 0.93

00:13:21.920 The way that Russians seem almost nonchalant is probably not the right word, but a kind of nonchalant when it comes to the casualties, etc. 0.89

00:13:31.660 Does that come from their history, or is there something else tied to that? 0.93

00:13:36.900 Well, I think there are two things there, but most of it comes from the history.

00:13:40.580 You're quite right.

00:13:42.720 There has always been this case whereby the attitude of meat for the cannon,

00:13:48.760 in the Russian phrase, is regarded, is assumed, because of the size of their population.

00:13:57.980 I mean, the whole notion, the Russian steamroller, etc., the idea that simply out of sheer weight of numbers, they can crush any enemy.

00:14:06.800 And that has certainly been why the French were so desperate to have the alliance with the Russian Empire for the First World War.

00:14:16.700 and again to a certain degree later on feeling that sort of only the sheer size and scope of it

00:14:24.640 would save the West in the Second World War. But the real problem is that they have often

00:14:32.620 treated their own people as badly as the enemy. I mean I remember being horrified when researching

00:14:38.940 in Moscow in the 90s at the scale of suicides amongst the Russian conscripts simply because

00:14:45.900 and the way they were treated and bullied and all the rest of it.

00:14:49.440 I mean, there were up to 5,000 a year.

00:14:52.040 And I remember the British ambassador was absolutely appalled

00:14:55.040 when he went to see General Lebed, who made a joke about it.

00:14:58.780 He thought it was terribly funny that in Siberia they had to make sure

00:15:02.780 that they were digging enough graves for all the suicides for the next winter

00:15:05.880 because otherwise they wouldn't be able to bury them.

00:15:08.320 In the Second World War, we see the way that,

00:15:12.440 and I think this is a crucial element,

00:15:14.440 But the soldiers had so often been treated so badly, and in fact, not as individuals, when, for example, at Stalingrad and, in fact, really through the whole of the advance towards Berlin afterwards, if there were any casualties or any desertions, an officer was expected to just grab any civilians they could and say, right, you're in the army now or whatever.

00:15:35.240 They'd never recorded their names. Their names were only recorded if they were suspected of treason or desertion and then investigated by Smirsch or the earlier before that, the NKVD special detachment.

00:15:48.880 This meant that actually there was a burning resentment. And this, in fact, is one of the major explanations for the mass rapes of 1945 in Poland, in Hungary and above all in Germany.

00:16:02.400 And it's also one of the explanations for the cruelty to Ukrainian prisoners of war and Ukrainian civilians in the war that we're seeing at the moment.

00:16:12.140 But also then don't forget the treatment of their own soldiers when, and especially the foreigners who've been guffed and tripped or press ganged into the Russian army fighting in Ukraine,

00:16:24.060 where we've seen Africans who've had landmines strapped to their chests and are being forced forward as suicide bombers.

00:16:30.920 I mean, this is a form of inhumanity, which obviously in the West we find incomprehensible. 0.56

00:16:41.240 But it's still something which Russia has not been able to get an attitude, which they have not been able to get rid of.

00:16:50.080 And how much do you think, if we go back to the Second World War, but also the Soviet Empire, how much of that was exacerbated by the communist mindset?

00:16:57.980 I think the communist mindset raised the idea of ruthlessness as almost a romantic, admirable heroism.

00:17:10.340 The idea of Zazinsky and the Cheka, the idea that, you know, you have to crush your enemy totally. 0.83

00:17:20.340 I mean, the poems about sort of crushing bones and all the rest of it written by members of the Checa in their own sort of magazines are simply unbelievable. 0.94

00:17:31.940 You know, even the Spanish Inquisition, I don't think that their torturers sort of wrote poems in that particular way. 0.92

00:17:39.160 It is a very special mentality, but it was something which was, shall we say, there in the background and then which the mentality of romantic communism, of achieving the future through total ruthlessness.

00:17:55.800 And one has to remember, at the Battle of Stalingrad, Russian snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian orphans who'd been bribed by German infantrymen with a crust of bread to fill their water bottle in the Volga.

00:18:09.160 And, you know, it didn't matter who you were, what your origin was, whether you were innocent or not.

00:18:15.620 That made no difference whatsoever when it came to what were regarded as the interests of the state.

00:18:21.820 And that being the case, do you think, in a way, it's a slightly gruesome question, 0.83

00:18:26.960 is it an effective mindset to have, particularly in warfare, particularly if you have the numbers that Russia does, 0.80

00:18:32.460 just to treat your own citizens and your own military with utter callousness?

00:18:37.380 I don't think it is.

00:18:38.800 I mean, in terms of morale, the way that the Ukrainians offered their telephones to prisoners so that they could ring their parents, their mother at home or whatever, was a very effective propaganda device.

00:18:57.680 Many of them felt tricked. 0.64

00:18:59.060 I mean, not just foreigners who had been tricked to join up being told, oh, we'll train you up as bodyguards or whatever it might be with some of the promises.

00:19:07.840 But many of the ordinary conscripts who were not supposed necessarily to go to a front line

00:19:15.640 found themselves every single promise was broken.

00:19:19.820 And although they'd been bribed quite often with an up front for some,

00:19:23.380 they then found they had no further control over their fate.

00:19:26.880 And I think it was this feeling that they had completely lost any form of control over their own fate

00:19:34.100 has a devastating effect on morality.

00:19:37.840 and on morale, rather. I mean, we're seeing what are called now the disposables, and these are

00:19:43.880 either the Africans or others who are being used, but also even some of the amputees being sent 0.91

00:19:53.720 back into the front. Well, I mean, the Russian attitude towards amputees in the Second World

00:19:58.540 War, they were known as some of ours after they'd lost their limbs. And Stalin, having talked about

00:20:04.500 heroism of the red army and all the rest of it in 1945 then bans any of them from the cities

00:20:11.380 that are sent to the north just to get them out of the way because he doesn't want to have the

00:20:15.140 cities cluttered up with limbless veterans i mean treatment like that does not exactly 0.78

00:20:21.620 encourage if you like loyalty uh worse than that is when you also recruit from the prisons uh some

00:20:30.020 of the most brutal uh members of society and gang members of the worst order uh they then become

00:20:37.460 even more uh dehumanized by their experience at war and then they're they go back into a civilian

00:20:46.020 society i mean the reports of some of the horrors which have been committed by uh soldiers who've

00:20:52.260 returned who've been even more traumatized by what they've been through um are pretty horrific so

00:20:57.700 the social consequences of the war in Russia are going to be pretty devastating.

00:21:02.980 The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It often tells you what to think is happening.

00:21:08.500 And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use

00:21:13.460 Ground News. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political

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00:21:39.140 estimates left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update and yet no coverage, literally

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00:22:05.560 unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use, and stop being managed by the media.

00:22:11.160 And coming back to this kind of Russian way of war, maybe taking a different angle, is it a

00:22:17.220 product of, historically speaking, of necessity as well. I mean, if you're Russia, it's much 0.69

00:22:26.100 harder to grow food in Russia. It's much harder to have a sophisticated economy. It's much harder

00:22:30.240 to be technologically advanced. And so what other advantages do you have other than a mass of

00:22:36.220 soldiers and an ability to be so cruel to them that you can make them basically do anything?

00:22:41.140 I think there's a question of mindset and a mindset which sort of refuses to change.

00:22:47.220 more than anything. And, you know, because it was the way that it's always been done,

00:22:53.320 you know, and you're a tough man and all the rest of it, this is what's going to make

00:22:58.360 the recruits tougher by treating them in that particular way. It's, shall we say,

00:23:04.220 unenlightened, to put it mildly. And I would have thought in the long term,

00:23:10.780 it's going to be much less professional in the effect that it has in your training.

00:23:17.220 Of course, of course.

00:23:18.740 Well, speaking of the mindset,

00:23:20.120 I mean, one of the things I think people in the West

00:23:21.780 really don't understand about Russia

00:23:23.300 is how a number of formative experiences in Russian history

00:23:27.480 have inculcated in people the idea

00:23:30.880 that a strong, decisive leader

00:23:33.080 is by far and away the most important thing.

00:23:35.520 And Russian people will put up with almost anything

00:23:37.500 provided the leader is strong like that. 0.75

00:23:40.820 And I think one of the times this comes from

00:23:42.940 is the period known as the Times of Trouble.

00:23:45.260 Yes.

00:23:45.520 after Ivan the Terrible kills his only viable heir in a fit of rage.

00:23:50.280 And this follows, perhaps you'll be better at telling the story of what follows.

00:23:54.280 Well, I'm certainly not an expert on that particular period,

00:23:57.480 but indeed it did traumatize the country in many ways.

00:24:02.540 What happened?

00:24:03.460 Well, because of the civil war, the massacres that were going on and all the rest of it.

00:24:09.220 I mean, in many ways, you could only really compare the time of troubles

00:24:11.800 really with, say, the European Thirty Years' War in the 17th century.

00:24:17.280 So from that point of view, the effect of it eventually meant that everybody was so exhausted by the end

00:24:26.680 that that was the opportunity when they made the Romanov dynasty start.

00:24:33.460 And Mikhail Romanov, to be in with, was being hidden by his mother

00:24:37.780 because they were certain that it would lead to his death.

00:24:40.320 Every other potential czar had been murdered

00:24:44.280 and that this would be his particular fate too.

00:24:47.740 But in the end, this was the start of the dynasty.

00:24:53.240 And as soon as he and his descendants sort of acquired enough power,

00:24:58.240 they knew perfectly well that if they were going to let it go,

00:25:00.220 there was always going to be the fear of the time of troubles.

00:25:03.300 And that actually, you're quite right to bring it out

00:25:05.660 because it's very much there, always in the back of the mind, of the Russian mind,

00:25:11.960 rather as, and of course the Civil War being another one, after the Revolution,

00:25:18.840 after the February Revolution, which even led to the point that sort of when Stalin died,

00:25:25.560 almost everybody was in tears, not because of love of Stalin necessarily,

00:25:30.000 but because they feared that the collapse of centralized power might again lead to another

00:25:36.220 period of time of troubles or civil war or whatever. I mean, one has to remember the

00:25:41.920 importance of the Russian Civil War. Historians, particularly German historians, were absolutely

00:25:47.020 right in identifying the First World War as what they described the original catastrophe 0.99

00:25:52.320 of the 20th century. But actually, it was the Russian Civil War which had the greatest influence

00:25:57.900 because the sheer horror of it, the sheer scale,

00:26:01.240 if you include those suffering from disease and starvation,

00:26:05.040 you're talking of up to 10 million casualties.

00:26:08.200 And this created such an effect, not just across Europe,

00:26:12.460 even across the world, fear of the destruction, 0.83

00:26:16.780 the cruelty spreading as a result of the split between red and white,

00:26:21.760 but also fear on the left of white counter-reaction

00:26:26.320 and fear on the right of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy,

00:26:30.240 of the idea that there was going to be a genocide, a class genocide.

00:26:36.560 And this leads to the Spanish Civil War,

00:26:39.580 this vicious circle of rhetoric and fear,

00:26:42.360 and also evened into large elements and contribution

00:26:45.340 to the whole of the Second World War.

00:26:47.180 So in many ways, the Russian Civil War basically defined

00:26:51.240 most of the pattern of history of certainly the first half

00:26:55.680 of the 20th century, but also to a certain degree, then the split between communism and

00:27:00.440 fascism, or sorry, between communism and capitalism in the second half. And we're still seeing the

00:27:07.280 effects of that today to a certain degree. But I mean, the way that all of this played out during

00:27:16.940 that particular period means that we are still, and this is why I think with the shock of last

00:27:25.380 year, that sort of the old order has suddenly changed and that the multipolar world, or

00:27:34.600 if one's going to call it that, has actually suddenly been shuffled, a large contribution,

00:27:41.040 of course, now coming from President Trump in that particular way.

00:27:45.060 And this is one of the great reasons for uncertainty, fear and, shall we say, even potential chaos

00:27:53.900 in many areas.

00:27:56.040 But it really does come very much more

00:27:58.300 from that particular moment of the Russian Civil War,

00:28:02.300 which again was an echo even of the time of troubles.

00:28:06.200 Well, I was going to say that, you know,

00:28:08.780 the reason I'm bringing this up is I think people in the West,

00:28:11.760 I'm no fan of Vladimir Putin,

00:28:13.360 but I also try to explain to people in the West

00:28:15.780 why he's popular in Russia.

00:28:17.480 And this is one of the reasons.

00:28:19.100 Because you talk about the Russian Civil War,

00:28:22.000 Well, you have, I mean, you talk in the book,

00:28:24.120 you have a weak, not very smart, indecisive czar, right?

00:28:29.000 And then who precedes Vladimir Putin?

00:28:31.700 It's Boris Yeltsin, who's seen by many people initially.

00:28:34.500 You know, he ran on the campaign slogan

00:28:36.180 of strong leader for a strong Russia,

00:28:38.520 but he's not seen as a strong leader.

00:28:40.300 He was kind of...

00:28:43.060 A strong leader for strong vodka.

00:28:44.700 Yes, yes, exactly.

00:28:46.540 And that strong vodka made him into a weak leader,

00:28:49.420 and then along comes Vladimir Putin.

00:28:51.300 And people go, oh, finally, someone is going to take charge.

00:28:54.860 Yes, absolutely right. I agree.

00:28:57.160 But, I mean, what one also needs, I think, to remember is how clever Putin was in bringing together the two sides, if you like, from the Russian Civil War. 0.65

00:29:09.440 He was the one who brought back various white generals to be reburied. 0.55

00:29:13.460 The way that you won't see a hammer and sickle, really, anywhere around the Kremlin anymore. 0.55

00:29:19.340 It's all a double-headed eagle.

00:29:20.620 and ditto on the palace on the Black Sea.

00:29:24.700 So he also, his criticism of Lenin and so forth,

00:29:29.540 he may say that the collapse of the Soviet Union

00:29:32.760 was the greatest geopolitical tragedy,

00:29:34.960 but his mentality is much closer to that of the Russian Empire. 0.94

00:29:38.020 Well, this is what I've been trying to say.

00:29:39.760 I think in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine,

00:29:42.240 there were a lot of people who don't really understand Russia very much

00:29:45.100 saying, oh, he's just trying to rebuild the Soviet Union.

00:29:47.740 I was trying to rebuild the Russian Empire.

00:29:49.900 Yes, exactly.

00:29:50.900 Very different thing.

00:29:51.900 Yes.

00:29:52.900 As we know, certainly, from the ideologues influencing him.

00:29:58.520 The whole of that particular essay was actually written by Medinsky, the one published before

00:30:03.660 the invasion of Ukraine. 0.99

00:30:05.660 And Medinsky, well, frankly, he's a fool in many ways. 0.98

00:30:09.020 There was the extraordinary attempt to get Kazakhstan back in by making that film of 0.98

00:30:14.940 General Pamphiloff and his 28 men or whatever, 0.56

00:30:18.380 which was then proved to have been a complete propaganda invention.

00:30:23.420 And Medinsky even said, anybody who doubts this,

00:30:26.180 even if it's not true, they are below slime.

00:30:29.760 It was a wonderful, it was unbelievably comic.

00:30:34.340 But that being the case, one of the things that I find really interesting 0.98

00:30:37.960 with Russia is we've talked about the cruelty, 0.96

00:30:40.500 and that goes right the way up to the modern day. 0.89

00:30:42.580 But there's also an obsession with spirituality, with religion.

00:30:46.800 I mean, how do you marry those two qualities, essentially?

00:30:51.960 Well, I mean, should we say religion and conspicuous cruelty have often been married.

00:30:58.020 Not just, I mean, in Islam, in Christianity, in virtually every single religion.

00:31:04.720 So I don't think it's unique to Russia necessarily in that particular way,

00:31:08.500 but it's something which has persisted.

00:31:10.960 And, I mean, we see it. We see unbelievable things.

00:31:17.100 I mean, for example, when the Tsar sends Tsar Nicholas II,

00:31:20.520 wants to send his fleet from the Baltic all the way around the world

00:31:23.660 to attack the Japanese in one of the most disastrous naval decisions in history. 0.72

00:31:28.520 You know, he gets the priests on board to bless all the guns to help the accuracy.

00:31:34.360 It's a mentality of the idea that somehow the power of the icon,

00:31:39.820 which was sort of distributed to the ships and the individuals and all the rest of it.

00:31:46.420 These talismans, all of those sort of gave the idea of, you know, God is with us,

00:31:53.900 which, you know, the Germans had inscribed on their belt buckles.

00:31:58.900 And, you know, the British used to say to themselves, you know, God's on our side.

00:32:02.940 God is an Englishman.

00:32:06.360 Nobody is really one escaped that particular idea.

00:32:09.180 It is part of a national mentality.

00:32:12.500 But I suppose what I'm touching on is the extremities.

00:32:16.360 On the one hand, you can be so callous, so cruel. 0.51

00:32:19.560 And we've seen it with Russian leaders. 0.83

00:32:21.460 You talk about it in the book.

00:32:22.760 I mean, the way the Tsars...

00:32:25.060 There was one instance where during a battle,

00:32:29.200 there was his...

00:32:30.780 I think it was during the Japan War,

00:32:34.760 there were tens of thousands of people who were dead, soldiers.

00:32:38.540 and then that very night he went to a party as if nothing had happened.

00:32:42.300 How can you have, on the instance you have that,

00:32:45.200 and on the other hand, you know, this deep spirituality, religiosity?

00:32:49.200 Surely there must be, I guess what I'm saying is,

00:32:52.360 a concern for your fellow man.

00:32:53.760 Isn't that also important?

00:32:55.960 Yes, but he wouldn't necessarily regard them as fellow men.

00:32:59.240 This was the trouble.

00:33:00.880 He was the Tsar, they weren't. 0.75

00:33:02.620 But also, Nicholas II particularly believed

00:33:07.200 in not showing emotion.

00:33:09.500 He felt that that was the worst thing he could do.

00:33:12.660 And this is the trouble whereby, 0.99

00:33:14.980 not necessarily stupidity, 1.00

00:33:16.640 but, I mean, he wasn't a totally stupid man, 1.00

00:33:19.160 but at the same time, 0.99

00:33:20.760 he refused, he had no imagination

00:33:24.380 or he blocked off his imagination.

00:33:26.840 He was different to his wife in a certain way.

00:33:32.280 He believed that they should never show any emotion at all.

00:33:36.620 And, for example, there was a German prince staying in Petrograd who'd been invited to dinner.

00:33:43.820 And he suddenly heard that the Tsar's uncle had been blown up in Moscow.

00:33:51.920 So he immediately rang the palace to say, I assume that the dinner has been cancelled or whatever.

00:33:58.360 And he said, oh, no, no, no, it's going ahead. It's going ahead.

00:34:01.380 And he arrives and finds that the Tsar and a cousin are having great fun trying to push the other one off the sofa.

00:34:11.860 I mean, playing sort of childish games.

00:34:14.780 So it's the question of blocking out anything that is uncomfortable to their worldview.

00:34:22.040 But the idea that people have died in huge numbers, if you describe, in their defense or under their orders, is not something which troubles them. They regard that as part of the natural world.

00:34:37.220 And Rasputin says at one point to the Empress, when she is genuinely concerned at the casualties,

00:34:44.800 he says, oh, you know, think of them, each one of them as candles lit at the throne of God.

00:34:53.980 Well, it was a brilliant phrase to the point of view of sort of calming her down,

00:34:57.960 of saying, you know, all of the sacrifices perfectly.

00:35:01.780 It's a tribute. It's a tribute to the Almighty.

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00:36:01.580 And what's interesting is that that overt religiosity or attitude to the spiritual,

00:36:09.140 it leaves leaders potentially vulnerable to people like Rasputin, but not just Rasputin,

00:36:15.120 others of his ilk who can come in and be incredibly manipulative for their own ends.

00:36:20.520 Yes. I mean, it is fascinating that you can have that sort of contrast within the same person. But again, you know, this is one of the fascinating contradictions, partly with, as I say, Rasputin and the relationship with the royal family, but also within the royal family itself, because there were other members of the royal family who were simply appalled.

00:36:43.400 I mean, the Tsar's mother was horrified.

00:36:48.020 Now, she had actually been influenced by the fact of having this traumatic dream

00:36:52.920 when she was pregnant with him and about a peasant chopping off the head of her baby.

00:36:59.080 And then 38 years later, she finds that her son and daughter-in-law

00:37:03.680 have become completely besotted with the Siberian peasant. 0.82

00:37:06.500 And she is absolutely certain that they will die in a revolution killed by peasants.

00:37:14.400 And you mentioned the Russo-Japanese War,

00:37:17.080 something very few people outside the history world know anything about.

00:37:21.440 Why does that war happen?

00:37:24.260 Well, the war happens to a large degree because at this particular period,

00:37:28.680 the Japanese...

00:37:28.940 1904, right?

00:37:30.180 We're talking about 1904, exactly.

00:37:32.420 This is a period when Germany and Russia interested in seizing parts of the Chinese territory.

00:37:42.060 One has to remember, you know, the way that the great Chinese resentment against the West is very much the unequal treaties which were forced on China when it was at its weakest in the 19th century.

00:37:56.680 And the Russians even imposed a railway which they built to accelerate the Trans-Siberian Railway right across Mongolia.

00:38:14.940 So the Chinese had a lot to resent. 0.82

00:38:18.460 But the Japanese also were in this period of expanding population 0.90

00:38:23.620 and wanting to colonize Vernia abroad, which basically meant Manchuria.

00:38:30.320 And therefore, there was an imbalance, if you like,

00:38:37.020 certainly in power in that particular region.

00:38:40.080 And the Tsar had been persuaded by a forerunner of Rasputin,

00:38:44.380 There's another mystic con man basically called Philippe, a Frenchman, saying that you should be the emperor of the east.

00:38:54.400 And actually, the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, was saying from the center signal at sea to the Tsar, saying from the emperor of the Atlantic to the emperor of the Pacific. 0.58

00:39:06.740 Now, Nicholas at that particular moment thought, well, that's ridiculous.

00:39:10.200 But then he was encouraged by one of his ministers, particularly by Pleva, that, you know, a war against the Japanese would be a huge advantage because it would be a quick, easy war. 1.00

00:39:22.020 They're just Orientals. You know, they can't take on a modern Russian army. 0.99

00:39:26.980 Well, modern is a doubtful phrase.

00:39:31.800 And others were much more skeptical, but the Tsar rather liked the idea.

00:39:37.200 And so on the ambassadorial reception in 1904, in January, the New Year reception, he was pretty insulting to the Japanese ambassador who bowed and said nothing, not realizing, in fact, that the Japanese were about to send huge numbers of troops across the sea to the Korean peninsula.

00:40:03.500 and suddenly they were in a position

00:40:08.260 where they were starting to attack at Port Hartha

00:40:11.060 which was the great Russian port in the Far East

00:40:15.980 and from there then of course they assembled a vast army

00:40:19.360 where the Trans-Sybean Railway was not ready sufficiently

00:40:24.320 to equip them and to supply them

00:40:27.060 and then as I mentioned there was the utter disaster

00:40:31.700 of sending the Baltic fleet, really, all the way around the world,

00:40:35.740 and they were destroyed in the Battle of Tsushima,

00:40:39.000 one of the greatest naval victories, which the Japanese won easily.

00:40:44.740 So it was a vast humiliation to Russia, especially to Nicholas II himself, 0.59

00:40:51.960 and it forced him into accepting basically a constitution in October 2005, 0.60

00:41:01.700 At a time when 1905. Sorry, I don't know. Yeah, I know one easily skips the century. Yeah. And this, of course, was because the war had created such anger that being the march of Father Gapon, the protest in St. Petersburg in that January of 2005, where they were gunned down by the Imperial Guard and the Cossacks.

00:41:31.700 and all the rest of it, and terrible repression in the countryside

00:41:36.680 when houses, manor houses, were set on fire.

00:41:40.180 It was very much a prelude to the later revolution, the 1905 disturbances.

00:41:45.780 And you also then get, of course, the battleship for Tjemkin

00:41:48.300 and the mutiny in the Black Sea.

00:41:53.660 So there Nicholas was in a very defensive position.

00:42:00.360 He burst into tears after signing the document

00:42:05.100 and felt that sort of he betrayed the whole family

00:42:07.640 because he had signed away, basically he felt, Romanov autocracy.

00:42:13.040 And then, of course, the struggle between him and,

00:42:17.380 worst of all, from his point of view,

00:42:19.800 the liberal conservatives in the Duma,

00:42:22.360 who have been the only ones who could actually have saved

00:42:25.480 or helped save the monarchy from itself.

00:42:28.500 But because of his obstinacy, because of his lack of imagination

00:42:34.000 and his insistence on trying to restore the Romanov autocracy,

00:42:39.520 he actually became his own worst enemy.

00:42:42.100 And so the war really weakens him.

00:42:45.560 Yes.

00:42:46.200 Well, losing the war really weakens him.

00:42:48.580 And is it a case then that it's almost, you see this throughout history

00:42:52.380 where you've got a fairly weak ruler who engenders resistance and rebellion,

00:42:59.060 which he then, because he's a weak ruler, is way too brutal in putting down,

00:43:03.760 generating more resentment, which builds,

00:43:06.280 but he's not actually able to bring the country with him.

00:43:08.700 Is that basically what happened?

00:43:09.960 Yes, but there are two versions of that.

00:43:12.240 There are also those who will argue that the collapse of regime

00:43:16.020 is accelerated when they start making compromises.

00:43:19.100 So, you know, it can work both ways. In his particular case, of course, it wasn't just the repression. Stolipin, the prime minister, had been known to repress as strongly as he could.

00:43:42.460 And that was an effective repression. But for the time being, I mean, the hangings, everybody referred to him as Stolipian's necktie because of the mass executions.

00:43:55.920 But it wasn't just the mass executions. The way the army was sent into the countryside and any rebellious peasants were sort of beaten with an inch of their life with the cleaning rods of their rifles.

00:44:07.440 And this, of course, created vast anger and bitterness and so forth.

00:44:11.820 All of these elements were some form of preparation, but the real collapse in the authority of the Tsar Nicholas II came very much actually from the way that rumour, and false rumour, because of Rasputin and his relationship with the emperors.

00:44:37.800 One of his letters to the Empress was stolen and then was circulated

00:44:42.300 in which he said that she wanted to fall asleep forever on his shoulder.

00:44:46.960 Well, this was interpreted automatically as the fact that she was sleeping with him.

00:44:51.620 But, of course, she wasn't at all.

00:44:53.420 It was much worse than that.

00:44:56.000 And, I mean, then we start to get closer to the revolution.

00:44:59.420 We get to that sort of pornographic fantasy which precedes, it seems, many revolutions,

00:45:04.860 like with the French Revolution, the idea of Marie Antoinette

00:45:07.920 and her relationship with the Princesse de Lombard

00:45:10.680 and all that sort of stuff,

00:45:12.460 that Rasputin was even sleeping with the teenage daughters.

00:45:15.800 Again, totally untrue.

00:45:18.140 But the point was that the Tsar,

00:45:21.340 who refused to have any interference

00:45:23.180 and refused to listen to warnings from his own cousins and uncles,

00:45:26.940 was allowing his wife to entertain Rasputin in the palace

00:45:34.800 on their own, which was obviously a complete breach of protocol, and was ruining her reputation.

00:45:42.480 And he decides, he describes in his diary how, you know, I returned home and I found my wife

00:45:47.460 and Rasputin, you know, chatting happily and I joined them and we had a very enjoyable evening

00:45:52.160 without any imagination of what this was doing. I mean, even his own confessor was saying,

00:45:57.640 don't you realize what you're doing to yourself? And he just refused to be. So why cannot I have

00:46:02.120 my own private life and everyone said well your life belongs to the country you know you but he

00:46:07.180 refused to accept that and the idea in a patriarchal society like russia that the czar could be a

00:46:14.460 cuckold um was obviously going to really undermine any belief and confidence in him and this is why

00:46:23.180 come February 1917, after the, shall we say, rather delayed murder of Rasputin,

00:46:32.720 which was too little too late if it was going to ever happen.

00:46:36.540 And also it actually had a contradictory effect,

00:46:38.640 the idea that suddenly we were going to save Russia from itself

00:46:42.200 because we're saving the monarchy from Rasputin. 0.73

00:46:45.300 Well, the trouble was that, yes, there was rejoicing amongst the rich and the aristocracy, 0.84

00:46:51.340 and they were all jumping up and theatres were interrupted

00:46:56.780 and people would sort of jump up to cheer and sing the national anthem.

00:47:00.700 But as far as the pericentery were concerned, they're saying,

00:47:03.600 well, you know, the bosses, they've just killed the only person

00:47:07.920 who ever got close to the throne.

00:47:10.000 In the end, as I say, it was too little too late.

00:47:12.800 But when it actually came to February, by then, again, another disaster 0.96

00:47:18.140 because the Empress and Rasputin together

00:47:22.180 had appointed not only 70 altogether new governors,

00:47:28.620 they had changed most of the government

00:47:30.880 while the Tsar was at the headquarters, the Stavka,

00:47:35.520 and away from St. Petersburg, from Petrograd.

00:47:38.740 They had been appointing the ministers, basically,

00:47:41.280 and just getting the star to rub a stamp it.

00:47:44.720 And the worst of all was Protopopov,

00:47:47.200 the last minister of the interior, who actually was suffering from syphilis and was talking as

00:47:54.460 a result with terminal paralysis of the insane, was actually talking to icons and believed he

00:48:01.840 could commune with the dead and so forth. And he said, I will take over the transportation system

00:48:08.800 or whatever. And this was what actually brought the February revolution forward because the trains

00:48:15.280 were all in the wrong places at the wrong times. They froze solid in that particular

00:48:20.620 January of 1917. And it was hardly surprising, therefore, that there was, although sufficient

00:48:26.920 grain in the country, it wasn't in the right places. And that's why you started to get

00:48:31.100 starvation in the cities. So the actual street revolution, which had nothing to do with the

00:48:37.840 Bolsheviks, they were all away, Lenin in Switzerland, Trotsky in North America, Stalin in Siberia.

00:48:45.280 the regime was completely vulnerable and so demoralized that none of the imperial guards

00:48:53.560 officers were even prepared to draw their swords in defense of the regime going into this year i

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00:50:28.620 And to inject a note of empathy for the Tsar into proceedings,

00:50:32.840 as I was reading your book,

00:50:34.860 this idea kept replaying in my head

00:50:37.880 which was, I couldn't think of two people less suited to those positions than the Tsar and the Tsarina.

00:50:45.480 No, you're quite right.

00:50:48.560 You know, psychologically, I mean, talk about having daddy issues. 1.00

00:50:54.960 I mean, the poor Tsar with his father, who was a muntin of a man. 0.99

00:50:59.940 And the Tsar was absolutely always, Tsar Nicholas II, 1.00

00:51:03.780 was always conscious that he was one of the smallest of the Romanovs. 0.77

00:51:07.160 You know, who's going to take orders from me?

00:51:12.420 He sort of says almost in tears when his father dies, he says to a cousin.

00:51:19.700 And so he has this sort of permanent complex.

00:51:24.160 And then he marries this woman who again has her own complexes,

00:51:30.940 partly because of being brought up in an impoverished court.

00:51:33.740 then is very much sort of you would have hoped that Queen Victoria bringing her up as her

00:51:38.900 granddaughter would have had a slightly better influence. But then you get this extraordinary

00:51:47.420 transformation when having refused to marry Nicholas because she didn't want to change

00:51:52.800 her religion from being a Protestant to becoming a Russian Orthodox. She then becomes more Russian

00:51:59.760 orthodox and any Russian, and obsessive in her belief in the power of icons, in spirituality,

00:52:09.560 and the idea of, you know, the peasant alliance with the royal house of Romanov, the Batyushka

00:52:15.560 Tsar, and all the rest of that sort of stuff. Lack of imagination was one of the worst.

00:52:21.980 Inability to listen to any advice was common to both of them. And the effect, of course,

00:52:28.940 was utterly disastrous absolutely but he also to be fair to him as well he wasn't because of the

00:52:34.820 way his father died and we can talk about that a little bit he was left directionless yes it was

00:52:41.160 true um the trouble was that one has to remember first of all first of all the czar uh his father

00:52:48.240 alexander the third uh thought that he was going to have much longer time sort of to prepare his

00:52:53.560 son. And anyway, he felt, well, I'd had no preparation or whatever. So surely he doesn't

00:52:59.260 really need preparation either. So again, lack of imagination. And of course, he did treat his

00:53:03.780 son as a weakling, which did not improve his confidence. And the only confidence Nicholas

00:53:08.860 ever had was when he was surrounded by young army officers who, of course, all were fawning on him

00:53:14.700 and so forth. And he was at his happiest when he was going to sort of regimental dinners where

00:53:20.800 they would all cheer him. And then when he left, you know, he was treated as a hero.

00:53:25.320 And this gave him the idea that the army would always be loyal, that, you know, that the power

00:53:30.540 of the Romanos could never be shaken. The idea that that would ever change never occurred to

00:53:38.200 him. And of course, until the Second World War, sorry, the First World War. And right at the end,

00:53:43.240 when he suddenly saw the disintegration of his own armies. And he also had a vulnerability,

00:53:47.360 which is his heir and successor, Alexei was deeply, deeply ill.

00:53:55.100 Well, the tragedy, of course, was it was called the English disease

00:53:58.820 because haemophilia came through the line of Queen Victoria

00:54:02.520 and it was on the mother's side, the mothers who carried it.

00:54:06.880 I knew you guys grew up.

00:54:09.520 It skipped a generation going on to Alexandra,

00:54:16.040 the empress Alexandra, and the daughters, the four daughters, were absolutely fine.

00:54:23.840 And then Alexis, when he was born, they realized that he had haemophilia.

00:54:29.780 Haemophilia is when your blood doesn't clot, basically.

00:54:31.640 If you get a cut, you're going to bleed out.

00:54:33.760 It's obviously a disease entirely of the blood, which produces appalling pain in the joints, particularly.

00:54:42.340 And, of course, this is what gave Rasputin his power.

00:54:46.040 He didn't really have any power or influence at the beginning, but the moment that he started to be able to relieve the symptoms, mainly by the voice and by the touch and his eyes, some people say he was a hypnotist, but I'm not so sure about that.

00:55:02.360 I mean, he did use those eyes in a sort of powerful way.

00:55:06.440 But as far as the children were concerned, it wasn't just Alexei.

00:55:11.700 Alexei, it was one or two others.

00:55:15.560 He did have some extraordinary calming influence in that particular way.

00:55:19.060 But I mean, that in a way is fascinating area of debate of whether he did have a certain power,

00:55:27.380 particularly in his hands, without actually touching the body,

00:55:30.680 which could make this influence.

00:55:33.440 But a lot of it also was that the calming of the voice

00:55:36.940 was able to bring down the blood pressure,

00:55:40.440 which actually then released quite often the joints

00:55:44.320 which were causing the extreme pain.

00:55:47.960 But there was the great moment at Nspala,

00:55:50.800 in a hunting lodge in Poland, where he came closest to death

00:55:56.180 and they really had given up hope.

00:55:59.840 And it was only a telephone call from Rasputin

00:56:02.580 which convinced the mother that he was going to survive

00:56:08.060 and whether that just coincided with the break in the fever

00:56:11.720 or whatever it was.

00:56:12.880 But from then on, Rasputin's power was total,

00:56:15.900 as everybody in the court realized in horror,

00:56:19.020 because she believed he was a total saint

00:56:21.820 and that God had worked through him

00:56:23.580 and had saved the dynasty and that the crown prince, the Tsarevich,

00:56:32.840 will definitely be the future Tsar.

00:56:37.300 Anthony, well, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

00:56:40.020 As we wrap up, I have two questions for you.

00:56:42.020 We always have the same question at the end, but before that,

00:56:44.680 if you look at the history of Russia's relations with Europe,

00:56:48.220 in particular in the West more broadly,

00:56:49.640 there have been times when european countries have been at war with russia there have been times when

00:56:54.680 russia has been a participant with other european countries and wars against other european countries

00:56:58.920 etc so those relationships the relationship with russia is up and down and flows in different

00:57:05.480 directions for a time do you think there will be a time certainly in our lifetimes when the

00:57:13.640 relationship that we have with Russia will shift in a more constructive direction? Or do you think

00:57:20.280 the impact of the war in Ukraine is such that it will be a tarnishing force for a very, very long

00:57:25.640 time? I fear very much the latter, yes. I think there will be such bitterness after the war.

00:57:32.680 It's impossible to predict, obviously, at the moment how it's going to turn out. But I think

00:57:37.560 that uh the the suffering in russia will be uh considerable partly not just because of the

00:57:45.640 economic consequences i mean how will they be able to readapt their economy back to a uh should we

00:57:53.960 say a more civilian economy and demilitarize it uh will be very very hard and that will cause

00:57:59.960 vast suffering in the countryside and certainly outside the main cities but even in the main

00:58:04.840 citizens themselves, I suggest, but also what we talked about earlier about the

00:58:10.520 traumatized and brutalized soldiers coming back from the war and what effect they will have on

00:58:18.280 the whole place. So without going into any sort of predictions, I don't think Russia will split

00:58:25.320 into different parts or anything like that, as some have tried to predict. But I do think that

00:58:31.960 It will be a center of resentment and will be dangerous in that particular way.

00:58:40.520 But a lot will depend on other elements of to what degree China will help Russia

00:58:46.120 or to what degree China will actually exploit Russia's vulnerability at the end of the war

00:58:51.880 with its own interests in Siberia and other areas.

00:58:57.200 The Chinese are taking over the Far East of Russia, just demographically speaking, already. 0.99

00:59:00.920 Absolutely. Demographically already. But they're even changing the maps, as you've seen, with the names of Vladivostok and others now in Chinese. So there's little doubt about Putin being in need of the Chinese, but I think probably underneath afraid of them as well. 1.00

00:59:19.440 Well, and of course, the big question is what happens when Putin goes. 1.00

00:59:23.240 Exactly.

00:59:24.620 Well, thank you for coming back. We appreciate it.

00:59:27.260 You said before we started, I will tell the public this,

00:59:30.580 that this is the last podcast you're ever going to do.

00:59:33.480 I actually don't believe that.

00:59:34.800 I think you'll be back because it's so great to have you on

00:59:37.680 and you are so prolific with your writing.

00:59:39.840 We're delighted to have had you.

00:59:41.320 Well, no, what I enjoyed was, I mean, because we were talking in the large

00:59:45.060 rather just in the specific, and I think that the problem has been

00:59:49.440 that sort of you know people have just given away the whole story of their book and for many people

00:59:54.160 they think well why do i bother to go and buy it now um but i mean when one can actually have a

00:59:58.880 really great discussion um that's a different matter uh so no as i say we look forward to

01:00:04.960 having you back is what i'm saying hold on hold on before you run uh our final question as as is

01:00:11.840 always is the same which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be

01:00:15.360 could be in the context of this could be in the context of something else

01:00:19.620 um what do you mean well said about contemporary politics could be about anything at all anything

01:00:25.340 that's on your mind that you think why doesn't anyone talk about this um

01:00:29.620 well uh well at the moment you know what are going to be uh the environmental consequences

01:00:38.440 let's face it war is one of the worst environmental disasters you can imagine

01:00:43.140 And here we are with more wars around the world at the moment, more conflicts going on, whether in Africa or elsewhere, where already people are suffering water wars and climate disasters of one form or another. 1.00

01:00:57.720 So the biggest issue really is, I'm afraid, going to come back again to immigration because of the side effects of everything else going on. 0.92

01:01:08.300 And, you know, there's no way that Europe can be the lifeboat. 0.95

01:01:11.560 And I remember, actually, funny enough, in a book that I wrote and was published in 1990,

01:01:18.200 I remember predicting there that the possibility that perhaps the role of armies in the future

01:01:23.100 are simply going to be to prevent mass immigration.

01:01:28.400 So, Anthony Beaver, thanks for coming on.

01:01:30.140 Not at all. Great pleasure.

01:01:41.560 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - June 06, 2026

The Russian Mindset and Where it Comes From - Historian Sir Antony Beevor

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