Steven Lee Myers' Putin Primer

this new world power through force of will? My guest today, Putin's foremost biographer, Stephen Lee Myers, begins to unravel that question in his book The news Are. Myers is a longtime correspondent for The New York Times, first at Moscow, now in Beijing, and he's met Putin more than once. When I shook his hand, I felt this immense coldness and determination. It wasn't scary, he wasn't mean or anything, but it was just we were there to do business.

The news Are tells the complicated history of a man who values stability above all else, who truly believes, along with his constituents, that he quote got Russia up off her knees. He's created that impression in part by dedicating a higher and higher percent of g d P to military It was that money that allowed Putin in two thousand fourteen to invade Crimea, re drawing the borders of Europe by violence for the first time since World War Two.

In his Wall Street Journal review of the book, Stephen Cotkin describes the man who emerges from Myers pages as a quote snarling stuntman, playing global poker with a wretched hand, and presiding over a country in decline. I put those words to Myers because that's not a full picture of the Putin you read about in the news are. I think you can come away from what I wrote and come to the conclusion that Kotkin did. I think you can read it, uh and see Putin as a sympathetic figure.

I wouldn't disagree with some of what he said, but I wouldn't agree with all of it either, because it's it always seems like it's about to teeter and fall apart, like Putin can't just keep this going, you know, And after the events with Ukraine, when we put on all these sanctions, and sanctions really hurt and people are like, he won't survive. One of the wheels are going to fall, and yeah, and and yet there's a certain resilience. UM. And Stephen Cottin I respect him mentally, UM, but you know,

people see Putin in different ways. He's almost like a or shark test of of your views of the world of Russia itself, US Russian relations and so forth. When you went to the Moscow to start the job there without a job you wanted, it is and but it's not something that I expected or I worked for. I

didn't study Russian history or language happen. You know. I covered the Pentagon for a number of years in Washington, and this was in the nineties, and you know, the Pentagon was busy though it was before the um the War on Terror era, and the Pentagon correspondent did a lot of the reporting on arms control, which for the Soviet period was the big story really and so I think there was a bit of a Cold War hangover that people who covered the Pentagon understood arms control, so

they went to Moscow as their next posting or their first posting. You know. Bill Keller was executive editor of The Times. He followed that path. Michael Gordon h great correspondent now with the Wall Street Journal. He did that, So it was it was something. It was a kind of beaten well, well beaten path. So I followed along with it though at that time, UM I went and

it was the beginning of the Bush administration. UM. This was a new era, and Bush talked about trying to establish a new relationship with Russia that would get beyond the Cold War. UM for something happened, right, Oh, lots happened, but the but in the beginning, at least, if you remember, UM uh Putin reached out to Bush and vice first to call him. He made the first phone call, first foreign leader. He didn't get through that night, by the way, but the next morning UM Bush didn't call him back.

And Putin authorized an immense amount of cooperation with the United States at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, intelligence sharing, UM in a very concrete way. I think at that moment there was a feeling that we had innered this common cause with Russia. UM. In those months right after the Nini have an attack. When when you arrived there to do the job, it's what year you begin in? What year I was I was studying Russian

when nine eleven happened. In preparation for the job exactly, I was still in d C when the attacks happened, and I went back to work that day in the Pentagon, which I had left a few months before to art my studies and went to Afghanistan and then came back picked up my studies and then in summer of two thousand and two started in Moscow. What would you describe was the relationship between the US and the Russians done?

UM was just the period as well when Putin it was like some comment he made about, uh, you know what, however you want to describe it of Russia potentially entering NATO. He was asked and in a television interview, I believe it was BBC uh and attend it was. It was even earlier. It was. It was when he first emerged on the scene as Prime Minister and then president elect, and he said that it was something that they wouldn't

rule out. It's hard to think back at that period when I think Putin was looking towards the United States and NATO, UM the West generally UM for a different kind of arrangement, a new UM, a new security infrastructure or architecture, and um, there were you know, people will say that there were missed opportunities on both sides in that case. Um. So when you got there, how would

you describe the US Russian relations? They were still that point, fairly good and there was quite a bit of cooperation. Putin came to the ranch in Crawford, Texas, if you remember, you know, appeared with Bush at the high school there. So I do think that there was still a fair bit of goodwill. Even there were a lot of business deals starting. There was a lot of American companies eagerly

investing in the oil and gas industry in Russia. UH. And so it seemed like there was a lot of potential, yeah, potential, um. And then what happened is the Bush administration was very eager to build missile defenses. This has always been a

Republican pipe drain, going back to Reagan and Star Wars. So, with very little notice, after all of US help that Russia had given to the United States in Afghanistan, Bush announced that we were going to pull out of the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty UH and gave Putin notice only a few days before he went ahead and did it. Publicly, and that really embittered Putin and gave him pause about

what is really the American intentions here? You know, act nice bushes chummy, but you know, at the end of the day, the US sees itself as the hedge them on, and it's is really going to control the world. And and um and from there, shortly after, if you remember, they went into the build up to the war in Iraq, Um, which Russia was very much opposed to. The idea of overthrowing another country by military force is something that he fears,

and so he was pushing back hard against that. I remember when we had an interview with The New York Times had an interview with him in two thousand and three, a few months after the invasion. He talked about the consequences and how we didn't foresee how bad this was going to go, and he was largely right. Well, when you arrive at a job like that, I'm sure you're briefed about how to go about that job, who are your contacts? And it might not be as much as

you would think. Um. They did give me the time off to study. That time was shortened because of nine eleven and um and the work I did in Afghanistan. But um, beyond that, it's it's more of a collegial process. I mean, I turned to the correspondence who'd been there before and asked them for advice. Um, there were um different you know, different ones said different things. They said, you should know this person, you should eat at this restaurant.

The best advice I got was from Joe Lalibeld, who was the executive editor at the time, who told me not to bother reading the books by journalists. He said, read the literature, Understand the books that people are going to be referring to. That putting himself refers to a lot. It's great advice and I'm doing that now in China

reading the novels. And when you were there, did you feel that you were being watched or you were being so I remember when the bureau manager I asked her this question and she said, they don't come around anymore. First of all, when the Soviet Union collapse, so did the KGB, and then it was disbanded, and then it was reconstituted in different forms. Um. But under putting it's clearless security services under new names have've reasserted their primacy,

whether or not we were tapped. I mean, I assume yes, um, But I also don't think they really cared that much. I mean, they could, they could read every thing we did. It wasn't they like in the old days where they were pleasing you know, which dissidents were talking to the foreign media um, which by the way they do in China now they watched that very closely. Who's quoted, um. But towards the end, you know again when I win, it was a hopeful period um, and it Russia seemed

like it was opening up. There were their debates in parliament, they were going on UM. As a reporter, it felt wide open um. And there was obviously the war in Czech new which is extremely controversial and it's very sensitive. There were restrictions on reporting there and so forth, but it didn't feel oppressive the way it did in the Soviet times and now where it seems to be much more hostile environment to work in. You read a little bit about Putin and not a great student, poor family. Uh,

how does he get that job? What happens in that country that he rises to this position. Well, first of all, he wasn't he wasn't a poor student. He seemed in fact to be quite smart and quite clever. He is. Um, but you can go to the best schools. Well yeah, no, I mean he was not part of the elite. Um. That's the thing about him. His parents, um, were survivors of the Siege of Leningrad during World War Two. He grew up in a city that was still living with

the effects of that, the damage literally from it. His father worked in a train factory and his mother held odd jobs. They were good Soviet citizens, um, but they weren't, you know, any part of the intelligencia. He grew up in a pretty typical Soviet experience. It was poverty by our standards even then in the in the fifties and sixties when he was young, not somebody you would see a you know, at the honest that was going to be primed for this job. He did sort of find

a purpose in school through the martial arts. You know, he wanted to take up judo and to stick with the judos. Then he was a young teenager, um and uh uh so he would have been like our equivalent of junior high school or middle school. And um, you know, he took he took that quite seriously. So when he put his mind to something he could do, and discipline is what he shows when he's committed to something. There was versed a book and then a movie that came

out that inspired him to join the KGB. It's called The Sword in the Shield and it's a pretty propagandistic novel about a spy who infiltrates the Nazi army and rises through the ranks from a pretty low position and helps win the war. Was serialized on tv UM and this enchanted Putin as he tells it, and he um tells the story of wanting to volunteer even when he was um still a teenager. And then you know, the KGB doesn't take volunteers. They they come and volunteer you

and Um. You know, there's obviously a screening process to work in the intelligence agencies. But he understood that he had to show some discipline and he got into university, and he got into Leningrad State University, which was a prestigious school, maybe not the top one. He didn't go to Moscow. But what did he study law? Do they have a similar system when he got a law degree and became an attorney. It's more you study law and you become a police officer or or you know, maybe

a court officer or something like that. It's not a law degree that you do after you complete your undergraduate program, so assist in there is a little bit different. But the but you know, he studied that with the goal in mind of joining the security services, and when he was in his fourth year, they came to him and and said, yes, are you interested, and so he um, he signed up. Then what happens he spends how many years in the intelligence services there from nineteen seventy five

to nineteen ninety or ninety one. There's a little bit gray area about when he finally resigned, UM several years. Yeah, no, it was fifteen years UM of his early life. And when you researched that, what kind of work was he doing? I mean he worked at home for the first part for ten years. He claims counter intelligence, you know, chasing foreign spies. He claims he never worked for the domestic KGB,

which was oppressing its own people. He held kind of bureaucratic jobs, mostly in learning grand and then after a number of years he was finally assigned to the advanced training courses that would put you into the pipeline to go overseas. But he got into a fight this first year that he was in this program, and this is the finishing school when you when you're a spy. Is fascinating that Soviet spies could be tripped up on basic things like not knowing what a mortgage was because there

was no such thing. And so, I mean, we've all seen the Americans. Now you have to really be immersed in the culture to pass. Putin had studied German when he was younger, so when he went to the school, the assumption was he would be in you know, Berlin or Bond or he would get one of the premier assignments. But because he washed out early after one year, he ends up in East Germany, which was an ally of the Soviet Union, and he wasn't even in the East

German capital, East Berlin. He was sent to Dresden, which was kind of seen as an outpost. It was a small office engaged mostly in cooperating with the Stazi, the East German secret police. It was really just pushing papers and reports back to Moscow. It wasn't a glamorous spying job at all, and he wasn't even undercover, which is you know, like the movie that inspired him. You know, he wasn't doing any James vonn stuff. As as he put in himself once, how would you describe his political assent?

I mean he gets to become prime minister first, does he have some other office before prime minister? So what happened is when the Soviet Union fell apart. He was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, and this was a very serious experience for him because he watched the Warsaw Pact nations crumble top of their communist regimes and then lurch into the West. Um He, like many others, then retreated back to the Soviet Union out

of work essentially, and the Soviet Army. To remember, there are hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in East Germany. They all had to go back um through at the time. Yes he did. He was married before he went, which was a requirement of being a spy, of working for the KGB, I should say, overseas, you had to be married. They didn't want single officers who could be tempted into

UH liaisons by other agency exactly. So his second daughter and was born in East Germany, so they were quite young, and the whole thing comes poppling down and he has to go back to UM to Russia. He goes back to Leningrad at the time and took a KGB job at the university, overseeing students and foreigners who came to the university. You know, not it might be a comfortable job, but it certainly wasn't a prestigious one. He was at this point only a lieutenant colonel. He hadn't advanced very

far in rank. He he just in It's throughout his career he didn't seem to show a great deal of ambition. Going back to your question earlier, you know, it's not that he wasn't smart or wasn't capable of but he just didn't seem to have a burning drive UM to

move up and UM. At some point through his job at the university, he comes in contact with a man who was one of the leaders in the democratic movement and in Russia when the Soviet Union still existed, a guy named Ana Totally Solbcheck, who eventually became the governor of St. Petersburg and then after the collapse of the Soviet Union, served for six years until and Putin served as his deputy. And that's where he began to get political experience. I mean, he wasn't a politician by nature,

he never has been. But he worked as a very efficient bureaucrat essentially for subject he was in because of his German and his experience in East Germany. He was the liaison for the city and trying to get new investments to come in. I mean, you remember the communist system collapsed and you know, Russia had nothing. They didn't have banks, they didn't know how to do basic stuff. It was it was you know, he was put in charge essentially of attracting foreign business to St. Petersburg, and

well apparently he did, and some people he did. Um. You know, it was a tough time and there were there were assassinations, there were there. There there was a lot of um, you know, mafia type activity. Lot what years were this, This is in the early nineties. A friend of mine, an actress, she was gonna be starting some kind of business over there. They were there because of that opening, because that cleaving of that of that

economy and that market. And my friend was gonna head over there and over like a skincare line for runching women's who was a Hollywood actress, and we we we I helped her, and we reached out to different people who knew the business realities over there, and they all said, don't do it. And they said, because they said, you know, half of the products you're going to send over there and more we're going to fall off a truck. And they said, and transactions and credit cards and money and

all that. They said, it's a nightmare over there at the beginning. And it certainly was a nightmare in the beginning. It was interesting is how many came UM and big companies UM they want to spend the way doctor and gamble was there and and uh, you know otis elevator. I mean, there was this real heady period when they made this trand edition and became a capitalist country. Uh. You know, it was painful for a lot of Russians involved, and the system was certainly not well equipped for it.

And it was exploited by UM, by corrupt actors both in government UM and and in the private sector, and the criminality that you know is always lurking around. That said, a lot of people became quite wealthy UM and uh, you know, the people who were willing to take that plunge became quite rich. He become quite wealthy. That's an interesting story and it's key to the question about him and even today. Um. Early on, he was known for not taking bribes. He was seen as an enforcer who

was very loyal to the city. He was the guy you went to to get things done, and so people that knew him got things done if you could get to him, you know, it helped you succeed. You know. Did people give them gifts? I'm sure things like that happened. He acquired apartment as part of his job, which is a kind of you know what it is that perruption or is he as a perk, you know, and it's part of his salary. And you know, then he acquired some other land, perhaps that was loaned to him from

people who were he was helping out. Um. But those people who suggest that Putin has stolen billions, I mean, they don't hesitate to you with the word of the b billions of dollars from the Russian treasury over the last several years of its economic ascension. Do you think that's true? The I don't doubt um at all that people around him, including people related to him, became very wealthy because of their access to the decision making in

in contracts. Um, you know, is he is he lopping tw off every contract that's signed by the government and putting it in in a bank in in Switzerland or somewhere else. No, I don't think so. I think it's more complicated than that. And you know, there's the famous stories that came out of the Panama Papers of his childhood friend who I interviewed, um, whose name was on

offshore companies worth billions of dollars. And I had a chance before the Panama Papers came out to interview him, and I was struck because I was writing about a bank that's run by a bunch of people again very close to Putin, that's become now one of the largest banks and in Russia, and it's an operating banks. It's

it's not a fake, it's not an off shore. I mean they're they they were a wealthy you know asset now and his childhood friend has three percent share um and three point six and at the time I remember looking it up and it was more or less worth three hundred million dollars. And he's a cellist, very accomplished, the musician and um and he um, No, he's I

mean he's traveled the world. He's also the godfather of Putin's oldest daughter, and now he runs a conservatory in music school in Petersburg that's in this beautifully renovated imperial palace in the city. So I asked him, like, how did you end up with the shares in this bank? Um? And I was working on a separate story on that, but I also wanted to know for for the book. And you know, he he seemed quite absent minded about it or active that he was. He's he said, oh,

it was a complicated business. It was involved a lot of lawyers. And it's like he didn't quite no. And I mean, I would remember how I bought shares that were worth three hundred million dollars. But then it turned out we learned in the Panama papers that there were a lot of other off shores that we didn't know about that were similar things. And so is that just because you know, they all had the same accountant and they got great deals on these investments. Is he holding

it for Putin? That's certainly the implication that people like him, if not him, Um, you know, hold assets for Putin or his or his family. And you know, Putin each year under Russian law, has to declare his income and it's quite modest. I've heard people say he doesn't need a lot of money. I mean, he has the assets of the state, and you know, he has several homes he can live in, and you know, he declares a couple of apartments, including the one that he acquired when

he was deputy mayor at Dacha near Finland. But you know, claims to have a pretty um modest lifestyle. Yeah, Now when you're there, what is the lifestyle for you? Are you married and you have kids? Did you raise your kids over there? I was there with my with my family the first time I went for five years, and I had been to Russia before I moved there. But the uh, the breadlines and the shortages in um in supermarkets,

you know, could I get fresh tomatoes? I mean, these are the things I was thinking when I was contemplating moving there. And the fact is is that you could by then. And that was two thousand and two, so the you know, the Russia still has a lot of dire poverty, especially outside of the city's um, but the the cities have really become transformed and they've really become capitalistic.

And I was just in Moscow last for the World Cup last summer um and which was a dream of mine to see the world up um uh and to see it in Moscow, and and the city is just was glistening. Um and it's probably in its thousand year history never been a better place to live than it is right now. When you got sent on the job, did you take your wife to like her favorite restaurant

and you said, honey, we're going to Moscow. The I think that was it was um, it was an adventure, you know, to be honest, they were signed, they were and the for my kids it's they're really their first memories. And um, you know they learned some Russian. Um. I didn't put them in a Russian school. I wouldn't go that far. But it's made my two daughters very internationally minded. I think when you left after seven years, whose decision was that? Well, first I went for five years the

first time, and then I went back. Actually when I was starting to write the book, I was almost about halfway through the book when they had an opening that they had, uh, they just needed somebody to fill in for a while, and so it was I was free, and it was an obvious choice for me to go. So that's when I went back and I was there almost two years that time. But then but then when you stopped it, were't there. That was your decision. Just

want to do it anymore? UM, you know, we rotate and we uh you know, the foreign posts don't last forever, so you usually go um for the times three to three to five years, UM, depending on on the location, on your expertise, you know, availability of other places. UM.

I quite liked it. I would have happily stayed. And UM you know, at one point they decided they extended me from four years to fifth year, and I said yes, And then um, you know, they've found a new correspondent to come and it was my time to um to rotate out and at which point I went back to Washington and covered the end of the Bush at Ministry.

In the way the Trump supporters, who, regardless of what has revealed in the news about his behavior and his dealings, they view that it's an expression of love for their country, even to stand by the president and so forth, do they have that over there as well? Does he enjoy some popularity among some critical mass of people that he has um An enormous base of popularity. UM. And there a lot of reasons for that. Um. From the beginning, I think a lot of people saw him as a dynamic,

young leader. UM. If you remember, Yelson was quite sick and and uh drunk uh at the end of his presidency. Um. You know, Gorbachev, who was a younger leader, was seen as ineffective and left so Union follow fall Apart. Before that, there was a string of leaders who you know, died after a few months in office. Regnev was there forever. And then here's this young guy, UM who comes in.

He's quite dynamic, he's quite decisive and forceful. Women found him attractive, UM, and you know he played that up. He was the macho guy. He wasn't a drinker. You know, he'd fly on airplanes, he went skiing. You know, he's a sportsman. UM. That from the very beginning, you saw that, Um, that that media portrayal of him. I mean, even before it became a propaganda campaign. He was ready to deal.

But he was also acting force forcefully because at at the time the war in Chechnia had erupted again, and erupted with his rise to the Prime minister, Prime Minister's office, which led some people to see that the war somehow was linked to his rise, or even orchestrated in order to let him rise. UM. But he responded quite forcefully, and the first Chechen War in the nineties had ended more or less in in a technically a ceasefire, but

it was a humiliating defeat for the Russians. UM. And you know, Chechnya descended into a kind of lawlessness, and UM, you know, he intervened and said, we're not going to tolerate this, We're not going to tolerate Chechen independence and uh, interviewing quite forcefully, bloodily. A lot of fighters were killed, but so we're a lot of civilians, um, and indiscriminate bombing of the capital there. But the Russian people, I think most people in the political elite and feared having

another civil war. Um. But he said, no, we're gonna We're gonna not only have one, we're gonna fight it hard and we're gonna win it. And that proved to be popular to people. And then he rode on top of that. I mean, in his early years of office and the oil boom where prices rose, Um, he did a lot of macroeconomic things correctly, people will say, built up reserves of the state, and and that minimized some of the you know cut harsh cuts and swings and

services and stuff. You know, the economy picked up and then became quite wealthy, and then people started to float up as well, and you know, the middle middle class, consumer class, UM began to grow. I mean it was there before, but the nineties were so chaotic with the instability in the in the ruble and so the black market and nobody trusted rubles. Everybody used dollars, you know. And and he he revived the economy in a way. UM that built him, UM, a huge foundation I think,

to rule on even when things went badly. And you know, he he continues to rely on that and part of the propaganda that he has and and the propaganda machine is really strong now. They will constantly remind Russians, don't forget how bad it was in the nineties, you know, And don't forget we have enemies all around us, and you know NATO is going to come and take our freedoms away. They're trying to chew off a piece of

our country. He once said, UM, he never quite says who they is, but you know, it's the outsiders, it's the West, it's foreigners. How dangerous do you think is the military threat from the Russians and meeting their immediate area in terms of UH. This concept of Rusky near that all Russian speaking territories should be part of Russian

I think that's his active agenda. Now. I don't think that he intends to incorporate all Russian speaking areas back into the Russian Federation, but I do think he wants to assert a special right to influence or have influence over those regions. And that's particularly true with Ukraine. The Russian military, like the country itself, always flat on its back for a lot of years and um and it's it's made progress and becoming a more modern force again.

And they've obviously kept up the strategic arsenal they had from the Soviet times. That makes Russia a potential military rival or threat at least UM. I mean, I think they've fallen way behind the American military, but nonetheless they're they're um still a capable fighting force. I think that there's an enormous UH potential for a clash. There was a conflict in Syria where we were bombing Russian mercenaries

and and bombed them pretty badly. They lost by some accounts, uh, several hundred people, which of course had to be hushed up. And you know, I think Putin is smart to not want to have this go into a hot conflict. I mean, no one's going to win that. And and one of one of my old friends, who was a diplomat for many years on the Russia desk in the State Department, UM said, you know, we avoided war with the Soviet Union for decades, we can do it again, Um with Russia.

I thought that was a very wise point. Um. He's shown now with intervening in Syria that he's willing to project force beyond the borders, which they hadn't done in a long time, with the exception of Georgia, and people rally behind that. And you know, there are people definitely who look at him and they see the corruption in the system. They feel it day to day. Um, they're but people I think support him. And you know that

goes up and down over the over the years. UM. I don't believe that it's eight percent um, which has been reported to be at some point. Um. You know, when you get that phone call from a polster saying, you know, how do you support the president. I'm surprised that anybody says no. Um. But nonetheless, I mean, I think that the popularity is is quite genuine. And then when I was doing the book, I really wanted to try to show how that was that it wasn't uh,

it isn't just fakes. He does people who want ability like anywhere else. Yeah, and there are also people who are invested in this system. You know, a lot of his close friends and acquaintances from when he was young, his judo partners are now two of the richest men in Russia. So you know, the system that he's built on a certain level is functioning. Um. I always joked that Putin always wins. That's Putin biographer and New York

Times reporter Stephen Lee Myers. Meyer's old job as Moscow correspondent was once held by New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick, who arrived in right before the Soviet Union began falling apart. Food shops said really attractive things like bread, That's what the shop would say, and there was no bread in it or PRODUCTI meaning groceries, and there were none of those either. It was really stark. I loved it.

People wanted to talk to us for the first time in decades, us being the tribe of Jerenalists, they wanted to talk to. Hear more from New Yorker editor David Remnick. Check out our archive that Here's the Thing dot Org. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Stephen Lee Myers wrote the definitive Putin biography, The news are Putin's presidency was teed up by Boris Yelson post Soviet Russia's first leader. Yelson was coming to the end

of his second term. Um when he was looking around for somebody he could hand pick. But when he picked Putin the first time, UM, that election was open. I mean Putin only one of the vote, and you know it wasn't a slam dunk. And since then Putin made sure that the ways elections are managed, Um, there's no uncertainty in the voting. He stripped them of the competitive uncertainty that makes them truly democrat either in terms of

who can run and then the actual voting itself. Because transitions in Russia have never gone well even during the Empire, it was always tumultuous. Now in this country, you turn around one day and Vladimir Putin is working on behalf of Trump again. These are my words, and my kind of glib way of framing this is that Putin is the president of the Luxe campaign manager. Correct. During the

age summer of sixteen, I was back in Washington. At that point I had finished the book, the book could be come out, and partly because of my expertise in Russia, they asked me to help in the coverage of what seemed to be abundant ties between the exactly and and UM and Russia, and so we worked vigorously on that. I wrote several stories that summer about his odd personal affection towards Putin, who at that point he had never met,

so it was a virtual affection. And uh I was involved in the reporting on Paul Manafort and his ties to the Ukrainian president, and also that one of the older guards through that that he had done business with them, And with my colleague Eric Lich, we worked vigorously on what appeared to be some kind of communication system with a bank from Russia and the Trump organization. There were a lot of pieces out there, and we worked very

hard to confirm them all. And I can say now, I guess we were quite familiar with the dossier and its various forms as it was being circulated around Washington, and you know, I don't want to get too much into the sourcing on all this, but we worked very hard and this ended up becoming a story which unfortunately had a headline that said almost the opposite of what the story said, And if I remember exactly right, it was FBI sees no Trump ties to Russia, um, when

in fact, the whole summer of our reporting was showing that they were all kind of connections. We just hadn't pieced them together yet. And that's, you know, that's what's going on right now. And I think even now there are people still trying to figure out what they all the connections add up to. So so for me to get this right, you were saying it wasn't necessarily electing Trump specifically, but disrupting the US electoral process. People still

debate this, and honestly debate this. Was there an elaborate campaign or instruction or operation with a code name UM to elect Donald Trump? Um? Uh? And there are people who think that, and there are people both in this country and in in Russia especially, who think that's ludicrous, UM, that there's there's no way that they could have done that. UM. Which, of course then your conspiracy minded people will tell you, well,

that's because they're so good at it. Um. But others will tell you the FSB is just really not that good. Look at the assassination, the poisoning in London recently with Scripple and the uh you know that was the g r U, the military intelligence agency, and it was just completely botched, almost amateurishly botched. So there are skeptics of the view that Trump has been installed like a Manchurian candidate. And and honestly I will say I don't see the

evidence for that yet. UM. But what is clear, and there's been some good reporting done on this. Then Putin had a personal disdain for Hillary tan and blamed her for the protests that erupted in Moscow when he did this announcement that he was coming back as president and the elections the parliamentary and then presidential elections around that time. UM. And I was covering Hillary as Secretary of Status coming

in State department at the time. UM. It's conceivable there was a secret US plan to overthrow Russia that I didn't come across um, But I'm pretty confident that they weren't actually orchestrating the protests in the street. They were pretty genuine expressions of the unhappiness in the Russian electorate, especially in the elite in the cities, the hipsters, you know, the young people today in Russia who are quite dynamic.

And Putin blamed her for this, and he blamed her for the Panama papers that that was meant to embarrass him after the events in in Ukraine. But another thing you read is Putin did all he could to help Trump in exchange for the elimination of these sanctions. Do you think there's some veracity to that. I don't think you're going to find a quid pro crow on that. I will tell you that it was absolutely the number one um issue for the Russian ambassador of the United States.

It's absolutely not surprising that that would have been the thing that he His first task was to get these sanctions lifted because they're hurting the Russian It dried up the capital. I mean, it's it's almost the secondary effect of it. Banks overseas. We're no longer willing to underwrite Russian investments in dollars. So it really constrained the economy in a lot of ways, and the economy went into negative growth for a few quarters and it's slowly coming

out of it. But it's involved having to been a lot more money internally, but also finding new access to capital, which they've done through China and some internally as well. But they pinch and people, and in Russia especially the elite love to come to New York, they love to party in in in London and other European capitals. Um, they don't want to live behind an iron curtain again

inside of of Russia. And so these sanctions, you know, the ones against people close to him, the Judo partners that I mentioned already, they're sanctioned under these They can't you know, do business now with the United States or with the United States affiliated companies, and you know it

can you can see how it stings. He was surprised by the extent of the sanctions that were imposed after CRIMEA, and he was surprised by the unanimity that they hadn't in with the Europeans and Japan by the way, I mean, this isn't just a solely US operation to punish them, and so it's been a priority of THEIRS to get these lifted. And they clearly wanted outreach. And you know, if they followed the election the way we all did, and they saw Trump, you know, praising UM Putin and

UM eager, it seemed to make a deal. And Mike Flynn, who was the first National Security Advisor, had already had some contacts with Russians as well, so it was obvious that they would have reached out to him to see what kind of can we move quickly on getting these sanctions lifted? What could it take? Did they do everything they could to elect Trump so that they could lift these sanctions? I think it is more of an indirect

um uh consequence of it as as the intent. I think the original intent, and I was told this on good authority. At least, the perception of some people was that Putin wanted to embarrass the United States up through the summer they like everybody else in the United States. I think I believe Trump had no chance of winning, and they saw that UM under Clinton there was not going to be any chance of an improvement in relations,

which I'm not sure was true. I think she might have been more pragmatic in dealing with him once in office, but they clearly wanted to harm her as much as they can. And when you look at what the operation has involved, the hacking, really um, the leaks to wiki leaks, the you know, the the emails, um, embarrassing stuff about Sanders or about Clinton. Um. You know what is it all add up to, you know? And and it's it's really meant to discredit democracy itself as system tweet accounts

and Facebook accounts and all. This is new only because it's social media. They did this in the sixties. If you go back and look at the propaganda they put out during the Vietnas wars. Um, it was leaflets, it was books, it was posters. They supported civil rights organizations that were challenging the government, anti war movement, um exactly. And you know, what they were doing is essentially an

old playbook on Facebook. And one of the things I've wrestled with is that they were pushing on an open door right. If they created these fake websites to push fake news, you know, they they found a receptive audience to it. Um and a lot of those repostings things going viral. We're done on American soil. They muscle was there. They just gave it a steroid and they were sort of you know, they were exploiting the existing divisions that are out there, and I think they did it quite effectively.

I don't know how much they relish this victory of theirs, because I'm not sure it turned out quite the way

they imagine. One of the political advisors, very close to the Kremlin, just the other day was talking about the supremacy of the Russian system, you know, why it's a better form of government than you know, liberal democracies of the West, trying to pretend that it was a purer form of democracy because it wasn't cynical, which is ridiculous because there's no political leader more cynical than Vladimir Putin.

But nonetheless, this idea that we have this veneer of we're all equal, you know, and and all every vote counts, and you know, our system is full of checks and balances, and you know, this is the model that everybody should adopt, you know, and they hate that, and to the extent that they can show that, No, it's actually ugly, and it's you know, it's big business running things invested interests, and there are the seething racial tensions, and you know,

the systems rigged against people like Bernie. They play on class. And then going back to your question about like what the intent was, I think that was the intent. It was to show that democracy isn't some um shining wiz. Yeah, it's as flawed as any other system. So who are you Americans to tell us, um, that our system is wrong?

And and you know, I think there was a sense of personal vengeance in it because of the way, in his view, Clinton and the United States, the abomb administration Um broadly you know, discredited his triumphant return to the presidency. It was personal, I think, Um, interesting, it's Obama taunting Trump at the White House correspondence to their leverages his presidency, and it's Obama taunting putin the leverages putin aid Trump.

But I want to ask you in the way, you know, leaders in this country often model themselves after someone else. They'll say someone's a candidate Democrat or a reagular Republican and what have you. And Russian history, did put model himself after anybody? As far as you can say, that's an excellent question. People will say, you know, he's a new Stalin. Um. There will some will say he's, you know, a new Gorbachev because he's reform minded and drop of

I mean, people have made comparisons. The one obvious one, and it was the reason I titled the book the way I did is he's clearly reaching back to some sort of imperial greatness. Um. You know, people say Old Putin is trying to recreate Communism as Soviet Union. He's not. I mean, he's been saying that for years. Um. You know, he obviously sees and saw the failures of the Soviet

Assistant and of Communism. But what he wants to recreate is a sense of greatness of his country, pride in his country, which when he was a young boy was putting a man in space, the first country to put a man in space. Um. It was defeating the Nazis uh in World War two. Um And that resonates in Russia much more than World War two does in our country for the obvious reason have been lost, the scale

of lost twenty seven million people, um. And and the destruction on the homeland um uh in a way that we didn't experience except for Pearl Harbor. But you know, I I often think that he's not modeling himself to be uh Peter the Great or you know, Czar Nicholas. Um. But I think he he looks at history as a sort of Schmoorgas board, you know, a buffet where he will dabble a little bit that depending on his mood. Uh you know, uh what his taste is that in

any given day, what the situation is. So he might need a little Soviet nostalgia, which you whip up with the war in particular, maybe a little bit of the imperial greatness, the restoration of the church, you know, Russia's exceptional place in world history as the Third Rome. He professes to be a believer and practices, though somewhat loosely, it seems, but he wants to be seen as a

religious believer. He wants to be a tough guy and um, you know with the military greatness, you know, which can evoke you know, Borodino in War of eighteen twelve or World War two. So he picks and chooses as as is necessary. But the combination is what makes him so intriguing, because I think that there's this cartoon version of Putin as the super villain, but in fact it's a more complicated history there. And I think that he believes that he's created this um, this new Russia. They really came

out of this, you know, horrible experience. So, I mean, what he called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union. They always say Russia is up off her knees. You know, there was a sense that she was down and and he's made her great again, make Russia great again, exactly. And it's the same when you're looking at at a rising China and a more aggressive um, you know, a country that's willing

to project power. How do you deal with that? My mistaken that China is more anxious to protect their power than the Russian. Uh No, I don't think that's true. I mean, I think that the Chinese are are very anxious to project power in the areas that really matter to them, which is Taiwan and the South China Sea. Though they have opened a base in Jubouti, their first overseas base, and you know that, I know that the United States has now under the Trump administration, declared both

of these as potential rivals. If you were president, which one would you be more worried about. There's no question that the biggest challenge for the United States now is China. It's the economic challenge, it's the military challenge, it's the

trade challenge. I mean, it's it's the issues that you're seeing this this administration deal with, and and Obama administration with dealing with it as well, and whoever comes next going to be dealing with it because China is a country that really firmly believes in it's just any and um. And it's a system that is even more authoritarian than Russia is, and more efficiently authoritarian than RUSSI is, and that makes them more powerful. Their economy is working better.

I was just up on the border on both sides of Russia and China looking at the trade, and it's staggering to see the differences, um on the Chinese side versus the Russian I mean, it's Russian Siberia, so it's always been a forgotten region. But in er Kutsk, for example, now you see signs in Chinese. There's a lot of Chinese trade. There's a lot of timber coming in from Russia and natural resources UM, and the Chinese market is just so big that it's devouring these resources and they're

happy to have them. And you know, in the old days and the Chinese used to sing these songs about the big brother if the Soviet Union helping the little brother, and the roles are reverse me And you know, Russia and Putin are now a junior partner to China, and that's gonna be a very hard pill for them to swallow. I think, when did you get the call that you were going to Beijing? Uh? They asked me actually right before the election, um and um. And you're still there

now And I'm still here. Yeah, I've been in almost two years now. They put you in the bubble and want you to learn from Chinese. I did try to learn Chinese, and I'm still trying and I will be trying for many years to come. And what's the difference in terms of the bureau and the work that's there. Beijing now is much bigger. Uh, it's our biggest foreign bureau outside of the two editing hubs in London and

Hong Kong. Um. There are seven of US correspondence in in Beijing, two more in Shanghai three and uh Hong Kong. And how's the job different for you. People ask me this and I'll say again that China is a much more authoritarian place in terms of politics. There is no opposition person. You can go talk to um who will tell you, oh, yeah, the president's wrong, that was a terrible decision, or we should be doing this. I'm not even talking about people trying to overthrow the government, but

just people who will disagree. So you have this almost conformity in the in the system, and people are very afraid to speak out against that, even on seemingly non controversial issues and demographic issues, environmental issues, you know, not the core center. I mean like Tibet or Taiwan, Tianamen Square, those are the three t s they say you're never supposed to talk about. They're heavily censored. You know, we have to work with virtual private networks even to get

on the Internet in New York. Times has banned there, but so is Gmail, Facebook. I mean, the things that we all rely on for communicating and for work. And you know, I was detained when I went to a Tibetan region of Sichuan and and basically driven by the police out of the area and then put on a plane back to the regional capital because they just didn't want me there. And this happens to everybody. It wasn't unique UM. And you know there are regions we can't

go to. Tibet, the sin jong Um region, which we still can go to, is heavily police now UM almost uh totalitarian like surveillance UM. And in Russia you can still talk to people who tell you Putin's crazy, he's driving us into the ground. You know, I was in er Kutsk in October on a trip up to Lake by Call and I just happened to walk by the headquarters of this opposition anti corruption UM fighter UM name Alexei Navalney, who was a very impressive figure, and it's

just almost daily bashing the government for its corruption. And you know, he's been sentenced to short terms in jail. His brother got a three year sentence in jail, but he's still speaking out. He still holds rallies and his campaign office can openly exist in this provincial town in Siberia. Inconceivable in China that somebody could exist again as even as loyal opposition. I remember reading an article where they talked about the high speed train being built there and

they told these people. You know, here's the timeline, and you've got to build this train over this enormous breadth of space. And the men that were charged with this contracting they did it. They did exactly what they were asked to do, and they did it on time, and they did it on budget. They were really kind of emphasizing another Chinese discipline that way. And then there was a derailment of the trains soon thereafter. Some people were killed and they took a couple of the engineers and

they executed them. That people did that. I thought, let's bring those guys over to the m t A. They will get some results here on the second have of the subway. I hope it doesn't take that extreme to get these subways to work or Amtrak to be more efficient. You know that the Chinese system works that way, and it's it does make it incredibly efficient. They don't have to worry about even economic things um that would stymy us. And so you know, you see this incredible network being built,

their new airports, even small towns. This town on the border I went to had a really glistening new airport town of three thousand people. The high speed trains are great there Um, there has been. There was that one really terrible accident, but by and large, it's a it's an economy that's booming, and that's what that's why I

think it's imposing such a threat. I mean, Moscow is glistening as a city, Um, you know, but the rest of the rest of the of Russia is still struggling in a way that China you can feel it eaping forward. That was New York Times Beijing correspondent and biographer of Vladimir Putin, Stephen Lee Myers. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the thing, m