David Satter is an author, journalist, and scholar with a background on issues having to do with Russia, the former Soviet Union, and relationships between Russia and the United States.
The following has been edited for context and clarity.
Federal Newswire:
We're going to start with the present time or more or less the present time, and then we're going to work our way backward, David. Let's start here, which is you foresaw a lot of this... In some of your past writing, by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't say David's written a series of books. The most recent one is Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. Also, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, which I'm very excited to have my own copy of. But you foresaw the rise of what's going on with Putin and the West and what's going on in Europe. Talk a little bit about what you saw way, way back when.
David Satter:
Well, it began really with Yeltsin and the criminalization of Russia, the way in which Russia was really taken over by criminals after the fall of the Soviet Union, the way in which property was stolen, privatization was really massive theft, and the disregard for human life, including the life of ordinary Russians. All of this culminated in the apartment bombings of 1999, which brought Putin to power. All evidence, even at that time, showed that this was carried out by the Federal Security Service, the FSB, which is the successor organization to the KGB, in order specifically to bring Putin to power.
Now, what does that mean? That means that they were responsible for the murder of hundreds, 300, as it turns out, plus many who were severely injured, people who were completely innocent. They were chosen at random. These were not enemies. These were people who simply happened to be living in the apartment block that was chosen at random to be blown up.
Federal Newswire:
Take a step back for a second, because I think people seemed to forget what was happening in Russia at the time and the power struggle that was involved between Yeltsin and Putin. Yeltsin, really many others as well. But Putin was looking for an excuse to push Russia into greater war. Talk about that.
David Satter:
Well, here was the situation. 1999, Yeltsin has an approval rating of 2%. His family has monopolized power and privilege in Russia, and an oligarchy has been created, which has come into billions and billions of dollars of unearned wealth that could be threatened if a new president is elected who is determined to get to the bottom of the kind of theft that took place in Russia during the 1990s.
Putin is nominated as Prime Minister. He is the former head of the FSB. Public opinion polls showed that his popularity rating, in the only polls that were conducted before the bombings was also 2%.
Now, it's important to bear in mind that sociologists consider that in any survey, 6% of the respondents don't understand the question. So this raises the question of as to whether anyone in Russia supported Yeltsin.
On September 8th, there was a phone call from Bill Clinton, or to Bill Clinton, between Yeltsin and Clinton. I'm not sure. The text has now been released by the Clinton Library, in which Yeltsin says, "The next president is going to be Vladimir Putin. You're going to like him. He's a very capable man. You'll work well with him." The question, which was logical at that time, was how Yeltsin, with a 2% popularity rating, could be sure that Putin, with a 2% popularity rating, was going to be the next president. Did he really think that he was in a position to recommend his successor, let alone guarantee it?
But on September 9th, the day after that telephone call, the apartment building on Guryanova Street was blown up in the middle of the night, killing 100 people and wounding many hundreds of others. That was a part of a series of apartment bombings that were used to justify the Second Chechen War, an invasion which the Russian public did not want. But once they were convinced that they were under attack... This is the same thing as the Nazis did at the beginning of the Second World War when they staged an attack on German territory from Poland.
Federal Newswire:
I think it's important for people to sort understand the mindset of the Russian people at the time. They had just 10 years earlier, only 10 years earlier, had gotten out of a bloody conflict. The bloody ten year conflict in Afghanistan, the justification of which was also kind of...
David Satter:
Well, it was more than 10 years earlier. But yeah. Yeah. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Yeah.
Federal Newswire:
Yeah. But the Russian people had a massive distaste for this kind of protracted war.
David Satter:
Well, they had a massive distaste because of the First Chechen War. The First Chechen War began on New Year's night, '94 to '95, with a slaughter of the 131st Micop regiment, which was sent into Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Russian generals bragged, and this is reminiscent and very similar to what happened in Ukraine.
But they bragged, "A paratroop regiment can take Grozny in two hours." Yeltsin, at least according to his chief advisors, was interested in a short, victorious war to boost his rating.
The war went on for 18 months. In the end, Russia was defeated and was forced to withdraw from Chechnya, as we hope they'll be forced to withdraw from Ukraine. But under those circumstances, you can imagine that they had no taste whatever in 1999 for a Second Chechen War, having experienced a bloody conflict in which thousands of people were killed. In Moscow and other major cities, the streets began to fill up with invalids from the war who were begging for alms. They had no desire to launch yet another war. But those bombings convinced the Russian people that they were under attack. The authorities said that there was a Chechen trace. Just the wording was very strange because there was no proof. But a trace? What do you mean by trace? In fact, no Chechen and has ever been connected to those bombings, and they've denied any participation.
Federal Newswire:
Let's take it further back because I think it's important for folks to understand how things got to where they were, why Yeltsin was so supremely unpopular. Let's talk about the transition. Mikhail Gorbachev just passed away fairly recently. In that August coup, and he was replaced, and then we had the transitional period. What could have been done differently? Well, actually, we'll come back to your journalistic career, the time you spent in Moscow in the '70s and '80s. But what could have been done differently in the '90s to restabilize things? I mean, one of the things that I remember from my own studies, and we talked about this before we went on the air, my undergraduate degree was in Soviet studies. So, we spent a lot of time looking at these things as the Soviet Union was falling apart.
But one of the things was, is that the only people who knew how to run any kind of a successful commercial enterprise where the folks who were in the criminal element, but obviously we couldn't have those folks running the economy. What could have been done differently in order to smooth that transition and not have that stuff happen?
David Satter:
Well, what Russia needed was the rule of law. What Russia needed was the rule of law. That was the last thing they were concerned about. They were concerned about transforming the economy from a state-run economy to an economy which was based on private ownership. That in itself is a worthy goal. They had to do that. They had to take the economic assets and the means of production away from the state, out of the hands of the state, and turn them over to responsible private owners. The word responsible is very important here.
But that's not how it happened. They handed out property indiscriminately in return for bribes.
Federal Newswire:
So the only folks who had hard currency were the criminal elements.
David Satter:
Well, not only that. Those who quickly found enough money to bribe officials. Bribing the relevant official was really the most important part of the starting capital of any enterprise at that time.
Federal Newswire:
Were the failures that we had, the failures of US policy vis-a-vis Russia, the post-Soviet Russia, the same as the failures in US policy in post-invasion of Iraq? And by that I'm asking, in both instances, we were really interested as a nation in the pursuit of democracy and fostering democracy as opposed to freedom and capitalism and the rule of law. Did we fail in both ways? Because I remember there was a huge emphasis during the Clinton administration on the creation of democracy in Russia, and I think we may have missed something massive in that.
David Satter:
Well, when we talk about democracy, we're talking about the rule of law.
We should be because the rule of law... And by the way, when we talk about the market, we're talking about the rule of law.
Adam Smith said that the market is equivalent exchange. But when we think about it and we understand the complexity of the market, we realize that that presupposes a certain framework of rules. You can't just take property and put it in the hands of criminal elements and assume that you're going to have democracy. What you'll have is a criminal takeover. And that's exactly what happened. Now, yes, we were in favor of democracy. We should have been in favor of democracy. We didn't know what democracy involved. Americans are superficial in their own country, but when they go to another country whose culture they don't understand, whose language they don't speak, whose people they don't know, it's [fostering a sense of property rights] really...Well, we couldn't have had that in Russia. The local customs and the local institutions would've been contrary to property rights because they aren't... Russians for generations were not accustomed to property rights, even before the Communist takeover. But nonetheless, what you can do in countries in which we become involved, is establish the authority of universal values rooted in a system of law. We were in a position, had we understood better what was at stake, had we understood the history and the culture and so on, we would've understood also why that was critical, why that was more important than, for example, propagandizing privatization, which we did without understanding what privatization was and what was taking place.
Federal Newswire:
You talk about superficiality. In 1989 there was that whole idea of if we just introduced blue jeans and rock music and Pizza Hut and Pepsi...
David Satter:
Well, that's the American way.
Federal Newswire:
Maybe some of the failures [of thought] is that if you simply introduce people to these goods, then they will somehow get implicated to that values. That's a very naive view. I would think you would agree with that.
David Satter:
Yeah. It doesn't change what's in people's minds. Everything depends ultimately on values. If we take the communist period, what the communist regime was based on was the denial of the traditional moral values of the West and their replacement by what was called class values. What needed to be done in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union was reestablishing the authority of universal values, the same values that come down to us from Plato, from the New Testament, from the Old Testament, from the foundations of Western thought and civilization. It's not rocket science, actually.
Federal Newswire:
No. But talking about that and the disdain for the Western values, and again, now getting back into Putin and sort of Putin's career, this idea of... Part and parcel of Soviet foreign policy vis-a-vis the West was to use Western values against the West and to work to undo those values, sort of the values of classical liberal democracy.
David Satter:
Well, those values and the system that was based on them were a standing threat to the kind of tyranny that was established in Russia and the control that was exerted by the Russian leaders.
Federal Newswire:
So the Soviets knew and folks like Putin knew that they could use things like the idea of free speech and the institution in America of free speech as a weapon against the West, to work to undo those values because we've seen a lot of that in terms of our cultural debates over the last 50 years are rooted in undoing those values. Certainly, the Russian interference in US elections and US politics over the last decade are further evidence of using these institutions against us. What are your thoughts?
David Satter:
Well, trying to undermine... I think what they do is they try to use our internal conflicts. They try to make them worse, and they don't want... It's interesting. During all the period, for example, when we were talking about the Trump collusion, supposed collusion. There was no attention to the Moscow apartment bombings. There was no attention to the Beslan school massacre. There was no attention to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London.
There was no attention to many other things. The initial invasion of Ukraine. The destruction of the Malaysia airliner, MH17. It's wonderful to keep Americans busy with their own internal quarrels because then they won't have time to deal with what's really important.
Federal Newswire:
Exacerbating conflict in the United States in 2014 and 2015.
David Satter:
Absolutely. It's a form of self-defense.
Federal Newswire:
Talk a little bit about what it was like to be in Moscow or to be in the Soviet Union in the late '70s and into the early '80s. At a time when Breznya was trying to tilt the West, when certainly the United States and our ability to exercise power on the global stage was at an ebb. What was it like to be in the Soviet Union then?
David Satter:
Well, I was there. I was the Moscow correspondent for the London Financial Times from '76 to '82. It was like having a front row seat at a gigantic theater of the absurd. To see that people were actually acting out a false version of reality and treating that false version of reality as if it were truer than the truth. You can't beat an experience like that.
Federal Newswire:
Sure. But the decay... I guess my point is that the decay that they were trying to hide in the early '80s was not necessarily fully out in the open, but it was a lot more out in the open than it had been. So for me, who would, as a child of the Cold War and becoming interested in this because I was ready to defend America if the Russkies invaded... For me, it was an eye-opening experience in that regard. But talk about the Potemkin Village that was the entire Soviet Union. Talk about this issue of the theater of the absurd, the rot that was going on behind the scenes.
David Satter:
Well, the first thing I need to say in this regard is that the Perestroika years that you're talking about, '88, '89, this was already a different country because Gorbachev transformed the Soviet Union. For this, you have to give him at least a certain amount of credit. He allowed truthful information. But before Gorbachev, you could not express a truthful word.
I'll give you an example. A friend of mine was a writer, and he was one of the few people who was successful enough to have his own car. He was listening on the radio and a radio announcer began talking about the invasion of Afghanistan. Now, all Soviet media, in all the newspapers, the radios, the lectures, the public meetings, all spoke about fraternal help, just as now Russia is saying that this is a special military operation in Ukraine and it's punishable to say it's a war.
In those days, in the Soviet days, in regard to the invasion of Afghanistan, it was out of the question to say it was in invasion. This was fraternal assistance to the people of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union never carried out acts of aggression.
So, when my friend heard this over the radio, and by the way, the announcer was later arrested and put in a mental hospital, my friend was so stunned to hear this truthful description of what was going on that he almost ran off the road.
I'll give you another example of the kind of silence that prevailed. Another friend of mine was driving on the Moscow Ring Road, and he looked up and he saw a plane coming in for a landing at Vnukovo Airport. Suddenly, one of the engines caught fire. He watched in horror as smoke started to pour out of the engine. The plane started to spin around, and he saw in the distance that it crashed and there was an explosion. But that wasn't the frightening part. The frightening part was nothing changed.
Nothing on the radio. Nothing on the television. No police sirens. No indication of anything. It was completely covered up. Anyone trying to get to the scene was prevented. This was a society based on lies and suppression of information and idiotic propaganda which people were obliged to repeat ad nauseum. That was the world I lived in for six years.
Federal Newswire:
That's where I wanted to go, which is because Vladimir is, I would say, both a product and a facilitator of that kind of an environment, a lot of this is playing out again today.
David Satter:
In a modernized form. Yeah.
Federal Newswire:
It's interesting because there are debates going on about how technology can be used to censor and stifle and control people. But on the other hand, it can be very difficult to tamp down on information being exchanged. Let's fast forward now to the war in Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine and Putin and, again, the unwillingness to grasp with the basic truths of what's going on in Ukraine by folks in Russia.
David Satter:
Well, you don't have, as you did during the Soviet time, complete control over information. But instead, the population is propagandized massively by dishonest television, broadcast news reports, all of which are cleverly designed by the regime to play into their sense of aggrieved nationalism and their desire for Russia to be a great and powerful country.
During the Soviet times, I was once standing in line to buy some potatoes at a grocery store. A guy in the line ahead of me started shouting, "How long can we stand in these lines? This is humiliating. How long can this go on?" An old woman turned to him and said, "Never you mind." She was wagging her finger at him. "Never you mind." He said, "The whole world is afraid of us." The Russians loved the idea that they could inspire fear, and in a perverse way that compensated for their own individual lack of liberty. They were not significant in their own right. They lived worse than the people in the West. But they were part of a great, powerful state that was going to spread enlightenment to the whole world. That psychological complex or that psychological tendency underpins a lot of the Russian support now for the war in Ukraine.
Federal Newswire:
Added into it is that there is so much misinformation that's out there. A lot of times what has happened, certainly in the early part of the war, there were things, there were stories that were out there that may have had a kernel of truth, but then got overblown by the West. The ghost of Kyiv and some of the other stories that were off of Snake Island.
David Satter:
Well, we have a lot of misinformation in the West by people who can pretend to be experts. The idea, for example, that NATO expansion. They don't know history. So they're confused and they confuse everyone else. The fact is that Yeltsin considered seizing Crimea before the Soviet Union even broke up. The military doctrine of defending Russian speakers, wherever they happened to be, was developed long before any of the former Soviet states entered NATO. It's a good thing that countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania didn't listen to our so-called American realists. They acted on what they knew about Russia. And what's the gap? First of all, I think, of course we defend free speech in this country. We want everyone to express their views. You don't have to be well-informed, unfortunate.
But it would be nice. I say this as someone full of goodwill. It would be nice if some of our people who do pretend to be experts actually tried to learn a little bit, because the information that shows how foolish they are is certainly easily available. What I think we are had we not extended the protection of NATO to the Baltic Republics, for example, the Russians would've faced a nation of 1 million Estonians instead of a country like Ukraine that can fight back.
So then what's missing, of course, is they apply Western models and they know nothing of Russian mentality or history. The people in the region do know, and they react accordingly.
Federal Newswire:
It's interesting because as were so many debates that were going on as to the reasons Russia was going down this road, to fulfill the designs of glory, to push back against NATO expansion. There was the theory about the third Rome theory. The idea of Putin doing this to appease the Russian Orthodox Church.
David Satter:
It's all wrong. All of them, based on our misconceptions. The bitter truth is different. The bitter truth, it's the personal interests of a small group at the top. The prototype is Yeltsin's remark when he said that the president needed a short, victorious war in Chechnya, this is 1994, in order to boost his ratings. Well, the thing that people in America don't understand and they need to understand, is that for Russia, war is an instrument of internal policy, and that it's used as a device to strengthen the hold on power of a kleptocratic group.
Federal Newswire:
It's interesting you said that because, again, if you go through the sweep of the last century and 20 years, in terms of current Russia, Soviet Russia, pre-Soviet Russia, that is a truism, what you just said, whether it's Czar Alexander... I'm sorry. Czar Nicholas deciding to not pull out of the first war, or staying in the First World War when he knew things were hopeless. Then you had the Soviet Union, and now in terms of Russia itself.
David Satter:
It's a little different in the previous historical incarnation. That's a subject that we could go into. The Czar didn't need a war in order to strengthen his hold on power, although there was a huge burst of enthusiasm and support for the Czar in 1914 when war was declared, but that wasn't really... The promise to pull out of the war was made by Lenin. It was the provisional government that fell because they wanted to stay in the war out of a sense of responsibility to their allies, which of course the Czar knows about. Communist regime operated through the framework of the ideology.
These are complex questions, but what is really at stake now, and what is in a sense of further evolution or something new in Russian history, is a criminal gang who runs the country and will do anything to stay in power, and manipulates the patriotic and nationalistic and chauvinistic feelings of the entire population, and treats them as absolutely expendable raw material in the achievement of their goals.
Federal Newswire:
Grishvenval, I've seen the recent Russian videos of Russia propaganda: "Come live in Russia where you can come back to traditional values."
David Satter:
Yeah. Come in. Come in and be cannon fodder.
Federal Newswire:
Was one of the fatal mistakes here, in terms of this invasion for Putin, just the complete miscalculation over the sheer size of Ukraine and the idea of trying to seize and hold that country? So we're now sort of seeing the blow back recently in terms of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
David Satter:
Well, first of all, there's a tendency in Russia to always think that victory will be easy. This was the case in the war against Finland. It was the case in the war against Japan, the Russo Japanese War. They thought that, who are these Asians to resist us? We'll polish them off. In fact, that was the first short victorious war that, and it ended up dooming the empire. Even in relation to Hitler, they were overconfident. So, it's not surprising. In the case of Chechnya, we know...
So it's not at all surprising and it's not out of character that they went into the Ukrainian war with the assumption that it would be over quickly and that they would be victorious. It's amazing the degree to which history repeats itself. Because in the case of the First Chechen War, they also told soldiers, "You'll be greeted with flowers. You'll be greeted as liberators." They begin to believe their own propaganda. I mean, it's a claustral world there. But the devices that they use to fool others end up fooling them.
Federal Newswire:
Getting back to this issue of the so-called experts and the problem of so-called experts pontificating on these things, I think about the debates, I'll say this, amongst conservative circles in the weeks and months immediately after Russia finally decided to invade Ukraine... There was the question of, well, the Ukrainians, they can't possibly win. So, they need to be suing for peace. They need to be negotiating. And of course...
David Satter:
Kissinger also made that argument. Basically.
Federal Newswire:
But now we're seeing that the Ukrainians, least in recent weeks, Ukrainians can mount a counteroffensive, So the question is, were those folks who wanted Ukraine to just surrender, they were wrong. That's question A. But question B is, if they weren't wrong, what's the overall exit strategy for Russia in all of this? How does this get resolved in the end? Does one side have to totally defeat the other? Is there a way for Russia to just withdraw somehow? But it's a two-part question.
David Satter:
We have a lot of people pontificating, and very few of them have actual firsthand experience of Russia, who actually know the country. And that doesn't stop them, of course.
They speak with great deal of confidence about a country they've never experienced.
Federal Newswire:
By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, but also a country who, in terms of those experiences, as you've said, things change over time. So, my experience of visiting Russia in '89 is an entirely different experience of you're being in Russia in the 1970's and 80's.
David Satter:
Well, you have to follow what's going on. Yeah. Because it's an evolving situation. If Russia had not received Western military support.
Federal Newswire:
Yeah. Ukraine.
David Satter:
I'm sorry. Ukraine had not received... which was critical to their ability to resist... Let's remember that during the Obama administration, even the Javelin anti-tank missiles were embargoed.
For all of his mistakes, Trump had authorized those deliveries. And they were critical. The Javelins made all the difference in defending the capital. But let's say that that hadn't happened. Let's say that Ukrainian resistance had collapsed. Russian aggression, first of all, really, we would've abandoned the most important principle guaranteeing peace in the postwar world, which is the inviolability of national borders and seizing territory by force. The mere fact that we had allowed it to happen would've so imperiled the NATO alliance that it's highly likely that many NATO members would have tried to reach accommodations with Russia, compromising our security. Or, failing that, that Russia would have then begun to intimidate the Baltic states. They have an enormous strategic advantage vis-a-vis the Baltic states because of the small territory and the small populations. They don't have an overall strategic advantage vis-a-vis NATO, but in that theater, they do.
We would've been inviting a new and much less advantageous challenge, and we would've been undermining the principles on it, which all of world security rests. By the way, we would've issued a standing invitation to the Chinese to follow the Russian example.
So that's the reason why. President Biden, for all of his mistakes regarding Afghanistan, nonetheless in this case deserves credit. There are people who argue that the support is not sufficient, that it's not timely enough. But it's been pretty good. The administration has gone further than I would've imagined.
Federal Newswire:
Especially given the precedent of the Obama administration.
David Satter:
Yeah. Absolutely. And Biden's own role in that administration. But give credit where credit is due. He's listening to sound advice and he's acting on it, which is all you need from a president, really in this situation.
Now as far as the the way out, well, we have the precedent of the First Chechen War, which was largely supported when it was launched. It lost the support of the Russian people after 18 months. Yeltsin, in the end, withdrew unconditionally from Chechnya after vowing to pacify it.
Someone capable of committing the kind of atrocities against his own people that Putin has carried out, let alone the atrocities against the Syrians; against the Chechens, well, if you consider the Chechens to be different from Russians; against the Ukrainians, has a hypertrophic commitment to his own personal safety. If that is threatened, he'll amaze the world with his readiness to pull back and describe what happened as a victory. We don't need to... But he has to understand that he has nothing to gain from aggression, that he's going to lose. He has to be defeated involuntarily. The cost of defeat has to threaten him personally. That's the important thing.
Federal Newswire:
Given what we know and given Putin's willingness to kill his own people, is there a risk of pushing too hard in terms of that threat to his personal safety and he reacts in what we would consider in the West to be an irrational manner, but for somebody like Vladimir Putin, not so irrational? I mean some kind of catastrophic, over-the-top military action.
David Satter:
Well, his actions so far in this conflict indicate that he understands the cost.
Federal Newswire:
Yeah. And that there's a limit.
David Satter:
And that there is a limit. But the thing for all of us to bear in mind is that he has no internal moral compass that would prevent him from doing anything. But that's why it's so important that he understand that these actions, actions that cause catastrophic damage to Ukraine, to the West, to others, would have consequences for him personally.
Federal Newswire:
That's the deep and abiding concern.
I want to shift gears. What else floats your boat? What hobbies do you have when you have leisure time and you're not thinking about Putin and Russia? What are you doing?
David Satter:
That's an interesting question. Just the usual things that a lot of people do.
I go back and forth. My partner is a woman who is a Russian political refugee. Lives in Paris. I go back and forth to Paris. But I spend an awful lot of time speaking and teaching and discussing all these things. But, yeah. I have two sons, both of whom are journalists who live here in Washington, and I spend time with them.
Like doing the leisure activities that most people like.
Federal Newswire:
Does your partner cook? Does she have a favorite Russian dish that she makes?
David Satter:
Oh, she knows all of them.
Federal Newswire:
What's a favorite thing that she makes?
David Satter:
Oh, gosh almighty. I mean...
There's, well, it's pelmeni, if you know what that is.
Federal Newswire:
Of course. Absolutely.
David Satter:
Yeah. She's a political refugee. She grew up, by the way, in the town where they make the nuclear bombs that are pointed at us. There's a polonium factory in the city of Azorsk in the Euro Mountains. She got in trouble because she organized an NGO to defend the victims of radiation poisoning, and she was forced to leave Russia. That's why I met her in Paris. But at the risk of seeming a little one dimensional, I'm so caught up in all this stuff.
But I read Russian literature and philosophy and...
Federal Newswire:
Do you have a favorite Russian poet?
David Satter:
Well, Pushkin, Aleksandr Blok. Russian literature is very, very rich and so is Russian philosophy.
Federal Newswire:
Thank you. David Satter, thank you so very much for joining us today.
David Satter:
Thank you.
