 Hi everybody, thank you so much for coming out tonight My name is Sarah Baleen. I'm the program manager for the New America Fellows program, and I'm so pleased to welcome you Thank you to core for co-hosting this event with us for sharing their beautiful space with us I'm so pleased to welcome Joshua Yaffa tonight for his new book between two fires truth Ambition and compromise in Putin's Russia So Josh was a 2016 New America fellow and he's a correspondent for the New Yorker based out of Moscow And tonight Josh will be joined by Miriam elder Miriam is a senior politics reporter at Buzzfeed Before we get started I have a couple of quick housekeeping points first of all And I think there are some in the room if you're a journalist and You're looking for funding for mentorship a community of peers to work with you as you develop your next idea Please consider applying to a new America fellow The fellowship application closes at the beginning of February and if you have any questions Please let me know I'd be happy to chat more about it with you And I'm sure Josh would be happy to share his experience as well, which I hope was positive We also have two other new America NYC events happening this week one tomorrow night here at the core club featuring Lee Drupman and his book Breaking the two-party doom loop. So if you're interested in that event or our event later in the week Please visit our website or ask any of the new America staff my last bit of housekeeping before I turn it over to our Guests of honor is that Josh's book is out in the lobby and will be for sale after the event And Josh would be happy to sign it for you. So please consider buying a copy supporting Josh Supporting our bookselling partner books on call. So with that, please join me in welcoming Josh and Miriam Hi everybody, thanks for joining us Josh congratulations on writing a really compelling book that is sort of a series of portraits of people who are living in Russia today or who I've lived there recently and are Live their lives making compromises so they can figure out how to survive and thrive in Putin's Russia and What I'd love to start off with is so You're dropping this book at a time when reporting on Russia is incredibly polarized We have a fairly black-and-white portrait of the country here in the country in in America Having gone through Russia gate now everything with the impeachment trial even And I'd love to start off with like was that your intention? Was it your intention to? To show us that it wasn't a black-and-white country or what was it and I'd love to hear your thoughts And I know that you've written a bit about this in the introduction and if you want to read something from it Thanks Miriam and thanks to everyone for coming tonight. It wasn't my intention I didn't really understand what my intention was right away when I Got to Moscow in 2012 when you were there working as a journalist Also, and it took some time for me to understand what it was I wanted to say at least in in book length and as you alluded to the first prism that I started to view Russia through and use in my journalistic work was essentially Putin and his minions the many mini putans around the country Versus the brave mini Sakharovs or Solzhenitsyns the the people who Who do exist and who do bravely at great risk themselves? oppose or Stand up to Putin's regime and that's an understandable and very compelling journalistic story That's definitely true, but it also as I came to understand with time Misses a larger and in some sense I think more true story about Russia as I came to experience and Understand it which is about all the people in the middle who are really in Their everyday accommodations and even compromises Not that dissimilar to you or I or in other words I'm not sure that if we scramble the snow globe of fate that I would be a brave Human rights campaigner or opposition politician who at great risk to myself and family Stood up to the Putin regime. I might look for another path to realize my talents make use of my education have a nice life for myself and my family and Just as would be the case just as I knew would be true for me So it's true for so many people in Russia and I felt like understanding the way that actually works For them in their everyday lives might be a way of understanding Russia outside of that dichotomy which I Began to understand had limited explanatory or analytical power It wasn't until I came across an essay by a Russian Sociologist named Yuri Lovato That I had a name for what it was I was thinking and seeing in this kind of creeping way and the essay is called the Wiley man And it was Lovato's attempt to make sense of what had happened to his fellow citizens in the years after The Soviet collapse why hadn't they become these? free-thinking self-actualized Democrats as maybe some people would expect when the Soviet Union collapsed instead they had conformed and Compromised and become very adaptive citizens of a new Russia Now read just a line or two from that essay The Russian Wiley man Lovato wrote not only tolerates deception But is willing to be deceived and even requires self-deception for the sake of his own self-preservation He adapts to social reality looking for over sights and gaps in the ruling system Looking to use the rules of the game for his own interest But at the same time and no less important he is constantly trying to circumvent those very same rules I'll read another just a couple paragraphs from the introduction where I begin With that prism or framework of the Wiley man to make sense of the world around me that I saw in Moscow in recent years In Moscow and in my travels around the country I met fiercely proud and brilliant men and women Activists economists journalists business owners who believed the best if not the only way to realize their vision was in concord with the state It was hard to believe they were wrong nor was I confident I would choose any differently There was my friend with a graduate degree from Oxford who came back to Moscow to take a job in a state-run think tank a Place where smart young professionals thought up good ideas Half of which were implemented and the other half of which those with more worrying political implications were discarded I Would periodically have lunch with a youth activist who had been unable to resist the offer to take a seat in Parliament Where he was quickly told to vote along party lines as the Kremlin dictated or risk losing the funding for his youth programs For a while the most fashionable job in Moscow was working on state-funded urban beautification projects Expanding pedestrian zones renovating city parks launching bike-sharing programs Rethinking public transport routes such initiatives made the city undeniably more pleasant and humane With time similar efforts expanded to other cities around the country Even in the absence of larger democratic reforms if anything Russia's politics tacked in an opposite unmistakably Regressive direction its cities became more desirable attractive and enjoyable places to live a Debate emerged among my friends in Moscow Is it laudable to lens one's talents and expertise to the state so as to achieve real change on a local level? Or does this only help perpetuate an unjust and inefficient system? This question was never really settled but surfaced time and again a referendum on the permissibility of compromise that repeated at regular intervals Does harnessing the resources and power of institutions you ultimately consider malevolent to achieve something good? Mean the joke is on them or you? Although the Gulag is a mostly unhelpful metaphor for understanding Putin's Russia I found myself returning to one thing Solzhenitsyn wrote about in the camps If you're stuck inside an unjust system isn't cheating it a bit here and there for your own purposes an entirely rational even virtuous response Maybe there are no good answers to these questions an impossibility captured in the Russian saying Meshudvuh Agnya between two fires the condition of being stuck in the middle of two opposing forces bigger than yourself Making it out the other side is just about the best outcome available The more I thought and wrote about the ways people live and work in Putin's Russia The more I realized it was largely impossible to separate them into two camps the oppressed and the oppressors Yes, there were obvious victims and those whose resolute unyielding positions brought them great frustration and hardship Just as they were the unambiguously corrupt and sadistic who use the state's authority merely to line their pockets Or who got off on enacting all manner of petty cruelties But most of the people I encountered were neither They were strivers nimble and resourceful who usually set out with virtuous and thoroughly understandable motives What fascinated me were the compromises and prevarications required and bringing those Initial motives to life and how over time those concessions can change a person and the very rationale that motivated one's actions in the first place so pretty early on in the book you toy with Taking on the persona of the wily man yourself and you're weighing this decision of whether to appear on a Propaganda program on state-run TV where the whole point is to denigrate the West Could you tell us a little bit about Your decision-making process in participating in kind of the propaganda machine Whether you were successful in your goals and now with reflection whether you think it was the right decision to Do that sure there was a an element of just purely selfish Repertorial curiosity in that decision. I went in very clear-eyed that I was there to get material from my book So maybe that was maybe indeed you're right in calling that a moment of kind of wily self-justification Because they were of course getting something useful out of it, too It may be more useful in that interestingly Russian state TV is actually desperate for live Breathing Americans who are willing to be subjected to that experience on Live television, I guess there aren't that many of us in Moscow and even less who are willing to be sort of beaten around like a birthday party pinata for an hour on on television And I did it purely because I wanted to see what it was like on the Factory floor of the state propaganda enterprise, which I think I achieved somewhat And was able to narrate in the in the chapter about channel one the the main state channel where I appeared How the sashes gets made? I guess you could say and what it feels like on the receiving end of it and it was interesting I guess I should say first and foremost really frustrating but but also interesting to see how Clearly defined and ultimately inescapable my role was on the show. I was actually allowed to say Anything I wanted In that sense, I wasn't censored. They never cut off my mic Or what was the subject? What were you talking about? Lots of different things I went on half a dozen times always concerning various machinations of America. Why is America so unreliable so hypocritical? the questions were Always leading Joshua, don't you think that's when you know Obama forever ruined the wouldn't you agree Joshua that that's when Obama forever ruined? You know the image of America in the eyes of the world that sort of question But even in my Protestations, I was ultimately part of the overall spectacle because as I write about in the chapter the clever innovation of Putin era propaganda as opposed to Soviet era propaganda is that all Voices are welcome and in fact the noisier the conversation the better because everything ends up in this Cacophonous information soup that's impossible for the viewer to parse or make sense of and so me screaming and in fact the other unfortunate thing about the Nature of the show is you can say anything you want but you have to scream oftentimes to get your point across and Then you become just another screaming talking head who's interchangeable with the screaming talking head next to you and How would a viewer judge the relative merits of my points versus? Let's say a Russian parliamentarian who is another guest on the show that day who's screaming at me and we just become two screaming people whose voices somehow cancel each other out so It was interesting to observe that in action and I had written about as a Viewer an analyst of Russian state media the way that innovation works in practice the way that Russian state media for example was able to vary cleverly and successfully mask Russian responsibility for the shootdown of the MH 17 the flight over those flying over eastern Ukraine in 2014 and the way by throwing up all manner of theories That were themselves contradictory and thus Kind of absurd it couldn't actually be this and that and this other thing all at the same time But by putting up all of these theories on TV the Russian viewer was left feeling like and that other fourth version that the West was saying that it was shot down by in the Russian anti-aircraft Missile it was equally was just as unlikely or likely impossible to know with any certainty and so I was reduced essentially to a character in that same kind of Performance and I guess I'm glad I did it so as to write about it with a bit more tactile Detail, though. I also understood I was there Not by accident and not because of their generosity, right? It's sort of like legitimizing what what they want to do sure and I was a necessary or at least useful character in that drama It's actually useful to have an American come on because then the overall effect can be well see he's He sounds just like us what he's saying is no more less credible than what we have to say He's screaming just like we are so you see there's nothing so were you really screaming at points? It gets really frustrating as a video of this that we can all look up on the internet Yeah, it takes thankfully some complicated Googling likes channel one despite the amount of a huge number of resources that channel has their search engine optimization is terrible So for the fact checking of the book it actually became really difficult to find these segments They're buried and like the you know practically the dark web, which is now for my intense purposes relief But they are they are out there So my absolute favorite chapter in the book is about Dr. Lisa For those in the audience who don't know about her Maybe you could tell a little bit about her and then I'll ask you my sure questions So dr. Lisa's full name is elizaveta Glinka. She's a doctor Who spent some time in the US with her husband in the 90s? and it was there that she was introduced in Connecticut Vermont sorry to palliative care palliative medicine she worked at a hospice and was really Struck by the dignity at the patients at the hospice were treated with and Medical care like that palliative care didn't really exist at all not in the Soviet Union and not in post-soviet Russia and She on her return to Russia was the first person to bring that kind of medicine to Russia and the terminally ill Were and to large extent remain a population that Not just modern Russia, but Russia in the Soviet times either didn't really know how to Make sense of there wasn't a lot of there wasn't a lot of understanding of how to Treat and care for the terminally ill other than keeping them out of sight out of mind essentially and dr. Lisa began working with that population and also quickly began Working with another marginalized population the homeless in Moscow and started going to the Pavoletsky train station to do On-site street medical care bringing them food bringing them warm clothing And this was all at a time when Moscow you were there in those years was going through this incredible oil fueled boom this real kind of euphoric high of wealth and opportunity and People like the homeless or the terminally ill didn't really fit into that narrative And it was left to people like dr. Lisa to look after them and that gave her especially in Moscow's let's say liberal intelligentsia circles a really esteemed reputation she became quite popular and people supported her charity, which was called fair help and It was in 2014 when things really changed for her like things changed in Russia at large and for so many other people after the annexation of Crimea the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine out of her Humanitarian impulse she felt compelled To begin treating the sick and injured especially children in eastern Ukraine who were largely on rebel held territory territory Controlled by the Russia backed separatist forces and Russian direct Russian soldiers As well and that inserted her into a political battle that she didn't want anything to do with but she was willing to make that sacrifice and I think it was a sacrifice for her to become so involved in this really political Battle and to lose many friends in back in Russia Russian Liberals who thought that Russia's war in Ukraine was an outrage And dr. Lisa was somehow lending her legitimacy to that operation by making the Kremlin somehow seem much more Humanitarian than of course its intentions ever were to make Putin look like he was some great humanitarian in Ukraine rather than being the person who Started the war, but she did all of that Because for her the opportunity to save a life, especially a child's life was much more important and The Kremlin gave her incredible resources resources. She wouldn't have had on her own to do so She got planes from the emergency ministry to bring injured children out. She was able to get them hospital beds and very expensive complicated operations back in Russia and the real The thing about Russian I narrate this in different ways in the lives of different characters in the book is when the state decides To lend you a hand essentially when you fall in the state's favor the resources can be Unparalleled I write about a theater director named Karil Serebnikov Who is their premier is the premier avant-garde experimental theater director of his Generation and for a while when the state decided it had what turned out to be a fleeting interest in avant-garde culture He basked in the kinds of resources that a cultural figure a director could only dream of and the same thing was true For dr. Lisa of her mission was to help the sick and injured. There was no one who could help her do that like the state and her story ends on a very tragic note in 2015 when Russia began its military intervention in Syria. She was roped into that conflict as well. Shall we say also? To present Humanitarian face to that intervention. She traveled to Syria with the Russian military visited hospitals delivered medicines And it was on one of those trips in December 2016 flying on a Russian defense ministry plane from Sochi Shortly after takeoff the plane crashed into the Black Sea killing everyone on board including dr. Lisa So it's a dramatic and maybe in a way the most dramatic case in the entire book of where that Relationship that proximity to the state both provided someone with unparalleled opportunities To realize whatever it was that was important to them in life, but also in this direct way ended up being the thing that led to her death Yeah, part of the reason that chapter spoke to me so much aside from the fact that she is such a or was such a Compelling figure and did something so unique in Russia like she almost She almost like revolutionized the idea of charity work In Russia, it was also that it was kind of one of the cleanest examples of somebody really compromising Themselves Getting something and suffering the worst fate and I just I called out a couple of quotes That some lines that you wrote in that chapter because it was questions That was like weighing on me as I was reading the book So one as I have my terrible eyesight was You wrote her attempts at neutrality were taken as the exact opposite And then a few lines later you write she had tried to steer clear of politics But the thing about war is that it is an inherently political event and This is something that kind of hung over me as I was reading the whole book because it's it's not just war That's an inherently political event especially, you know When you're living in an authoritarian country if that's how we want to describe Putin's Russia then every choice is in some way Political and do you do you believe that there can be such a thing as like clean compromise or clean? Neutrality in a country like Russia isn't somebody always kind of choosing sides Definitely. Well, I don't know if I necessarily agree with the latter part. I'm not But I I'm definitely agree with you on the first part and that it is False to think you can engage in a clean compromise. I'm not sure that's particular to Putin's Russia I think it's more acute in Putin's Russia. I think that's probably true in lots of cases here It's probably true in Trump's Washington with lots of people who have gone into that administration one way or another Thinking that they can do some good with their expertise and experience and it turns out things are more tricky than that And the compromises you have to make along the way Change you and change the very reason maybe why you entered into them in the first place so I'm not sure, you know that there are some particularities to Putin's Russia But maybe there's also more universality in the way that compromise works and how it Changes you and the motives you set out with in the very beginning, but as for Russia today. I do think it's Sadly tragically especially for the characters in this book false to think you can engage in the kind of clean compromise You you mentioned no the state is always going to extract its pound of flesh One way or another and of course, it's just not a fair fight the resources and power of The state apparatus versus you It's always gonna come out in the long run in in the state's favor that happened with Serebnikov the theater director I mentioned who fell from grace and ended up being charged with embezzlement and ended up under house arrest He's now out from under house arrest. He's kind of had a third act a quasi resurrection after his fall From grace though that story could twist yet again, but he's definitely just as he was At the state's mercy to a certain degree when it decided it had this interest in supporting avant-garde art He was just that it's mercy just the same at its mercy when the state decided it no longer had that interest and in fact found Something useful in putting him on this kind of show trial to send a message in another way the state wanted to send A message about its support for avant-garde art art then the state wanted to send a message about you know, putting Such artists and cultural figures on notice. So he was always Mean he was he wasn't a purely passive actor in that drama But the power dynamic was such where he was always going to be in a reactive mode same thing with with dr. Lisa and So for me on the one hand there was the dr. Lisa chapter, which I really it's Her life story is just it's incredible and tragic And then the flip side for me was cut was the the chapter on Constantine Ernst Which some of you may have read because it was excerpted in the New Yorker. I find him such a difficult Character to understand and to try I was trying to understand him as like the compromises that he made For himself because on the one hand he loves art He loves to be kind of forward-looking, but he's obviously running one of you know the major propaganda outlets In the country and the question that that his life story raised for me was I would love to hear your thoughts on What's the difference between a? Compromiser and a collaborator It's a good good question in fact that very question was raised by Russian political philosopher, I guess you could say Kirill Roga of the summer and I quote that a bit in the in the prologue and he In the context of protests that were happening in Moscow at the time around municipal elections Put that very question forward and that sparked an interesting debate that I talked a bit about in the prologue because he Happened to hit on the very question that I had been Wrestling with I think there are two types of characters in the book at least the way I see it There are those whose compromise brings them into the system itself someone like Ernst he went from being this kind of counterculture Perestroika era hippie a tour who Had long hair and wore a black leather motorcycle jacket and made shows about Fossbinder movies and went to the running of the bulls and all of that which was very weird for 1990 late Soviet Union To being as you say the head of the most powerful State media outlet in the country and therefore in a certain sense as I say in the book and was excerpted in New Yorker The kind of unofficial minister of propaganda and it's a very interesting arc to me But he's someone who entered the state and became part and parcel of the Putin system. You know, he's a full-fledged inner circle member and traded in a way that's understandable to me. I don't necessarily understanding is not the same as approving let alone applauding but he Went to the one place that could give him Kind of like with Sedebnik of the director between even more exaggerated degree all the resources in the world to realize all of his creative Interests and impulses and there are there is actually a fair degree of interesting Sometimes even edgy cultural programming on channel one So he's been given this license and this instrument to produce programs That as far as Russian contemporary culture goes are really good and some of the best stuff out there The price he pays for that is also Lending his channel or or using his channel as the chief propaganda arm or one of the chief propaganda arms of Of the state, but he's really in the system. He's not using it in this Glancing episodic way like say dr. Lisa who shows up every now and then Asks Putin or those around him for something Can you change the law in a certain way so I can treat more people who fled the conflict in Ukraine? Can I have more planes to bring out more sick people? She never Join the system and as you quoted she tried Maybe not really successfully to really remain apart from it. She she insisted on her neutrality She insisted on how she was outside of politics even as that became I think a difficult position to defend nonetheless, she was not going to Cross that line and join the system in some formal way that made her a part of it She was gonna use it to her advantage and use it to do good, but she wasn't going to be One of its members whereas someone like Ernst has really gone all the way in And become exactly the thing that dr. Lisa was unwilling to and I guess I was thinking about Ernst also because in compromising himself or It's for me. It's very hard not to read him as a collaborator because he then In control of this entire propaganda unit kind of takes away the choice for compromise from all the people the Millions of Russians You know who are watching his channel and so you see you spent you spent quite a bit of time with him Did you ask him about that about the power that he felt over like the minds of millions of his citizens for him? It's a real high and I think a great joy He spoke about it a bit in the book which I quote and I also talked to some of his Friends it was interesting to talk to his one-time collaborator and one-time close friend Leonid Perfionov They made a wonderful show together in the 90s called old songs about important things That was a way to really resurrect the Soviet cultural legacy and provide it a modern context and to demonstrate to Millions of Russians who are really disoriented after the Soviet collapse that there was actually something really worthy At least in the cultural heritage from the Soviet era and here's how we can bring it forward And make sense of it in our new context and so they did that show together and they became very close friends their paths diverged as Perfionov Due to his kind of stubborn free-thinking independence Drifted or rather was pushed further and further off-state airwaves whereas Ernst doubled down on his choice and rose to this position of great power But Perfionov told me something interesting for the book that I won't be able to quote exactly verbatim, but essentially Ernst always dreamed of Being the kind of visionary who could impart a style on an era who could teach people About themselves and the time in which they lived And to provide these touchstones that helped people or guideposts even For people to make sense of of the era in which they lived and he said for for Ernst That's a great high and I'm sure a great joy and I think that's That's true Ernst that's something to me Essentially that these are my these are my people these are my fellow citizens. I love them So what I remember him telling me about Russians the millions of Russians who watch channel one and so I think he Sees himself as providing in his mind a really useful and necessary Service I guess you could say for through television Helping people make sense of the era in which they live and in a way that mirrors I think Putin's understanding of his own rule bringing people out or giving a hand to people to come out of a time of anxiety and anarchy and chaos and bring them into an era of Stability and predictability and resurgent power that image was fed back to them on the television screen and helped them Move into that new era. I think that's how Ernst would see his role How did you write this book without judgment? Because like he you know hearing that that point of view that's coming from him or Hearing how like he loved modern art not that I'm making a comparison between Putin's Russia and Nazi Germany But I just like had the name of Riefenstahl like floating You know in the back of my head and how did you then this book is written in such a way where you're like These are people who exist Was it hard not to to write about it with judgment? Is that something you tried? Definitely tried to do exactly that. I'm glad it reads that way part of the the answer was solved in the Pre-writing or even pre-reporting casting phase of the book I guess you could say and when I was searching for characters and I was clear from the very beginning that I wanted to write about people That I would be able to emerge from the reporting and writing process not having judged Not having reached a definitive moral conclusion about were they good were they bad did I approve or disapprove of their compromise? So I was very aware from the beginning that if someone seemed either just too cynical to transparently Selfish in their motivations and in what guided their compromise. I wasn't interested and at the other end if someone was just too much Veered too much to the kind of Sakharov model someone who really sacrificed Everything and was you know stubbornly stubbornly refused to compromise that also wasn't interesting Although there is one character. I think the book who gets close to that the priest Pavel a little game who really resisted the church's growing proximity to the state in the Putin years, but nonetheless my principle was I want to find people who challenge or make impossible my own conclusive moral judgment and I think or I guess I succeeded if you're saying the book reads as As you say it does and I'm glad to hear but that that was an important element to me of the book And I and I think one of the main ways I solved it was in who I picked to write about So there's a chapter where you you like go inside the mind of Basically like a Russian nationalist in Crimea and this is one of those chapters where you're reminded why Like white white books are written. This isn't this could never have been a story, right? It would have probably been torn apart on the internet like why do we need this point of view? But this is a man who he owns two zoos in Crimea and you describe him You know, they're they're fans of Putin fans of the Kremlin They see a Lenin statue fallen on the ground and they start crying as a family They embrace Russia's annexation of Crimea And why why do you think that? Going into like his mind and explaining what's motivating him is important I guess I would you know, it's not a perspective that makes it across in in US media Often and possibly ever so I'm curious as a reader What do you want me or us to walk away with as a reader from? From getting to know that guy. Well, I definitely knew I wanted a character from Crimea for maybe exactly that reason that it's it's a place that We heard a lot about in 2014 and then kind of disappeared from the media radar for understandable reasons First and foremost, unfortunately logistical. It's very hard to get to post annexation Crimea and I narrate a bit in the book about the various logistical rigor moral involved of getting to Kiev getting a pass from the Ukrainian authorities Traveling down across a very fraught land border with two border crossing. So it's just it's hard to get to Crimea and after 2014, I think media interest in Crimea quickly waned and new conflicts and crises Emerged and so there was this place where these incredibly intense and bizarre Events happened and then we we all collectively myself included Put our attention Elsewhere and I wanted to understand what actually had happened. What's happened since and to also take Seriously, I guess why was it that not just Putin, but so many Russians? welcomed the annexation of Crimea found something really just and correct in it and I didn't want since I'm writing a book about Russia and Russians and especially trying to understand their Psychological inner lives. I felt like it would be only correct to understand From the ground, what was it like both in those sort of heady strange days of 2014 and since and why might someone have welcomed the annexation of Crimea something that to us without much kind of interrogation or examination we just dismiss as you know legal and Unjust and all that which is not incorrect But why was it that millions of people thought otherwise millions of people who most interesting to me if you sat down with them and listen to them could sound eminently reasonable and Understandable with personal experiences and histories that made sense within the context of their own lives and this guy Oleg Zubkov who is ethnically Russian but had lived in Crimea with his family for many years was exactly that I should say His opinion of Russia and annexation changes dramatically what he experiences and lives through in as a new citizen of Russia in post annexation Crimea really Disappoints him to put it mildly and he because he really sours on Annexation and it turns against him in this very Kafka-esque way where he's wrapped up into all sorts of absurd legal battles and the very existence of his parks is threatened and he really feels like No small degree of buyer's remorse shall we say even as he acknowledges in this very Russian Fatalistic or stoic way like well, you know, I got what I asked for so I guess I shouldn't complain, but nonetheless Annexation has not turned out for him the way he thought but the fact is as you say he was very much a raw raw pro-russia pro-Putin patriot in 2014 and I Thought that was an interesting and important perspective to get in the book because How else do we make sense of those events and why they happened? It wasn't just Putin alone deciding although that is actually What made it all possible, but it wouldn't have been possible for Putin to snap his fingers and decide to do that if there Wasn't this pre-existing sentiment that I wanted to understand and explore so you've mentioned Sahar of insolvency needs in a couple of times and the history books are usually written Through you know with with those men as as main characters And as I got to the end of the book I started thinking like oh this whole idea of compromise It seems to rest on the idea of accepting Putin as like the forever ruler of Russia is That correct is like do you think that that reporting on Russia? Being so much about the machinations in the Kremlin and then Focusing on opposition to Putin. Do you think that's the wrong way to report on Russia? I don't think it's necessarily the wrong way, but I do think it's the incomplete way to report around about Russia And it depends on what you want out of your news and what you're looking for as a reader that the Political story really is Putin centric. That's not an exaggeration. He does hold an outsized Monopolistic hold on power in Russia. So if you want to understand the political course of the country, it's unavoidably correct to focus on Putin and those around him and to play Putinology in the way that Kremlinology was the way that a generation previous or two made sense of what was happening in the Soviet Union and there is something interesting Happening with the opposition as well and that also deserves our attention especially the summer we spoke a bit about there were some protests that threatened to at least Not topple Putin, but at least scramble the kind of governing Architecture the rules of the game for for Putin and those around him and all those are interesting and important stories I just don't think it gets across what it's actually like to live in Russia and to be there circa 2020 I don't think this book was Partially written I guess as a way of saying you know other metaphorically literally handing to someone who asks was it really like to live in Russia, you know, maybe I read your articles about various political things and You know analyzing Putin Trump what's really going on and all that and if someone says well What's what's it really like to to begin Russia to live in Russia? I hope this book is at least partially An answer to that. So you wrote this book while Russia gate, I mean I assume you wrote this book while Russia gate had like reached its frenzy, right? where like Rachel Maddow was unspooling things every evening How did you personally manage the demands of trying to keep in touch with what your editors were probably screaming at you from New York? versus what you were Seeing in Russia and what you were wanting to focus on with the book was that hard Yeah, though, maybe I kind of benefited from a bifurcated working life where I could feed the beast of Russia mania in 2017 to 16 17 and then sort of retreat to the book. Those were the years when I was Reporting the book. I hadn't yet sat down to write. So it was actually a relief to fly to perm for example to even fly to Chechnya felt like a bit of a break from Trying to answer what ultimately turned out to be the unanswerable maybe because there is no answer at the heart of the question in terms of Trump Russia and Trump Putin and what really Happened there. I never solved it nor did my colleagues I guess to my relief better if I couldn't solve it because I'm glad that no one else quite could either which maybe means it is an unsolvable Question and it was frustrating First and foremost as a reporter like like you you understand if you do want to It's not just because I want to please my editors It's my own internal drive as a reporter to get to the bottom of things So it was frustrating to feel like you were banging your head against a wall Repeatedly On on Trump Russia stuff, but I actually enjoyed I was glad that there was this place to retreat to and I could go talk to Dr. Lisa's Husband an incredibly stoic and generous man who's quite Welcoming to me and quite pleased I guess that's the right word to narrate the story of his wife's life and or fly to perm where I wrote about this museum set on the site of a former prison colony it was Rewarding to be able to get into what I felt like was quote real Russia or back to understanding Russia as Russia as opposed to Russia through the prism of Trump So I was gonna have to do the Trump stuff regardless so better that I had this other Parallel reporting life to fall back on