 Good afternoon everybody and thank you for joining us here today. My name is Joshua Tucker. I'm the director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University and this is our first event actually for the Jordan Center that we've ever held in Washington DC outside of New York but it's also the first event and the first of what we hope will be many in the years to come that's jointly cosponsored by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the United States Institute of Peace here in Washington DC who are obviously our hosts here today. I want to thank all of you who are joining us on video. I want to thank those of you who brave the Canadian wildfires to make it here in person today in DC. I'm heading back to New York afterwards so I hear it's even more going on there but it's a great pleasure to have all of you here today to join us for what I think will be an incredibly important conversation and I personally for one am considering myself unbelievably fortunate to be able to share the stage with our distinguished panelists. The plan for today is that we have I've asked each of the panelists to prepare about five to seven minutes of opening remarks. I will then ask them some follow-on questions based on their remarks and then we'll hopefully have the last 15 or 20 minutes to open it up to questions from the audience. Those of you who are watching online you can also ask questions as well they will be hand delivered to me on stage is my understanding but we're all very much looking forward to the discussion here today. I'm going to introduce each of our speakers in turn in the entrance of speed before their opening remarks. There are you know pages and pages I could spend the whole hour speaking of the accolades of our panelists I'm going to keep it really brief you know where you can find out more about them. So we're going to start off to the left with my colleague Dr. Evgenia Albut who is a Russian investigative journalist a political scientist author and a radio host. She has been the political editor and then editor in chief and CEO of the New Times a Moscow based Russian language independent political weekly since 2007 which I'm sure most of you here in this room know. She has spent I'm very pleased and honored to let you know that the final part is she spent the past year as the first distinguished journalist in residence that we've ever had at the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Evgenia? Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me and it's a great pleasure to be in such a respectable institution such a great building so many times I passed by and I always wanted to come in. So thank you very much for inviting me it's a great pleasure. Before I say anything else I want to say that as I say each time I talk in any audience about anything related to Russia and this horrible war that Putin and Russian army is conducting in Ukraine that I'm sorry for what Putin and his army is doing in Ukraine I am responsible for this if for nothing else but because I was among you know these active members of the Russian opposition I ran an opposition magazine I ran an opposition you know political show however we failed and we allowed Putin and because of our failure this disaster happened so once again I bear my responsibility for that even though I've never of course you know voted for Putin and was in a position to Putin from day one the title of this panel the impact of the war in Ukraine on Russian civil society but Russia's society sees to exist one million or so according to the Secretary of State Blinken left Russia and scattered over countries and continents these are politically activists and journalists first and foremost who over the last few years time and again went out on the streets in protests against Putin and his fascist regime they were beaten arrested fined and jailed those who stayed are in jail now all my friends each and every one of my friend is in prison as we speak Alexei Navalny the leader of the Russian opposition sentenced to nine years in maximum security prison and he's expecting another trial in 12 days most likely he's going to get another 30 years in jail I was at his previous court hearings conducted in his inside the panel colony number six his last remarks were devoted to the brutal war in Ukraine and his condemnation of Putin and his generals for this evil war my other friend Michael Krieger Mikhail Krieger a native of Dnipro Ukraine was sentenced to seven years in the labor camp he made his last remarks when he was sentenced in Ukrainian in Moscow my another close friend Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight years and six months for a video piece on atrocities committed by the Russian army in Butcher answering a question on the state of Russian society from the Canadian Globe and Mail from the Moscow jail Yashin wrote quote people are getting jailed for likes on social media for private conversations for having the colors of the Ukrainian flag in elements of their clothing a man was sentenced to two years in jail for the fact that his daughter made an anti-war drawing in a school class there had been a full blown political dictatorship established in Russia and the society is paralyzed with fear you can of course judge my fellow Russians right Yashin for being afraid of the maniac and power whose hands are soaked in the blood of tens of thousands victims but before you judge the Russians ask yourself wouldn't you be afraid and of quote and one more quote Germany used to be ruled by absolute evil that was destroying people on an industrial scale and unleashed the most horrible things in human history but the Germans were able to make it out of this darkness and created an amazing society based on humanism justice and progress we are not nation of thieves and killers we're a nation that's been taken hostage by thieves and killers end of quote yesterday just yesterday an artist Bogdan Ziza was sentenced to 15 years in prison for dousing the uh dosing the official building with blue and yellow paint which are colors of the Ukrainian flag of course since March 5th 2022 when repressive laws were passed by the state duma which prohibited any coverage of the war and the words war and invasion were prohibited as well and i was sentenced for that for using these words uh 19 718 people have been detained since February 24 for anti-war stances 584 individuals are charged with a criminal offense for the anti-war activity 6 839 individuals are charged with spreading this information about the Russian army four cases are mined personally and the thief uh uh case i got just two days ago uh in mail 262 individuals organizations associations were recognized by the russian justice department as foreign agents of which i am one of them uh and i was proclaimed as it's written on the minister of justice website i'm a foreign agent working on behalf of ukraine so uh it was august 5th 2022 today two people were detained at in san petersburg they were standing near the military draft point with a poster uh quote do not go to kill do not go to die so i will stop here and we'll be happy to answer your questions thank you very much jenna uh we'll turn next to uh dr demothy fry who is the marshal d shulman professor of post-soviet foreign policy at columbia university his most recent book is weak strongman the limits of power in prudence russia rather than treating russian politics as an extension of vladimir prudence world view or russia's unique history weak strongman emphasizes russia's similarities to other autocracies and highlights the difficult tradeoffs that confront the kremlin on issues from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy he's currently serving this semester here in washington dc as the library of congress chair in us russia relations tim thank you very much josh thank you everyone for coming and uh i've known you've gained you for a long time and i always know that she's a very difficult act to follow so i will do my best um i want to talk a little bit about what's changed and what hasn't in russian public opinion in civil society since the start of the war um the title of the panel focuses on civil society and the war but i think it's really important to understand that russian civil society was been facing a slow death uh for well going on at least 10 12 years depending on how one wants to count it so as we see russian civil society and by this i mean independent groups autonomous from the state which have largely ceased to exist on any scale in russia particularly after the uh invasion um but we have to remember that this you know has been going on for um you know for at least since 2014 is a good place to start rush has never been a very much of a high trust society but if you look at generalized social trust uh around 2017 2018 we see sharp drops in level levels of how much people trust each other which is a crucial element of civil society um so we want to remember that the death of the demise of russian civil society did not begin with the war it's been going on for some time uh if we also look at public attitudes towards ukraine um so uh we all know that the russian populace across all strata were very supportive of the annexation of ukraine it caused a big uh rally around the flag of fact and insupportively demir putin but when we look at the public opinion data more closely um we also have to bear in mind that the vast majority of russians prior to the invasion of ukraine were willing to accept ukraine as a sovereign state levada center repeatedly over the years has asked russians what would their preferred relationship be like with ukraine um and less than 20 percent each time this question has been asked said that unification with ukraine was their preferred response most russians were perfectly happy with the sovereign ukraine perhaps they wanted better relations perhaps they wanted visa free travel but the recognition of ukraine as a state was something that most most russians had come to accept also if we look at public opinion toward the introduction of troops into the donbas uh into the the war of 20 after the annexation of crimea most russians were against this um uh by only 20 25 percent depending on the timing of the question were russians willing to say yes it's a good idea we want to see russian troops actively um we all know they were there but that the russians for the russian government to actively introduce russian troops into the donbas this was a very unpopular policy um uh among russians so what happened after the war where we see you know big increases in uh support for Putin and consist majorities consistently in support of the activities of the russian army uh in ukraine well one thing we're seeing is a rally around the flag effect which is something that we see um in lots of countries and it's likely to last a lot longer in russia given the dominant control that the russian government has over uh over the media but again once we peel back the public opinion data the picture is not quite so clear um if you ask russians whether or not they would like to continue the war or to start negotiations it's about split 50 50 uh and um if you ask russians whether or not the um uh budgetary money should be spent on the military or toward social programs again it's very much split between those two groups and if we look across the range of public opinion polling focus groups and other kinds of research that's been done generally people recognize about a third of russians are kind of hardcore enthusiastic supporters of the intervention in ukraine maybe 10 or 15 percent many of the people that jenia was talking about are hardcore opponents of the war but for most russians this is not an issue that is very high priority for them and most of them are willing to go along with whatever the kremlin does right now the problem is russia is an autocracy right so even if there was a large majority against this war in the current time there's no political vehicle uh to mobilize to constrain the kremlin to be able to take actions that would be costly for the kremlin in order to get them to change course and that's really the problem uh that we see in a society in which civil society is so weak thank you very much great thanks tim thanks for teeing all of that off um our final uh panelist today is angela stent uh who is dr angela stent who is professor emerita of government and foreign service at georgia university a senior advisor to the us institute of peace here and a senior non-resident fellow at the brookings institution she served in the department of state's office of policy planning and as national intelligence officer for russia and eurasia her latest book is putans world russia against the west and the rest the updated version of which was published this february angela thank you very much um and maybe um i'll just follow on from what you were saying so i was at the lennet merry conference in talin a few weeks ago and they had a very interesting panel with russian opposition figures some of them are still living in russia and some of them aren't uh but they were really bemoaning the passivity of the population who have remained there and that you know if putan said if putan stood up tomorrow and said i made a mistake you know let's pull all our troops out and let's give everything back to ukraine then they'd agree with that too i mean that may be an exaggeration but they really um and then there was also uh and maybe we can get into this more maybe there was also discussion about how much one can believe for instance the lavada polling and there were very strong views on either side of that because there was an individual from that organization there obviously defending what they were doing so um so i was going to cover three points today i was going to talk a little bit about uh the emigration and what that might mean for the future um then the impact of the war and on the elites and then something about the impact of the war um on the on the general population so as we've heard from genia a million roughly russians have left uh since the war began um many of them because they actively opposed the war some of them because they wanted to avoid conscription uh even if their political views aren't that that strong but many of these they're young they're the brightest the most talented um russians they have a lot of technical skills and things like that um and so um uh and then there and then there are some who have gone back since they've left but but most of them are still outside of the country um so that leaves behind mainly people who support the war or they're indifferent or passive um or they just cannot leave uh for different reasons um but this also means that there's a real deficit in human capital looming um over russia uh if these people continue to stay outside of russia and obviously it's going to depend on what happens in the next few years um if things don't improve in the next decade if there isn't a new government if russia doesn't change then probably most of these people will not return this is the largest emigration since the russian revolution uh in 1917 and of course most of those people uh didn't return uh for obvious reasons but you'll really have then a split again which has historically happened before between a large number of very talented russians who are living outside the country and then uh those who remain there um now um let me say just a word about how the war has impacted the elites in russia because i think some of us were surprised outsiders at least in the beginning when we thought about the kind of westernized globalized elites who own homes in europe the united states and bank accounts there too the kind of people that we would meet at the st petersburg international economic forum every year uh and who really enjoyed all the contacts they had with the west and i think a number of uh of us were surprised that there wasn't more opposition that most of these elites have stayed there i think we understand that for some people they can't leave they've just been told that they cannot leave um but for many of these people they made a bargain with putin when he came to power that they would stay out of politics as long as they could accumulate money you know send their kids to school in different western capitals um and enjoy again their villas um in the south of france and i think none of them realized that this is what would happen to the bargain that this is how it would end in a sense and yet most of them have now adapted to it they've accepted to it um and those that were you know in the private sector have understood also that they now have to work and many of them are uh in a much more nationalized economy uh we also think of the head of the central bank albira nabi ullana who has managed to steer the economy pretty well given um uh all of the sanctions um and i think one of the great mistakes of uh policy makers in this country and to some extent in europe was to think that if they imposed all these sanctions on individuals at the beginning of this war that these individuals in russia would kind of get together and say we can't stand this we have to get rid of this government this is not how the system works in russia and this this is not uh the impact that it's had now are there splits in the elites i'm sure there are uh it's you know a little obscure we don't quite know how to gauge them we don't have much insight into it but even if there are splits for the moment those elites have in a sense buckled down and they've understood that they have no choice but to support the war as we've heard from janier obviously the system in russia has become much more repressive since the war began um uh you know people are jailed at the for the slightest hint um of opposition um and uh and and what we've had a return to some of the uglier things that remind us even if the Stalinist passed the denunciation for things that janier was talking about with the girl in school drawing the picture and the teacher then uh reporting her to the authorities um and we've also had a much a return of militarism in terms of education uh you know now children in elementary school um are uh doing military drills to some extent as they did in the soviet times people thought um that that had gone away um the other thing is that putin i think has used these 15 months and in my opinion he's consolidated his power in these 15 months there are no real uh restraints um on his power as far as as many of us can see and he's used it to consolidate a new russian national identity which is sort of the old russian and even soviet national identity uh but it's definitely convincing the russia people that uh you know russia is a great power it needs to be respected it needs to be feared it espouses conservative christian values and it's fully sovereign and it has the right in perpetuity to dominate its less sovereign neighbors um and uh i think that was clear also from what we heard from my from my other colleagues here again there are elements of tsarist ideology in this elements of soviet um ideology and then there's i think an extra dose of xenophobia uh militarism and real hatred of the west uh people are being you know told that the west started this war that the west is against them and unfortunately the fact that kind of russians have been quote unquote cancelled it for different reasons in different parts of the west i think has fed in to this concern uh this belief among many russians that in fact the west is is out to get them um so um i think the you know the this has had a corrosive impact on society um uh and um you know it's if if things were to change for the better um then i think some of this can be reversed if the current system remains uh for a decade or longer and russians remain isolated which they i mean they're increasingly isolated and unable to or unwilling uh to to go abroad but unable largely um then i think it will take much longer to kind of revive if you like the the kind of critical thinking facilities that i think would be needed if there is to be a better system in russia um and so a lot of that of course will depend on the outcome of the war and how long putin stays in power wonderful thank you so much thanks angela and thanks all the panelists for those opening remarks um you know i want to come back to you with i think there's two big picture questions to stay on the theme of the of the uh of the panel of the impact of the war in ukraine on russian civil society there's lots of different directions that we can take this in here but i have what i would call a kind of medium term question and a long term question that i'm interested in all of your all of your thoughts on it though in particular ways so the medium term question i'm going to push you a little bit beyond what is to think about what could be and then what will be so in terms of what could be or this is the medium term question what would it take for russian civil society to break with putin so here we are we are having this discussion in an undercurrent of this discussion whether it's about passivity you know complaining about passivity among emigrates whether it's about public opinion data is that you know tim you said 15 percent you know 20 percent might be against them it doesn't mean 80 percent is for everything but it's still a fairly low number there um what would have to happen in order for it in order for russian civil society to turn decisively against putin and i want to sidestep the issue i mean i inherent in this and maybe we have to maybe we have to address it is the extent to which as angela mentioned this debate that was going on previously and jenna you and i were talking about this the other night how much you know we can trust public opinion data in a climate of repression we've thought about this a long time in many different countries but what kind of events would have to take place in order for there to be a decisive break with putin and is it something in the war like for example the loss of crimea or is it something in the context of russian domestic politics or splits in the elites or something like that so i was thinking to start with you know maybe tim you could address this from lessons from the public opinion data that you've looked at and then we can go to jenna to talk about what you think from all of your on the ground reporting and everyone who you've talked to about this as well as your contacts with the russian opposition so maybe we'll start there so great so one of the interesting things about russia is for a long time you could do really good public opinion polling there and it's really remarkable because there are very few autocracies like that um since the war began it's become much more complicated um i've written about this lots of people have written about this but i'll just say this that we know the direction of the bias right so uh if 50 percent of russians are willing to say that they would prefer negotiations to begin rather than uh to continue the war i think that does tell you something right so we can you know look at the numbers recognizing that there's a bias and then um uh in then adjust now more broadly um you know russia is too well educated it's too wealthy it's too urban it's too you know ethnically homogeneous to be as uh autocratic as it is to have a civil society that is so weak this is a very unusual setting i mean if we look at latin american countries and look at their societies you know they're at least as unequal um their education levels are lower many of them are are poorer but many of them are much more democratic with much more robust civil society so i'm not sure that there's anything inherent um in russia or russians in the difficulty of building civil society the problem is there's a repressive apparatus that makes that impossible at least for the moment so i think for this for civil society really to break with Putin the outcome of the war obviously plays a role here the state of the economy plays a role for a long time that's been an important determinant of how russians perceive the state but the big issue is how the repressive apparatus holds together and if they will continue to repress at this rate you know it makes it very difficult for civil society to organize now one more point if it's more difficult for us to read a russian society it's also more difficult for the kremlin to read civil society if people are holding their true views about the war or about uh Putin to themselves uh you know it's also more difficult for the kremlin to predict how people will respond given the chance uh Virginia knows more about the the repressive apparatus so she might be able to shed some light on on that yeah Virginia if you can sort of you know what i'm really interested in here is like you know this this uh frustration the emigrate community has with the passivity of russian civil society from your talking with people who are still in russia what is your sense of what it would take to move the needle on that what is it that people what is it that is keeping people in line is it simply the repressive apparatus and if so what could make people uh more willing to change their attitudes even than the so tim has given us one answer if the repressive apparatus falls apart but even in the face of the repressive apparatus are there developments that we could imagine domestically within russia with the economy or with the war that would lead people to to become more more opposed and more actively opposed you know i'm a little bit surprised you know the angela said about you know this talk about the passivity of the russian society as i said 20 000 people in this in the matter of 15 months were detained 20 000 people across the country were detained for their anti-war activities it that's what you know we know that's what happening in the authoritarian regimes that you don't need to put in jails millions it's enough to put you know one or two in each city and then the entire city shut downs it's not just happened to russia it happened in many countries across the globe it happened in nazi germany it happened you know in uh you know post-war european countries and etc etc etc so i wouldn't talk about the russian passivity because we don't know this what we know for sure that the response rate for all these polls are five is five percent you would tell me oh you know in the united states it's not that bad in fact you know i checked 20 percent your usual response rate here is 20 percent so five percent it's not five percent it means that uh only five out of hundred people there to answer questions i talk to people in moscow on a daily basis my family is there you know my friends are there and etc people are afraid people are really afraid because each time anyone is trying to open his or her day mouth if he or she or they immediately gets a house arrest the reason i left not be was very simple because we i knew that after my four sentences for you know for spreading this information about the russian army and fines at the amount of 13 000 rubles next was not just not just jail but they were going to take away all my electronics and first put me under house arrest so it would preclude me from any work so to cut the long story short you know people it's one thing that people are afraid because everyone knows somebody who is in jail but the second thing don't forget this is the country which lost millions and millions to gulag there is something that here and every in almost each and every family there is somebody who perished in gulag there is somebody who was arrested in many of us we grew up in the families where parents were afraid to tell us that somebody was pronounced the enemy of the people during this time this year my grandpa was shot by the firing squad in our november 1st 1937 but in my family they didn't talk about that it was like you know it was there was silence about that because it's something that was a bad mark on people's papers you know through the kids now i don't as i said there is no civil society there is no society it's absolutely dispersed population now you know people you know it's you know there was a great book by hans fallada about nazi germany everyone uh everyone dies alone so it is you know exactly this type of situation when everybody is afraid so uh yes i do think that the the the regime is going to fail because of the because of the mutiny or split of the elites as we say in the upper echelons of power somebody is going to slit put his throat or you know whatever else is going to happen to him and you know i pray to god that somebody will have an courage to do that so uh but the point is that uh i don't think that this will go for long because put his clothes on to rush they lost billions and billions of dollars they lost access to their property outside the united outside russia many of them they had property in europe and still have property in france and england in italy vineyards in italy and etc you know some of them still have you know property on manhattan in the united states or in the outskirts of atlanta georgia and so it goes these people do want to get back their life they never intended to live in the golden cage as they now live in russia they got accustomed to make money inside russia and to spend and to have a luxury life outside russia to have all their yachts wheels and etc finally they have their children and their grandchildren who used to go to the boarding schools in great britain and switzerland and the united states and their children who were going to universities yel university was famous for that you know they and all of a sudden they had to leave those universities and those boarding schools and returned back to russia they don't like it and their wives and their mistresses and the school in torus they hate the life that they i speak to the to these people you know when they you know when they'll outside russia even when they inside russia and they are terrified by what is happening and they don't want this to continue so to cut the long story short no it's not going to be popular mobilization no it's not going to be another october great october social revolution it's going to be an elite split what will have you know what happened in many regimes of that type in latin america there will be you know putin will go these were another you know there will be junta which is going to replace him precisely because of you know low level of trust so there won't be one person there will be you know several people who will become you know who'll become the rulers they will have no legitimacy and that's when our time will come and we will use it much better than we did before angela just an illustration of this right many of us ask when as the war was going on where are the soldier's mothers so in the soviet afghan war one of the things that led the gorbachev to end the war and withdraw the troops were because you had this very active group of mothers who were protesting so the difference was obviously russia is much more repressive today than it was in the late gorbachev period and so what you've had instead there are there is a soldier's mother's group but it's one that was created essentially by the kremlin and in fact there was a video that you can go and see of putin meeting with some of these women and saying well it's good that your son's died you know heroes fighting the war instead of dying of alcoholism right the cynicism there and then the other thing that's happening is that the families of the dead soldiers are being given cash payments they're being given new cars and things like that so it's a mixture of the greater repression and then in fact bribing people to somehow believe that you know their son's husband's brothers died in some for some great cause but to me that's really an illustration of what's changed given the we know that I mean apparently more than 200 000 russians have either been killed or severely wounded and then the other thing that could cause a break would be if they really were if the economy really were to crash and people you know couldn't go out and buy food anymore and that also hasn't happened because you know Russia has used the period since 2014 to greatly improve its agricultural system so you know there is enough food things are more expensive for some people and there is greater unemployment because some factories have had to close assembly lines down because of the lack of spare parts but those two things kind of excessive deaths and then economic privation it's just not happening so that's interesting so the the sort of taking the three things from the comments there's repression right if repression was to be lessened that's one way it would give people more space for in order to do this the second is about elites right if the elite situation changes well that's a reason that masses would break with Putin and then the third as you bring up this question of the economy is important not because it's something it's easily controllable but it does suggest that it's a kind of constraint on the war effort right that you can't necessarily mobilize everything for the war effort because then you lose this support at home I want to ask you all a second question but if you can answer a little bit briefer so we can turn to the audience momentarily but looking farther into the future right we've talked about people having left the country we've talked about these higher levels of repression we're talking about the you know the experiences that are happening now because of the war someday Putin will not be in power do we expect at that point and let's go with Tim's point about the repression being what's holding people back let's imagine so Putin's reputants out of power for whatever reason in some x number of years in the future repression comes back to you know let's say early Putin levels right it doesn't disappear entirely but it's lower does russian civil society bounce back to where it was or is this experience you know you could imagine the lesson is okay there was the soviet union we had repression it gradually lessened then we were in the post-soviet period okay we have a more open society we don't have to worry about this you know the gulag in the back of the head but now it says wow the gulag can come back right you have a bunch of people who've left the country and so you have a different pop different mix of people who are left behind is that something that we expect is going to constrain russian civil society and the vibrancy of russian civil society or do we think that you know much after the collapse of communism we saw a vibrant russian civil society in the 90s chaotic but vibrant that we would can expect it to kind of spring back afterwards and i'll let whoever whoever wants to take well i'll just start off by saying i mean it depends if you it depends how long this takes right you know if it takes 10 years that's different than if it were to take three years or 20 years and then i think it would also depend on how many russians who've left come back because they certainly have been living in places where there are is a vibrant civil society and then how they interact with the russians who stayed in russia and didn't leave so i would assume civil society will at some point come back again historically in russia you have long periods of repression and then you have you know dissent revolution whatever but i think a lot of that will depend on on how long it takes to have a different government in power yeah a couple thoughts one is um autocrat it's very difficult to replace autocrats uh even when autocrats lose wars they tend to stay in power right um however you know i looked at the data a little more closely and the kinds of autocrats that stay in power after wars they're the saddam hussein's the joseph thalins the muammar qaddafi's who i have no objective measure for this but i think we're much more feared uh by the elite than than than president putan is um so you know the outcome of the war i think you know could play a greater role here than it did than it does in some of the comparative cases that we uh that we often like uh to cite i mean look the key thing here is will it will civil society be able to will there be enough space to allow civil societies organizations to form uh and to uh not be atomized the way that they that they are right now right now i think russian values are are not that un conducive towards building a civil society the difficult thing is creating organizations uh and that takes political space so uh you know and that would have to come from a government that's much different from the one that is currently in power i think that's you know one thing that we are missing i feel like that maybe you know i'm wrong and correct me if i'm wrong that in this discussion it is that the current russia is not your soviet union and the repressive apparatus that existed in the contemporary russia is not the one that existed back in 1991 or in 1999 a prayer to the disillusioned soviet union for for for good or for bad there is a market economy in the country and uh the current success of the kgb but you know i will use kgb just as easy uh it's it's it's not this solid body the way it existed uh back at night even back then in 1991 uh some of them you know special people in the intelligence they already were involved in some businesses and they already you know when uh kryuchko of the chairman of the kgb you know conducted this attempted coup you know many uh didn't support him because they had other interests in fact you know the middle level of the kgb didn't support because they had uh he had business interests so the same much more true for the contemporary kgb for the fsb and for other agencies these are basically a conglomerate of different businesses all of them or the majority of them you know kernels and generals they have their own you know small businesses on the side just not to be you know not to be sorry when i will get old you know just a little bit you know how's there you know mistress dance etc so there is no this solid you know even in this in this in the last years of the soviet union there was much more precisely because all of them they were dependable upon the state they couldn't you know they couldn't imagine themselves living outside the state right so they were gatekeepers uh yes it's true too that the current guys you know they survived through 1991 1992 they were they shared illustration it never happened and then they made this amazing comeback which was absolutely in the cards predictable and was clear that it was going to happen the point is but still the when we have different business interests we have plurality of interests and the second very important thing is that there is no ideology soviet union had ideology for good of a bad you know my grandfather who passed away in 1980 he was a communist you know he's you know he's half of his family perished in gulag but you know he was a communist he was building military industrial complex so uh you know there is no ideology whatsoever there there is nothing that and ideology is something that cement you know society in this type of the regimes nazi germany recall yes you know it took 12 years to destroy nazi germany but still you know there was very powerful ideology with a clear cut enemy and that's what cemented the society there's nothing like that existed just nothing what's the ideology what's the ideology make russia great again you know i don't know that note yes let's pass out do we have questions from the two questions from the audience yeah it's right there and i'll take go ahead uh do we need a mic yeah it's coming my name is gregory vape and i'm a lawyer with memorial which is russia's oldest human rights group and one of the recipients of the Nobel peace prize i first met yvgeny albatz 18 months ago at the dissolution trial of memorial at the russian supreme court where i was sitting as a lawyer in front of the bar and she was in the public gallery covering the trial now that we are both here yvgeny markovna i want to ask you how do you see your mission in exile i don't know about mission in exile you know my life is there and mosco my friends are there my most important thing the way i see it is to support my friends who are sitting in jails and to do my best in order to help them to survive through this ordeal uh you know in in uh in russia i was precluded from teaching you know high school of economics i was the first professor fired because of my political views so uh you know i enjoy teaching here i like doing this you know i learn here a lot you know in fact you know life in the united states it's a it's a learning experience you learn just by living here and i think it's all that is very important i keep doing my show absolute albatz on youtube channel and i keep i'm going to to continue doing this so but you know i i understand nothing about mission i'm a journalist you know so listen we cover events and but yes i'm going to do my best in order to help my friends who enjoy it i'll turn now to one question from the from the um virtual audience here today picking up angela on one of the points that you had made here which is to say the question is there's been a recent coverage of the rise of militarization of russian society and youth you were talking a bit about the changing curriculum and this was sort of feeding into my question before about the longer term implications of this but the question is how can this be combated to build a strong civil society in russia after the war and after russia so what's the what's the lasting impact of younger people being harnessed and we see lots of images of this as well so angela maybe if you want to take first shot at that well i mean obviously you have to demilitarize it the first thing you have to do is to end i mean when i see these little children kind of kindergarten age in the uniforms carrying weapons and and doing you know mock battles it's you know in school that's terrible so you have to end those programs but it'll take more than that and so that's the problem i mean if we look back in the last 30 years of what's happened in russia since the soviet collapse you know it wasn't possible i mean depending on the age of the person and their inclinations to somehow rid them of habits and things that they learned in that period so it would take a major effort and i mean it's it's part of a broader problem um one of the themes at this lennet merry conferences and it was the estonian prime minister who who makes this point very eloquently russia has never been and the soviet union too never been held accountable for many of the atrocities it's committed and you go back to world war two we can talk about the cutting massacres we can talk about the occupation of the Baltic states and deportation of people and a lot of other things i'm not going to list them all now chechnya so if you really want to to cleanse society of these things you have to do what the Germans did under duress which is to confront your past and really sincerely try and overcome it and again russia seems has not been held accountable for that yeah i mean i'll note just to add one thing on this is someone who wrote a book about the legacies of communism on attitudes among citizens in post-communist countries towards democracies market social welfare gender equity we we actually went into it thinking that we would find that the number of years you had lived under communist rule when you were a child in the educational system would be the predictor of holding these attitudes and for most of those attitudes democracy market social welfare it turned out to actually be more adult experience under these roles that it did children so children sometimes can be malleable in some of these ways and and to me i think this is a super you know super important question do we have more questions from the audience here yes oh sorry i keep going the wrong direction on the mic it's all i will see where you are ellie next time and go to find the person farthest from the mic i was trying to i was on that side of the room so i was trying to go back to this side of the room yeah hi uh my name is eden volkov um i um i'm an economist so i uh don't think about this stuff very often but i think it's sort of interesting um sorry interesting this discussion um i had a question um for dr albot's actually i think if i interpret your sort of comments the right way at least what i heard was you think the sort of leverage point is the elites like the civil society is so weak at this point sort of expecting anything to come from them given the repression is sort of um too much so we have to kind of get the elites sort of change course um i wanted to know if that answer is contingent on the outcome of the war in ukraine so if the if ukraine is lost we lose the elites if the war drags on forever do we lose the elites um if you know if we win like is it sort of a contingent outcome like getting the elites um to sort of put more pressure on putin or to oust putin yes of course i mean you're absolutely right you know that you know the the the liberation of russia is dependable upon ukrainian success of this war and i have no doubt that ukraine is going to succeed in this war okay near where you're standing now in the back corner hi everyone um my name is sarah clef i am with freedom house and the so i want to turn this question um less on what's going to happen in russia and more on um what should we as as americans as the the donor class um ought to do so following following 2014 i really don't like hearing myself this is really awkward i'm sorry um in 2014 and immediately following the um the the february escalation um many donors left the area um what what should we do as as outside uh individuals and organizations should we wait until the war is over to reengage with the very disparate civil society um how do we make the argument that it's worth in some cases taxpayer dollars um i hope that makes sense tim is someone who is engaging with so i'll say two things uh right now um there's a lot of talk about messaging and strategic messaging and how can we get it right and i think that's important and it's useful um and there's a lot more that donors the u.s government can do to talk to the russian people uh about our intentions about the state of the war about the state of the world in which they live that they don't really know however uh it's a much more convincing message when we have our own house in order right uh putin like most autocrats loves nothing more than to point to dysfunction in the united states and say you want democracy in your country well this is what you have look at january sixth right so if we want to make that message credible it's really important for us to get our own house in order and then jane is absolutely right i mean so much of russian civil society depends the fate of uh politics in russia the fate of civil society in russia depends on uh ukraine emerging from this war uh victorias so if we're looking at where we put that marginal dollar i think there's a pretty clear prescription anthill do you want to know just i think um i mean i take what you say about we can't really preach something that we ourselves don't practice uh that well but i think we as the united states certainly could be doing a better job of trying to counter the propaganda that russians here just give them you know facts about what's actually happening uh you know without holding ourselves up as some great example for something for example broadcasting back into russia how many russian performers are actually uh active in united states little big is playing in dc next week i mean that is something that most russians probably don't know right or that you know the med is still putting on so that's time for another question from the audience you had a hand yeah sorry to go but this time hi uh kate boffman in a news network um so i have a question generally about investigative journalism and how that plays in the civil society and i was wondering um to what extent has that been hollowed out even among independent media that are still either in the country or uh speaking to folks that are in the country um and you know for those that continue to do it uh what is the motivation and even the strategies that they have to continue there are no independent media in the country 300 different publications and websites were closed since the war started in other approximately 3000 different internet based resources were shut down uh so in order to get access to those publications or those internet resources you need vpn however virtual private network however it's also true that russia became the second biggest nation in the world downloading uh vpns so people everyone i know in musco or in different cities and i communicate with people you know from musco turkutsk and khabarovs they use vpn in order to uh have the possibility to to get information from the web investigative journalism does exist in uh russian diasporas abroad you know all major uh uh all major investigative journalist networks all they all they immigrated they are now either in wilness with venia or in rega latvia some in berlin germany and of course you know uh alexey navalna's anti-corruption foundation which became the you know the the champion of investigative journalism uh is also keep doing their research however you know answering the previous question i want also to point out to some practical things uh that i think it's important to keep in mind uh it is that uh even we need to save those who are capable to start rebuilding russia the minute it will it will become possible that's why i think that it's in the that's the power of the civil society in the united states and its government to uh save people like alexey navalny ilia yashin vladimir kromuza and others political prisoners who are sitting in jail at least it should be uh mentioned in uh in the american media which are mostly silent about that secondary a lot of those million russians who left russia right after the war started you know many of them they have problems with their documents there is a huge necessity just to help them to and they should be established something like nuns and past but that was created for uh white russians for white russian immigration of 1970 1920 when people you know failed to have any uh proper passports the same problem exists for the current russian immigration now their passports expire they some countries just kick them out like georgia because they're afraid of the pressure from the side of uh putins and so it is it is a problem you know we it's uh it's not just a problem that many of them may not return i do believe that many of them especially you know in my circles in my line of work will go back the minute it will become possible and but they really experience a lot of just everyday uh problems so i think that you know for the organization like a freedom house you know there is plenty of things that can be done and third thing that i think feel very important to say that please don't treat all russians as nazi as yashens wrote in his global mail opinion column yes russia the country got uh hijacked by the government of thieves and killers but not all russians are thieves of killers not all russians are in favor of this war and please you know this is this is awful sometimes to read that russians are treated in a rhetoric that was used by some of most you know dark elements in the european history thank you thanks and we're almost the time we started a couple minutes late so we'll go a couple just a couple minutes more but i want to give tim and angela an opportunity to offer some closing thoughts is there anything about russian civil civil society you haven't had a chance to talk about yet now the current state future state we have a question from the from the audio from the virtual audience so we don't really have time to get into because it's a big question but about the role of of civil society outside of russia versus civil society inside of russia but i want to give you two a chance for some closing thoughts angela well just that you know again hopefully the war will be over sooner rather than later people who had left russia will come back and that civil society and that there will be a government in power that will allow civil society at least to reassert itself in some way because otherwise you know the the future would be pretty grim so one that's what i would hope for yeah two quick thoughts um autocrats tend to be replaced by other autocrats that's the bad news particularly personalist autocrats like booten tend to be replaced by other personalist autocrats on the other hand uh you know russia is not just any other any old autocracy you know it's wealthier it's better educated it's more urban so it does have some of the fundamental building blocks of uh you know what a civil society could look like also i don't think we should um uh fetishize the term civil society as if it's all good things you know there are parts of civil society that are helpful for democracy and some that are not and it's a very you know if we look at say latin american democracies often civil societies there are quite weak even though the political processes are competitive and their political systems are open and the media is free on that optimistic note i think i let me just say how much having run a lot of these um types of discussions virtually in the past 15 months just how much of a pleasure it is to be able to do this in person and to share the stage with my friends and panelists here and this has just been enormously illuminating to me i hope you found it as well and please join me in thanking our panelists for taking the time with us today thank you all for joining us