763: The Other Mr. President

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

The day Russia invaded Ukraine, Thursday, at the very end of the day, I reached Richard Ensor, Ukraine correspondent for The Economist. He'd started the day in the capital, Kyiv, and spent much of the day traveling.

Ira Glass

With him was a woman that he met on the train who needed a place to stay before grabbing another train to Poland. The consequences of talking to the Western press are not clear, so she asked me to call her Natalie here on the radio. She's an English teacher, 25, a Ukrainian who grew up a few hours from Kyiv but moved to the city five years ago.

And when she told me the long, frightening journey she had made that day, escaping the city while the Russians invaded, it wasn't one of those war stories where you think, oh, I can't imagine what it would be like to go through that. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. For anybody who has ever lived in a decent-sized city, it is shockingly, instantly easy to imagine.

Every moment of it happens in such familiar kinds of places. She was not woken up by sounds of bombing, but by her stepfather calling on Skype from England where he lives.

Ira Glass

Terrifying, she says, but a very specific kind of terrifying that you don't usually run into.

Ira Glass

She says she didn't want to feel this way for another minute, so she packed her things and called some friends who have a car, told them, we have to get out of the city really fast. They headed over to pick her up. It's not far, but they got stuck in traffic. So many people were trying to flee.

Finally when they got to her, they decided to head to a suburb called Irpin just outside Kyiv, maybe 20 miles. Should be a 40-minute drive on a normal day. One of the friends' parents have a house.

Ira Glass

The helicopters were shooting, she says. Turns out that Irpin was close to one of the big battles in Kyiv that first day over an airport in Hostomel. Russians sent helicopters to seize it, hoping presumably to use it to bring in troops and supplies to take the city. At one point during the day it was reported that they had captured the airport, then later that Ukrainian soldiers surrounded them and took it back. At this point the Russians seem to have it again. So anyway, that is what Natalie and her friends were driving towards.

Ira Glass

They got to the friend's house, the woman with the cellar, took a look around. They were so close to all this fighting, and Natalie decided this isn't right. She was going to turn around. She was going to undo everything she had spent the morning doing, go back to Kyiv where she'd just come from and try to get a train from there to the border, which would mean leaving a place where at least there would be some shelter and heading into who knows what. It was hard to decide.

Ira Glass

One guy decided to go with her, somebody who she'd never met before that day but who seemed like a rational guy. She said you want to stick with rational people in emergency situations. The friends drove them to the train station, a local train that could take them back to Kyiv. And when they arrived in Kyiv they hoped to take the subway, but Kyiv's subways were closed because they include these stations that are deep underground that double as bomb shelters. And that's what they were being used for.

Ira Glass

They finally get to the train station with trains that could take them west to the border. They had no tickets. It was mobbed. Natalie had money ready in case she needed to bribe somebody to get on a train, but it was such a moment of solidarity. The conductors just let people on without tickets.

Richard, The Economist correspondent, was on that train with her, and he told me he had never been in a refugee situation with so many cats. He said he felt like everybody on the train brought their cat. Eight hours later she was halfway across the country, 300 miles away, in Lviv, far from the fighting.

Ira Glass

Like it was just two days ago, she told me, she did a photo shoot with a friend in the center of Kyiv.

Ira Glass

It was hard to believe it happened. Even though she was somebody who had thought Putin would invade and she thought that he would quickly try to take Kyiv-- she'd actually been in the process of getting a visa to get out-- but she said most people didn't believe that, told themselves it wasn't happening.

Ira Glass

I got back on the line with Richard from The Economist. He's actually talked to lots of Ukrainians about this and pointed out that the country's media and its president for weeks have been saying nothing is going to happen. Putin was just posturing. And unless you read the foreign press, you probably wouldn't believe Putin was going to invade. Also he says--

Ira Glass

2014 is when the Russian military took Crimea from Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists in two Ukrainian territories seceded from the country.

Ira Glass

Today on our program we have an episode of our show that we put together back in 2017 about that man, Vladimir Putin. At the time it was inspired by news that had people guessing what his intentions were and what he was thinking. We wanted to understand him better. And there's one story we found that's Act One of today's show that I have to admit I've been thinking about for weeks as Putin amassed troops around the Ukrainian border.

It's this story about whether he came to power in 1999 by killing a few hundred innocent Russians. So we have that. If you haven't heard it, you really should. And more, including what do Russians think of him? Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Going In with a Bang. So have you heard this story? This is something people speculated about years ago but now seems mostly forgotten. It happened right when Vladimir Putin was coming to power. This was back in 1999. Boris Yeltsin was president, running Russia. Putin was the prime minister-- not well known, not well liked, polling at 2% as a possible presidential candidate.

And then-- Putin had only been prime minister for a month-- there was a series of bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere. 300 people died. Putin blamed it on Chechen rebels, invaded Chechnya, started the Second Chechen War, which he won. It was a popular war, catapulted him into the presidency. When he took office, he had 53% of the vote.

And even back then when he took office in 2000, there was a question. Did he bomb those buildings himself to create the pretext for the war and his own rise to power? If he did, of course it calls the legitimacy of his presidency into question in a big way, murdering his own constituents-- exactly the kinds of Russians that he claims to be serving and protecting as president. One of our producers, Robyn Semien, talked to reporters who covered this and reviewed the evidence with them.

Robyn Semien

Before we get to the more mysterious aspects of the bombings, a quick summary of what happened. The bombings came in fast succession-- four bombs in two weeks in random locations in Moscow and two other cities. Early September was the first one. A bomb in a truck went off right outside an apartment building, collapsing it. Over 60 people died.

Days later, thousands of miles away, another bomb goes off on the ground floor of a nine-story apartment building. Nine stories flattened, killing over 90 people. Within days there was another one, and then a fourth-- buildings destroyed in the night while people were inside sleeping. David Satter was in and out of the country at the time. He's been reporting on Russia since the '70s.

Robyn Semien

The government immediately blamed the bombings on Chechen guerrillas. Scott Anderson is another reporter who's written about the attacks.

Robyn Semien

But this story that Chechens were behind the bombings was kind of fishy. For starters, it was three years after Chechnya and Russia had finished a war, the First Chechen War. Chechnya basically won. They signed a peace treaty. Again, Scott.

Robyn Semien

So why commit acts of terror that were big enough to start another war? And just logistically, it would have been hard to pull off.

Robyn Semien

Even some people in the government questioned the official account. David Satter was in Moscow right after the bombings. And a friend who had good connections told David there were people in the security services who suspected the FSB-- that's the modern version of the KGB basically-- might be behind the bombings.

So David asked to meet some of those guys in person, and they agreed. But this was such a dangerous idea. They wanted to make sure they weren't caught. So they had this very private conversation in a very public place, in the center of Moscow.

Robyn Semien

The agents didn't have proof, but some things just didn't add up.

Robyn Semien

It's also at military bases. But how would terrorists get hexogen at all, the agent said, let alone drive big quantities of it around Russia unchecked?

Robyn Semien

The fifth bomb in yet another city, Ryazan. And this is where the story about the Chechens seems to really fall apart and where the story gets truly strange.

September 22, 1999, 2 and 1/2 weeks after the first apartment bomb. A couple of residents in a building in Ryazan noticed something weird. One guy, a bus driver who lived in the building, saw a car, a white sedan, parked outside the building. Maura Reynolds was a foreign correspondent for The LA Times back then living in Moscow.

She talked to the guy, who told her the license plates on the car didn't look right. They had a local city code on them for Ryazan, the number 62. But, he told Maura, when he looked closer, he saw that the number--

Robyn Semien

So he calls the police. In the meantime, two men get out of the car.

Robyn Semien

That's Scott Anderson again. The local police show up.

Robyn Semien

Local FSB start combing through evidence. A detonator was found in the basement.

Robyn Semien

Here's a TV news clip from them from a documentary about the bombings called Disbelief. The reporter says, "The sacks were discovered by police."

Robyn Semien

The sacks were taken to a lab that concluded the contents were hexogen, the same explosive used to blow up the other buildings, the stuff that supposedly only the FSB and military had access to.

One day after the bomb scare, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who, remember, has only been in the job for a month, launches the second war against Chechnya over the bombings. He says, quote, "The question is closed once and for all. We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport. And forgive me-- if we catch them in the crapper, then we'll rub them out in the crapper," unquote.

Meanwhile back in Ryazan, local police find the mysterious white sedan and the two suspects. They were not Chechen. They were Russian-- Russian FSB agents with FSB IDs.

The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, goes on TV and is like, there's a totally reasonable explanation for FSB agents to be caught doing this. The whole thing was a drill. This audio of that announcement is from a documentary about the bombings called Blowing Up Russia.

Robyn Semien

Again, Scott Anderson.

Robyn Semien

As for the hexogen, there was no hexogen, he says. There were no explosives. The white powder in the bags, he explains, was sugar.

Maura Reynolds talked to people who lived in the apartment building in Ryazan back then. She says people were angry, and they thought their own government had tried to kill them. Though, of course, since this was Russia--

Robyn Semien

At the time there was still something of a free press. People could speak out and did.

Robyn Semien

This is tape from a TV special on an independent channel, the NTV network, which has since been taken over by the state. The special is like a talk show with a host, some FSB higher-ups, and people from the building who are pretty mad. Again, this comes from the documentary Disbelief.

Robyn Semien

He's saying, "The people of Ryazan and many other towns just do not believe all these stories. I'm sitting here and just cannot believe the story the FSB is telling. I myself am a military officer. I was a senior officer for 28 years. I was in charge of countless exercises. What these generals are claiming about this so-called exercise, I just can't believe my ears."

All of this unfolds very quickly. Putin becomes prime minister in August. The bombings are in September. The war starts in September also. Putin is the public face of the war, and it's going well. This is when his popularity soars.

And on New Year's Eve at midnight, the president at the time, Boris Yeltsin, makes an announcement.

Robyn Semien

Maura Reynolds says when Ryazan happened she saw it in local news reports, but it wasn't a huge story. The FSB may or may not have planted explosives. It wasn't clear what it meant. And it was quickly drowned out by the invasion and the war.

Only in retrospect did it start to seem significant. And in retrospect there were other pieces of evidence that started to seem important. I'll tell you one more.

Right after one of the bombs went off in Moscow-- this was the third bomb-- the speaker of the Russian parliament, a guy named Seleznyov, mentioned the bomb, but got the city wrong. Mind you, he was in Moscow, and the bomb was in Moscow. But he said the bomb went off in Volgodonsk. Here's Scott Anderson.

Robyn Semien

The next thing that happens is--

Robyn Semien

--after the bomb finally did go off in Volgodonsk, another member of parliament, a guy named Zhirinovsky, confronts the speaker about how suspicious this looked. He says, you told us on Monday that a building in Volgodonsk was blown up three days before the explosion.

Robyn Semien

Zhirinovsky calls the act monstrous and says he'll try to keep the speaker from being re-elected, but he's hard to hear because they keep cutting his microphone off.

Robyn Semien

Someone calls Zhirinovsky a scumbag and then a scoundrel who deserves to be shot. Finally Zhirinovsky turns around, walks away, and gets hit in the back with a folder of papers.

There was an official government investigation into the apartment bombings-- trials, convictions-- all held in private, not open to the public or press. People were convicted. They were not FSB agents. They were not Chechens either. There have been people outside the government who tried to look deeper into the bombings, but overall that hasn't gone well, most notably an independent commission of human rights activists, politicians, and investigators. Again, Scott.

Robyn Semien

Radioactive poison, polonium-210, slipped into his tea. A British investigation determined two FSB agents had killed Litvinenko and that Putin had likely signed off on it.

In his autobiography which came out in 2000, Putin roundly denied any FSB involvement in the bombings, writing, quote, "What? Blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really utter nonsense. It's totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people," unquote.

David Satter has been researching this since it happened and has written two books about it. He's convinced the story went like this. Before the bombings, even before Putin came to power, Boris Yeltsin and his administration were plagued with corruption investigations. He worried they could eventually point to him and his family, especially if some other party or someone unsympathetic to him became president.

So he looked to appoint a prime minister who he could trust. He fired two other guys in just three months before landing on Putin. Then he and Putin together had the apartments blown up as the pretext to go to war and, in the patriotic glow, to install Putin and quash the corruption investigations.

Scott and Maura aren't so sure. For Maura, when it comes to the bombings, she gets that something was done by design and that it appears to be for political purposes. But as for who was behind the bombings exactly, she can't tell.

Robyn Semien

It's been nearly two decades since the bombings. And I wanted to know, what do people in Russia think about them? Putin is still their president. How big a deal are they? Are people walking around wondering if their president came to power by killing hundreds of Russian citizens?

So I interviewed four people who live in Moscow. None of them said they were big supporters of Putin. Three of the four had heard the rumor that he was behind the bombings. None of them believed it or wanted to believe it. "I can't know the truth, so I can't say," a 42-year-old screenwriter told me. A 22-year-old student I talked to said she didn't want to know if it was true.

As for Ryazan, only one of the four, a telecommunications specialist, had heard anything about Ryazan-- the sacks of sugar, any of that. He knew all the details though, read a book about it. And he believes Ryazan was an FSB drill. The one person who'd never heard the story that Putin might be behind the bombings was Yuliya, a 40-year-old lawyer.

Robyn Semien

So I ran through all the facts with her, all the evidence that Putin might be behind the bombings. She said she didn't care. Does it sound like a ridiculous theory, I asked. Yes, she said, most likely some ridiculous theory.

Ira Glass

Robyn Semien.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Mr. Popular. So one of the notable things about Vladimir Putin is that for years he's had stunningly high approval ratings among Russians. In January and early February of this year as tensions rose with Ukraine, his approval numbers rose with them to 71% from the 60s. And back in 2017 when we first broadcast today's program, the press was reporting that his approval ratings were something like 84%, which for a US president, that would be just unthinkable.

And we wondered, is that real at all, that 84%, or is that from some institution controlled by Putin? So back then we asked Charles Maynes to look into this for us. He is now NPR's Moscow correspondent.

Charles Maynes

This is someone I knew wouldn't exaggerate their feelings about the president because they were talking to a foreign reporter, someone I've known for decades.

Charles Maynes

That's her talking here, Olga Sergeevna Dmitrieva. I lived with Olga Sergeevna and her two children back in the mid-90s when I was an exchange student in Moscow. It was a good five years before Putin arrived on the scene. Over the years she took in several American exchange students.

Charles Maynes

That's her telling me I was her favorite. And I tell her I always say I have a Russian mom.

Charles Maynes

She says, I always say I have an American son who I don't see as much as I like. We took the tram to her apartment building through the neighborhood I lived in with her family back in the '90s, and she started pointing out all these changes-- a new playground, new stores.

And just by the new museum they're building a community pool. Now, none of this was here back when I lived with them. It's all part of the prosperity that's come to Moscow since Putin came to power. And it's why Olga Sergeevna and lots of people in her generation-- she's in her 60s-- it's why they love Putin.

When I lived with Olga Sergeevna and her family Boris Yeltsin was president, and things in Russia were really, really tough. In fact, there's a poll for that. It says 68% of Russians think nothing good happened in Russia during the Yeltsin years, nothing.

Charles Maynes

Olga Sergeevna says life was hard back then. People didn't have enough money. Grocery stores were empty. And they only began to clear with the arrival of Vladimir Putin.

It seems almost hard to remember now, but when Putin first arrived as prime minister in 1999 Russians had no idea who he was. He was this awkward public speaker back then. His suits were ill fitting. The guy never smiled.

Charles Maynes

Hardly, says Olga Sergeevna, the specimen she sees now.

Charles Maynes

She told me Putin's appearance was predicted earlier, when mystics said one day a man named Volodya would save Russia. Volodya is short for Vladimir. Lots of the older generation will tell you stuff like this.

Charles Maynes

Nobody thought that savior would be Putin. I mean, let's face it, she says. He's kind of short. No one believed he'd change Russia, that Russia would rise from its knees. But it did rise from its knees. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was seen as this buffoon-- visibly drunk in meetings with world leaders, an embarrassment.

Putin was younger. He didn't drink. The fact that he was a former KGB agent at least meant he was disciplined and educated. He spoke German, practiced judo. And he brought an end to the chaos of the Yeltsin years during which the ruble had collapsed several times, the government was constantly reshuffled, and a few insiders, the so-called oligarchs, became billionaires while most everyone else lost their savings.

But as soon as Putin took over, the economy boomed, mostly because of oil prices shooting up. And soon he exiled or arrested oligarchs who'd been running the country behind the scenes. A lot of people talk about how Putin saved Russia.

Charles Maynes

If you compare 1994 and 2017, Olga Sergeevna says, the difference is night and day. In 1994 and '95, we didn't celebrate holidays. Nobody was in a festive mood. The theaters were all closed because nobody went. Nobody had money.

Charles Maynes

Under Putin, she says, she lives a comfortable life-- has a job, can afford to travel, can go out to eat or to the theater. It's hard to overstate how important this is. During Putin's first decade in power Russians had never lived better, particularly in the bigger cities. People like Olga Sergeevna became part of something that was happening for the first time ever in Russia, the emergence of a middle class.

Over time, this economic miracle turned Putin into sort of a folk hero. There's the side of him we know in America, the guy flying jets or riding horses shirtless. But in Russia he's cultivated this image that he's frugal, lives modestly, works all the time.

A political analyst told me Putin's seen as the only one who can fix anything or improve people's lives, the one who keeps corrupt bureaucrats in check. He's the good czar. For Olga Sergeevna it wasn't just that Putin made the country better. It was that he could do no wrong.

Charles Maynes

Because he's smart, intelligent, cultured, athletic, she says. He's even a musician, plays and sings.

I asked her if there's anything he can't do. Her response--

Charles Maynes

He can't cook, but he doesn't need to. Finally I said, come on. Isn't there anything you don't like about him, anything at all?

Charles Maynes

While we were talking, Olga Sergeevna brought me over to her computer, started scrolling through her Facebook page. She subscribes to a Putin feed just to see what he's up to. And her feed is filled with pictures of him-- Putin snarling, Putin laughing. Doesn't he look like a benevolent lord, she says.

I just want to point out here that Olga Sergeevna doesn't work for the government or Putin's United Russia party. She's an accountant. She has been for decades, with a daughter who lives in London and a son who works for an American tech company.

Charles Maynes

One of the things Olga Sergeevna likes best is that Putin stands up to the West. And this is a big thing for Russians.

Charles Maynes

As Putin likes to say, when they curse me in the West, it means I'm doing the right thing.

When it comes to the bad things Americans hear about Putin-- that he's corrupt, that he's secretly one of the world's richest men, or that he's meddled in the American elections-- Olga Sergeevna says that's all lies perpetuated by Western journalists, people like me, a reminder that we have this ongoing joke where she tells me to leave our Putin alone. And she says she means it.

Charles Maynes

I ask her about the many opponents of Putin's who've ended up dead-- the journalist Anna Politkovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB whistleblower who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope. Who poisoned him, she asked. Some say it was Putin, I tell her. Oh, please. Everyone says it's Putin.

Charles Maynes

The moment somebody sneezes or farts in Russia, Putin is to blame. I say, but what about the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov? He was killed. But she interrupts me and says--

Charles Maynes

Nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. There was an investigation. Nemtsov died over a love triangle. She doesn't buy any of it. In fact, a lot of Olga Sergeevna's opinions are things you might hear on state TV. But I think with Olga Sergeevna and the other people I talked to, people who love Putin, the moments I understand them best are when they talk about the past, everything they went through before Putin arrived.

It's why sometimes I think the real reason people like Putin is not because they believe he'll keep moving Russia forward into the future. It's because they fear someone else, anyone else, might drive Russia back to the past.

Ira Glass

Charles Maynes in Moscow. This past week, he phoned Olga the day that Moscow invaded Ukraine to find out what she thought. She thinks Putin made the right call, that he was going in to help the separatists in Eastern Ukraine who've declared themselves independent of Ukraine and pro-Moscow. She believes Ukrainian authorities were going to attack people in that territory with arms they got from the United States.

The President of Ukraine, Zelensky, she told Charles he's a clown. Biden's a dope. Putin, still the smartest of the pack.

Coming up, another reason Russians see Putin the way they do. We get to know the disinformation mastermind who reshaped the world of Russian politics into what it is now. That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Other Mr. President, stories of Vladimir Putin and those around him. We've arrived at Act Three of our program-- Act Three, Maybe Pay a Little Attention to the Man behind the Curtain.

There's a quote that we heard while we were working on today's program back in 2017 from a writer named Peter Pomerantsev. He said that if the old Soviet Union was 75% violence, 25% propaganda, in today's Russia those numbers are reversed. It's 25% violence and 75% propaganda. And propaganda was radically reinvented under Vladimir Putin, its tactics and its methods, by this one political operative. Sean Cole explains.

Sean Cole

The operative's name is Vladislav Surkov. He was Putin's deputy chief for more than a decade, starting in 1999. In Russia he's what's referred to as a political technologist, but those are a dime a dozen. At the top of his powers, Surkov had a much more ominous, if unofficial title. He was known as a gray cardinal.

He doesn't look like a shadowy mastermind. He sort of resembles Rowan Atkinson, the actor who played Mr. Bean, except handsomer. And he actually doesn't manage propaganda at the Kremlin anymore. But the methods he invented to manipulate people and information, I've even heard them called artistic.

See, in the Soviet era the country was run by the Communist Party and the propagandists pumped out literally the party line and tried to suppress all other opposing messages. And then the Iron Curtain fell, a whole bunch of new political parties were created, and it was the messy early stages of a real democracy with parties bickering and vying for power.

And then when Putin became president-- I'm obviously skipping over a lot here-- his right-hand man, Surkov, helped solidify the Kremlin's power by putting together this party called United Russia, which gained majority in parliament and backed Putin. And then instead of tamping down the opposition like the old days, Surkov built a new system where there was opposition, but he dictated what the opposition stood for.

Sean Cole

This is Vasily Gatov. He's been a very high-level player in Russian media for nearly 20 years. These days, he's a visiting fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication, Leadership, and Policy.

Sean Cole

And he created whole new political parties and wrote their agendas.

Sean Cole

By 2003, so about four years into Surkov's tenure as gray cardinal, Vasily says Surkov had built up a whole cadre of deputies that would carry out his agenda with these different parties and other groups. I asked Vasily for an example of how all this worked, and he told me what everybody told me when I asked for specifics. He said, it's not like I was in the room with him. I don't know exactly what he said to whom, nor when.

He did tell me about this one case that he heard about from someone who worked with Surkov. In 2004, Vladimir Putin decided that governors shouldn't be elected anymore. They should be appointed by him. It's a long story. But at first, every other political party besides Putin's was against the idea, genuinely against it. But then Surkov manipulated them over to his side. It helped that he controlled their funding and the number of seats they got in the Duma.

And then the parties went through this whole drawn-out public drama, which had all the trappings of democracy. The bill was submitted. There were arguments for and against it, protests around the country. People announce they've changed their minds. There were several votes. And finally, after three months, it passes. All of this, Vasily says, was scripted by Surkov's people.

The name you hear for all these techniques is managed democracy. Surkov uses the phrase sovereign democracy. I suggested to one person I talked to that managed democracy sounds like a contradiction in terms. He said, exactly. It just means there's no democracy.

I don't want to overstate Surkov's power, nor his malevolence. Apparently he was much more carrot than stick in his approach, explaining why, no, you really want to align yourself with the Kremlin. Here's what's to be gained. And he didn't try to do this with everybody.

Sean Cole

That's Alexei Navalny. You may have heard of him. He's a high-profile activist. He's considered to be the only real opponent to Putin, except he can't run against Putin because Putin's people had him arrested, and you can't run for president in Russia if you have a criminal record.

Sean Cole

The more you hear about Surkov the man, the more it makes you understand how his whole Truman Show theatrical directing of society developed. He has all of these opposing factions inside of him too, all working in an unlikely but perfect concert together. Back in the early '90s he was a PR guy, designing ads for the richest oligarch in Russia.

At that point Surkov said he wanted to be like, quote, "the hero in Pretty Woman." He meant the Richard Gere character. But he's also a huge fan of the anti-bureaucracy, gay, Buddhist beat poet Allen Ginsberg. This is Surkov reciting Ginsberg's poem "Sunflower Sutra" from memory.

Sean Cole

You might be able to tell that Surkov studied theater, but he got kicked out of the Moscow Institute of Culture after a fistfight, reportedly. He's written lyrics for a Russian band called Agata Kristi. And so you marry PR and art and performance, plus his time at Russia's main state TV network Channel One-- managed democracy was just the natural culmination.

Sean Cole

Again, Vasily Gatov.

Sean Cole

He means the reality show Big Brother.

Sean Cole

Besides which, he could totally get away with it. Because not only was he good at it, but in Surkov's time as gray cardinal not very many people were paying attention.

Sean Cole

That is, after a certain point he wouldn't take very many pains to hide what he was doing, which I can imagine the feeling. Here he is carrying off all of these feats of manipulation in secret. You'd think he'd want a little credit.

On this point, there was a moment when Surkov seemed to be showing his cards a little bit, deliberately. It's a story that Peter Pomerantsev likes to tell. He's the journalist that I recorded earlier. Peter used to work in reality TV in Russia, and he's written a lot about Surkov.

Sean Cole

He was there to photograph an official meeting, but he said on his blog that he was much more interested in what was in the office.

Sean Cole

Like literally there's a whole mess of phones. And on one of them in particular, next to the numbers, there's a bank of buttons labeled Mironov, Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov, all heads of parties.

Sean Cole

Yes, Tupac Shakur the rapper. It's actually next to a picture of Barack Obama.

Sean Cole

And he wanted to create an atmosphere where you can never really tell what's true anymore, so everything is suspect. That was absolutely intentional. Surkov himself has come just shy of saying it openly.

Sean Cole

This is another shape Surkov is reported to have shifted into. He wrote a novel under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky. He won't admit it's really him, but Surkov's wife is named Natalya Dubovitskaya. So everyone's like, nutty coincidence.

The book's called Almost Zero, or Close to Zero. It's about a PR guy who grew up in the sticks, like Surkov did, moved to Moscow to hang out with bohemian artists, like Surkov did, and is now embroiled in the seedy, murderous underworld of illegal book publishing and distribution. Oh, and it's got an English subtitle-- Gangsta Fiction.

In any case, Peter says there are these really telling passages in which the hero realizes, oh, wait, everything's made up-- language, politics, every ideology. Everything's fake. I can see through it all. It's an epic kind of cynicism.

Sean Cole

Like I said before, Surkov is no longer the grand manager of propaganda in Russia. He was sidelined in 2011 after a dispute with Putin. But he stayed a personal advisor to the president, and he was also an organizer of Russia's takeover of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine in 2014. His involvement in that annexation got him sanctioned by the West, meaning he's not allowed to travel to the US or Europe anymore, and he can't have assets in the West either.

Surkov was unfazed. "The only things that interest me in the US," he said, "are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don't need a visa to access their work," which, you know, good comeback.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our show. Surkov, by the way, seems to have been one of the people overseeing Russia's Ukraine policy until a few years ago. There's some hacked emails from his account in 2014 when pro-Moscow separatist groups in Ukraine had declared that two territories on the Russian border were no longer part of Ukraine.

In the email Surkov seems to be managing them. In one of the emails, Surkov received a list of potential leaders for these supposedly independent regions of Ukraine with asterisks by certain names as the best options. And he was asked in one email to edit a statement that allegedly came from Ukrainians living in the separatist-held territories. In 2020, Surkov was fired by Vladimir Putin without any public explanation. One headline about that read, "Putin fires his puppet master."

Ira Glass

Act Four, A Matter of Principle. Let's talk about the people in Russia who don't like Vladimir Putin. There have been protests against the invasion of Ukraine across Russia-- in Moscow, St. Petersburg, other cities. A group that monitors the protests, OVD Info, said that in just the first two days since the invasion over 1,800 protesters were arrested in 60 Russian cities.

Back in 2017 when we first broadcast today's program, there were protests all over the country organized by Putin's most prominent critic, the charismatic opposition leader Alexei Navalny, about government corruption. In the years since 2017, Navalny was poisoned, fled to Berlin for treatment. German authorities said the nerve agent that poisoned him must have come from the Russian government. When he returned to Russia, he was arrested. He's in prison today.

But in 2017 he was turning out huge crowds of young people who showed up because of these great videos that he'd do online about the issues. After the protests teenagers started posting their own videos to the internet of their teachers lecturing them about the protests, telling them they were wrong about the issues, and the kids arguing back.

Ira Glass

Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine in Moscow. And he wrote about one of these videos that was filmed in the provincial town of Bryansk, 200 miles from Moscow. Apparently there was a student there who tried to enlist other kids to go to the protests, which led to their principal and homeroom teacher to talk to them, which they filmed.

Ira Glass

OK, and I should say that most of it is just completely black. You see nothing, and you hear sound. And then occasionally the camera sort of bops up.

Ira Glass

At one point she starts defending Vladimir Putin, saying, you can't blame him for the bad economy. That's because of the sanctions that the European Union and the United States imposed on Russia. And she says on the world stage and foreign policy he's doing a great job, which the students challenge.

Ira Glass

And then the homeroom teacher jumps in and argues with the kids over Crimea.

Ira Glass

The teacher says, did we really take Crimea? Didn't they vote and choose to become part of Russia? The kids correctly point out, yes, Russia did take Crimea, and the sanctions were the result. Soon the conversation turns to the fighting in Eastern Ukraine. Russia officially denies that its soldiers are there, but all kinds of evidence has come out proving that this is untrue.

Ira Glass

The kids don't watch TV the way older Russians do. The principal tells them, OK, you don't remember how bad it was here before Putin. The country was in chaos. People had to carry guns and knives. And this is when I was in college.

Ira Glass

When she says this and when she parrots talking points that you might hear on Russian state TV, she seems totally sincere. As an American watching this, it's one of the things that's actually most interesting about this video. You think that these government talking points on Crimea or Ukraine or whatever, you wonder if authorities are just mouthing these points and they don't actually believe them. When you hear the principal, she seems totally emotional when she runs through these talking points.

Ira Glass

At one point the kids openly laugh at the country's ruling political party, President Putin's party, United Russia.

Ira Glass

We're against United Russia, the kid's saying. The student asked everybody to raise their hands who is against United Russia. And then you get the sense-- this part is dark in the video. You get the sense that lots of hands are going up.

Ira Glass

Joshua Yaffa of The New Yorker magazine in Moscow.

Ira Glass

Well, the original version of today's program back in 2017 was produced by Jonathan Menjivar. Our update of the program today was produced by Chris Benderev and David Kestenbaum with help from Mike Comite, Katherine Rae Mondo, Michelle Navarro, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.

Special thanks today to Alisa Sopova, Oleg Krishtal, Dan Charles, Christopher Miller, Tanya Lokot, Mika Golubovsky, John Earle, Robin Hessman, Max Pozdorovkin, Matvey Kulakov, Andrew Wilson, Arkady Ostrovsky, Christopher Chivvis, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, John Dunlop, Yuri Felstinsky, Andrei Nekrasov, Anastacia Anishchenko, Ramzia Polizzi, Neli Esipova, Nikolai Zlobin, and Alexey Kovalev.

Our translation of the Russian student video was done by the website Global Voices. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Obviously, like so many public figures, people ask him all the time, did he ever meet with Russian officials during the transition to Donald Trump's presidency?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.