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- [00:00]
A
Hello, Good evening, everybody, I'm Edward Lucas. Familiar faces here in the audience. Nice to see some old friends again. I was a student here in 1980-83. Didn't learn very much, but got interested in Eastern Europe, which is where I met Charles, in Ukraine in 1998 when I was the Economist's Moscow correspondent. Charles was playing a lonely furrow, is that right? One of very few foreign correspondents who actually had the commitment and stamina to sit around in Ukraine, a country we didn't cover very much in the absolute belief that it was going to get interesting sooner or later. It did. The most important thing actually say, buy this book and don't just buy one copy, buy two. One for yourself and one for any friend of yours who's interested in it. It's a really terrific read. And it doesn't just get under the skin of the Eurasianism political philosophy, which is extremely interesting and important in Putin's Russia, but it also gets into some of the great mysteries of post 1991 Russia. What really happened with the shelling of Parliament, what really happened with the apartment block bombings, what happened with all sorts of other important political events which we reported at the time, not really understanding what was happening. So it's partly a work of cultural history and political philosophy. It's also excellent bit of reporting and a kind of detective story about the real hidden history of Russia. But you've come to hear Charles, not me. So I'm going to sit down, Charles is going to talk for a bit, then I'm going to ask some questions and you're going to ask some questions and we will carry on until a whole hard stop at 8 o', clock, at which point we may go to the pub. Thank you very much. Please welcome Charles.
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B
Thank you very much, Ed. That's a very kind introduction. Yeah, we've, we've known each other for almost 20 years and I've been following your career and I really appreciate the kind words. So I'm going to disappoint a few people. I'm not very current on the latest day to day stuff of Russian nationalism. I was an expert on Russian nationalism and followed it on a day to day basis until about two years ago when I became an expert on Chinese e commerce and now based in Beijing. So anybody who wants to talk about the sort of the very up to the minute latest events of, you know, who's up and who's down in the Donetsk Republic or you know, the latest musings of, or any of these, you know, really quite Actual questions of Russian nationalism. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to discuss these adequately. But what I've written is a history and I think a guide that will be useful to people who want to know more about Russian nationalism. I've written it's basically a history of Russian coffee house fringe nationalists with beards and how they have become mainstream pundits and with national talk shows and chairing departments of big universities and how they've basically become, how nationalism has become mainstream phenomenon in Russia over the last sort of decade or half decade. And the way that that has happened, I mean, it's quite interesting because basically, while these nationalists, while these kind of guys who were sitting in their basements, you know, formerly sitting in their basements writing pamphlets and blogs, were making this transition to the political big time, Russia was starting to behave in a new way. Russia was starting to behave more aggressively there. More rhetoric about empire, more rhetoric about nationalism, and the entire context of Russian politics started to change. And I'm not just talking about Putin being more nationalistic. I'm talking about the Russian opposition becoming more nationalistic. The whole center of gravity in Russia has started to move towards nationalism. And I think that's a very complicated process. And I've been trying and I've tried to kind of reproduce what I think happened in this book. And I would argue that it's not driven entirely by Putin or by these nationalists kind of wagging the dog. It's driven by a kind of complex cultural process. But it resulted from a decision early on by Putin and the Kremlin to empower nationalists of all types in Russia in an effort to both limit nationalism and neutralize it as a threat to the state and limit and neutralize separatism, but also to kind of take advantage of nationalism and use it as a way to mobilize support, as a way to mobilize, you know, to sort of consolidate Russia politically and also to expand in an imperial way. And what we've seen in Georgia and Ukraine over the last, you know, half decade, so that's what my book is about, what I think the best, the best way to do it, the best way for me to tell the story of this process, this process of co opting and using nationalism, is to tell a murder mystery. And there was a killing that happened in January of 2009, which kind of exposed this entire policy. And the trial, the subsequent trial, which happened in 2014 and 2015, the testimony from the trial is actually quite illuminating about what, how this, what they call Managed nationalism was implemented and how it went horribly wrong. So this was one of the first stories that I covered when I. When I came to Russia. It was in 2009, it was January, it was the middle of winter, and a human rights lawyer named Stanislav Markelov was. Had given a press conference in the center of Moscow. And he was coming out of his press conference with a colleague, Anastasia Baburova, who was a journalist at the opposition newspaper Novay Gazeta. And they were walking down Pretystinka street, which is a very ritzy street in the center of Moscow, and they were walking towards the metro and a guy came up behind them and shot them both in the head. And that murder was incredibly. I mean, it was an incredibly noisy political event and the opposition in Russia was very distressed about it. There were demonstrations. There was also a lot of suspicion about exactly who did the murder because it was carried out in a very professional way. Whoever did it was quite, you know, clearly had some sort of training. The police found no spent shell casings at the murder, the murder site. The guy had obviously collected them, couldn't identify the weapon. He walked 200 meters from Pretystenka street to Kropotkinskay Metro in the middle of Moscow through, you know, being photographed by numerous CCTV cameras, always at the wrong angle, always wearing a hat, walked right in front of Christ the Savior Cathedral into the Met and disappeared. And, you know, it was widely suspected that this person probably had some sort of special services background or military training or something like that. So everybody was a bit surprised when the police arrested a guy named Nikita Tikhonov, who was a history student, a weedy intellectual with no military training, no special services background that anybody could detect. He was a radical nationalist. And he then confessed to the murder. And people were a bit suspicious because obviously a confession doesn't really mean anything in the high profile murder investigation in Russia. And so, but gradually, according to, you know, I mean, I was reporting this story, colleagues were reporting this story. The people who knew, knew Markelov. The people who knew the deceased said, well, actually, it seems like the police got their man. Tikhanov does seem to have been. He had a previous arrest record, had been wanted for murder and was a very violent skinhead nationalist. He sort of. He was kind of a philosopher gone wrong in the way of sort of a, you know, Dostoevsky character. And so around this time I met with a guy named Alexander Barkashov, who is the kind of the oldest, the godfather of all Russian nationalists. He was the Leader of one of the first Russian nationalist movements in the 1980s. It was named Russian National Unity or Russian National Unity. Yeah, Russian National Unity. And he. I just wanted to talk to him in general about this. About this situation. And one thing he said was very curious. I drove all the way out to his farm, three hours outside of Moscow. He's an interesting guy. He breeds Ovcharka fighting dogs and has a collection of medieval armor and composite bows that he likes to show off to people. So he kind of lives the life of an edgy, militant nationalist. But his organization, Russian National Unity, was. I mean, it was a kindergarten compared to what they've got today in Russia, the skinhead gangs that are now operating. I mean, all they did was sort of march around and pass out Protocols of the Elders of Zion or something like that. That was nothing compared to what you've got today in Russ. And he's. But he's kind of a, you know, he still knows everything about who, you know, all the goings on in the nationalist movement. And he said, at the end of the interview, he said, you know what? Actually, Tikhonov was a member of an organization, and it was called Russky Obraz, or Russian Image. And Russky Obraz was a Kremlin organization. He said this. I was like, hmm, that's interesting. That's a. Interesting conspiracy theory. Okay, can you prove it? And he said, no, no, just everybody knows it, you know, you should look into it. Okay. So I did. And it turns out, sure enough, Nikita Tikhanov's organization, Russky Obra's, was, in fact, had. There was a lot of. There was a certain amount of suspicion about them because they were able to, for instance, hold demonstrations in the middle of Moscow. This is something that, if you're a nationalist skinhead gang in Russia, the authorities don't really like to have people marching through the center of Moscow anyway, in general, least of all, skinhead nationalists who can sort of beat up the police and stuff. So they tend to. If you're. If you're a nationalist movement, you can get permission to hold a march, but you have to hold it on the outskirts of Moscow, out in the suburbs. These guys were able to hold a march in the middle of Moscow, right near Red Square. And all the other nationalist organizations that I spoke to said, this is, you know, these guys are definitely, you know, a Kremlin project. So then I talked to Ruski Obraz. They have a spokesman. They're a normal kind of political movement. And their spokesman said, well, actually, yes, the way he put it is, the Kremlin gives us a green light we do get in return for good behavior. You know, we don't kill people and we don't fling Nazi salutes at our demonstrations. Actually said this. We can, you know, we are given lenient treatment by the Kremlin, and we can hold marches and they give us support. So I thought that was an odd thing for them to admit to, but, you know, you know, that seems to have been accurate. And they were closed down soon after this murder, so they didn't exist for very long after that. But now, this was my first encounter with this policy that I've described, which is in Russian called u pravliami Nazionalism, or managed nationalism. And it's an effort to. Well, this is the way that the Kremlin manages and managed politics for most of the last decade and a half in Russia, which is that they create kind of double organizations. They create sort of simulacra kind of organization, you know, political parties that are. They say they are Communists or leftists or democrats or nationalists, and they are kind of. But they do the Kremlin's bidding, and they only take the opposition to a certain degree, to a certain limit. And one nationalist leader who I spoke to about this, a guy named Alexander Belov, who was the leader of the movement against illegal immigration. It was another skinhead gang in Moscow. It was one of three big kind of radical nationalist, semi opposition skinhead gangs. And the way he put it to me was the Kremlin has the following principle for dealing with any political organization. If they cannot destroy it, they will lead it, and they can't destroy the nationalists. So, yeah, so this is how the Kremlin managed politics under. There was the guy who kind of created this approach to politics, this approach of having double organizations and simulacra and kind of this postmodern approach to politics is a guy named Vladislav Surk, who was the deputy chief of staff under Putin until 2011. So about the first 11 years of Putin's presidency, he was the guy who managed the domestic political situation. And he was actually an advertising executive who they got to run the domestic politics department in the Kremlin. That sort of tells you a lot about their approach to politics. And this approach, this kind of or managed approach to all politics worked pretty well until. Except with nationalism and except with this case of these nationalist groups that they basically created or managed or led, these all ended up getting out of control. All of the nationalists, starting with Russky Obraz, starting with Tikhanov's gang. And the first signal that that was going to happen was the murder of Mr. Markelov. And I'd just like to sort of take an aside to explain why nationalism might be different. Why this, why is the Kremlin so concerned about nationalism? Why are they concerned to manage it? And what is the danger that nationalism represents in Russia? And so I just, I'll quote probably the top one of maybe the one or two top scholars of nationalism in the modern era. A Cambridge historian named Ernest Gellner, who wrote the following. Wherever nationalism has taken root, it has tended to prevail with ease over other modern ideologies. And I think that's true. And I think that's. That was true when he wrote it in the 1980s, and it's even more true today. We're living in an era of nationalism. I mean, you just look out the window. I mean, there's some, you know, nationalist fantasies very close to home here in London. And, you know, the rise of Donald Trump, the rise of the far right in Europe, the rise of identity politics and militant fundamentalism in the Middle east, the rise of Russian nationalism, you know, and take your pick, of Ukip, Brexit in the uk. I mean, all of these things are sort of, these are all kind of nationalist projects and they're all. This is a period, I think, in the last decade where we're just seeing this kind of snowballing of nationalism in all countries, and Russia is one of them. And I think that the Gellner quote is interesting because it shows you that, I mean, he thought of nationalism as something in itself. It is something. He's not saying that nationalists are more suited to ruling or nationalists are stronger. He's saying that nationalism, something about nationalism, chases everything else out. It's just somehow more suited to winning competition against other ideas than, you know, liberalism or communism or, you know, it's just in this period we're seeing nationalism take off everywhere. And for precisely this reason. In Russia, there was a long standing gentleman's agreement not to use nationalism beyond a certain limit because the Russian elite had seen what had happened when in the late 1980s, the rise of nationalism had torn the state apart and very nearly created a Yugoslavia type civil war across the entire Eurasian land mass. And so they were very anxious to see that that did not repeat itself. They were very afraid of nationalism taking root and spreading. And so there was always going to be a kind of an inherent tension in Russia between the imperative not to use nationalism and to limit nationalism as a threat. But Also to take the temptation to take advantage of it. And I think that is kind of what happened. The Kremlin decided, well, actually, you know, Putin sounds really good when he bangs on the table and talks about, you know, the motherland. He sounds really good when he uses words like Novorossiya, when he uses tsarist language or imperialist nationalist language. He gets high scores in focus groups and polls and things like that. And so there was a temptation to say, simultaneously use it, but also try and channel it. And this effort just sort of went out of control. And some of the groups that would use nationalism ultimately to challenge the Kremlin were groups that the Kremlin actually created, such as Mr. Tikonov's organization and such as the other. There were three or four other very large groups of radical nationalists that had a sort of unclear links to security services and the police and some funding from who knows where and stuff.
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So.
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Anyway, the interesting thing about Orusky Obra's a Russian image, Nikita Tikhanov's organization was that it was basically a terrorist organization that functioned with the full knowledge of a part of the Kremlin, according to court testimony later on. So when I spoke to the Russky Obra's press secretary, they said, well, we have cut our ties with Mr. Tikhonov back in 2006 when he was wanted to for murder, and we've not had any contact with him since. And then later on it turned out that that was not the case. And in reality, this is going to be a bit hard to follow. I'm just going to try and whiz through the court testimony that came out of when they finally put Mr. Tikonov on trial and his girlfriend on trial, then they put the man who was a friend of theirs, who was also head of the organization, on trial. And there was reams and reams and reams of court testimony that's been made public. And this is quite an interesting kind of resource. If you have several days to read a lot of Russian court transcripts, you can learn an awful lot about Kremlin support for militant nationalist organizations in Russia. So according to Tikhonov's girlfriend, Yevgeny Akasis, who is also who was given an 18 year sentence in 2014 for aiding Tikonov's crime. She described two organizations. There was Russky Obraz, which was a legal political front organization, similar which he said to Sinn Fein. And then there was another militant terrorist organization called the Baja Vaya Organizatse Russkihnatsionalistov, or the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists Born, which was an underground militant group that was headed by Mr. Tikhonov and Mr. Tikhonov's friend from university, a guy named and Ilya Garachev, ran the legal open organization Russki Obraz. And then what? And then both Mr. Tikhonov and his girlfriend, Ms. Hassis, testified that Goryachev had boasted of having patronage with the Kremlin, had met. They had met what they described as the Kremlin, that this organization, that they had had a Kremlin kuratar. Now, in Russian, a kuratar is like a conductor. I don't know how to pronounce, how to translate that. It's somebody in the Kremlin who is a kind of liaison officer or a liaison person who works together with.
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How about minder?
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Minder. That's great. A Kremlin minder, which is not an official position, but they named the minder, the minder testified. The minder has given several interviews. His name is Leonid Simunin. He's currently apparently fighting in Eastern Ukraine at the moment. And he was responsible for ferrying requests from this organization to the Kremlin and patronage from the Kremlin to this organization, according to the testimony of a couple of the people involved in this relationship, including Tikhonov and his girlfriend, Ms. Casas. Now, the Kremlin has since denied that this ever happened. I think, you know, it's not. I mean, Mr. Tikhonov said very clearly in court that his friend Ilya Gariachev had said, had told him to kill Markhailov and that there was an interest. Let me just. That the regime was interested in this, that Markelov, the lawyer who was murdered, was an ideologist of the opposition. And there are people in the regime who are interested in seeing him dead. And if he did this favor for the regime, they would forgive him everything. He was wanted for murder, a previous murder. And so he was living illegally. And so they said. Apparently he said that they had. That he had been promised some sort of amnesty or something like that in exchange for killing Markella. Now, clearly, he wasn't given amnesty. I mean, he's been given a life sentence for murder. So there's, you know, there's some reason to suspect that maybe not all of this is accurate. But whether the Kremlin actually ordered this organization to murder Stanislav Markelov is very unclear. And I wouldn't say necessarily that that's true, but they did know. It is very clear, reading these transcripts, that the Kremlin knew that a political legal organization that enjoyed its patronage continued to have links to an illegal terrorist organization. And despite that, the legal front organization continued to get funding from the Kremlin. There's one guy who actually knows the answers to all of this. His name is Nikita Ivanov. He was Surcov's deputy in the Kremlin, and he's now a senator in the upper house of parliament. But I've never been able to talk to him anyway. So I guess this sort of shows us a number of things. There has been an effort by the Kremlin, clearly, to create or back or sanction some nationalist movements in Russia of this, of which this is just one example. The other thing that's clear is this effort did not go very well and seems to have. They've lost control of it now. In 2009, the police seemed to have started to go after these skinhead radical nationalist organizations. Now, it's possible that Markelov's murder was a signal they realized that this policy had gone off the rails and they needed to just roll these organizations up. That's one interpretation that's probably the most likely.
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So.
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The big three sort of skinhead radical nationalist organizations in Russia have all been rolled up now. The founders or leaders are either in prison or on probation or the leader. The movements themselves have been banned. But for whatever reason, the genie seems to have gotten out of the bottle. And. And the movement really hasn't actually died. It's gone both underground, but it's also mutated into an actually quite powerful opposition movement in Russia. In 2011, there were the first major demonstrations against Putin's regime in the streets of Moscow. These were attended by up to 100,000 people. I reported on them. There was some controversy about the numbers. I. I think it was about 100,000. That sounds about right to me. That's quite unprecedented. A lot of the people who showed up for these demonstrations were nationalists. They were waving, you know, yellow and white and black flags. They were using slogans that they probably shouldn't have used. It was all, you know, there were lots of liberals and lots of. I mean, the opposition coalition to Putin was quite broad, but nationalists certainly made up quite an important part of that opposition movement. And it really launched the career of Alexei Navalny, who is sort of the leader or the de facto leader of the opposition to Putin. And he is himself a nationalist. So the nationalists really got quite a bit boost from this opposition movement. Putin seems to have answered this opposition movement by playing his own nationalist card. When the opposition talks about. They talk in their sort of buzzwords about ethnic unity or ethnic crime. They, Putin tends to answer back with kind of the vocabulary of Tsarist Russia, imperial slogans, and increasingly something called Eurasia, which is what my book mainly focuses on. It's a kind of supranational imperial nationalism. And he's begun to weave this kind of Eurasian. Now, Eurasia is a concept of Russian nationalism which has become kind of an official nationalism that the Kremlin has sponsored and begun using. And you see it in Putin's speeches, you see it in, I mean, particularly in and on television. And it's also in the kind of the rising profile of the, the adherents of this trend, Eurasianism. One of them, an acquaintance of mine, is Alexander Dugin. He is sort of the chief Eurasianist among Russian nationalists. And he enjoys a certain amount of favor from Putin's circle. Though it's not entirely clear whether Putin has ever heard of Dugin himself or has read any of his books. But I mean, I'll give you an example of how this kind of buzzword works. Eurasia was originally created in the 1920s by a group of exile nationalists as a way to kind of neutralize what they saw as the fatal nationalism of Russia, to neutralize separatism in Russia and to create a continent spanning ideology of nationalism that would not dissolve into internecine nationalist civil war, which they saw as the kind of the tragic flaw of the Russian Empire. Their concept of nationalism, this Eurasianism, was sort of handed down over decades. It was discovered at the end of the Soviet Union by a group of conservative bureaucrats in the upper reaches of the state and also simultaneously by a group of kind of bohemian nationalists who took a huge interest in publishing books about it and sort of expanding this as a concept. So Dugan in 1997 wrote a book about geopolitics, about Eurasianism. And it's become kind of a textbook for Russian hardline nationalists. It's even used as a text. It's literally used as a textbook in the military. And this was the first kind of example, the first attempt to popularize this idea of Eurasia as an ideology. So then Fast forward to 2011. Putin writes an article in Izvestia newspaper where he advocates the establishment of something called a Eurasian Union, which is what he says. Well, it's very similar to the Soviet Union. I mean, he says it's not going to be like other unions, you know, meaning the Soviet Union. But it's quite clear that I think this is kind of a dog whistle, you Know, we have this concept of dog whistle. This is something that. A term that you use that's kind of deniable. You know, Putin can say, well, I'm not saying we're going to create the Soviet Union. We're just going to create something called the Eurasian Union, and it's very much like the European Union, and that's our model. But everybody who's read or who's familiar with these theories knows what he means, and he can kind of communicate on a sort of an esoteric level with the rest of his elite in a way, using these kind of buzzwords. So then in 2013, he used this buzzword again. He told the Valdai center, these are a group of visiting academics who come to Russia every year, and it's quite an event. And Putin usually gives a very big, important speech to them. In 2013, he said, the 21st century promises to be a century of great change. The era of the formation of major continents of geopolitical, financial, economic, cultural, civilizational, political and military power. And because of this, our absolute priority is the tight integration with our neighbors. And then he described the Eurasian Union not in strictly trade and economic terms, but as a project for the preservation of identity of peoples of historical Eurasia in the new century and a new world. Eurasian integration is a chance for the former Soviet Union to become an independent center of global development rather than a periphery of Europe or Asia. So Putin's, you know, the ambitions for Eurasia seem actually quite vast. Now, whether he believes this or not is, I think, beside the point. You know, I don't believe that. You know, I mean, let's take an example. Very close to home. I mean, you know, does Boris Johnson really believe in Brexit? You know, there's quite a number of people who believe that. Actually, he really couldn't care less. But he's kind of using this as a. As a way to further his political career. And this is the way a lot of politicians use nationalism. They. They latch onto an issue and ride its coattails. And this seems to be what Putin is doing. So I think the question is not necessarily to ask whether Putin believes it. It does matter what he says. And actually, if you look at Russia and if you look at what the policies that have been implemented over the last maybe five years, over the last decade, you can see a kind of strikingly interesting correlation between the philosophy that I've described. I haven't described it very well. I'm sorry. It would take an entire other lecture to describe what Eurasianism really is and what it advocates. But there is a. If you list the kind of the major steps by the regime, by the Kremlin over the last decade, there is a very striking correlation between that and what the Eurasian Project describes. So there's a revival of the Orthodox Church, the pursuit of. Of what they call a church state symphony. There was a decision to allow the Baltics to join NATO. They're according to the tracts of the movement, not part of the natural boundary around the natural red line around this Eurasian sphere of interest, influence that they have. The decision to fight over Georgia and North Ossetia, the decision to fight over Ukraine, the decision to consolidate a sphere of influence and prevent the European Union from encroaching on its sphere of influence and obviously NATO. The conflict over Western values in Russia. This is something that's actually erupted since Putin's come back to power, or. Well, not that he ever come back to a third term as president in 2012, is that there is a move to kind of limit Western values. And the hot button issue has become gay rights in Russia. This has become a kind of a bellwether of the Kremlin's commitment to expunging Western values from Russia and encouraging sort of native Russian values to emerge. And lastly, the rhetoric about something called. That Putin refers to as a civilization state. He criticizes the concept of the nation state as something that's outmoded and archaic and not in the interest of Russia's heft as a historical power, and instead has advocated the establishment of a civilization state. Now, that's just a. It's a word, but it actually makes. It's actually a. It tells us a lot when a president or when an elite starts to talk in these terms. So I think we're coming to the end of the. Yeah, so I think that's about what I wanted to say. I mean, it's quite compelling. I would say that, you know, this is not. There's been this very profound acceptance of radical, marginal ideas in Russia over the last decade. And the process of that happening is something that I don't fully understand, and I don't think anybody quite fully understands it. But it's probably the most important thing that's happened since I began paying attention to Russia. And it's an expression of how utterly the consensus in Russia has changed over the last. Well, since Putin came to power. And I guess what I've been trying to say is that he's aided and abetted this, but it's not entirely driven by him or by. It's not entirely inspired not entirely intentional. So I guess that's.
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A
Well, thanks very much indeed, Charles, for giving us so much to chew on and lots of hooks for our questions. I just have a question. First of all, how many people in the audience are Russian? Two. That's very good. Or Ukrainian or anywhere else than that. What we. Georgia. Wonderful. So we've got a few people here who've got first hand knowledge of what Charles has been talking about. I've got loads of questions, but it would be unfair if I abused my position as chair to file them all at once. So we've got about 45 minutes and I'd encourage you all to be bold. I know Charles, like me, enjoys hostile.
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B
Questions, I really do.
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A
So if you just want to say you think the book is wonderful and you bought six copies, that's very nice. If you want to say it's complete rubbish and here's why, that will make much more entertaining. So on that, let's see if anyone wants to kick off. Yes, gentlemen, at the back there. Go ahead, sir. I think we may have a raving microphone, which is a change since I was at lse, but there we are. Progress may even work. Go ahead, sir.
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B
To what extent are the tendencies you've described informed by paranoia and who are the targets of the paranoia? For example, I've heard one admirer of Putin say quite sincerely and seriously that the recent fall in the oil price was caused by a conspiracy between the United States and Saudi Arabia to wreck the Russian economy.
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So question about paranoia and how far Eurasianism feeds on paranoia. Real or. Just because Russia's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get it.
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There probably are a fair number of people out to get it by now. Not sure that was the case when Putin started being paranoid, but it certainly is probably the case now. I mean, definitely. Okay. One observation is that in my career as a journalist, the most paranoid people I have ever met have all, without exception, been employees of the intelligence services.
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Of the Russian intelligence services.
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Everybody's, everybody's every. Okay, so people who are in charge of creating consultants, conspiracies, whether these guys are in the CIA or MI6 or the ISI or the KGB or whoever, tend to be the most paranoid about the existence of other conspiracies. So I will throw that out there. Putin, being a former intelligence officer, probably has the same characteristic of being extremely paranoid. If you come to power in Russia, you are probably very paranoid and it's probably a very good, healthy characteristic. Putin's speeches do indicate that he is paranoid. I do think that a paranoia, I mean, you know, some of his speeches are obviously, you know, just written by his advisors and stuff. I mean, you do see a strain of paranoia running through his public speeches. To what extent? That's paranoid and ill informed as well. Yeah, I mean, I'll focus on the paranoia. I mean, you know, to what extent? That's his speechwriter saying, okay, we got to play on fear of the Americans or whether that's actually Putin saying, I think Hillary Clinton is out to get me. It's not entirely clear. But you do have that. Certainly paranoia is alive and well in the public communications of the Kremlin. Whether that's real paranoia, I don't know. But, you know, paranoia does feed into a nationalist mindset because part of, you know, every nationalist movement everywhere in the world is all about, you know, it's about fear. It's about, you know, we have been humiliated. We have been. We are being kept down by a conspiracy of, you know, the foreigners. We must fight back. We must take back our rightful place in our former great power status or something like that. So paranoia does form part of the nationalist mindset. It is definitely an inalienable part of the nationalist mindset in anywhere you see this in the Middle east, in China, in America, in Britain, in Russia. So I definitely think that paranoia, you know, I mean, you're right to point out that factor, that paranoia is definitely alive and well at the upper reaches of the Kremlin. And it's also extremely important part of the whole nationalist mindset.
- [48:56]
A
And you also make the point in the book very interestingly that there's this kind of cognitive dissonance between the idea that Russia is a superior civilization, but the west seems to be so much more successful. And that one of the roots of Eurasianism was the attempt to try and resolve that by saying, yes, the west may look more successful, but actually it's decadent and hostile and we have to defend ourselves against it.
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Exactly, exactly.
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A
I have really read the book.
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B
No, no, it's that sort of the, the Western, the rotting west is a definite, is a trope. And again, that's not just Eurasianism, it's nationalism, broadly speaking. I mean, I find that in China with neo Maoists, in the Middle east with Islamic fundamentalism, you can find that oddly in America itself, that's a major part of the Donald Trump rhetoric. So nationalism, you know, the rotting west is definitely a part of this kind of view of, you know, unresolved greatness that we need to aspire to.
- [50:08]
A
Let's have Some more questions. Who are the targets of nationalism? We'll come to that in. We'll take. Take a couple of questions together, sir, in the middle. Yes, go ahead, sir, with your white beard.
- [50:27]
C
Thank you. I had some difficulties about your definition of nationalism and I expected quite a bit more. By the way, in terms of Russian definition of nationalism, what you've given us is something of hooligan nationalism, skinhead nationalism, which exists in many other places. Russia will see itself as being facing an invasion. NATO is right down to the Ukraine. Russia has been invaded on two occasions and were two major world occasions, once by Napoleon, second time by Adolf Hitler. And the great thing for the Russians, because they've already got a made nationalism and supranationalism is the Great Patriotic War, the battles of Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad. I mean, I was born during the Second World War. Stalingrad is the supreme battle recognized by everyone of the Second World War. The Germans themselves who have been defeated there will recognize it. And Putin has brought it back. We now have major military parades of the nature that didn't exist before. He's brought back the Soviet national anthem and all the patriotic songs from the Second World War are back again. They don't exist anywhere else. I mean, we know them. Vera Lin, people who know about Vera Lin and how popular she was here in Britain, that is barely mentioned, but it is back now in Russia. And you don't seem to have addressed that at all because everything else I would expect would be an offshoot of that. But here is something ready made for the Russians. A they're at the center of it. And it wasn't just the Russian effort, the defeat of Adolf Hitler. Bear in mind that the red army had nine of the 10 largest victories, at least in terms of manpower, of the Second World War. And it wasn't just achieved by the Russians. It was effectively an international Russian effort, if you like, a communist effort as far as Stalin was concerned. But it is their Great Patriotic War that is at the center of it. And you just haven't mentioned it.
- [52:47]
A
Well, to be fair to Charles, I mean, his book has a great deal in it which we haven't touched on. Now. He's just. It's one of the problems of being an author is whatever you talk about, people say, why don't you talk about something else? But I guess one of the problems in this, Charles, is that there's quite a chunk of the Russian nationalists which have a sneaking sympathy for Hitler. And this makes it so they're quite. It's rather. It's A good question. If you meet a Russian ultra nationalist, you should always ask him, do you regard yourself as an Ubermensch or an Untermensch?
- [53:18]
B
No, no, I absolutely agree with you. I mean, there is a vast canon of official nationalism under Putin that. I mean, first of all, there is an extremely proud Russian tradition of history that they can draw on, of legitimate victories over fascism that are a totally legitimate history to be incredibly proud of that has been tapped by the Kremlin under Putin as a kind of an official patriotism. Now, I would argue, I mean, my talk has been focused on fringe skinhead lunatic groups. I would argue that those groups deserve a huge amount more attention than they've been getting. I spent quite a bit of time in Russia writing about these groups, probably more than my editor would have liked me to spend. But I don't want to minimize the move by the Kremlin to sort of create publicity to create an official nationalism. That was important, though, I would argue, precisely because it moved the playing field of Russian politics into the nationalist realm. And when you start, when the leader, when a country's leaders start to say, well, we deserve to lead because we are the best example of this national tradition, we are the best Russians, you start, you empower other groups in society to come and say, actually, we are the better Russians, you invite a new generation of radicals to say, okay, this is the terms of the political debate. We are now competing over who are the better nationalists, who are the better patriots, who are the better Russians. And you invite the radicalization of politics along nationalist lines. And we've seen this in the Middle East a lot as well. You know, these regimes in the Middle east who are not democratic and they rule based on. They say, well, we are the best Muslims. You know, the Saudi monarchy says, well, we deserve to our positions because we are the, you know, the guardians of the holy places, and we are the best Muslims. And that invites a new generation of radicals to come and say, well, actually, we're the better Muslims. And that creates a space, a playing field in using those symbols and using nationalism and using identity politics for a new generation to emerge. And that's precisely what's happening, is that the nationalism, the official nationalism, has created the space for a new radical nationalism to emerge. And the Kremlin has had to take into account that and move into an even more kind of radical position.
- [56:47]
A
There's also an interesting tension. There's two strands of the kind of new Kremlin nationalism. One is the Eurasianism, which you mentioned, which is a sort of Supranational, supra ethnic, something that you can support whether you're a Tartar or Bulgarian or any sort of loosely post Soviet nationality, it's a sort of civilizational project. And then the other is Russki Mir, which is the idea that there's something very, very. It's a particularist Russian or Russian centered. And I find these two are incompatible. I don't see how you can support both at the same time. Because if you're supporting Russky Mir, you're saying Russians are better than anybody else. If you're a Eurasianist, you're saying our whole landmass represents a different civilization. Do you think it's irreconcilable?
- [57:36]
B
No, but the interesting thing about nationalism and about these intellectuals in general is that contradictions simply don't bother them. And, and I have to say, nobody's really. I mean, when you say stuff like, you know, we are the heirs of Genghis Khan versus, you know, we are an example of Russian civilization. And, you know, these are, these are incredible, these are incompatible. But, but nobody's actually forcing anybody to explain themselves, particularly everybody. What people hear is not logical. But it somehow, and I'm completely amazed by this process everywhere I see it, nobody questions the logic. And actually belief, I would say belief doesn't actually play a major role in nationalism. Belief in logic, you know, kind of get suspended at the door. I'm not quite sure, you know, whether Russian, whether any nationalists, you know, how many nationalists actually really wholeheartedly believe in their nation. It's like going to a football game. You cheer. Do you really care about the team that you're cheering for? It's an emotional, it's an emotional or a sociological phenomenon. But pointing out, you know, a lot of work is being done on how to address, you know, the problems of identity politics and how to address, you know, terrorism and jihadi groups and nationalism. And I think, you know, that treating it as a kind of a cognitive or a psychological thing is maybe not the right approach. I'm not sure how much belief actually plays a role.
- [59:25]
A
When I reviewed your book in the Economist, I argued that Eurasianism is best understood as a response to trauma rather than as actual belief system. Anyway, enough of that. Let's have some more questions. Gentlemen, over there in the blue shirt. We are entirely male space at the moment, but if anyone wants to.
- [59:41]
D
I'll ask two questions, if I may, and then you decide if you want to answer both of them. The first of them, where are you from, sir? I'm from Uzbekistan. First question is, you've only lightly touched a Russian Orthodox Church. I just wanted to ask, what do you see? Is the role of Russian Orthodox Church? Is it the site of this nationalism or is it a tool employed by Kremlin to manage it? And second is, what do you think are challenges in Russian in Russia? For, for example, when central government supports this clearly radical and racist organizations, what is it? What are the challenges in national republics? As you know, Russia is a federation, and some of the republics got clearly the Russian population, ethnic Russians are in minorities. There are, and they clearly had in the past and up until very recently, very strong nationalist drive which has been mediated since, like providing them large subsidies. But at the moment, with forthcoming economic crisis, what are the challenges there?
- [60:49]
A
Well, of course, Tata Stan would argue that Tata Stan subsidizes the center with its oil. But anyway, two excellent questions there. How, what about the Russian Orthodox Church? And how does this play in the republics, particularly ones where the Russians are in a minority?
- [61:04]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think we get back into this idea of the contradictions of nationalism a lot because the Kremlin would love to say, you know, would love to say we are, you know, pro Orthodoxy, we cover ourselves in the mantle of the Orthodox Church. And they do. But they also are very cognizant of the fact that the more Russian they get in the public media, the more nervous the Chechens, the Yakuts, the minority nationalities get, and especially the more nervous the Muslim minorities get in Russia. And they know that they need a kind of a ruling idea that takes into account both Russians, the minorities living in the Russian Federation, but also potentially, if they're going to seek to appeal to a much wider territory, you know, in the former Soviet Union, they need to have an idea that will be broadly palatable to Muslims, Buddhists, Orthodox Christians, Tatars, Russians, Ukrainians. And that's where this kind of supranational nationalism comes in, this kind of, this tendency towards talking about Eurasia. But it really depends on the audience. You know, you can, you know, Putin can go, if Putin goes to, you know, to a minority republic, he'll dress in the national costume, but on an Orthodox holiday, he'll light a candle in an Orthodox Church. He tries to be not exclusive to any one religion. And the, and the problem with embracing Orthodoxy, this sort of Russia as the third Rome ideology is that the church would like to be. The Orthodox Church would obviously love to be the state religion of Russia. And that's a totally unacceptable thing for non Orthodox Russians. So the further you move towards the church, the more nervous everybody else gets. So there's always going to be a limit. But, you know, you also have these, you know, the Kremlin is a bit arrogant in the sense that they don't believe that the contradictions really apply to them. They can be Russian nationalists one day and they can be Orthodox believers another day, and they can be, you know, Tatar nationalists, and then they can. And they don't really believe that logic or that people are going to hold them to some sort of responsible standards of demagoguery in the end. And so far, it seems to be working.
- [64:18]
A
Let's have some more questions. Let me get an idea. If you would conceivably like to ask a question in the next 25 minutes, put your hand up just so I get an idea of who else is on the menu. We've got two over here. Let's have the gentleman in the front row first and the chap at the back in the.
- [64:34]
E
Thank you very much for your talk. My name is Johan and I'm from Finland. I'm wondering, because nationalism, as we can see it, has been spreading, as you also mentioned, both in the United States but also in Europe. And one major reason for this has of course, been also the economic insecurity caused by the economic crisis and many of the failures of the current economic system that we have. And as Russia also saw quite a strong market liberalization after the fall of the Soviet Union. And it has been it's been under process there. Do you think that in Russia, actually these economic inequalities and social. Economic and social inequalities are as well, a cause for raising the rise of nationalism? Thank you.
- [65:32]
A
Take that, Charles.
- [65:33]
B
Okay.
- [65:34]
A
Write a book on that.
- [65:35]
B
Yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. Every, everywhere you see nationalism, there's always a socioeconomic component to it. You know, the hard part, though, is, I mean, Russia has been becoming more and more prosperous. I mean, over the last decade and a half, you've seen, you know, average incomes rising about threefold. And so it'd be hard to say that, you know, impoverishment of the middle class or something is a cause for rising nationalism. And people are not necessarily getting worse off over the period that we see nationalism rising. But it's certainly nationalism is concentrated at the lowest end of the sort of the spectrum. I mean, when we're talking about radical skinhead gangs, these are not people who are, you know, these are concentrated in sort of suburban outlying areas of major cities, and these are places where there's a lot of, you know, a Lot of drugs and crime and social problems and incomes are not, not high. But I wouldn't say it's, I wouldn't say rising nationalism is confined to that strata, you know, to that group of people by itself. Because, I mean, and you've seen the elite becoming more nationalist over the same period, over the same kind of decade and a half.
- [67:20]
A
I think if you look at the CSIS study by Gerber and Mendelssohn, the most anti western segment of the entire country was young, university educated, male Muscovite. That was a 2008, which sort of predates that.
- [67:36]
B
Yeah, yeah. There was a study by the center for Political Technologies which was earlier, but that said that basically, I think it was published in 2002. That was quite a wake up call because it said that there was a worldview that had until that time been held exclusively in kind of the lowest, you know, the lowest elements of society, the lowest income elements of society was now, was at that time very pervasive at the top of, you know, had sort of infiltrated into the elite. And this was after, you know, a decade of economic misery, but it had, you know, the fact that the.
- [68:26]
A
These.
- [68:26]
B
Nationalistic attitudes had become general and also had spread to the elite was something that had happened very early under Putin.
- [68:36]
A
There's a gentleman at the back there. The microphone is just coming to you.
- [68:43]
F
My name's Chris David. I'd be interested in your view as to how you square the circle between, on the one hand, the nationalism, managed nationalism talked about, and the policies of the Kremlin, which by all accounts seem to be working very well these days. If you take into account the fact that Putin's ratings have never been as high as they are today at a time when the economic fortunes of the country have been at one of their lowest points in his tenure. So it seems to me that actually whatever he's doing around managed or patriotic nationalism would seem to be working for him.
- [69:30]
A
Yeah. Excuse me. While Charles is drinking. I feel that in a country with the level of political repression we now have, I'm not surprised that 80 subclass percent of people think Putin's wonderful. I'm amazed that 10% are brave enough to tell a total stranger that they think he isn't.
- [69:49]
B
Yeah. There is a question about the accuracy of these studies. And obviously you really can't compare.
- [70:01]
A
A.
- [70:01]
B
Public opinion poll taken in Russia with a public opinion poll taken in the US where or Britain, where, you know, political leaders are constantly criticized on television. And you don't see that in Russia. So comparing Putin's rating with Obama's rating or with Cameron's rating wouldn't be entirely correct. That said, the reason that all political leaders play the nationalist card is for precisely this reason. It's the, you know, it's a kind of a, it's almost a desperate measure. I wouldn't say that Putin necessarily wants to be in this position where he's being forced to kind of portray himself as some sort of besieged nationalist savior or something. He'd rather be, you know, seen as a statesman who's welcome in foreign capitals and things. But this is a kind of a desperate measure, and it's one that you see in country after country. You know, the Western sanctions on Russia feed into this narrative that they've got about Russia being sort of a fortress under siege. I'm not saying the sanctions are a bad idea. I think it's a very, you know, considering the situation, it's quite a good idea to put economic pressure on Russia. But the, you know, these are, this will happen. You see this happen in many countries that are under, you know, that are internationally isolated. You see it in North Korea. You see it in, you know, you saw it in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. This is a card that political leaders play when they're under sort of international, when they're being sort of internationally isolated. And it works. That's why they do it.
- [72:13]
A
I have a question, Charles, because you hint in your book that the KGB and the late Soviet era was sponsoring Russian nationalism with this repulsive organization, Panyat, which was the sort of the first sort of explicitly fascist organization in the late Soviet Union. And you sort of hint that there's a kind of deep state, the old bits of the old kgb, which latched onto this before it became mainstream and were helping these organizations right back in the early 90s. I think you described them as ideological orphans because communism had collapsed and they didn't know what else to believe in. But how much weight do you give to that? Do you think that you can trace what's now Eurasianism right back to the 90s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, or do you think it's really an autonomous sort of growth that came up in the middle, middle of the last decade?
- [73:15]
B
I mean, I put that evidence in the book because I think there's definitely something to it, but I never found proof. No smoking guns or anything. There were a lot of, I mean, what's clear is that, you know, there was a profoundly disaffected class of people in the, you know, in the security services and in the Security ministries and of the Soviet Union who were, you know, totally unaccepting of the new reality under Yeltsin and probably sought to subvert it in any way they could. And, you know, in a lot of countries there is such a thing as the deep state. I mean, I think we use that as a kind of a term. I mean, in Turkey, actually, it's, it's actually well known that it exists. There are court cases about the deep state. You know, it is the military and security elites tend to run things from behind the scenes. And I would say, you know, that's happened in a number of countries, especially, you know, in sort of new democracies. And that this is, it's quite likely that this happened in Russia too, that there was a kind of a consensus among the people with the power to, you know, that they weren't going to let things get out of hand, but. And they were going to try and move things in a certain direction. But, you know, I wouldn't, you know, I mean, there is enough smoke that, yeah, I would say that there were probably, you know, I don't know how organized this group was and I don't know how, you know, whether there was any sort of central direction or something. But I think there was clearly a consensus among hardliners and, you know, people with power in the state to, you know, around a kind of a new nationalist view.
- [75:28]
A
So we've got time for just one more question. There's a gentleman there. Go ahead. In the green sweater at the front.
- [75:39]
B
Hello, Don Levest.
- [75:40]
A
Did Putin's motivations for going into Syria involve managing nationalism?
- [75:52]
B
I think. I mean, I don't really know. There were a number of theories about why they did that. One was to demonstrate the prestige of the Russian military. Another was to practice very complicated types of air operations in a battleground where they were able to use a new generation of weapons. They were able to demonstrate their proficiency with the new generation of weapons systems, and they were able to show the world that actually they could use them quite well. And I think this was kind of a demonstration, you know, lest anybody get ideas about meddling in, you know, Russia's strategic backyard. Russia was actually quite good at, you know, doing cruise missile strikes from submarines from 900 km away and things like, you know, these are quite complicated operations. And they did them, as far as I can tell, pretty flawlessly. So I guess demonstration is probably the best explanation. There was certainly a domestic political component to this. You know, it showed Russia being, you know, intervening and intervening well, not well, intervening effectively. In a. You know, in a global conflict and outflanking the U.S. in a sense, you know, they were. And I think that was. That was quite important that they were able to show that. So there was certainly a kind of a demonstration. There was also a kind of a propaganda effort component to that. But I wouldn't say that. I mean, I think that was tangentially related to the whole sort of nationalist narrative.
- [78:00]
A
Yes. And I guess you could argue that there'd been a very successful kind of season of political soap opera in Ukraine and that had come to a bit of a halt with the failure of the Novorossiya project, failure of the Ukrainians ability to withstand the Russians militarily and the failure of any attempt to collapse Ukraine internally. And so that Ukraine had hit a bit of a dead end. And maybe it was something to put on telly, if nothing else. That looked pretty good, I think in this is another burning question I'm going to ask you to find. Form an orderly queue outside as you queue up to buy this absolutely excellent book from my old friend Charles, which has a great deal in it that we haven't even touched on tonight. We haven't really looked at the whole philosophical side and this extraordinary story of Anna Akhmatova's son who bizarrely through his time in the Gulag became, in a kind of Stockholm syndrome and a kind of arch nationalist and apologist in a way that I think is almost worthy of a book on its own. So there's really. There's a huge amount in it. I can't recommend it strongly enough. Please join me in thanking Charles very much indeed for spending time here.