 Yeah, come on on. Sure, have a seat. Sure. Good evening, everyone. Hi, good evening, everyone. I'm Andrew Weiss. It's a real pleasure to welcome you all to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We are delighted to see two very good friends of Carnegie and such a big audience here on hand to listen to Susan Glasser talk with her New Yorker magazine colleague, Josh Yaffa, who's the author of a wonderful new book. Two or three quick programming notes before I turn things over to Susan. One, if you have a cell phone, I'd appreciate it if you could please silence it. There'll be a period at the end of this for questions, so I hope people will all actively participate. We're web-streaming this. And then finally, there's going to be a reception immediately afterwards downstairs with wine and a chance to buy books and have them signed by Josh. So anyways, please welcome Josh Yaffa and Susan Glasser. Thank you. Thank you so much, Andrew, and congratulations, Joshua. He's the first time author, so I'll get to do all the shameless book promotion and flackery while he's still easing into it. Because I can say, having read the book, it is terrific and very worthwhile of your time. And of course, at this moment, he has conveniently arranged for the news gods in Russia to provide him with an all-purpose news hook for his book tour. So we'll get started on that in a moment. I have to say, Andrew, I really want to thank you and Carnegie. I was saying, beforehand, I've been having flashbacks as we were standing offstage to our book launch on a book about Russia and Putin in 2005 in this exact same room. And there is, in fact, this sense of the remarkable long run of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it's hard to believe that was 15 years ago. But I'm not sure anyone in the room or I would have said that Vladimir Putin would not only have blown-plast Leonid Brezhnev's record in power, but would be looking to compete eventually with Stalin in terms of tenure, flash forward 15 years. And we're talking about someone who has been in the Kremlin for more than two decades already and is still only, I believe, 66 years old. So there's this picture making around yesterday on social media of what an aged grandpa Putin would look like, presumably once the Constitution has changed and he's still in power after 2024. I have to admit, in the confusion of impeachment here in Washington, I knew we would be having this event with you today, Joshua. So I thought you could explain to me and to all the rest of us what you actually make of yesterday's events before we get on to your smart observations about how to think about Putin's Russia. What's the deal? Is this leader for life? Is this just a preliminary stage? Do we even care that Medvedev and his government are gone? Are they coming back? I'll try. Please help us, help us, help us. I was on a train today and happily distracted this week with the lunch for my book and other things. So I didn't pay much more acute attention to the news than you, though, did try and catch up on it, certainly, and have some thoughts about what it all might mean, because people have been waiting for something like this for a long time, at least since March of 2018 when Putin was re-elected for a third term. The fact of his re-election was never really in doubt. The Kremlin has long ago created a very manicured and controlled political space where the fact that he would win that election was not the mystery. The only mystery, if there even was one at all, is what would his last ostensible presidential term look like? And most importantly, what would his transition from power, if there would be one, look like? So the real question for Putin's, sorry, fourth term, I spoke, not third, would be what would happen at the end of it. He was a kind of lame duck from day one. So something had to give before 2024. Although he has a long time. I mean, that's the other thing that's mysterious about yesterday, right, is why yesterday. Right. I'm not sure there's a reason why yesterday, why January 15th as opposed to the 14th or the 16th or the 20th. Though I'm guessing the answer will emerge in short order and yesterday will appear as the opening gambit in a longer process of reconfiguring the Constitution, reconfiguring the architecture of power in Russia, removing or sharing some powers of the presidency, giving them to other institutions, building up the profile and influence of a new-ish body, the state council that Putin has begun to reference more and more than he may had as a kind of soft retirement president emeritus. Much of that will require constitutional changes. And because the Putin state likes to do things with the ostensible veneer of democratic process, there's a kind of internal emphasis on rule following, even if they allow themselves the prerogative to set the rules and decide what the rules are. They very much like to keep up the appearances of a rule of law state, at least according to their own definition of the term. It's important then that the parliament, say, has enough time to put forward the necessary changes. If there's a referendum, that can be carried out. If the constitutional court has to weigh in. So what happened yesterday, like I said, I think it's just the first move in what's going to be a whole series of dominoes that just may take time, that maybe you can't pull off. If you want to do it with the veneer of adherence to a kind of process, you can't just do in 2023, but have to set in motion some time before. But your bottom line is Vladimir Putin isn't going anywhere. No, but I think, and this could be famous last words, that the scenario in which he just stays on as president and they change the Constitution to allow a fifth or indefinite number of presidential terms and the system basically remains as it is and he just runs again for president and is the kind of president for life, that seems less likely if not ruled out. Because why would they have removed or softened the power of the presidency if the plan was for him to just stay president forever? This seems like, if nothing else, we can say the plan is he'll do something else besides be president, that something else may be imbued with a lot of power and influence, maybe more than the president, but someone else could be a figurehead, could be a placeholder, a temporary figure, but someone else will be president and Putin will do some other to be determined job. You know, I remember here in Washington at the very beginning of the Obama presidency, which also coincided with the last kind of leadership shakeup in Moscow when Putin, again, to observe the, at the time, constitutional niceties stepped aside temporarily from the presidency and handed that title over to Dmitry Medvedev, became prime minister. You know, there were endless probably events here at Carnegie and conversations and debates inside the administration as well as outside of it on, you know, well, is this for real and you know, isn't Medvedev actually really the president and we can deal with him and, you know, there was a sense, it'll conceive, as it turned out, that perhaps this was a stage along the way of Putin actually stepping aside and that the US did make an effort to sort of imbue Medvedev with actual powers that he may not have had at that moment in time. I wonder if Washington sort of having been burned, you know, will make that mistake again, you know, so do you take seriously, have you even ever heard of the new prime minister who appears to be a very sort of faceless bureaucrat from the tax service, which is a very powerful entity in Putin's Russia? I had never heard of him. I don't think that's a huge mark against me because it seems like most people who follow Russia hadn't heard of him either. And I think that's an indication that he's likely not to be the successor president, that he is performing a placeholder technocratic function and that it's another indication that what happened yesterday is an interim step to some other end game, that this is not the final configuration of Russian power going forward. Yeah, and in fact, he's not even the first sort of obscure prime minister that Putin has appointed. I was there in Moscow when Putin got rid of Mikhail Kasyanov, the holdover from the Yeltsin era and appointed Mikhail Fragkov, I think, was the prime minister. Probably very few people remember him and justify it, so. So what, you know, I think he actually is this conversation which is a sort of modern day Putinology, Kremlinology. It does seem like a pretty good pivot point to your book which is really about the nature of what is required to operate in even the semi-public space in Putin's Russia. It's all about, as you say, compromise in Putin's Russia and these very nuanced, complicated portraits of just how sort of both suffocating the public spaces under Putin and also the kinds of trade-offs and ambiguities that are necessary to exist in this sort of nether world just like the politics we're talking about, right? Like we're talking about a world where we don't even know what the constitution is gonna say next month and it's ambiguous and yet we know very clearly on the one hand that who's the boss and I feel like that these are essentially all on that theme. Even though you couldn't have anticipated exactly yesterday's news, the book is very on point to helping to think about the world that produced this news. And I'm curious actually how much in the end you have come away from this exercise of reporting in Russia feeling like this is truly a construct and a creation of the Putin era. Is this, was Russia just always like this? Is this because it's a post-Soviet state or is it, how much is it related to this incredible long run of Vladimir Putin? I think it's definitely related in just the duration, the length of time that this individual and a larger system that the individual has come to represent has existed and at this point it's about much more than just Putin, the one human being. There's an entire system and a logic to that system, rules to that system that have grown up and developed around him where, and we'll see this will be the great test of going forward, right? How much is now Putin or Putinism not about the single living, breathing human being but about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of living, breathing human beings who can keep alive a system long past its initial creator or namesake and that's certainly one of the themes of the book. I found a lot of continuity in Soviet history, post-Soviet history or rather, Soviet history, the kind of history around the breakup of the Soviet Union both just before and just after and leading into Putin that there was a lot more continuity in how people understood themselves and understood their relationship to the state than might seem just if you look at the changing figures, the changing individuals who sat atop that state who seemed to have much different and contradictory profiles and agendas but beneath the surface the way people understood their own place in society and both the opportunities presented to them and what kind of vexed or would prevent the realization of those opportunities and how to get around them, there was a lot of continuity there and my suspicion is that that could be the same going forward regardless of what particular role Putin takes or doesn't take. Well, it's a great observation, I mean, right that the former Soviet people just because the Soviet Union collapsed, they didn't wake up the next day and abandoned all of their previous habits of navigating the system and the world and they brought a lot of that into the Putin era and to me that really is the sort of great contribution of this book, why did you decide to write it around the sort of moral ambiguity and compromise? In our politics here in Washington today, nuance is a dirty word and things have gotten more technicolor and less nuance but you seem to be proudly insisting that not only on nuance but that nuance is the story in Russia. That's a nice observation, that's a nice summation of the repertorial approach I took to the book, I wouldn't have described it that way exactly but I think, but I agree to it and I don't really have a greater answer just then that's what interested me the most and that's what I feel like, not that I wasn't getting it getting to say it in articles I was writing but I wasn't getting to say enough of it maybe and I wasn't getting to follow those questions all the way to the end or at least in the depth and nuance as you say as I wanted and I felt like Russia for totally understandable reasons like a lot of places but I think Putin makes this all the more true is that it's reduced into a very black or white prism and there are a lot of things especially that Putin and those around him do that are just objectively harmful and worthy of our judgment and contempt as kind of moral, political beings and we can retain that power of judgment over the country's politics but the way people live their lives I felt like it was unfair to the Russian people to take that same prism and to view everyday Russians or even not everyday Russians people who might occupy some position of stature and influence in the system the same way and I just felt a growing sense of sympathy or empathy to people I was reporting about who were trapped in situations that I found frankly just very interesting repertorially very compelling to see them stuck between a kind of rock and a hard place wanting to realize or bring about something that at least began as a virtuous admirable or at least understandable goal but in doing so were confronted with obstacles and compromises as you said that demanded a lot of them and changed them in the process and I couldn't think of myself or I couldn't say with certainty that I would have acted differently I didn't see myself as necessarily different than them and certainly not above them and when I realized that what they were going through both resembled but maybe in a more dramatic scale some of the compromises I face we all face but also in their position I'm not sure I would act so heroically different maybe there's no inner saffron inside of me Okay that's very interesting you're being very I maybe humble is the right word but you know let's be real one of your main characters and it's fascinating that he agreed to talk to you is Konstantin Ernst who is essentially the visionary chief propagandist chief artist you know of channel one the main instrument of communication and political influence as well as artistic influence in Putin's Russia it's amazing that he agreed to talk to you first of all but second of all you know he's just not some simple man I mean he made an explicit choice which is to engage with power and to you know to ride that for his own ends but did you you know you started out with this empathy but where did you end up I mean you know this is a guy who more than any other has you know essentially provided the platform for the justification of all of the Putin government's you know most controversial and problematic acts where I ended up is a position of understanding him I think though maybe that's my own estimation right I mean he might disagree others might disagree how close I got to really understanding the core of his essence and what motive have you heard from him since you you published a big excerpt of this in the New Yorker not exactly no he confirmed having read it let's say well they haven't canceled your visa to Russia have I'm here now so let's see what happens in a few weeks we'll have a follow-up conversation but actually I think to rewind which it's both about his likely reaction to it and why he agreed to talk to me in the first place gets in a way to the answer to your question is he sees himself very much as a sophisticated auteur the kind of person who of course would sit and talk with a reporter from the New Yorker because he knows what the New Yorker as he reads the New Yorker he is proud of that kind of cultural sophistication and where's it well I mean it's organic to him actually that kind of cultural sophistication as one of his friends told me and it was the best and most pithiest summation of Ernst was that he's an intellectual and an estet but he's not a liberal and oftentimes in my life those things kind of overlap and you don't actually think about the distinctions between them because so many people I encounter are all three things fluidly he's not so in a way there's not a huge contradiction maybe he's actually one of the people in the book who's compromising the least because he doesn't necessarily have this wellspring of liberal values that he knowingly or subconsciously you know violated in this Faustian bargain for power what he has gotten are unlimited resources to realize his aesthetic and creative vision as the head of channel one he has almost unlimited budget to produce these really quality from a cinematic or aesthetic point of view programs and films that he wouldn't have that opportunity otherwise that the central or one of the central conundrums of the book is it's not like, this is in regards to another character the theater director Kareel Serebnikov it's not like in Russia you have the choice of making a movie with state money or without state money the choice is do you want to make a movie or not make a movie and if you want to make a movie while there's one source of financing in town and then when you think about it that way especially in someone like Serebnikov who's a very different kind of creature than earned so I don't want to compare the two unjustly but nonetheless you can start or I could start to understand the nuance as you say or the difficulty in these choices and I could at least understand if not applaud certainly Ernst's choice to take the reins of this channel where he could do as he pleased creatively and yes, serve the state that I think he ultimately legitimately believes in so for him it's not such a huge I think he sleeps well at night in other words. No, I get that he does that's pretty clear he's benefited by his choice but I guess for you as a writer for a liberal bright thinking western magazine it's just such a fascinating like as you contemplated these characters in the end what is different for us to try to understand about a propagandist for Putin's Russia or another one of your characters an apologist for what we would view as the illegal annexation of another country's territory now he gets burned so he has probably a different point of view but in the end these are characters that are familiar to all regimes in history in Ernst you found a sophisticated wannabe auteur who also is in the end a propagandist for a regime that does some bad stuff all the worst dictatorships in the world many of them had pretty sophisticated propagandists too why is he any different? It's hard for me to say how he's different than those propagandists who worked in other regimes I think he's particular to the Putin system because of his intellectual sophistication I compare in the book channel one under his leadership to the other two main state channels which are no less propagandistic much more propagandistic but they're also frankly kind of tawdry or trashy or cheap and they're full of just the most sort of low budget oftentimes literally pseudo documentaries the most bombastic television hosts the most sulfurous of all Russian television personalities Dmitry Kostylev is I think by no accident not on channel one but on Russia channel one's main rival where he holds forth about how gays and lesbians should not be allowed to donate organs because their genetic code is not worthy and that Russia can destroy the United States in a nuclear war and turn it into a heap of radioactive dust I mean the most vile bombastic rhetoric is not on channel one and I don't want to give Ernst too much credit there's a whole lot of propaganda on channel one including especially during the war and that most active phase of the war and Donbass some outright vile disinformation but overall the tone on channel one has an air of a kind of sophistication or aesthetic quality that is not found on the other channel so to compare him to other people who do the same work in Russia he does carry the air of an auteur of someone who understands and cares about quality and that degree of cultural sophistication I think does make him an interesting figure and he's retained don't just take my word for it he's retained the affection or at least there's this great word in Russian which essentially means someone is handshakeable which means he's kind of welcomed in certain whatever the subculture or community of people is within that community he's considered handshakeable and Ernst is largely handshakeable among Russia's cultural elite people who do consider themselves liberals who do consider themselves anti-Putin somehow there's something about Ernst and his discerning on certain questions air that allows him to retain that handshakeable quality and that's what made him interesting to me No I think that and that in the end is why the book is something you don't see all that often in our sort of who's up who's down political coverage which is why I found it so interesting so tell me first of all the between two fires you know you could pick it up and be forgiven for thinking like you know are we talking about that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin what are the what are the two fires in the book's title? Well it comes from a Russian phrase which literally means between two fires which I thought had a nice literary ring to it it's essentially close to not the same thing as between a rock and a hard place but it gets to this idea of navigating yourself between two forces that are much larger than you right it gets to the kind of impossible smallness of the individual between two larger forces that are objectively dominating maybe not quite insurmountable but the trick is how do you navigate yourself between them how do you find the path from out of between those two fires and making it out the other side is really just about the best outcome available I think embedded in the phrase and my understanding of it or at least in the way I deploy it in the book it's kind of it suggests that there are no perfect outcomes here when you're stuck between two fires the kind of survival equilibrium is the best you could hope for and it's about balancing and navigating those two forces that are much bigger than your own well you know I think that was a very powerful metaphor and there's actually there's another quote in the book that is reminiscent of the book's title one of my favorite chapters is where you are going to Russia's essentially only major museum of the Gulag which features a classic state takeover and lots of political intrigue as a country that's really not come to terms with its own history is essentially not only one of the themes of your book but it's one of the great themes I think of its whole post-Soviet story and you quote the great poet Anna Akhmatova who observed after the death of Stalin now the two Russia's are eyeball to eyeball those who were in prison and those who put them there well essentially flash forward 70 years and that's still essentially the raw material of the country and that's very much the story that you're talking about that everybody is compromised and both the kind of victim of an overbearing state and yet also compromised in having to work with it if they wanna operate in it and that's the story I've earned you told so for me that chapter I think about the politics the unsupportable politics if you will of a museum about the Gulag in Putin's Russia that was I think my favorite chapter which characters do you think you learned the most from in reporting this book? You know I'll answer that in a second I'm glad you quoted the Akhmatova line because that was an important chapter for me to write and to research really to understand how much of Russia's current I think the degree to which it doesn't understand itself and how much that determines the way Russians and Russia as a state acts that there's so much unprocessed gestalt that has been left to just fester in a corner untended to and oftentimes purposely ignored is really explains a lot I think about the way Russia operates as a state in society today and there was another scene in that Pirm chapter where a former someone who was a prisoner at the Pirm camp who became a human rights activist Sergei Kovalev he was a political prisoner then a human rights activist and then did some outside curatorial work for the museum he visited the museum one day with some German students who became very perturbed when they saw Kovalev shaking hands and acting generally friendly with another employee of the museum who was a former prison guard so there was a former prisoner and a former prison guard who were both now helping to create exhibits at the museum and the German students who were a product of Germany's very admirable post-war reckoning with its dark history were aghast by this bonhomie between a prison guard and a prisoner, right? It's how could you ever imagine a scene in which someone who was at Auschwitz is shaking hands and smiling with a guard from Auschwitz? It's an overly dramatic metaphor that doesn't exactly fit the case but nonetheless that's what the German students had in mind and they became very upset and they wanted to leave and what kept them from leaving was a very impassioned lecture, I guess, from Kovalev where he explained essentially this notion that Ahmata was summed up so beautifully and poignantly in one sentence which is there was less of a difference between me and this guard than you think. In fact, we were all trapped in kind of the same prison together and there was nothing so different about him or his fate or rather it was just an accident of fate that meant he was the guard and I was the prisoner and there's a line from one of my favorite Russian authors Sergei Davlatov that I quote at the beginning of the book and he was a prison guard early in his life. He was sent as part of his conscripted military service to be a prison guard in the north of Soviet Union in the 70s and he wrote a series of diary entries from that experience or during that experience and one of them was saying it was as if he just walked through the wrong door and ended up a prison guard when he easily could have gone through the other door and been the prisoner and I think it's that notion of how similar or overlapping those two positions are in Russia as opposed to say a place like Germany that makes Russian history and Russia's present reality so complicated and so interesting for me ultimately that the overlap is very subtle or at times non-existent and there isn't this sense of the other like say there was in Germany's horrific 20th century history. Yeah you have the two rushes both talking to each other and coexisting but even being the same person in a way that the idea of a whole population that was both victims and victimizers is something that is really, I think that's probably the thing that's most different say here in our divided politics where we have non-intersecting, non-talking to each other to America's, this is almost the exact opposite is a phenomenon you're exploring through this vein of compromises. So I wanna get to the audience questions in just a second but two quick ones for you. First of all Crimea obviously and Ukraine remains top of mind both here in Washington as well as in terms of the foreign policy challenges that are facing Russia today. You address this in the form of a very memorable character zookeeper of Crimea but putting aside the sort of personality of it what can you tell us about where that is headed? Why is it still a hot conflict? It seems amazing and yet there haven't been meaningful negotiations. You just did a big profile of the now famous President Zelensky in Ukraine. Do you think that developments here as well as elsewhere mean that there's more pressure for Ukraine and Russia to come to the table now? Do you see a resolution of this conflict? I'm not sure about a resolution because what you hear in both capitals Kiev and Moscow is that for there to be a final resolution it would have to end on the terms of each capital would only agree to a final resolution on their own terms and that's just definitionally unlikely if not impossible the conflict can't end on the terms of both of the two conflicting parties at the same time but there does seem to be momentum and interest for some sort of quasi resolution or at last at least a sustained quieting of that conflict. I think that neither certainly not Putin anymore sees great utility in keeping that war hot or particularly active and very much and quite openly would like to end the Western sanctions that are a result of that war and I think would be willing to do what would the minimal requirement to lift those sanctions and in New President Lenin-Merzelensky you also have someone who is quite vocal and open about his desire to end that war. In fact, for someone who didn't run on a very substantive political campaign, presidential campaign, it was much more about a kind of mood and in general image the one thing he was specific about during the campaign was about ending that war and that seems to be a promise he's pretty intent and transparently intent about delivering on so that creates some room for a kind of resolution that would maybe be an end to the war and all but name or rather a kind of de facto but not totally de jure end to the war but from Russia's perspective, the whole reason for there being a war in the Donbass in the first place and for Russia continuing to support it through military and other covert means is to create this perpetual wedge or lever of influence over Ukrainian politics for some indeterminate or indefinite period to come and I think Putin would be loathe to lose that instrument, though he does seem to be equally concerned about ending sanctions so that might be the only place where there could be some room for a maneuver going forward. So you were spending time obviously reporting this story about Zelensky first you started it before the events now in question on Capitol Hill had while they were actually playing out unbeknownst to us and then continued it once the whistleblowers complaint became public and this became an impeachment inquiry. So give us a little bit of a sense of how do they, how are people in Kiev, how do they look at this American political explosion around their country? I mean obviously it can't be, it's not good for Ukraine to be in world headlines in this respect but what were people there telling you about this? How do they perceive President Trump and what he was trying to do? Has it diminished the view of the United States and made people more cynical about politics? Definitely yes to your last question. Ukraine and I've been going there and reporting there for some time for about the same time I've lived in Russia which is eight years so I've been going back and forth to Kiev since before the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and certainly consistently after and there was this really sweet affection for the American idea that you had in Ukraine and among especially a younger generation of Ukrainian politicians, people who came into politics after the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Yeah it was what was different about Kiev versus Moscow. Right, there really was this charming maybe a bit outdated and kind of naive notion of city on a hill image of America and that certainly has been tarnished if not entirely dismantled by this scandal. It would be hard to look if you were a Ukrainian politician to look at what's happening in Washington under Trump and still think of the US as the shining city on a hill whose politics are to be admired and emulated. That would be just objectively strange thing to think at this point. So it certainly has affected Ukrainian perceptions of America and in this political class most of all the sense I got frankly which was just frustrating from a repertorial perspective maybe interesting for you all was the extent to which figuratively in some cases I got the situation quite literally the Ukrainian politicians were hiding under their desks after this story broke. I mean nobody wanted to touch it for obvious political reasons there's just no good would come of Zelensky or anyone around him getting themselves involved in this story one way or another either Trump survives and is reelected and is around for another five years and if you put yourself into the story one way that he's even more mad at you and thinks even more poorly of you than he seems to have already and on the other side you could end up an enemy of the Democrats with Biden central figure in this whole story what if he's elected president I mean so there's whatever way you insert yourself in the story you're gonna make enemies that you don't wanna make for totally understandable reasons if you're a relatively small country like Ukraine that is dependent on American assistance and it's kind of an unbroken bipartisan American diplomatic consensus or support for the country that's existed for 20 years. Do you think though I've been surprised I mean I see all of that and you know I think people have done a good job of conveying that your reports and others from the scene do you think that I'm surprised that they've never really actually been forced in any way though to lay out you know just even the basic vaccine and we have a drip drab of background reports and things like that for example it's still at issue what did they know and when did they know it with regards to the holdup of nearly 400 million dollars and congressionally appropriated aid that's a very significant issue as regards to what Trump did or didn't do in the trial and yet you know they've never except through blind quotes and anonymous reports in the New York Times and other media they've never been forced to sort of even give a pretty straightforward accounting of what actually happened from their point of view are we ever gonna hear that? I'm not sure I mean I would like to be you know among those whom they tell it to if they ever do and I've certainly tried and in this sense I would say Zelensky has very quickly matured into a seasoned politician I was at this marathon that they call it a press marathon not a press conference press marathon held at a food hall in Kiev which went on I think in the end for 14 or 16 hours I mean is there from 10 in the morning until past midnight? He didn't say anything. And that was his great you have to hand it to him I mean he sat there answering questions for 16 hours and this question came up over and over and over again what did you know when did you know exactly the way you're phrasing it and he somehow managed to wiggle out of it not just once or twice but for 16 hours he managed to ostensibly answer the question without answering the question and that's not accidental right I mean I think his task for that day and beyond is to not give red meat to either side to not put himself at the center of this he doesn't want Ukrainian officials being subpoenaed testifying before Congress having to answer those kind of direct yes no black or white questions that you're alluding to because that would put Ukraine in the tough position it doesn't wanna be and if he emerged from this press marathon talking to every American reporter who could get him or herself to Kiev without giving a concrete answer if he managed to avoid doing it for 16 hours I think we can say he knows how to avoid doing it and I don't know if that's gonna change anytime soon. All right well stay tuned we'll see whether Ukrainian reporters have an interest in knowing what their country knew and what it didn't so I wanna bring the audience in I would say there's so many of you let's in the interest of time really make it a question tell us who you are and who you're with and we have some microphones here so we'll just jump right in to these questions and see how many we can get through ma'am you can go ahead right there thanks I'm Dr. Caroline Poplin this is way outside the you don't know any of the places that I deal with my question is do you have any sense of what Putin has over Trump why Trump turns to Jell-O whenever Putin is around he's never given him a nickname he just Putin has a spell over him and I wondered if spending all this time in Moscow you had any sense of what's going on? I'm glad we led with the easy question forgive me as the moderator for failing to ask this already I mean if I knew the true answer to that I wouldn't be sitting on it and just accidentally reveal it at the Q&A yeah don't tell David Remnick that he knows the answer oh by the way I found that out two years ago I just forgot to put it in the page of the New Yorker he's also got the tax return but the answer the reason I haven't put this in the page of the New Yorker anywhere else is that I definitely don't know and suspect maybe I'm letting myself off the hook I don't know because there isn't anything is my suspicion time could totally make a fool of me I'm open to that possibility also but I think it's if I had to wager it's a combination of one that Putin, Russia every time Trump hears those words there for him code words for his election somehow being having an asterisk next to it that his victory in 2016 the biggest victory in American political history however he likes to talk about it that he can't totally claim that as some glorious win because people bring up Putin, Russia, Hackers, whatever and it drives him crazy and so to talk negatively about Putin specifically to admit or chastise Putin for election interview in 2016 it would really be an ego hit for him and so it becomes this kind of impossibility to give a voice to that and the second thing we see it not just with Putin but with Erdogan Netanyahu MBS and Saudi Arabia he just has a kind of infinity affinity or even envy for autocrats and I think he just feels more comfortable in their company and sort of aspires to that style of rule and doesn't understand you know why he can't just have it like that here and so you know there's something about Putin especially being this alpha male figure that Trump so desperately wants to be seen as himself that it's a further reason why maybe you know he doesn't do the nicknames and all the rest as you say but you know as concerns the you know infamous you know tape from the Ritz Carlton I haven't seen it and waiting for someone to show it to me well the conventional wisdom is that of course Putin in his latest move is in transferring power from the executive to the parliament is trying to maintain power some way but is it possible from another perspective that he really wants out and that he wants a Russia that has a new system in which the executive is not more of a system like the German system that he foresees it that it's better that you have a whole parliament of I don't know how many have a parliament that's six hundred vote on who the prime minister should be rather than the public who can be easily corrupted voting for the president in other words this is not as in this is his way out maybe I mean you know one of the reasons I wrote this book to Susan's question earlier is that I found myself so incapable and therefore kind of exhausted by Putin's psychology which was a growing requirement of the job as a American reporter in Moscow and I just wasn't getting anywhere with that and found it more interesting and just more doable to do psychology is of people a few lower a few rungs lower many rungs lower were more accessible and understandable to me so Putin's psychology I wouldn't claim to or motives understand we can make some analytical guesses about them but your theory is as good as any it does seem clear that whether it's because it's idea grows out of his political philosophy or it's a way of assuaging the elite that the next president will have much less power than putin did there won't be a second putin whether that's because putin had some epiphany about you know the nature of political power in Russia or he did that because otherwise he could never get consensus among elite groups for there to be a successor I don't know but like I said with with this book I happily got out of the the putin psycho analysis game and your your your version sounds as good as any okay let's I want to try somebody in the back all the way in the back there thank you hi I'm from Ukrainian Embassy and I'll be just say that I'm still not acquainted with the book but I will definitely look into it as soon as I have the ability to take my hands on it and thank you for the very interesting discussion I just wanted to ask you while you were working on your book did you get the feeling that Russia is actually changing that something drives it towards the critical change that not only all the neighboring countries like my like my motherland but maybe all the other countries in the world are waiting and just a little remark I don't know how about my countryman but I'm personally a fan of the United States and I don't know with the documents that were approved with the financial aid and everything that a little misunderstanding of the scandal seems a little bit shuttered so back to my question and if you could answer it that would be fantastic thank you sure the whole last chapter of the book actually is about the question of generational change and will the sorts of compromises that I talk about and narrate in the bulk of the book with the with the main characters you know will that carry forward in the next generation and how will the next generation think about their own place in society and relations with the state and will they be ready to make the same kind of compromises will they have to make the same kind of compromises uh... I don't totally answer all those questions with great specificity or finality in in the last chapter uh... of the book but I do think things are happening generational processes are happening and the generation that is coming of age now is different insignificant important ways than those that have come before it for the most immediate reason because of their what their formative experiences were that it's the first generation that didn't live through and wasn't shaped by the dual traumas of the soviet collapse and then the hardship uh... and and kind of lack uh... void of meaning uh... of of the nineties which seems very formative formative trauma for many people in in russia many people uh... in in my book who lived through cynical double-think years of the late soviet union and then the abject uh... chaos and hardship of the nineties those dual traumas seem quite powerful in the lives many people really shaped how they think of themselves and their certainly their relationship to the state now there's a whole generation just didn't have those experiences by dint of biology the year they were born they grew up in a different time there's the so-called putin generation people who were born around or after two thousand who quite literally known or not lived under any other president and they seem to have degrees of trust of openness uh... aren't quite as scared or scarable uh... with talk of say you know return to the anarchy of the nineties that they never saw uh... so i do notice a different level of essentially civic or social trust which i think is a pretty important building block people ready to enter into bonds of one kind or another with their peers with the belief that those groups or groupings however even informal might actually lead to something i guess you can say less less cynicism or trust in less cynicism and that could prove to be a powerful uh... factor for as this generation comes of age okay uh... i think we probably have time for just one or two others so uh... go ahead right right up here no right here no right here this guy right here either i'm timothy i go to university pennsylvania here for the semester alright so if you were in russia you would be part of generation that uh... so my question i'm not uh... my question does kind of concern that though so you talked a little bit about the city on the hill uh... in that idea uh... so when you think about the idea of american exceptionalism do you think that there's uh... kind of a journey back to maybe people in europe holistically but also in the ukraine kind of developing that idea of american exceptionalism back uh... kind of building that back up yeah i mean that's what i uh... my my colleague in the ukrainian embassy seems to disagree which is uh... welcome thing to hear uh... but my impression was that the notion of america being the land of some unique and sacred political sphere had been really tarnished not just by this latest in particular scandal involving uh... trump but but you know the whole myriad of the last you know twenty years of american foreign policy have done their own you know damage to to america uh... presenting itself as this unique uh... and kind of particular uh... saintly uh... state in world affairs but as concerns ukraine specifically uh... the way that the united states provoked uh... the united states political leadership provoked political scandal that has proved quite damaging to ukraine and that in its particulars was just very tawdry uh... i think has done damage this notion of american exceptionalism can can it be rebuilt or not uh... i don't know i mean i think that's a question larger than just american ukrainian relations right but ukraine will take its cues from how the u s acts in the world in a broader broader sense and you do see it interestingly the same kind of notion of america being uh... this unique uh... or home to unique political system among russian liberals as well that russia i should say in the community of russian liberals in moscow and other big cities you can also find this so much as a meeting in a phone booth right well yeah a big big big phone booth uh... but uh... yet not a hugely representative sample of the country at large but you know you can feel this this room a few times over uh... that's another place where you have i find uh... one of the i don't say totally outmoded that that is too sad but but you know the admiration of america you don't find uh... that widely in other places in europe right go to western europe but germany i don't think you'd find that same attitude uh... toward the u american political system like you can find in in ukraine and among uh... russian political liberals that really look to america as an example that actually reminds me of something uh... in understanding who urnst is we began this conversation as he narrated his own intellectual and political journey he said something very interesting which i think speaks to much wider experience of his generation which was he really stifled under the controls of the late soviet union he thought that the late soviet union was this totally bumbling you know inefficient uh... system on its last gas run by a bunch of you know wheezing grandpas and he assumed everything must be the polar opposite in the country and system that presented itself as the opposite to that system so in all the ways that the soviet union was running on fumes the united states must be this really vital energized place full of all sorts of uh... political dynamism but also cultural dynamism and he and his friends the other thing allowed them to think that is because of the iron curtain they never wedged the u.s. so it's much easier to create that fantasy in your mind we've never seen the real thing and as he narrated to me once uh... soviet union fell once he had the opportunity to travel more widely once the united states itself began to you know act on the world stage in the nineties in the two thousand the scale fell from his eyes as as he said and these uh... romantic fanciful notions about u.s. being a shining city on on the hill uh... were replaced by a rather cynical understanding of world affairs in which everybody's tainted no one no one state or system can claim superiority over any other and to do so is just hypocritical uh... positioning and and it was interesting to hear him narrate essentially the growth of his own cynicism which is very essential to his uh... how he sees himself and his job and i think is also representative of a wider swath of his generation which includes putin they're roughly the same age and i think putin's experience with the west would be relatively similar i mean listening to you and give that description i think it's a perfect you know sort of big note to close this on me you're describing it seems to me that a reputants view of uh... the united states and it's its role in the world as well which is uh... essentially a very real politic idea in which uh... you know no one country has any uh... claim to moral superiority over any other and we may cloak uh... our uh... goals in in noble sounding language but uh... essentially operate from the same base principles that he thinks everybody else does all right one final question and then uh... onto the reception so uh... right here in yeah thanks very much uh... thank you very much and uh... i came a bit late i apologize but what remarkable remarks uh... talking about wheezing grandpas and grandmas uh... so uh... i've i've worked in the arctic air region of uh... which includes uh... as we know russia and alaska and the nordics and uh... govich have made a comment about the arctic being his own a piece in cooperation so whichever generation and my question brings it uh... wonder your point of view in terms of i think and correct me if i'm wrong the recent uh... announcement that ukraine is going to uh... or by lizolensky that ukraine is going to engage in investigations regarding ambassador yovanovich and i guess it was some comments made by parnos in a recent interview and uh... i wonder with respect to the triangle of russia uh... u.s ukraine how do you see this dynamic what are the risks uh... and and what are the benefits uh... that could emerge out of this thank you uh... for my reporting in ukraine going back to the spring and early summer before the scandal broke it seems that lizolensky team really hoped to somehow convince a corral trump into taking more active uh... position in exactly that triangle and to kind of be the muscle in the room in negotiations with russia and uh... somehow lend uh... u.s power and credibility to making uh... to make ukraine's position itself more forceful in negotiations with russia of course it's hard for ukraine and russia to negotiate on their own in a room that power in balance is just objectively not equal but if the u.s is standing in the corner you know with its arms folded uh... then then zelensky's position would be that much stronger so that was the initial hope uh... it's clear that that's not gonna happen now for all sorts of reasons uh... trump is not gonna get involved in in that way if he ever was after the scandal broke and now impeachment you know trump is not gonna i think rush to the table to aid zelensky in in negotiations that would be politically impossible and just not fitting with trump's personality uh... and i think that's one of the reasons that zelensky became ready or understood that the window of opportunity was was had appeared for dealings with uh... directly but there's still a lot of iterations in this story to come the impeachment uh... stories maybe only just beginning as as susan alluded to at the beginning of our uh... talk and so how tenable the ukrainian position of we're not involved you know see nothing hear nothing uh... is you know maybe that's actually not uh... gonna work uh... for the duration of the impeachment scandal and maybe the indication uh... that they would look into an investigate the uh... suppose that alleged trailing of uh... for best you want to which is a sign that that position is evolving or being forced uh... to evolve all right well stay tuned i think it's the answer but uh... joshua what a well time conversation uh... again i really want to plug the book you'll be downstairs selling copies and signing them for you uh... there's free booze courtesy of our wonderful hosts at carnegie uh... and so i want to thank all of you for sharing some of your busy time with us and again congratulations joshua it's a great book and i hope you all read it that reception is downstairs by the way good job you are officially launched we did it thank you here uh... how did i do this uh...