YouSaid · the spoken record

Erika Fatland

lines on the record: 37
first: 2022-06-24
most recent: 2022-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“With St. Petersburg by railway. So before that, the fastest way to reach the Kola Peninsula and this border area was by boat from St. Petersburg and around the whole Scandinavian peninsula. So it was just too bothersome to invade Norway. And we are very happy about that today because what we see today is that those countries that are most at risk are the countries that were former a part of the Russian Empire. So kind of the empire is not dead and it wants its former territory back.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russian Norwegian borders also. I'm not a very long border. It's 196 kilometers and it's in the very north of Norway. So now I'm sitting in Oslo and I'm 2,000 kilometers away from the Russian border. So sitting in Oslo, that border feels very distant. But it is a very special border because it's probably one of the most peaceful borders in the whole world. And definitely it is the most peaceful among the Russian borders. Of those 14 neighboring countries, Norway is the only neighbor of Russia that has never been at war with Russia or never been invaded or occupied by Russia. And this is not because Norwegians are very special people. Of course, we are, but it has to do with geography. So I mentioned that this border is in the very north. And then before Mermansk was founded in 1916 and simultaneously, it was connected.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ask them, but how can you miss the Soviet units because of the Soviet Union that you don't have a lake any longer? And then they said, well, as long as the Soviet Union existed and the fish factory was still working because when the water disappeared, they just started shipping them frozen fish from mermansk.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Former Aral C in Uzbekistan. The Aral Sea was the fourth biggest lake in the world, but then the Soviet authorities decided that they would take the water that was being led to the lake and they would take that water and use it to a water, the cotton fields instead. And cotton needs a lot of water. So deliberately they emptied one of the biggest lakes in the world and I will see disappeared and that was planned. And now the places which used to live at the shore of the Aral Sea, they are just filled with dust. It's very dangerous to live. They're very unhealthy. And of course there is no industry any longer. No one can fish because there is no sea any longer. And even there, the old people that I met there, they were very nostalgic about the disappearance of the Soviet Union. And they said to me, oh, those were the times.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not at all unique, and I have encountered this nostalgia at the most bizarre places like in semi palatinsk, the test site area of nuclear bumps, where the workers who were living there, the people who were living there, the children who were living there, they were not informed of the danger. They were part of the experiment to see how these explosions would affect the health of the people living there. And even there, in Semi-Palatinsk and close to the test site, where there was a small village which now was almost abandoned, I met some old people sitting there drinking, playing cards, and even they, they were nostalgic about the Soviet Union, they missed the Soviet Union, and another weird place where I counted nostalgia and I had not expected to encounter it that was at the forefront.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I remember asking Shushkevich when I met him in 2016, and I asked him, so when did you understand that the Soviet Union was history? And I have funded so much about his answer the last couple of months because he told me that the Soviet Union is still not history. It continues to live in people's minds.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Stanislav Shushkiewicz, he was the first leader of independent Belarus and he kind of became leader of the parliament by accident because this was after the failed August coup and in the parliament of Belarus they just tried to find someone who was neutral. So they chose him because he didn't belong to a party and he was by education, he was physicist, so not really a politician and then Belarus became independent in 1991. And he was part of that. So I was so happy to meet him because meeting Stanislav Shushkiewicz, that was like meeting history with a big age. He died last month, sadly, but he was still well when I met him. And then he lived in a modest apartment in the outskirts of Minsk. And that's where I met him and his wife Irina. At the beginning of December in 1990, He invited his colleagues.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a strange place the house for the palace of Yanukovych and it is surrounded by this huge park so you can rent these kind of golf cars to go around because it's too big if you want to see everything. You can't walk. And then the house. So if you have seen the servant of the people, parts of the first episodes are actually filmed inside this house where this new president is, Shizan Zelensky, is going to live and then you can get an idea of the interior, which is, I would say, it's a lot of gold marble, all these expensive things that dictators and corrupt politicians seem to enjoy so much.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investing in hotels, football stadiums, etc. So, in many ways, it just seemed like a very normal city and people would go to restaurants and they would celebrate Women's Day and et cetera. But it was also a very empty city. There was no traffic jams whatsoever. Very few people walking on the streets. And this is because already in 2016, more than 2 million people had fled the war in eastern Ukraine. Most of them had then fled to other parts of Ukraine. That's why it's a bit difficult to answer your question. Yes, a lot of the people I met in Donetsk, they were pro-Russians, but most of them had already left.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were definitely the people that I met, but I visited the military academy where this new government was educating 16, 17-year-olds to become soldiers, defenders of this breakaway republic. So this was basically brainwashing machine. I visited schools where the teachers had been instructed that now there was a new subject that they had to teach and that was called patriotism. The only problem was that no one really knew what to teach because there was no curriculum and no one really knew what they should say about the breakaway Republic of Donetsk because everything was so new. The city of Donetsk was probably one of the most clean, pleasant places I had visited in Ukraine ironically because before the war broke out, it was one of the wealthiest cities in Ukraine. A lot of oligarchs were living there.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It never became a frozen conflict like many people predicted it would become. And kind of what we are seeing now, the full-scale invasion, it's in many ways, it's the continuation of this war that started eight years ago.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All up until the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass, Ukraine was kind of divided between East and West. But what happened after the war broke out was that Ukraine very rapidly became a united country and didn't matter if people lived in East or West or spoke Ukrainian or Russian. They felt Ukrainians and Russia was the enemy. Before when I was giving talks about the border, I used to always used to remind the audience that as I'm talking now and as you are sitting there listening to me, there is a war going on in Europe. And that was started in 2014. And when I visited Donetsk in 2016, more than 10,000 people had been killed already. And I remember very vividly as we crossed the border to the youngest breakaway republic in the world that we could hear shooting not very far away.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I studied Russian in Odessa about 15 years ago and then ten years after having studied Russian in Odessa I came back to do research for the border and then I really came back to a very different country. I came back to a country that was at war and even in Kiev or in Odessa far away from where the fighting was ongoing. You could feel the war. There were photos of dead soldiers everywhere and also to me it seemed like Ukraine was a lot more united when I was studying in Odessa in 2006. So just shortly after the Orange Revolution and I remember how my Russian teacher she was talking to me about the Orange Revolution and telling me that the demonstrators, they were given money from the CIA to participate in the demonstrations. So think.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because the Georgians are very happy people. They love celebrating. They love having guests. They love drinking wine, which they do a lot. But then it's a small country and they are surrounded by very big neighbors, Turkey, the Prussian Empire, and then the Russian Empire. So it kind of stuck between these empires, and they have had a lot of problems with all of them. And now lately, mostly with their neighbor in the north. And since the 1990s, Russia has controlled, has effectively controlled 20% of Georgian territory by controlling the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I encountered this Hachapuri issue already at the border crossing from Azerbaijan when the border guards starts asking you questions you get kind of nervous because what if they don't let me pass they do have a lot of power and then the border guard he started asking me if I like Georgian food I said yes very much so but what kind of Georgian food we have a lot of different food and then the only name of any Georgian food I could remember Georgian is a very difficult language that was Kachapuris I said oh I was so happy that I could remember that name I love Hachapuri I said and then he looked at me not happy at all with my answer well we have a lot of different hachapuri so which kind do you like and then he started listing them and I will not try to repeat that so Hachapuri is basically a bread very often filled with Georgian salty cheese and sometimes they top that with an egg.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes sense that they wanted to have more presence in the north close to the Russian border. And also what they have done, Kazakh authorities, I mean, no one in Kazakhstan will admit that they are afraid of the Russians. But what they have done, especially after the annexation of Crimea, is that they have with economic incentives, they have made ethnic Kazakhs move not only to Astana or Nursultan, but to the border areas which are dominated by ethnic Russians.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's not a very pleasant place. It is a very planned city and it's not cozy like Almaty, but it's at times quite impressive because Kazakhstan is a very rich country. They have gas, oil, a lot of minerals. So you can really see this wealth when you go to Astana, Nursultan, as it is called now, in honor of the first president. It's big city, so you really are dependent on a car, there is no metro. There are these endless traffic jams, so you should never leave for a meeting at the last minute. And it is still expanding. They have this long time plan for Nursultan. So it's not done yet. It's still being created, so to speak. And it is very interesting that, as you mentioned, that when they decided to move the capital, that they decided to move it to the north, the Kazakh regime will not say so, but...”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of ethnic Kazakhs who have Russian as their mother tongue. But there are not only Russians in Kazakhstan because of the deportations of Stalin in the 1930s and 40s, you will find more than 100 different ethnic groups and nationalities in Kazakhstan because in the Chechen, English, Crimean Tatars, Germans, they move them from Western Russia and then Kazakhstan was ideal because you had all this empty land and almost no people.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's another good question. So most of the Russians emigrated to Kazakhstan in the 1950s during the so-called virgin land campaigns. Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, just looked on the map. And so all this land and imagined that, oh, wow, here we can feed the whole Soviet Union. So then ethnic Russians were kind of exported to Kazakhstan to start modern efficient farming. And this was no success at all. But many of the Russians remained. At some point in the 1950s, there were more Russians than ethnic Kazakhs in Kazakhstan. Now that number has changed because ethnic Kazakhs are having more children than the Russians, but still the ethnic Russian population in Kazakhstan is about 20%. And Russian is as a language also still quite dominating. So if you go to Kazakhstan, you will also find”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With how did it become a dictatorship? I think one can really blame the Soviet heritage that they did not have any traditions for being a democracy.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Country that really suffered during the Soviet Union, but maybe not so much in the 1970s and 1980s. So there was no freedom movement in Kazakhstan and there was no freedom movement in any other Central Asian countries either. But then Kazakhstan, like all the other Soviet republics, did become an independent country in 1991. And then they did the same in all the Central Asian countries, except for Tajikistan, where there was a war. So the general secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party, he just changed his job title and he became president of independent Kazakhstan. And then he just remained in that position until 2019, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He was re-elected in 2015 with more than 97% of the votes. So that's quite similar to the percentage which Kim Jong-un in North Korea is real.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were forced to start living on these state farms, collective farms. And, well, for one, these nomads, they had no experience working like a traditional farmer. And then secondly, there was a reason why people in Kazakhstan were living as nomads because it might look like a very rich country, but actually it's very difficult to do any efficient farming there. So this ended in catastrophe and during just a few years in the 1930s, one million Kazakhs died of hunger, and that is about 25% of the ethnic Kazakh population. So it's a huge catastrophe of which we can still see the consequences. And then it was also the test site of Semipalantinsk where the Russians or the Soviets were testing their nuclear bombs.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question, and that is a faith that many of the Central Asian countries have suffered. But just to talk a little bit more about the Soviet history of Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan was really one of the countries that suffered most during the Soviet experiment. I mean, like Mongolia, the Kazakhs, they were also nomads. And then Kazakhstan became part of the Russian Empire. It was one of the first Central Asian countries to become part of the Russian Empire, and that was in the 18th century. did not try to change the culture of the Kazakhs. They just wanted tribute tax. But then in the 1920s, the Russian Empire was transformed into the Soviet Union and then suddenly everything was about politics and also farming and the nomads, they could not live as they had done for generations any longer.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Tibet or to India to study Buddhism because there was no one from whom they could learn about religion in Mongolia any longer.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I wouldn't say that life has gotten any easier, but probably it hasn't gotten any worse either because Mongolians suffered during the communist period, and even if it was not officially part of the Soviet Union, they did follow old politics of the Soviet Union. So in the 1930s, for instance, they also had a state terror in Mongolia where many Buddhist monks were killed and also traditional shamans suffered. So what they tried to do in the Soviet period was to eradicate all traces of religion. So when I now visited Mongolia a few years back, I talked with monks who are now trying to restore this tradition, this religion in Buddhism, history of Buddhism in Mongolia goes of back a very, very long time. And the monks I talked to, they had to go to”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's a difficult question. It is very difficult for many of them to survive and they might have electricity, but most of them don't have running water, for instance, so they are living this, you might compare it to a slum. So it's a very big slum surrounding Ulanbatter.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the most polluted cities on Earth because, as you might imagine, it gets very, very cold in Ilandba during winter. And then these families who have moved to Lanbata, they are heating their yurt with charcoal.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Mongolia is one of the few countries where you can still meet full-time nomads, people who are nomads all year round. But as you said, yes, this number is shrinking because of tough climate conditions. So quite often they have so tough winters in Mongolia that many nomads, they lose their whole livestock. It's simply too cold for the animals to find any food or to find any water. And then in Mongolia, the state will not really give any support for families who lose everything. So then they are on their own, then they don't really have any other choice than moving to Ulanbatar. If I remember correctly, more than half of the inhabitants of Ulanbata, they are not living in houses or apartments, but they are living in the outskirts of the city, in Mongolia everyone can put up their yurt anywhere. So this also makes Ulambata in the winter.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they do call those two treaties that were signed in the eighteen fifties they call them in China the unjust treaties, as I don't think they're very happy about those treaties for now, I don't see any signs of China reclaiming land, but one could imagine that maybe a more nationalistic China in the future could try to reclaim this land. What they are doing for now is that they are renting a lot of land in East Russia.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much, much stronger than Russia, and Russia does not have many friends left. So for Russia, China is now extremely important. And last year, China was the biggest trade partner of Russia, but this does not go the other way. So Russia is not the biggest trade partner of Russia.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. It's like you say, it's a Disneyland. So today there are no Russians left. There are Chinese working in all those Russian shops. So it's more the whole city of Harbin, it's more like a Russian Disneyland now because there is no real Russian influence in China anymore. So the balance has shifted totally from the 19th century when China was very weak and Russia took advantage of that. forced the emperor to sign some border treaties in the 1850s or 1860s and by signing these treaties Russia received one million square kilometers of Chinese land including Vladivostok which is Russian today so in the 19th century Russia was the strong neighbor today that has shifted totally and today China is economically”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what many people probably don't know is that at the end of the 19th century, most of Manchuria was actually controlled by the Russian Empire. And then Harbin was founded by Russians and the beginning of the 20th century, Harbin was known as the most cosmopolitan city in China. There were a lot of Jews moving there. I mean, it was a very international city and a very Russian city. And even today, if you visit Harbin, you can see the traces of this Russian influence. There is a Russian church, there is a Russian street, and today they have also built a Russian village where you can actually meet real Russians. So they have employed some old ladies who work there.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While there are a lot of North Korean column slave workers working in Russia, I think the number is actually about 50,000, so that's quite a lot. But these slaves, these workers, they are very controlled. And this is a big export of North Korea. They are exporting slaves to many undemocratic countries in the world. Apart from that, there is not much contact between Moscow and Pyongyang at the moment.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using the harbor in the north of North Korea, but then Russia has like all Western countries joined the sanctions against North Korea. So these plans are stopped at the moment.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in fact, there was a ration on my tour group when I visited North Korea because I did not go there as a journalist. It's very difficult to get the journalist visa as I went there as a tourist and joined the tour group. And this Russian, he was so fascinated visiting North Korea. He said that they are making all the mistakes that we made. Now, I wouldn't really agree to call North Korea communist regime because it really isn't. It's a dictatorship. They are totally controlling the people, but their ideology is not really communism. It is more a religion where the people are worshipping the leaders. Russia was planning to do some investments in North Korea. And when I was there, I could see the bridge, the railway bridge, which crosses the border river and continues to Vladivostok. And they had some plans.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Military camps, they also spoke Russian. He did not speak Korean very well. So before he was giving his first speech to the Korean people, he had to receive intensive training from a Soviet officer. And this man was Kim Il-sung. So the plan to control North Korea through this man did not work out very well, meaning in fact Kim Il-sung, he survived six general secretaries of the Soviet Union and he even survived the Soviet Union himself and when he died in 1994 he had transformed North Korea into a hereditary dictatorship and today it is his grandson who is ruling this country like a big concentration camp.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the border between North Korea and Russia is the shortest of the borders with Russia. It's only about 19 kilometers. So it's a very short border. Today, the Chinese border, China is much more important, influencing North Korea. But historically, no country has influenced the North Korea that we know today as much as Russia or the Soviet Union. Because in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided between the US and the Soviet Union. The Japanese had lost the war. And then in Moscow, when I started searching for a puppet who could rule Pyongyang kind of on behalf of the Soviet Union, and then they found this 33-year-old man who had not spent much time in Korea at all, he had like many Koreans spent his childhood in exile in China. And then he spent the war in Siberian.”
2022-06-24 · Intelligence Squared · Neighbouring Russia, with Erika Fatland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT