 them. He's now the Europe disintegration correspondent in central Europe based in Budapest. That's his joke. I should give him full footnote credit. But it's really been a pleasure for a lot of us in this field to read his dispatches from the former Soviet Union and to have him here with us today. I'm going to ask Sean to kick things off and talk a little bit about the book. Then I'll ask him a few questions and then we'll open things up for discussion. So, anyway, Sean, welcome to Carnegie on the floor of George. Thanks very much for inviting me and thanks for coming. So, yeah, I'm just going to say, just talk for a few minutes about the book and then I'll be happy to take any questions about the book or about sort of where we are in Russia more generally. So, yeah, as Andrew mentioned, I've been in Russia for about 13, 14 years. I actually first visited Moscow as an 18-year-old in January 2000, a couple of weeks after Putin had taken over as acting president. I'm leaving just before he gets another six years. So, this book is kind of my attempt to make sense of this 18-year period and to look at Putin's attempt to create a sense of nation in Russia and overcome the sort of psychological scars of the Soviet collapse. What I've tried to do is tell these stories through a number of portraits of very different people, whether it's a separatist commander in East Ukraine, a war veteran from Stalingrad, Chechen mercenaries, Gulag survivors. Vladimir Putin is a character, but he's not necessarily the main character. He's just one more person who is affected by the Soviet collapse. Though, of course, his experiences would go on to be very important for the future of Russia. And I do take as one of my starting points a newspaper column that Putin published in 1999, a few days before Yeltsin made him acting president. And in that column he bemoaned about how weak Russia had become in the past decade. Putin said that for the first time in 200 to 300 years, Russia faces the real danger that it could be relegated to the second, if not the third tier of global powers. And he called on Russians to unite to ensure that Russia would remain what he called a first tier nation. So there's a sense that he felt that economic and social indicators were important, that they would come naturally if this first tier status was reattained. And so like with many post-imperial leaders, dealing with a loss of importance seemed more important than the loss of material wealth. So when Putin took over, he knew that he wanted to restore this great power status, but it wasn't really clear exactly what the new Russia should look like, what kind of country it should be. And you know, it's my argument that probably Russia and Ukraine were the only two of the 15 countries that came into existence after the Soviet collapse that hadn't by that point come up with a unifying, coherent national narrative. And I think the events of 2014, which is most of the second half of the book, the revolution in Kiev, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the war in eastern Ukraine, those events were at least partly about competing Russian and Ukrainian attempts to mint these new national identities. And so the first half of the book is about the creation of this new national idea. And you know, it's not a new thought that common historical triumphs or defeats are a good way to rally people behind a national idea. And while, you know, the collapse of 1991, that was something that resonated with a lot of people, and was something that people could, that Putin could use, playing that card too strongly, this Soviet nostalgia would alienate a lot of younger Russians, a lot of business people who enjoyed the new opportunities of capitalism. So Putin kind of equivocated on that. He called Soviet collapse, as we, you know, famously know, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. But he also said that while a person, only a person with no heart, would fail to miss the Soviet Union, but only someone with no head would want to restore it. So instead of focusing on 1991, Putin turned to the one event that kind of had the narrative potential to unite the country and to serve as a foundation stone for a new nation. And that's the victory in the Second World War, or is it still known in Russia, the Great Patriotic War? And my main argument in the book is that Putin used this victory as a kind of national building block. And obviously part of the reason for this was that much of the Russian war narrative really is incredibly inspiring. Soviet Union did play a decisive role in defeating Nazism. And almost every Russian has a personal history relating to the war. So this kind of made the war very real in an important way. Because, you know, when you look at today's Russia, after the people witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then the disintegration of democratic slogans in the 1990s, there is a sense that Russia is a place where people don't really believe in anything, that when you look at politics, ideas or values are kind of a means to an end rather than something of intrinsic value. And the war was different. It evoked real and genuine feelings in people. And this was something that was noticed in the Kremlin. And I think there was this sort of logical progression. It was a rare source of pride for Russians. You know, if you look at the recent history of Russia, there weren't that there aren't that many victories to celebrate. I think of the the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony, where, you know, this is a sort of chance to show your view of the sort of glory of your country's history. And on this particular occasion, there wasn't anything about the Second World War, because the Olympics don't allow military imagery. But we had this procession of this beautiful evocation of czarist Russia, and we had the industrialization of the 20s and the 30s. We had Yuri Gagarin going into space in 1961. And then that was the end. There wasn't anything that was deemed worthy of something that could be proud of or something could be presented as a great Russian achievement between 1961 and 2014. So, you know, this was something that was a sign of Russia winning. Putin, in fact, in 2000, said to the veterans, through you, we got used to being a nation of winners. And this is kind of an important feeling. But obviously there were other parts to the war narrative as well. You know, the war brought such a horrible toll on the Soviet people that it might seem more appropriate as a cause for somber commemoration rather than brash celebration. And aside from the general horrors of war, there was the deportation of around 2 million Soviet citizens, including Crimean Tatars and Chechens. It was the post-war deportations of Bolts and Western Ukrainians. And of course, more broadly, there was the regime that had won the war. So, you know, while it wasn't Putin's intention to lionize Stalin, if you're going to make the war victory make sense as this national building block, then he at least has to be a neutral figure. The victory is not much use if it came about in the service of a criminal regime. So, all of these issues and how they played out are things that I cover in detail in the book and I'd be happy to talk about more. The last thing I'd say was that, you know, it's important to note that in this war narrative that became so pervasive, both sides were actually painted in black and white. So, while on the one hand, the more difficult pages of the Soviet war narrative were hushed up, Nazism was also simplified as a concept. So, you know, Nazis don't mean militarism or cult of personality or gas chambers. Nazism means invading the Soviet Union. The cardinal sin of the Nazis was that they invaded the Soviet Union. And so, that makes it very easy to transpose this onto the events of the modern day as well. And that's kind of what we saw happen in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea and the separatist movements in East Ukraine. The orange and black St. George's Ribbon, which symbolizes the war victory, was almost as common a sight as the Russian flag. And so, I spent quite a lot of the book talking about those events of 2014. Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, and I think both Russia and Ukraine were working through their attitudes to 1945 and 1991 in those events. And again, I won't go into that in detail here, but I'd be happy to talk more about it. You know, 2014 was obviously this watershed moment in relations between Russia and the West. It was meant to be the year that Russia was going to host the Sochi Olympics and would prove to the world that it was, again, a first-tier nation. And instead, it became the year where Russia asserted itself, if you like, in Ukraine. And from then on, Putin's messaging became much more nationalistic and ideological. And 2014 actually became a companion date for 1945, another narrative of Russian's triumphant against a powerful enemy. So I'll pretty much leave it there, I guess. We're now in 2018. And from the point of view now, kind of Putin in many ways has been quite successful in this attempt to recast Russia as a first-tier nation. Russia has changed the complexion of the Middle East for the intervention in Syria. The whole world is fretting about Russian interference. CNN is running a documentary about Putin called The Most Powerful Man in the World. And internally, too, Putin has largely succeeded in this mission of creating a new sense of nation and rallying Russians around a patriotic idea. But instead of transcending the trauma of the Soviet collapse, his government has exploited it. And sort of, you know, the traditional models for societies coming out of a dictatorship would be either a reckoning with the past or reconciliation. And Putin's initial goal had been reconciliatory. He wanted to use history to bring the nation together. But it was this kind of reconciliation without the hard work and the discussions required to move on, and it helped create these feelings of victimhood and martyrdom, which would explode in 2014. And this kind of obsession with the war and of Russia fighting against the world has really formed the basis of the upbringing of a whole new generation of Russians. And I think it will probably kind of continue to endure, even if and when Putin finally leaves the Kremlin, a recent incident with this schoolboy who was giving a speech in the Bundestag when he spoke about feeling pity for some of the Nazi soldiers that had died and sort of led to this tremendous backlash of people saying he should be put on trial and his teacher should be put on trial. And this real genuine societal fury about what was admittedly a fairly strange choice of words, but essentially was a 14-year-old kid trying to talk about the horrors of war. And I think that kind of shows that they've really tapped into something and actually it was interesting to see the Kremlin trying to row back and sort of pester off and people saying, calm down. But people got really, really angry about that, which just I think is a sign of how powerful these kind of feelings have been. So that's the sort of very brief introduction. And I'd be very happy to talk. Great. So Sean, thanks for the macro portrayal of what you're trying to do in the book. And I'd like to, if I could, sort of drag you into the micro, because part of what I really enjoyed when I read the book were these portraits where you basically give a huge amount of space in the book to using a couple of individuals, especially to talk about the legacy of Stalinism. And there's this one woman, and I'm curious if you can just kind of share with us your experience, where you basically go through there's a chapter in the book about Kulamak, which was one of the harshest or the harshest parts of the gulag, and you become connected to the region, you talk to amateur historian, you talk to people in Magadan, and then you meet this woman Olga Gureva. And my sense is her personal story is so singular in some ways, but also speaks to this bigger national trauma. And I'm sort of curious if you can sort of walk people through her story and why you centered the discussion of the gulag around her. Sure. So yeah, so they were they were kind of two portraits, right? And that in that gulag chapter, one with her, and another one, which I'll come on to afterwards was the this this amateur historian who'd sort of set up a museum of the gulag in his own apartment. But Olga was was, you know, she was a frail woman in her late 80s. There aren't many survivors now. And the gulag and those that are alive, and often don't want to talk about it. So I was quite curious, because you know, you read I studied that, you know, the 30s and in Soviet Russia University, and you read about all these terrible things that happened. And you know that in sort of most Russian families, there are these histories of repressions. So it becomes confusing why why so many Russians are able to be so kind of blasé about about this sort of huge historical trauma. And why it's, you know, really quite widespread today in Russia to say, you know, well, you know, there were difficult times, of course, there may have been some excesses. But that was that was the only option at the time. And so Olga was someone who she was born in Western Ukraine. And she was rounded up at the end of the Second World War, when she was about, I think, 15. And so when the Nazis have been had invaded, she'd been about 12. And she was accused of being a sort of dangerous, Ukrainian nationalist, Nazi sympathiser, whatever, and was sentenced to 20 years in in of hard labor cut Olga in the gulag. And you know, it's this sort of almost so I went to see her. She's now this very small old lady. And and is you know, I'm not going to go through it's just a sort of litany of sort of horrific experiences. Basically, she was took a month to get across Siberia on the train, almost dying on several occasions on the way, then taking this horrendous, essentially slave ship from Vladivostok to Magadan, which takes 10 days. And then years of 10 years of kind of horrible labor in a tin mine. And then she was released. And when she was released, the thing that after Stalin had died in 1956, and she was released, but she wasn't allowed to leave Magadan far east of Russia. And she was told by the person who signed her release papers, you know, here's a word of advice. Don't ever talk about this to anyone. And so she ended up marrying somebody who she met the day she was released who'd also been released. And like after they'd spoken about their mutual experiences, they never spoke about it again to any of their friends. And you know, there's there was this sort of awful moment where her son in the I think late 70s was being was a conscript in the army, and he was about to be sent to East Germany. And she sort of finds out that he is told, you know, you're not going to be sent to East Germany because you're your parents enemies of the people. And that's the first time he's heard about this. So you sort of start to understand that people just didn't talk about this for for years and years. And that it was was considered a taboo subject, you know, there was all this literature about people coming back from the gulag and never talking about it, or people whose parents died in the gulag and would then tell their children that the parents had actually died in the war, because it was shameful to have been in the gulag. So you kind of end up with this. I found her interesting as just on the one hand, it became clear why why so few people knew about a lot of what happened during those years. But on the other hand, you know, here was someone and there were plenty of people like her, certainly in the late 80s and early 90s who were willing to talk about it and who had taken that step. And yet, really, you know, you go to the main museum in Magadan, and there's exhibits about the gulag and it's sort of all airbrushed. You know, you have a list of the number of passengers who arrived on boats during these years. And you think, well, hang on someone like in the bottom of a freezing slave ship, is it's a weird way to kind of call them a passenger. And you know, I went to talk to a local history teacher. And she said, you know, well, look, I teach the I teach the gulag in this way, I say, you know, this is what the benefits of Stalinism were. Yes, there were some excesses, like you decide whether or not they were justified. And so this kind of comes back to this whole point of the war. And I think the importance of the war narrative has meant that, you know, for the war, the great victory in the war to make sense. You, you have to the very least, minimize this this horrible gulag history. And if you should I talk about the the panikarov. Yeah, and also maybe you want to talk about her little brief sojourn living outside Russia, which I also thought was quite quite bizarre. Yeah, no, I mean, she was just she was just a very sad story, really. She was she'd yeah, she'd she'd moved. She decided in the 90s that she had a Ukrainian bride for family that lived in Chicago, and she actually left Magadan and gone to live in Chicago for a year and just been so confused by it that she she sort of couldn't quite understand and wanted to go back to Magadan and then moved back to Magadan. And then she moved to her home village in Ukraine as the sort of idea of which, you know, we're talking sort of nine time zones away or something. Magadan's right in the far east of Russia. And that didn't work out either. And you know, it's kind of just a miserably depressing story, really. But I kind of found that probably the most interesting guy in the most unexpected meeting I had in Magadan was I'd read about this guy, Ivan Panikarov, who in the late 80s, he'd become fascinated by the gulag and he'd started driving around these abandoned gulag sites, which often weren't even marked on maps or whatever, and collecting the artifacts that he would find there. And he built this museum in his own flat and in this town that's about a 10 hour drive from Magadan. I thought, fantastic, I'll go and see this guy like he's going to be the one guy that is really keeping this memory alive in the face of all this apathy. So I showed up to meet him and he was sort of quite irritated to see me, it seemed. And he kept accusing me of in the west of having a one sided view about the gulag. So, you know, the gulag wasn't all that bad. And it turned out that in the intervening years, since I'd read a story about him in the Russian press sort of seven or eight years ago, he kind of changed his whole view of the gulag. And he said, you know, that we mined 500 tons of gold in Kolima and, you know, without that gold, maybe we wouldn't have won the war. And, you know, it was a cruel time. But that's what happened. And so it was really fascinating to me that, like, you know, even the guy who has sort of spent his life kind of chronicling this, you know, he now saw himself not so much as a sort of chronicler of crimes, but remembering these, you know, victims of a higher cause, if you like. And that, to me, was really symbolic of kind of how things have changed over the last years in Russia and that they view of those years. So if we can just go from the past horrors to contemporary horrors, there's another very memorable passage in the book, which is when you are in Eastern Ukraine and you are interviewing the most notorious field commander, this demon with a Russian woman journalist and writer, and they take you into a dungeon and you meet and interview prisoners in the dungeon. And I'm just sort of, you could just sort of recount both your experience with this, the very dangerous setting was, but then also you're reunited later with the prisoner that you interviewed. Yeah. So I mean, and his views also just like the gulag historian don't really align with what you think the script would be. Right. So yeah. So yeah, I speak to a number of these these kind of strange men who ended up running their little fiefdoms during the East Ukraine war and best the demon, Rihonov, his name is Bezla, I was one of the scariest guys. And so we went off, a friend of mine who's a Russian journalist. He didn't really give interviews, but one of the men fighting for him had read her stories and liked them. So kind of invited her to come and interview him. And I went along with her and he had he had a sort of a basement for the prisoners, one of whom was this guy who was a sort of he'd been he'd been found with Ukrainian radical photographs on his telephone. And obviously, you know, when you are in a basement interviewing prisoners, there's not there's not you don't want to get into too much of a discussion. So I just, you know, I this guy told me that he'd been arrested for being a kind of pro Ukrainian radical. And then we got into this very messy situation where where the demon got very angry and sort of started threatening us and it all got quite scary. This is a person who'd posted YouTube videos of himself apparently executing prisoners. Yeah, some question about whether he had actually executed them or not. But yeah, I think in the YouTube video, no, but in reality in other cases, yeah, he definitely has carried up a bunch of extra extra judicial executions. So he's a guy he he'd fought for years in the Russian special forces. But he he was from Ukraine. I think it's from Crimea originally speaks Ukrainian, the demon this is. But a year later, I was sort of I met again this prisoner, this guy, Vasil, who I'd met in the basement. And he, you know, but this point he was work this was summer 2015 and he was working for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry to try and help further prisoner exchanges. And we started talking about the demon. And I said, you know, he said, Oh God, I remember the day you came. You know, he just executed a couple of people the day before he was in the horrible mood. It was sort of you were really lucky to get out of there. And then I started asking him about, you know, did he know what had happened to the demon? And he said, Oh, yeah, I skyped with him a week ago, actually. Sort of what? And he said, Oh, you know, demons like, I mean, you know, he did some terrible things. And he did some things that I would only talk about to a war crime is tribunal. But he's actually a pretty decent guy. I sort of say, you know, isn't there a bit of a case of Stockholm syndrome here? I mean, surely he's just a nutter. And he said, Well, you shouldn't be so judgmental about people, you know, he. This is a man who can recite like whole verses of Taras Chechenko's poetry and Ukrainian. He was a guy in the early nineties. He wanted to fight for the Ukrainian army. But the Ukrainian army was just too busy stealing. And he ended up going and fighting for the Russians. And, you know, he's a guy who fought in Afghanistan. He fought in both Chechen wars and, you know, killing in a war. It kind of demeans you as a person. It's very hard to get over that. And he said, You know, you've got to remember that the demon gave his allegiance to the Soviet Union. And I think, you know, you could talk about Russia or Ukraine. But I think he remained loyal to the Soviet Union. You know, you give your you give an oath to your mother lands and then your mother land disappears and not everyone can handle that. And so obviously, I mean, this is a bit of an extreme account. But, you know, this title of the long hangover. I think a lot of the there's a lot of kind of middle aged men in this book who who were just marooned and lost really by, you know, particularly people who kind of came of age around the time of the transition. And and and really had this sort of huge psychological trauma sometimes comes out in in sort of less violent ways, sometimes in the case of him or of the two other commanders that I wrote about in the book. You know, they were all people who had who had somehow seen this collapse as a real sort of psychological turning point. And so that's sort of one of the themes that, you know, that I explore and I guess part of what Putin's task is to sort of try and overcome that broader trauma in the country. And, you know, it's something if people have read Svetlana Alexievich, I mean, something that she explores a lot is this sense of kind of the trauma of the post-Soviet human. So you were in Moscow for about 13 or 14 years as a correspondent. I'm sort of curious if you can talk a little bit about how difficult it was to operate as a Westerner in an environment that got progressively more entranced by this anti-Western ideology and by this sense of victimhood. And, you know, my sense is, you know, a normal reporter and a normal country has ideas. They bounce those ideas off of government officials or insiders or sophisticated outside observers and they frame what they want to do for their stories or they follow the big issue of the day. But a Western correspondent in Russia today is seen for the most part as someone who's either there for ulterior reasons or who's there to, you know, support Western policy or who just is a foreigner and isn't worth talking to. And I'm sort of curious how that experience has left you feeling now about the role of foreign correspondents in an environment that's become progressively less hospitable. Well, actually, I would say the thing that I found most difficult to deal with was not so much aggression and you do meet occasionally both officials or just people that you're interviewing who are very aggressive. One of the hardest things to deal with was actually people who are very jovial. So, for example, you know, you'd often meet in Eastern Ukraine, you would meet Russian state TV reporters or Russia today reporters and they'd be sort of very friendly and they'd say, you know, wait, you know, let's forget this sort of ideology. Now, I've got my line, you've got your line, you know, I know that you're, you know, you're writing what you're told to write. I'm told to write and that's fine. That's what we do. But, you know, let's have a drink and you're sort of like, well, hang on a minute. I mean, I'm not trying to do that. I'm actually trying to, you know, I'm not told what to write, et cetera, et cetera. And even among even among sort of a lot of very good and friends, there's a just a refusal to believe in that it might be possible to try at least to be an objective reporter as a concept. And, you know, I think that, you know, obviously there's good reporting on Russia and there's bad reporting on Russia and there's a lot of things that do play into stereotypes and so on. But this idea that more or less the majority of correspondents operating in good faith is kind of seen as just the ridiculous sort of naive thing. And that sort of everyday cynicism is almost harder, kind of psychologically kind of taps away at you more than somebody just like shouting or you know, you're relying scumbag. OK, well, I'm sure that didn't feel good when it happened. All right, well, look, let's open things up. There's microphones. If people could do two things, well, three things. One, wait for the microphone. Two, state your name and affiliation and three, ask a short question that ends in a question mark. OK, and I will start up here, Annie, with this gentleman up here in the green. Thanks. Hi, thank you so much for coming. It's so interesting. My name is Keith Webber. I'm a master's student at Georgetown. So you talked about the kind of euphoria in 2014 from the invasion and annexation of Crimea and kind of how Russians viewed that as a win. And kind of from accounts now, it's sort of that euphoria sort of gradually fading. Is there any other place that you might have kind of come across in your reporting and interviews of Russians that could have a similar replicated effect? I feel like Crimea is somewhat unique in its cultural and historical religious value for Russians and in fact in its role in World War Two and all of that. Is there I feel like Transnistria doesn't really play that same role. I'm curious your thoughts on if there is another sort of region like that that has that might have that same effect. Yeah, I think I think you're right that sort of Ukraine broadly and like Crimea specifically have this sort of visceral visceral importance to Russians that even a lot of people will really just struggle to see Ukraine as a real kind of thing, right? And you know, I would look at it a little bit more complicated even that you know, there are plenty of people in eastern Ukraine and in Crimea, of course, who would also struggle to take Ukraine seriously as a real country without Russia or without being at least aligned with Russia. So yeah, it's this really I think, you know, you've got this this this post imperial syndrome where all these other countries have split off. But I think the way that average Russians think about the Baltics or Transnistria doesn't even come close to the way they think about Ukraine and certainly about Crimea. And I think in terms of the same effect, you know, we've seen we've seen kind of attempts to portray the Syria intervention in not obviously not in a similar way, but as again, as sort of Russia demonstrating that it has its red lines and that it's going to be active on the international stage. And that's had some resonance and you do talk to people who who kind of will say, oh, you know, Putin saved the world from World War Three with my fighting terrorists in Syria. But it doesn't quite have that same visceral kind of sense that Crimea had. As you say, there is also a sense now that it's that's that's wearing a bit thin that you know, economically, it's a burden and that you know, you can't you can't keep this euphoria going forever. But equally, you don't meet many people who say, you know, we should give Crimea back. Randy Levinas. Thank you very much, Randy Levinas with the US Russia Business Council. I have a question following up from Andrew's question with the premise that that things are bad for journalists and things getting worse over time. I mean, we can look at from the business community standpoint when 2014 was bad, obviously, political relations bad, kind of currently. But from the business community standpoint, I think we can see a difference between 2014 and today in terms of attitudes where where there hasn't been a turnaround, I would say, with Russia engaging with the West. But certainly from this moment when China and the East were much more, we talk about the pivot to Asia, there's certainly been a shift where there's more interest in looking back towards the West to do business. I'm just wondering from the journalistic environment how you see that. Is it, you know, to sort of take issue, I guess, with Andrew's premise in terms of it being hostile, has there been an improvement at all? If at all, maybe not. But I'm just curious. You mean specifically in attitudes towards journalists, or. I mean, it's it's a weird environment there. So, you know, you know, I think it's the answer. There's there's still I think the biggest problem with being a journalist and a foreign journalist in Moscow is access. So, you know, there wasn't great access prior to 2014. It got worse around 2014 and it hasn't got any better. You know, in terms of, you know, we're sort of by and large insulated from or at least up to now I've been insulated from the sort of violence or like actual physical attacks that sort of local Russian journalists would face. So, you know, I think I wouldn't I wouldn't exaggerate how difficult it is to operate just on and on the sort of terms of living there. Right. You know, Moscow is strangely enough since 2014 has become much more a pleasant city to live in. And, you know, the plenty of foreign journalists, I know who live like really quite pleasant lives in Moscow, kind of going out to cafes and restaurants and coffee shops and and you know, doing things that what I part of the reason that so much of this book is reported from outside Moscow is that, you know, it is obviously this fascinating country where you can go and so many extraordinary stories and human stories out in the regions, whereas if you sit in Moscow kind of trying to guess, you know, what decision Putin's going to make tomorrow, it's journalistically very frustrating. So I would say, you know, in terms of access and in terms of sort of general aggression towards the West, it hasn't really got better. And, you know, there's, if you look at, I think, Masha's a hard of her, who's the foreign ministry spokeswoman, you know, she's a great example of this sort of duality because on the one hand, you know, on one hand, she's great because previously, if you wanted to get a quote from the foreign ministry, you'd have to send them a fax and they wouldn't reply to you. And that's the end of it. Now, you know, she's on Facebook, you can send her a message, you can go to them, she doesn't offer a record briefing once a week. But most of those briefings will be her shouting at you. So it's sort of of minimal use, journalistically, you would normally, in London, you would go to an off the record briefing at the foreign ministry to find out, you know, the things they were really saying that they couldn't say publicly. There you just sort of go and sort of, you might get a little bit of useful colour, but essentially you just get shouted up off now. So yeah, I don't think it's become more welcoming, but equally, I wouldn't sort of exaggerate that we're sort of scurrying around and in fear for our lives. I've got two questions up here. I've got Hope and then Jeff. I'm sorry, Hope and then Wayne. Sorry, I'm going to put Jeff on the spot. I hope Harrison George Washington University. I teach courses on Russia and on uses and misuses of history in politics. So I'm very excited about your book. And it reminds me a bit of David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, which deals with Gorbachev's approach to history, which was, of course, the opposite of Putin's and in which he somewhat makes the argument that by opening up discussion of history and criticism of Soviet history at home and abroad, that's what brought the whole system down. So I really look forward to reading your book and perhaps having my students read it too. So I have two questions. One is this World War Two Focus. What happens with the next generation? How long is that going to sort of excite and motivate Russian citizens? Isn't that going to, you know, it's amazing it's gone on this long, you know, doesn't have have a bit of a short shelf life and sort of what's next and related to that as someone who studies the politicization of history, I'm, of course, fascinated with this topic and tend to pay a lot of attention to it. But of course, your average Russian citizen, there are probably other things that affect their view of Russia, of Putin, of the world, perhaps even more than this identity connected to World War Two. And I'd be interested if you could talk about a couple of those things, sort of what else are the big factors that influence people's, you know, Russians' view of Putin and perhaps of the West. And does anyone ever talk about the fact that the US also fought in World War Two against Nazi Germany or is that not talked about much? OK, let's start with, you know, the shelf life and how much young Russians think about it. So, I mean, one of the things that I found quite interesting like researching this book was that, you know, there's this general belief in among most Russians today, actually, that the sort of the May the 9th celebrations and the sort of cult of victory is something that's been, you know, has been there forever since 1945. And that's kind of not really the case, right? There was, you know, in the first two decades after the war, it was actually wasn't talked about that much. And then it became what we're seeing now is a sort of resurrection of this kind of late Soviet cult where, you know, the sort of Brezhnev era stagnating Soviet Union couldn't no longer look forward to the sort of glorious communist future. So instead began to look past to find this legitimacy in the past rather than the future. And, you know, then you have the Gorbachev period, you have the Yeltsin period where, you know, there were no there were no May 9th parades. They started them again in 1996, but they were essentially kind of quite small things. And even, I mean, even the first eight years of Putin, you didn't have like tanks rolling through the streets like this is all since 2008. You know, in terms of the shelf life of the idea, there are some surveys that suggest that sort of Russians are getting slightly less sort of inspired by the victory narrative. But I would say, I mean, you know, it's I'm not suggesting that everybody is kind of consciously walking around and saying, you know, Russia, we are Russian and Russia means victory or whatever. But, you know, when you start this kind of epilogue of the book is a trip I took to Irkutsk in February last year. And when you start sort of actually looking looking consciously for sort of stuff about victory, you suddenly notice that it's just sort of nibbling away your subconscious from everywhere. So, you know, I'd gone there to do this story about these 80 people that had died from drinking a sort of fake bath fluid, really horrible story that sort of is cheaper than vodka. So people drink it. But somehow a poison batch had come about and 80 people had died. So I went to do this story and you go and talk to the doctor and the doctor's got a May the 9th flag. You know, this was in February. The doctor's got a May the 9th flag on his desk. You go outside. The ambulance has 1941 to 1945 written on it. I get into the car and my driver's listening to a documentary about the fall of Berlin. I went to meet a young kid who was sort of fighting who was trying to fight this counterfeit alcohol, you know, doing this really quite good sort of volunteer work trying to find this stuff in the shops and make sure people didn't drink it. And I said, you know, where are you from? And he says, I'm from this town. During the war, this town mined a lot of coal. And his first questions then. So he, you know, you ask about the do Russians think about the US? I mean, his first question was, you know, in Britain, do they realize that Russia was, you know, won the war? And you sort of say, well, you know, maybe people don't know the details, but everyone kind of knows about the like battle of Stalingrad. And he said, well, you know, in all of these questions were about about Britain. And yeah, I don't think I think there are. I was just reading the day I can't remember the numbers, but there is an increasing number of people who, when asked the question, you know, would the would the Soviet Union have won the war without allies? It's gone up dramatically of people who say, yes, they would in recent years. I think, you know, in Russia, there's a there's a really strong feeling, you know, possibly not with entirely without justification that kind of in the West people don't appreciate the the Soviet sacrifice. But that comes with this sort of concomitant thing that, yeah, people don't even think about the the any any sort of other allied effort. When Mary. Thank you, Wayne Mary, the American Foreign Policy Council. There's an aspect of Russia that I'd like you to talk about since you were there. Even, you know, about twice as long as I was. And this Russia is a country that has a long history of diasporas and the influence of those diasporas on Russia. I mean, I happen to grow up in a small town in Oklahoma that was settled after 1905 Revolution. My high school songs melody was God Save the Tsar. It was in the 1960s. But today, the Russian diaspora everywhere, not just in Europe, not just America, but in China, in Latin America, in the Middle East, everywhere. It's an astonishingly large, astonishingly active. And it's, you know, doing very well. It's not just oligarchs, but it sure isn't just taxi drivers. I think if you were to say, what is the third largest Russian urban area in the world? I would say this Moscow, Petersburg and then the diaspora. And I'm not sure it might even be bigger than than Petersburg. What was your sense of the dynamics back and forth between the Russia within the Russian state and the Russia beyond the Russian state? Because certainly in my experience of Russians, I know this country in Russia, there's a lot of not just family connections. There are a lot of institutional connections, financial connections, cultural connections, not very much in the way of political connections, but I may just be missing that. But there has never in all of Russia's history been such a large, such a well-to-do, such a global Russian diaspora. So I'm like your thoughts from your experience there. How does that play into Russia? Not so much as a political entity, but Russia as a socio-economic, cultural thing. How does the Russian nation within the Russian state relate to the Russian nation beyond the Russian state? Yeah, I mean, I think there are obviously all these. I mean, I think the interesting thing about the Russian diaspora is it's not homogenous, right? So there are all these completely different waves of immigration at different times. So the sort of the white Russian waves, my sense is that, while there are still people who sort of feel proudly that their great-grandfather was a noble, as are his noble, that sort of strong Russian identity, I mean, that's slowly dying out. It's a long time ago. The sort of Jewish emigration of the 70s and 80s. But I think I don't see, I haven't noticed it as a particular force. I think what is much more, the part of the diaspora that is interesting and is influential and is a subject of the sort of everyday discourses, there is the post-soviet diaspora and Putin said in his speech, kind of in the Kremlin on the annexation of Crimea, he said, you know, what Russians woke up and overnight Russians were the biggest diaspora in the world because we lost, you know, all these Russians sort of went to bed in their homeland and woke up in a foreign country. So that side of it, I think, is very visceral and very important. Obviously, other earlier waves of emigration that came before, I think they're obvious cultural and sort of family links, but it doesn't feel to me like something that plays a huge part in the discourse. Please, here. Thank you very much for your presentation and for your very useful work. I'm Nikolai Vorobyov, I'm Ukrainian journalist and currently a research fellow at John Hopkins University. So I have just a short remark and then a question. So remark about B.S., I mean, these guys are very, they are very violent and there is even a video which was released in June, 2014, probably, where they gunned down few Ukrainian prisoners. Somebody then told that it was a fake, but they did it publicly, actually. So they not only executed Ukrainian prisoners, that's, I mean, so they have nothing to do with any international conventions. Yeah, this is a famous video, so you maybe can look at that. And I have a question, so you spend a lot of time in Russia and we know that most of Russian media, they are controlled by government, disinformation, propaganda, and so forth. Do you use any Russian media as a source of information for you and for your work? Do you still, do you believe that there is still some free media in Russia, like maybe Erbaka or Dorshtrain TV channel or Echa Moskvy? Or you think that it's just a fake, it's just a manipulation, and Kremlin is playing like this game, saying, pretending that they still have a liberal media. So the basic question, do you believe in liberal and free media in Russia? Thank you. So just on your remark quickly, so yeah, yeah, I obviously have seen this video and in fact, the guy that I was talking about who said he was still in Skype contact was one of the guys in that video. So it was a fake video, it wasn't a real execution. At the same time, from this guy's testimony and from other people, we know that they were executing people. And by portraying this guy's words, that he was traumatized by the Soviet collapse, I'm not in any way trying to suggest that he wasn't a thoroughly unpleasant criminal. In terms of Russian media, yeah, I think it's over the years that I've been working there, it's never been a sort of flourishing, fantastic media scene, but you've seen these small islands get smaller and smaller and you've seen sort of places that were doing really, really good stuff, being taken over and having the editors changed. I still think there are a few kind of places that are still genuinely independent. There are places that you say, is it all part of this Kremlin game? And I think there are times when sort of both things are true. So Echo Muscovy clearly played, which is the liberal radio station in Moscow, but is owned by Gazprom Media. Clearly, it plays to certain rules, like Benedicto for the editor-in-chief is, he's a very wily operator. He knows where he's very well connected and tomorrow it could be closed down. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real journalists working there doing decent stuff. So yeah, I think the dodge, the other places you mentioned, over the past two, three years, Nova Gazeta have done some great stuff. At the same time, we've seen it with Verdamisti, we've seen it with Verbakar, we've seen it with Gazeta Roo, seen it with Lenta Roo, that these things, places that are doing good stuff, get kind of slowly and slowly crushed and it gets smaller and smaller. And now you've got a lot of good journalists without jobs in Russia, because there are so few places that real journalists could work. So we have time for two more questions. I know a lot of people are trying to get a word in and then there's going to be books for sale and a reception behind that door where you can pose those extra questions to Sean and buy copies, many copies of his book and get him to sign it. So I'm gonna take two more questions. I've got Jeff and then Gerard, please. Thank you. Jeff Mancoff with CSIS. I was trying to remember who famously said that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past, but your remarks today have just emphasized the truth of that observation. One of the things that I find striking about this unpredictable past is the way in which Putin has effectively integrated memory of the Soviet period with that of the czarist period, so that there's almost not a contradiction between the two. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit based on your experience and the work that you've done in this book. How much resonance the pre-Soviet period has with ordinary people? How much do people identify with symbols, ideas, memory of things that happened before 1917 and how effective are they at kind of holding together that contradiction between embracing a pre-Soviet past but also a Soviet past? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly, especially in the past few years, you've sort of seen this, you know, you've kind of seen the 1945 thing augmented with all these other figures or events going right back to the sort of giant monument to Vladimir the Great, which has gone up outside the Kremlin, during the opening ceremony of this monument, there was never once mentioned that he was the Prince of Kiev. So you have this kind of millennia-long lineage from Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin. And I think Putin's quite consistent in his, if you wanna call it a philosophy, that sort of a strong state is good and state collapse is bad. So you can not be happy about 1917 revolution, but you can say that the sort of strong state that grew from that is a positive thing that should be celebrated. But I think where he has to be quite careful and where he is quite careful is that, there's still, as we saw this past year, there kind of isn't really a consensus on 1917 and there are some people who sort of, you know, extremely big fans of Nicholas the Second, get very excited about Zara's, I'm thinking the revolution was a tragedy and other people who think it was fantastic and that sort of Putin has to play to both those constituencies. So I kind of guess he's always like very, very careful on the occasions that he talks about Lenin or he talks about the revolution. And, but at the same time, we have seen this sort of monumental Alexander the Third, monument to Vladimir the Great, monument to Stolypin, kind of filling in this narrative of a sort of, long running tapestry of kind of Russian greatness where basically you can be, you can support the current Russian state and the Soviet Russian state and the Zara state, but you can see 1917 and 1991 as tragedies at the same time because state collapsing, whether it's in 1791 or in Maidan, in Kiev, or in Syria is always a negative thing for Putin. Go ahead. Hi, Sean, I'm Gerard Toll, I'm a professor. So my allegiance is to the Enlightenment. I wanna thank you first. The book is terrific. I would really strongly recommend it. Thank you on behalf of the researchers to study conflict and don't have access to or don't undertake the very hard work of and putting your sort of neck on the line to go and report on very live conflicts as you have done in Georgia and also in Ukraine. I wanted to ask about the process of the work itself, which is that as a foreign correspondent and as a correspondent for The Guardian and we should all should subscribe to The Guardian, pay money because this is not free, but as a correspondent, you're working with the deadline and so there's a certain instant history that is created, the first draft of history, so-called first draft of history. The writing of a memoir is a contemplation. It is where you get to think about and edit on your own, not have an editor do it for you. So I wanted to ask you to talk to us a little bit about the potential disjuncture between your kind of filed reports and then you're thinking about what went on later in the light of what happened and whether you felt that looking back on those reports, maybe you were sort of on the wrong track or perhaps you were captured by a kind of prevailing wisdom at a certain time and so on so forth or you later came to appreciate something. If you could talk to us a little bit about though if someone wants to read your dispatches and then read this memoir, what would you say to them about the journey between those two? I mean, I think the first thing is, there's obviously like a procedural thing that as a correspondent for a daily newspaper, if you don't tailor what you're doing with very much of the book in mind, you end up with sort of 2,000 fascinating vignettes and no through arcs of sort of characters that you followed and seen their progression or so on. And so, for me, it was something, because I'd been in Russia for so long and I'd always had the idea of doing a book and then when things started really happening in 2014, it became clear that this was like really quite an extraordinary moment. And so, from that point, it's sort of in the back of your mind that at some point I'd like to, I don't quite know what it's gonna look like yet, but I'd like to turn this into a book. So you might, you'd just spend like five times longer with somebody than you would if you were just getting your sort of three quotes with them for the daily newspaper or you would go back and revisit the same people again and again. In terms of sort of changing of views, I mean, I think, of course, it's always, you always look back at things and sort of see things that seem more significant that at the time didn't quite seem so significant. Certainly, things like people in Kiev will often get irritated and justifiably so that the country is largely covered by Moscow correspondence and not by Kiev correspondence or by Warsaw correspondence or whatever. I mean, I do think it would be great if everyone had a Kiev correspondent, but I do think there are probably more similarities in the sort of issues that Ukraine and Russia face that many people in Kiev would like to admit, but that's another matter. But certainly, I feel like going into a hue, I dipped in and out of Ukraine, I knew people in Ukraine, I'd done stories in Ukraine, but being thrown into this incredibly complicated story of Maidan and everything around it without having done the kind of reading that I later did around the sort of history and the historical currents involved. I think maybe, as in many conflicts in many cases, we're all benefited from kind of understanding the context a bit more than you do in the heat of the moment. But I think, I feel quite lucky that The Guardian is somewhere that, first of all, I don't feel any kind of pressure at all to follow a particular line, and there was a given leeway to sort of, yeah, go to Maidan for a week and talk to people and not always having to file for the sort of hourly web updates and things. So I did feel like, I hope that naturally, daily news reporting is something you do quickly and could always be improved, but I don't look back and sort of think, like, God, what a load of absolute crap I wrote. Hopefully, maybe I'll do something different. Okay, well, Sean, you've been very generous with your time. It's a terrific book, and I encourage folks to go in the back and buy a copy from me. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thank you.