Getting Inside The Mind Of Vladimir Putin

>> Andrew Roberts: My guest today is former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration, Mike McFaul. He's the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of the foremost public commentators on Russia and Vladimir Putin. Mike, you were an undergraduate at Stanford, and you studied Russian at Leningrad University in 1983.

And later researched at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and were a Rhodes scholar. It's quite a resume. Who taught you history?

>> Mike McFaul: Well, that's a big, interesting question. I've been blessed with lots of great teachers about history. The first one that comes to mind is Alex Dahlen. He was in the Department of History here.

He was my undergraduate thesis advisor. He was a soviet historian, although he had a joint appointment in political science, but he was a real historian, lots of books in his room. And I wrote my thesis about soviet interventions in eastern Europe, 56, 68, and the intervention that almost was 8081 in Poland and the western reaction to it.

And I remember throughout the margins, I bet you he wrote 40 or 50 times. How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? Cuz I was saying things about the Soviet Union this, Khrushchev that, Brezhnev this, and that lingers with me 40 or 50 years later.

How do we, when we say we know how states or individuals or regimes are thinking or intending to. He really taught me that lesson.

>> Andrew Roberts: And being in Russia in the 1980s, did you know, did you get a sense that by the end of that decade, the wall would have come down?

 

>> Mike McFaul: Not in 83 or 85, although Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary when I was living in Moscow. And most certainly there was a buzz about him being new and young. But I went back. I went back in 88, twice and 89. And then I spent an academic year 1991 at Moscow State University.

And in those early years, in fact, 1988 was the crucial year. I was there doing research for then my DPhil at Oxford. And I was writing about international influences on national liberation movements in Southern Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa. And I took this trip, this research trip, to go talk to people at the African institute.

I was quite naive at the time, living in Oxford, and I thought I would just go talk to them, and they were going to tell me what they were doing in Africa. And it was a complete bust of interaction, except there was one woman there. Tatiana Krasnopifteva is her name.

She was the Soviet Union's leading Zimbabweanist. And as we walked out of the African institute, she'd never met an American, and she just was not going to let this opportunity slip. Through her fingers. So she followed me out, and we spent the next several hours talking about my dissertation.

And when she's finally figured it out, she said, why are you writing about revolutions in Angola, in Zimbabwe? The real revolution is happening here. This is spring of 1988, when the rest of the world was euphoric with Gorbachev and his reforms. And later on that trip, she introduced me to some, for lack of a better word, revolutionaries.

They had this revolutionary idea that there should be free and fair elections in the Soviet Union and that they should get rid of the cult of Leninism. And it was from that day forward, I became interested in them, kind of studying them, because they reminded me a lot of the revolutionaries I was studying in southern Africa.

But I got to know that group. And so very early on, it felt to me that eventually this thing was going to fall apart. Much earlier, I would say, than conventional wisdom at the time.

>> Andrew Roberts: And by 1994, you were in a position as an academic again to be denounced by ultra Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

And then at some stage also, it was very unusual, I would have thought, for an academic to have that honor cuz he was the most appalling bigot. And at some stage, a bullet was fired into your office window. Were the two events related in any way?

>> Mike McFaul: We don't know.

We didn't know at the time. The events happened close at the time. The reason he denounced me was I was living in Moscow again, this time working at the Moscow Carnegie center. We just started it that year, 94 95. And I co hosted a television program called Lyudi, called People.

And it was a kind of silly show in retrospect, but the idea was, we have all these problems in Russia. How do democracies solve them? So the Russian host, Andrei Rostotsky is his name. He's still working there, by the way. He would say, look at all these problems we have.

This is horrible. How do they deal with them in the West? And then I would come on and say, well, in America, we vote. And Mr. Zhirinovsky didn't like the fact that I was on national television.

>> Andrew Roberts: How interesting. By 2009, you joined the Obama administration as a senior advisor.

What was the Russian reset policy? Can you explain it and what you felt about it then, what you feel about it now?

>> Mike McFaul: So I joined the White House, the National Security Council, just months after Russia had invaded Georgia, August 2008. And I had testified in September 2008 about my views, about how we should respond to that.

By January, we had done very little. The Bush administration didn't sanction anybody. They didn't send any weapons to Georgia. And when I joined the administration, I was surprised to learn that there was not, my view, was not the consensus view within the alliance, not just the United States, about what had happened in Georgia.

It's a complicated story, but it was much more complicated than I knew at the time. And so we debated what we should do and the reset, that word and how that locked in was an accident of history. That wasn't something by design at all. At least that was not my impression.

But the original ideas were pretty simple, which is we're going to disagree with these folks on a lot of things. We're going to not allow our policy to be linked in ways that are counter to our interests in places like Georgia and Ukraine. And I traveled to both those countries with the vice president, now president, in 2009.

But on a certain set of issues that President Obama think were portent to our national security interests, we had to work with the Kremlin. By the way, President Medvedev at the time, Putin was not there. So what is that list? President Obama had an idea that we should replace the old START treaty, which was expiring in 2009, with a new START treaty, and reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

And we did that 2010. He signed that treaty and then the Senate ratified it at the end of the year. Second, we decided whether it was right or wrong. It was not my policy decision, but we decided to expand the war in Afghanistan and to expand attacking terrorists, not just in Afghanistan, but in neighboring countries.

Including one in a very dramatic way in 2011, when we violated the sovereignty of Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. When I entered the White House, all of our supply routes went through Pakistan, 95%. We decided to diversify them. And there's only one other way to get to Afghanistan.

From the north, you got to go through Russia. That was the northern distribution network. Third, we wanted to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And again, whatever your debate, whether you think we had the right decision, the wrong decision, but back then, we decided, as a predicate to any negotiations, we had to implement sanctions.

And in 2010, we implemented the most comprehensive multilateral sanctions against Iran in history. And that's because Russia agreed with us, and I could go through the list. But the point was, we were looking to cooperate on things that we thought were in our national interest. And I would say it was never my impression.

I worked closely with the president, and I was there, that it was about holding hands and singing Kumbaya, or a phrase I really hate. We're never trying to improve relations with Russia.

>> Andrew Roberts: Why do you hate that expression?

>> Mike McFaul: Because I don't think we should ever try to improve relations with any country.

China, Russia, France, Great Britain, I don't think that should ever be the goal. The goal should be things that the American people think are in their interest. Like I said, reducing the number of weapons, getting rid of terrorists, stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And then you decide, okay, these are our goals.

Security, economic, and, by the way, moral goals. I was a big proponent of pushing for democracy and human rights. Not everybody in the Administration agreed with me. And then you decide, what's the means to achieve that objective? And sometimes it's diplomacy, sometimes it's engagement, sometimes it's coercion, economic coercion.

Sometimes it's even military force. But the means should never become the goal. So when anybody said, well, we should have better relations with Russia, I always cross that out. And I also always crossed out words like friend and partner. I just always felt like that's not the goal.

That may be an outcome of cooperation, but having a nice state dinner with Leader X, Y, or Z. And I was in charge of many countries, not just Russia. That always seemed to me to be the means, not the goal of diplomacy.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, the Palmerstonian, I mean that Lord Palmerston, who said that nations only have interests, they don't have eternal friends or enemies, interesting.

 

>> Mike McFaul: I hadn't thought of that, but, yeah, that's right.

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned Vice President Biden, now President Biden. And in March 2011, you were with him when you first met Vladimir Putin, talk to us.

>> Mike McFaul: When he first met Vladimir Putin.

>> Andrew Roberts: When he.

>> Mike McFaul: I had met Vladimir Putin in 1991.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You had before?

>> Mike McFaul: And it was his first meeting.

>> Andrew Roberts: It was his first meeting. And it was quite a historic one one way or another, wasn't it? In his memoirs, he says that it was a pretty much sort of aggressive moment. What are your memories of it?

 

>> Mike McFaul: Well, two memories are really strong. The night before then we met with President Medvedev. And that meeting was truly historic because it was in that meeting I was the note taker. There was just me, Medvedev, a guy named Prokhodko and Biden. Because Medvedev told everybody, the rest of the delegation, including people like Bill Burns, who's our current head of the CIA, you got to go chill in the waiting room.

This just needs to be a one on one because he didn't want the rest. He didn't want Lavrov and these other people there. That's when he agreed with us about the use of force against Libya. Now, again, that didn't go the way we had planned, but this was true multilateral cooperation to stop genocide in Benghazi.

And it was a Russian leader agreeing with us. The next day, we had the same conversation with Putin. And Putin categorically said that's a bad idea. And it was clear to me that the president and the prime minister on this issue were in very different places. And then we had a big conversation about Georgia, where Vice President Biden for the Obama administration was kind of the point person for the region, right?

If Obama dealt with Russia, he dealt with Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova. I went to Moldova with the vice president as well. And it was pretty testy. And Putin always makes a big impression when you first meet him. He made a big impression. But it was fairly confrontational, especially because it was, it was in the wake of the Arab Spring was happening at the time.

And in his view, and he's obsessed with this. And its tragically, I think, why he invaded Ukraine, in his mind, were always supporting small D democrats. That's what I would call them. He would call them neo-Nazis. But that was happening in real time. And it was clear that he thought that we were fomenting revolution in the Middle east that he thought was not in the interests of the world and most certainly not in the interests of Russia.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You say he makes a big impression on people. When you first met him in 1991, what impression did he make on you then?

>> Mike McFaul: No impression, I'm glad you asked.

>> Andrew Roberts: Genuinely, none at all?

>> Mike McFaul: At the time, he was the deputy mayor for a guy named Anatoly Sobchak.

I was working for an American NGO that promotes democracy. That's why we were meeting with him, ironically, we were meeting with Sobchak. He was the mayor and he was this charismatic, pro-European, pro-democratic, big former law professor, big personality. Putin had no personality whatsoever. And if you had asked me then name 5,000 people that might become the next president of Russia, he wouldn't have made my list.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Fascinating. Let's talk about his sense of history, because you were mentioning earlier about the drives that Putin had towards intellectual, psychological, historical drives to invade Ukraine. His essay, his famous essay of 2021 on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. What do you make of that as history?

 

>> Mike McFaul: It's pretty bad history. It's revisionist history. But it reveals a lot about his mindset. And by the way, we don't have time to go through it all. But his mindset has changed over time, too. I think that's an important thing to understand about him. He had different views 20 years ago than he has today.

And that's why he felt the need to write long essays like that to kind of, that's a marker he's putting down for history.

>> Andrew Roberts: Let's go into that. Sorry, could we go into that? Before we talk about that 2021 essay, can you talk about how his views have changed since you first knew him?

 

>> Mike McFaul: Yeah, well, a couple of things. First of all, he wants his people and maybe the rest of the world to believe that he was against the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was a tragedy greater than any other in the 20th century. And he wants people to believe that he's somehow the correction to the 90s to Boris Yeltsin and that whole time.

But people forget that he worked for those people. When did I meet him? I didn't meet him at a protest that neo-nationalist Zhirinovsky was running, although I went to those protests, by the way, I met Jaronosky during this period, too. He wasn't at the neo-communist protests against the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He was working for the people that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then when he lost his job in St Petersburg through a free and fair election, by the way, Sobchak lost, that's the way it should work. What did he do? He didn't join the communists.

He joined Yeltsin and he worked for four years for Yeltsin. And if not for Yeltsin, you and I, we wouldn't be talking about Putin. But he wants you to forget all that, that's first thing about his revisionist history. Second thing, when he initially came in completely by accident, one of the biggest tragic accidents of Russian history, for sure, cuz it could have been very different.

But initially, he was rather obscure guy. He didn't have set views on a lot of things, he didn't understand markets. And so he surrounded himself with people. I know all these people well, who were very pro-market. They would be very comfortable here at the Hoover institution. The flat tax, that's one of our ideas from the Hoover institution, never happened in the United States of America.

They adopted it back then, 13% flat tax, individual income, lowered corporate taxes, did a lot of market things. He's moved away from that now, he's evolved. And second, more importantly, back then, he was asked, what do you think of NATO? Actually, it was in a very famous interview in London.

David Frost did the interview right as he was president elect. And he said, well, I think we should join, that would be a great idea.

>> Andrew Roberts: He told that to George Robertson, actually, who's been on this podcast, who tells this exact same story.

>> Mike McFaul: I didn't know that, wow.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Extraordinary tale.

>> Mike McFaul: Well, he wants you to forget that history, right? He wants you to forget that because he needs NATO as this enemy as part of the justification. So he's never been a democrat. I think he went to KGB school. He didn't go to Stanford and learn about democracy.

But those pieces, those have evolved over time, for sure.

>> Andrew Roberts: Fascinating, and in November 2011, you were appointed US ambassador to Moscow, the first non-Korea diplomat to take that post. And you met pro-democracy activists, which, obviously, from what you've been saying, is something that was always part of your interest was to be able to talk to them.

And America hasn't always had the greatest history there. President Ford famously refused to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

>> Mike McFaul: Yes.

>> Andrew Roberts: But you did go out and meet these guys. How did the Russians react to that?

>> Mike McFaul: Well, first, I wanna emphasize it wasn't my decision to do that, that was our policy.

But I helped to rate the policy back in 2009.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you wouldn't have been appointed if you were completely opposed to that policy, presumably.

>> Mike McFaul: And I think it's important for people to remember, cuz it's been forgotten that when President Obama went to Moscow for the first time in July of 2009, he spent the first day that he was there meeting with the government, but he spent the entire second day meeting with non-governmental people.

So he met with the business community, he met with students. He met with civil society, a parallel summit, and then he met with the opposition. And I'd forgotten about the Ford, I remember that. But I want you to know that the summit of, from my point of view, was modeled after Ronald Reagan's trip in 1988.

Very consciously on my part, I helped to design that trip, because he had a very famous luncheon with dissidents at Spaso House, the ambassador's residence and I wanted to replicate that. In fact, I think it's chapter 29 out of George Shultz's memoirs, where he talks about dual track diplomacy, engagement the state, but also engage society.

But back then, nobody noticed, cuz this was a more cooperative time. When I showed up in 2012 to do exactly what other leaders in the administration had been doing, two things had changed. One, there was a falsified election that led to massive mobilization that scared the regime. And two, Putin was now running for re-election.

Putin was coming back. And so the context of my meetings with these leaders changed radically, and they needed the United States of America to be a bogeyman again to help. Putin won first, win re-election. Remember, he'd been prime minister before, and then he decided to throw Medvedev to the side.

But they needed this anti-Americanism, and I kinda became the poster child for it. I wanna be honest with you, It was controversial, cuz there were people back in Washington. If you're working on arms control, they're like, this is getting in the way of our important things that we're doing.

And there were others that was like, why do we care? We have more important issues, right? And this is a dilemma in American foreign policy that goes back to the French Revolution. Is it our interests or values? And it was not easy for me. They said very negative things about me.

At one point, I was told by somebody close to Putin that you're about to become George Kennan. He was the last ambassador that was PNG.

>> Mike McFaul: By the way, his photograph is on the wall of Spaso House. All the ambassadors are-

>> Mike McFaul: And every night I would go, and once I had been there longer than Ken, and I was like, well, if they throw me out now, I won't be the shortest serving ambassador.

They never did throw me out. They later put me on the sanctions list.

>> Andrew Roberts: But I was about to say, you were banned from Russia after the end of your ambassadorship in 2005. Another great badge of honor from that regime, I think.

>> Mike McFaul: Well, they both banned me.

They also have threatened to arrest me, so it's even worse for me. I wanna add a footnote, because you said something about history, and there was a day, it was Russia Day. And this is an interesting revision of history. So the day is June 12, 1990, the day that Russian Federation declared independence from the Soviet Union.

Boris Yeltsin did that in 1990. It's now been forgotten, and now it's just called Russia Day, like their national day.

>> Andrew Roberts: Is it still the 12 June?

>> Mike McFaul: Yeah, and most 90% of people don't know why, but I know why. Anyway, I went to this reception at the Kremlin with Putin, and I had all these people run away from me.

They were afraid of me. And one of his close people said, Mike, you just got to shut up. You got to stop talking about these things, that's in your interest. And as I was walking out, I remembered other leaders and other ambassadors and other journalists who were also in the Kremlin in the 30s and made choices during Stalin's time to take the advice of the Russian that I just met.

And I just decided that day, I don't care if I'm thrown out tomorrow, I'm not gonna be that person.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you weren't thrown out. You came to, I mean, you've been there three years or so, but you left at the same time almost as the invasion of Crimea.

 

>> Mike McFaul: Yes, the exact day.

>> Andrew Roberts: The exact day. And the risings in the Donbas and the Russian sympathizing parts of the Donbas, at least. In retrospect, what could have been done, what should have been done back in 2014 that might have saved Ukraine from its present disastrous situation now?

 

>> Mike McFaul: I would push you back and say, what should have been done in the 1990s. That's when we missed the opportunity, although I'll talk about 2014 in particular, but in retrospect. And now we have the benefit of that time. But I believe that we should have expanded NATO as fast as we could when Russia was weak.

And we should have armed those countries.

>> Andrew Roberts: Georgia as well.

>> Mike McFaul: Georgia as well. And Ronald Reagan used to say, peace through strength. Russia has never, or the Soviet Union has never invaded a NATO country, by the way. NATO has never invaded Russia or the Soviet Union. But I think back then, and I remember those debates, I was a part of those debates about NATO expansion.

We can't poke the bear. We can't poke the bear. And as a result, we left this gray zone of countries between Russia and NATO. And where have we seen military interventions? Precisely in the gray zone. And so I think that was when we missed a big opportunity. And after 2008, we should have sanctioned Russians and armed Georgia.

And 2014, we finally did implement sanctions. I was out of the government by that time, but- You were involved in the sanction-. Debate, yeah.

>> Andrew Roberts: Debate, weren't you?

>> Mike McFaul: These were friends of mine. And I was, do more, do more, do more, which is exactly my position today, by the way.

Work a lot on sanctions today and weapons to Ukraine, but you want to deter interventions. You don't want to react to them. And I think that's the mistake we made. We didn't think about how can we deter future Russian uses of force? Because I was always in the camp.

I remember I had the honor to brief President Bush before he first saw Putin back in 2001. And we had this big conversation about power and is Russia great power? Is it a weak power? And back then they were a declining power. And some were even talking about the Russian Federation might fall apart.

And I said, Mr. President, we're really bad at understanding power trajectories 20, 30 years down the road. What we should really care about, are they inside our tent or not? By which I meant the democratic tent. Because if they're not in the democratic tent, we want to shore up the democracies who are with us.

And so I think that was the critical mistake going back decades, not just 2014.

>> Andrew Roberts: Where are we now with sanctions?

>> Mike McFaul: Well, there's good news and bad news. So the good news is that we have put in place, we being it's a coalition of four dozen democracies.

They're all democracies. Maybe Singapore's joined down a little bit. The most comprehensive sanctions against Russia ever. And that's fantastic achievement. I run a working group on sanctions. When we started publishing our papers about what should be done, a year and a half ago, we were rejected by european capitals, the Biden administration.

This is like, this is too crazy. This is too nuts. And yet we, the west, have done a lot, especially on the price cap. And what Europe has done in terms of reducing its dependencies on Russian oil gas. That was a band aid I wanted to rip off.

Back in 2009, when I was in the government, I wrote a whole paper about why this is not in our interests as an alliance. So we couldn't convince our allies to do that. They've now done that, that's great. And the individual sanctions, and yet, the war's still going on, this horrible, barbaric invasion of Ukraine.

And so we gotta do more. And the metaphor I like to use is if you park your car illegally here on Stanford, you get a ticket, pretty hefty one, by the way. If you leave your car there a second day, you don't do anything. You get a second ticket.

You leave it there five days, you get five tickets. Putin's army is wrongfully parked occupying in Ukraine. And so every day we should be ratcheting up the sanctions. And so I applaud what's been done, but there's a lot more that could be done.

>> Andrew Roberts: What do you feel about Ukraine being allowed into NATO?

The Vilnius pathway, do you think it's fast enough? Do you think it's comprehensive enough?

>> Mike McFaul: Well, I was an advocate for more from Vilnius. I think I understand why President Zelensky and his team were disappointed. My argument was in the run up to Vilnius, it at least has to be an improvement over the last major signal of support for Ukraine's membership, which was the Bucharest summit in 2008.

Putin wants you to believe that the alliance has been pushing since 2008, and its just a matter of minutes before Ukraine is joining. That's complete and utter nonsense. There's been no effort. Its been stuck that whole time I hosted President Zelensky here at Stanford the day after he met with President Biden for his first Oval Office visit.

And he was struck. Hes like the new guy. But, Mike, explain why we've been stuck for so many years. So the good news out of Vilnius is there was incremental progress. It's not whether but when that's a good sign. I still think spelling out, there's this phrase in the communique that says when conditions are met, passive tense, by the way.

And I think had they spelled out what those conditions would be so that the Ukrainians knew what they had to do to join, that would have been progress. But as a former diplomat, when you have a diplomatic failure, you don't just lament that you failed, you get ready for the next meeting.

That's what diplomats do. The next meeting is in Washington. It's the 75th anniversary of NATO. And I hope that they'll do those things before that summit.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell us about Zelensky. What's he like?

>> Mike McFaul: So I dont claim to know him well, but I hosted him here and ive been in touch with him and his team since this war a few times.

You know, he's an accidental, rather he was an accidental president, not like Putin. He was a president who was elected because Ukrainian elector, the people were tired of the status quo. And everybody knew there was going to be a chance for a candidate like him. There was another guy, by the way, somebody I know better who was thinking about getting into that space.

But when Zelensky got in, it's like, okay, he's gonna be the outside guy. When he visited Stanford campus two years ago, this is the summer of 2000, 2021, just six months before the invasion. I think his approval rating was 20%. A lot of fighting inside Ukraine, like there often has been over the last 30 years.

But I think he has become a remarkable wartime president. I was actually on the phone with one of my friends who works for him the night the Russians invaded. And we were debating scenarios, should they leave? Should they not? It's about a two hour back and forth, and at the end of it, my friend, his name is Sergey Leshchenko, he said, Mike, this is an academic debate.

They're not going anywhere. They're staying here. And that was a momentous decision with a lot of risk, much of which we still don't know about. But I've heard hints of it, and I think he has really risen to the moment and fantastic leader as a person. He's a very nice guy.

He's very friendly. We speak Russian together. I remember the first time I talked to him after the war had begun. I got on a Zoom call. I thought I was speaking to his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and instead of Andre, who I talked to rather frequently, he was sitting there in the bunker, and he said, Mike, you look great.

Still really sunny. He loves Stanford, by the way. He's like, my God, you look so great. The mother must be great. I said, Mr. President, you don't look so great, because he'd grown this scraggly beard, and obviously he was in a horrible moment, but he still could joke around about his memories of Stanford campus.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Wonderful, let's turn to Russia. What's your take on the present domestic political situation in Russia? How safe is Putin?

>> Mike McFaul: Unfortunately, I think he's safe. I am not in the camp that thinks that he'll be overthrown or a coup. Let me also say and paraphrase, I've written about revolutions and coup in my academic life.

And one of the phrases I wrote about revolutions, paraphrasing somebody else, I'm sure, was before revolutions happen, they seem impossible. After they happen, they look inevitable. So I wanna be humble. We're not good at predicting these things, and I work five years in the government, and I would say the same thing about the CIA.

They're not very good about it either. So it's not just us political scientists that are bad. So I don't see those scenarios. But I also think we're witnessing the beginning of the end of Putinism, which is to say, I wrote my first critical article about Putin in March of 2000, even before he was elected president, because of his anti democratic ways.

And tragically, the things I was worried about then have turned out to be true. But even I would have to admit that he had a pretty good run. The economy got going on his watch. It was because of oil and gas prices, but you get credit for it if you're there.

He managed to take over the media to kinda create this narrative that lots of Russians buy into. And he went four for four with his wars, right? Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine the first time, Syria 2015. So he was on a run, and then he overextended this time. And I think it's the beginning of the end of their regime.

So I don't think it's tomorrow, but I don't see a way that a Putin 2.0 takes over. It will be, but that person will be an interim figure, not somebody that will be in power for 20 years.

>> Andrew Roberts: What was your take on the whole Evgeni Prigozhin imbroglio of a couple of months ago?

 

>> Mike McFaul: It's a sign of the crumbling of the regime. So, number one, you don't have paramilitary organizations if you have a strong military. So the very existence of Prigozhin many years ago, I think, was a sign of weakness. Number two, they wanted to liquidate him, and he knew it was July 1st and he would be done.

And so he went on this wild run, and they couldn't liquidate him July 1st, and he made it to Rostov with no resistance, and he was on his way to Moscow. And then Putin faced a bad outcome or a worse outcome and chose bad to negotiate with this guy.

But just 4 hours later, he'd called him a traitor. That's not a strong look. That is not a strong look at all. And that Prigozhin's still out there, that there are lots of generals that have been removed and others that we think are an arrest. These are signs that the guys with the guns are not united behind this war, and that's a sign that Putin is losing control.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: What we always have on this podcast is two things at the end of the questions, which the first one is, what book are you reading? We're assuming it's gonna be a biography or a history book. What have you got on your bedside table right now?

>> Mike McFaul: So the book I was reading over the weekend, because I'm writing a book right now.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: What about? Tell us about the book you're writing.

>> Mike McFaul: My book is called Autocrats Versus Democrats, and it's lessons from the Cold War for how to deal with China and Russia today. I've been working on it for years. I don't have a lot of time. But the book I was reading over the weekend is.

I have it right here cuz I knew you were gonna ask this, and it's a book I didn't know about till I was talking to him. His name's Frank Dikotter. He's a Hoover Fellow. I don't, he's a-

>> Andrew Roberts: He has a book on dictators?

>> Mike McFaul: No, no, no.

You know, all the famous ones. But I'm interested in this book. It starts with the beginning of the American republic and relations with China back then, relations with Russia. And there's these two interregnums that don't get enough attention. And it's part of, you know, I'm very interested in counterfactuals and things that could change history.

And so I'm interested in the collapse of The Enchante Regime in China and Russia, that there was some hope that could lead to a republican democracy. So 1911 in China, 1917 in Russia, Russia. It happens over a matter of months and the Bolsheviks take over. The China story is a lot more complicated.

The collapse of The Enchante Regime is 1911. The communists don't take over till 49, and that period, it's a civil war. It's World War II. But it's also, the book is called the Age of Openness. China before Mao. And Frank writes about this forgotten history of liberal ideas, of republican ideas, of elections, of rule of law.

Now we know now it got overthrown and the communists took over. And the victors always write the history, right? So we forget about it. But I think it's a very important moment in history to remind people that this was not preordained. And I'd say the same thing about the Iranian revolution.

I mean, there are these moments when then the breakdown creates an opening, but then the opening gets taken over by autocrats instead of democrats. So that's the book I've been reading over the weekend.

>> Andrew Roberts: It sounds absolutely fascinating. And you mentioned that you like counterfactual history, which is great, because that's my next question.

What's your favorite what if? What's your historical counterfactual that has intrigued you over the years?

>> Mike McFaul: Well, the one I know the best, there may be others that I'm a student of, but the one I know both from my own writing and I know the people involved, and it's had a giant consequential impact on history, is about Putin coming to power.

Now, counterfactuals. I'm not a historian, but I know a lot of historians. The best counterfactuals are the ones where you just have to change a little bit.

>> Andrew Roberts: Precisely.

>> Mike McFaul: And history might be different.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, it must just be the nail on the horseshoe, as it were.

 

>> Mike McFaul: Right, so if you go back, Boris Yeltsin was reelected in 1996, and almost immediately, they started preparing for his successor cuz he was in bad health, drinking, and the heir apparent was a guy named Boris Nemtsov. And Boris Nemsov, he was a friend of mine, actually, I knew him well before he was assassinated in 2015.

He, at the time, was the governor of Nizhny Novgorod. He had been democratically elected at a time of an economic depression three times worse than the American economic depression. So think about that for a minute, right? Really hard to be re elected in a time of depression. By the way, he's Jewish, so people say you could never elect a Jewish leader.

He was elected in Nizhny Novgorod, which is in the heart of industrial Russia. Yeltsin brings him back, makes him first deputy prime minister, and anoints him to say, you're my guy. And there's footage to talk about it, and everybody thought he would be the next president. In between coming to Moscow and the next election, there's what we call an exogenous shock, something not even related to Russia.

It was the 1998 financial crash. Starts in Thailand, Korea, and then eventually overtakes Russia. Huge financial crash inside Russia. It's still a democracy, so the government has to resign. And so Nemtsov's career, effectively as the Arab parent, ends with that. And it's a long story, but he initially appoints a communist because that's the only one that could get through the parliament.

And then they're like, we cannot allow this communist, his name was Primakov, to run for president. That'll destroy us all. And that's when they come up with this idea, let's get this obscure KGB guy, Putin, to become prime minister. And then let's have a little war in Chechnya.

I don't know if that was started on purpose or not, but there's lots of speculation that they started it on purpose to have this strong guy, Putin, and then he becomes appointed president-elect, and then that is ratified by the Russian people three months later.

>> Andrew Roberts: By the false flag operation against the block of flats, the residential flats, supposedly by the Chechens, but we still even today don't know.

 

>> Mike McFaul: Exactly, alleged terrorist attacks that allow Putin to look like the strongman. And that counterfactual, had there not been that '98 financial crash, they would have never picked this guy Putin, because he was not part of their inner circle. And then people say, well, he couldn't be elected, Nemtsov, because later he becomes an opposition figure, right, a marginal figure.

But the Yeltsin picked Putin, and then they used their electoral machine to ratify it. They could have done the same thing for Nemtsov, there's no doubt on my mind. And had Nemtsov become president of Russia in 2000, history would have been very, very different. He was a committed democrat, a committed liberal.

During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, he went and supported the Orange revolutionaries in Ukraine. And I knew, like I said, he was a personal friend of mine. The history of Russia could have been very, very different.

>> Andrew Roberts: You said he was assassinated in 2015. How and who by?

 

>> Mike McFaul: He was walking over a bridge just 500 meters from the Kremlin, out at night with his girlfriend. We know who pulled the trigger, he was a Chechen who ordered the assassination. To this day is not clear, but I can tell you what his family thinks. He was killed by the Kremlin, according to them.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you very much indeed, Mike, for a totally fascinating time. I so hope that you're right in predicting the end of Putinism.

>> Mike McFaul: Thanks for having me.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Mike. Please do tune in to the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft, where my guest will be Rabbi Meir Solovacek, author of Providence and Power, Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship.

 

>> Hoover Representative: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work or to listen to more of our podcast or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.