Making Russia Great Again

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Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has Russia been so front and center in our consciousness. What happened to create this? How did Russia go from Glasnost and Perestroika to Putin and Kleptocracy?

Did the country change, did the people change, or were the current tendencies there all along?

Arkady Ostrovsky, a Russian-born journalist who has spent 16 years reporting from Moscow, talks with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the reality behind the headlines.

The author of The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War, Ostrovsky shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin, like his US counterpart Donald Trump, is simply a reactive politician, driven to using nationalism to exploit fear, insecurity and feelings of inferiority.

However, in Putin’s case, the nation’s fear and insecurity are far more real.

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

In October of 1939, Winston Churchill said of Russia that, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. The key is Russian national interest.” Today, 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could say exactly the same thing about Russia. The Russia that Gorbachev ushered in as the Cold War ended is seemingly a far cry from the Russia today of Vladimir Putin. What happened? Did the country change? Did the people change? Or were the current tendencies there all along? We’re going to talk about that today with my guest Arkady Ostrovsky. Arkady Ostrovsky is a Russian born journalist whose articles for The Financial Times were the first to warn of Russia’s impending takeover by the KGB. He has reported from Moscow for over 10 years for The Financial Times and joined The Economist in 2007. And he’s the author of the The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War. Arkady Ostrovsky, thanks much for joining us.

Arkaday Ostrovsky: Thank you for inviting me.

Jeff: One of the things that you talk about that is so fascinating, within the broader context of trying to understand Russia then and now, is you talk about it being a country where ideas matter, a country where ideas have significance. Talk a little bit about that first.

Arkaday: Well, Russia’s a very idea centric country where words and literature really matter a great deal. I first started thinking about it while I was translating Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, a great trilogy, about Russian 19th century thinkers. And one of them, a Russian literature critic, says in it that literature can replace, can actually become Russia, that literature carried sort of a lot of social purpose and fulfilled the role that another country’s institutions and parties do, etc. So I just started looking at this through the prism of the media, and the words, and it was… it proved to be a rather fruitful approach because suddenly that complicated story started a rather different picture for me. And words had enormous importance in the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union was, you know, the Bolshevik country was based on the idea of utopia. On the books during the Soviet era, people studied Marx and Lenin, the way they studied the Bible and Torah. That had been my approach, and then in the 1990s of course it became television that replaced the printed words and became the dominant medium. So I wanted to tell the story of what happened in Russia between that extraordinary time of hope, aspiration and optimism in the late 80s when I was a student, when the country was about to open up, when there was an enormous sense of hope and promise, how did we get to today? Even though when Russia is seen as a threat, as a challenge, security threat to its neighbors, a challenge to the United States, and I believe a threat to its own people.  How did we get here when we didn’t really have any one moment, any counterrevolutionary turn that we can point to and say, “OK, this is where it all changed.”

Jeff: One of the things you talk about is that there was really a kind of fatal flaw that was inherent in the way the transition took place under Gorbachev.

Arkaday: There was… well more than one. I mean you could look at the economy, you could look at policy, but once again what I concentrated on was the media. The flaw, one of the flaws was that on the way to open up the country, on the way to tell the truth, the local people who were in charge of the Russian media used the lie, or half-truth.    

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from poster (Mike Maguire / Flickr – CC BY 2.0).

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