YouSaid · the spoken record

Orlando Figes

lines on the record: 47
first: 2022-10-14
most recent: 2022-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, it depends how much long he's around for. I mean, he might be forced out before he dies. But if he lives, say, I can't see anything but a Putin Mark II and perhaps worse. After Putin, because especially if he goes while this war is still on, and I think the war is going to go on for some time, It's more likely he's replaced by a very hardline nationalist who wants to take the war to the West, then he's replaced by someone looking for a diplomatic solution simply because for the regime and those in power, those around the inner circle and indeed in the outer circles to some extent it's an existential battle. I'm afraid that it's wishful thinking to suppose that Putin goes and they all breathe a sigh of relief and say let's get in someone more reasonable and make peace with the West. I don't think that's going to happen.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's the we who's going to break it up rather than conquering? I don't know. But again, the problem is how can you have small states with no resources?”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same reason I mean, yes, at the fringes Yeah, especially if they carry on mobilizing from so-called minorities like Daghistan, Ingushetti, et cetera, they could be on the fringes breakaway movements. But they don't see any possibility of Russia being sort of carved up into fiefdoms, which is what they thought of doing when they invaded Russia in the 17th century or even in the 19th century. I mean, Palmerston had that idea. And it's being mooted now, isn't it, that the problem of Russia is being imperial aggressive power, too big. We need to break it up.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's the patrimonial state That's exactly an example of what I mean by the patrimonial state and the people who govern industries like Gazprom for Putin and the Russian state, they see it as their feeding grounds. They literally refer to it as their feeding grounds, which is an old patrimonial concept of I will administer the oil reserves of Siberia, but I will also profit from them. So a highly decentralized regional sort of governance wouldn't really work for Russia either. So I think we have a problem here as to what sort of political system would work for Russia.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russia, if you think about it, is a state which is heavily natural resource dependent, so fossil fuels, minerals, etc. And if you allow, I mean, so those economic resources sort of require a highly centralized state In order then to redistribute the income from Gazprom or whatever. I mean, the problem is it doesn't get redistributed because there's so much corruption.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A national parliamentary system of democracy, i.e., not a class based one like the Soviets, but a genuinely national representative body like the Constituent Assembly, which unfortunately was elected and then the Bolsheviks closed it down. So, you know, I don't think liberal democracy is an easy fit on Russia. And I don't think it ever will be, probably. But I think that more forms of direct democracy could work. But I don't think that means, and this is perhaps the real sort of issue with what I've just said, I don't think you could move towards some sort of regional governance, which people like Khodorkovsky favor, which people in the opposition favor.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know, I have a sense that in 1917 there could have been a different, more direct form of democracy run through the Soviets. Now, don't get frightened and think I'm some sort of communist because the Soviet, all it means is a committee, basically. It's self-governing committee. And I think that there were people at that time, some of the Mensheviks and SRs or socialist revolutionaries who could see the direct participatory democracy of local Soviet power could be somehow grafted on to...”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you look through Russian history, there's many elements of social organization which are intrinsically democratic in spirit. So the basic unit of Russian society until collectivization in the 1930s was the Russian peasant commune, which was a thoroughly democratic, egalitarian, self-governing community of peasant farmers. So, it's not that there isn't the ability to become Democrats, but I don't think the liberal Democratic mold would fit very easily for all the sorts of reasons we've been discussing.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said to me, Orlando, if you're a year, you've got trouble with your girlfriend, or you hung over. You don't want to battle with Hegel every morning. So why don't you do something empirical? And suggested Russian peasants, and they gave me a grant to learn Russian, which I did in 1983. And 1984 went off to the Soviet Union to work on”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, originally, I was pushing that direction. I mean, when I was an undergraduate, I was interested in German, Jewish intellectual history. Particularly the young Hegelians. And my supervisor at that time was at that point a very famous historian called Norman Stone. I don't know if he ever came across him.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that you own the land, as Khingish Khan thought he did, and that your servitors may be rewarded with bits of land for serving you, but you can take it away from them any moment. There's no full allodial property in the Western sense. So there's no development in Russia of a fully independent land-owning aristocracy. Their military and civil servitors whose tenure of land is conditional upon the Tsar's favor. I would go so far as to say that you can trace that right up to Putin and the oligarchs, that they are like the boyers to Ivan IV. They can be allowed to enrich themselves. But they have to do what the Tatar tells them. If Putin tells him, give me $100 million, or if Putin says go and run Chukotka, as he said to Abramovich, they have to go and do it.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Europe very much. So the tradition that comes out of that Mongol experience, which I think is always denied in Russia because they like to see themselves as basically Europeans and Christians, the Mongols came, but they left and there was no trace of them. This is nonsense. The Mongol occupation left deep imprint on Russian culture and above all on Russia's statehood because Ivan IV, or the terrible, who was the first sort of Tsar of Muscovy as it was then, to push back the Mongols and build a state around Moscow's power, did so by inheriting so many of those Mongol political traditions.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a very important part of that. But it's not just religion, I think. I think it's also another element of this which comes from the Mongol occupation. The Mongols, the Golden Horde as they were in Russia, occupied and collected tribute from the Russian principalities for 250 years more or less at a time when the rest of Europe was going through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, codification of the laws, everything that we now see as the foundations of Western civilization. They took place at a time when Russia was basically paying tribute to the Mongols and never had the ability to develop or even have contact.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the tar is the holy tsar, which you can see then feeds into the cult of Stalin and Lenin as these almost sort of godlike figures that have to be worshipped and venerated and taken on trust never questioned The other part of that religious concept of power is the notion of the Russian land or holy Russia itself. Because this is part of the original mythology of Russia, that it is literally the place where Christ is going to come when he reappears. Russia has the true God because it's basically what we call the Third Rome ideology, that Moscow after the fall of Rome, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when it was overrun by the Turks, was the last true seat of Orthodoxy, Christianity. And the Catholic state had fallen into heresy effectively. So that idea that we have the true religion and we have the ruler who is the true God”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Russian, I don't want to go to Russia for sure, but I mean, those areas that have formed the Russian way of thinking about the world that stem from its religion tend to get overlooked by The secular Russian intelligentsia, and by those who rely on the secular Russian intelligentsia to look at Russia. And we tend to think, well, you know, there's a division between church and state. Well, there isn't one really in Russia. Russia has always been politically a sort of Byzantine empire in the sense that, as in Byzantium, church and state are two sides of the same. That Tsar, who inherits from Byzantium not just the blessing of Christ, but the power of a human God. So under the Russian tradition of autocracy, there's always been this tendency to sacralize political power”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And part of the reason for that, I think, and I argue it in the book, is that the West has always been very dependent on the Russian intelligentsia. But its views of Russia. Those are the people scholars talk to. Those are the people we read. Those are the people we feel an affinity with because most people who study Russia or deal with Russia never go beyond Petersburg and Moscow anyway. Those are the people they're going to meet. The trouble with that is that the Russian intelligentsia sees Russia through Western eyes. So you get this sort of perfect circle you can't break. And the church is a good example of those spaces of the Russian mind, if we can put it that way. I don't like using the words mindset and stuff.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I can turn the second part first, I think the reason why we have got Russia wrong for so long in all sorts of ways. Is that we've tended to firstly impose our own Western values onto Russia and then declare Russians and the Russian nation and state to be a failure because they don't quite come up to our expectations.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he's opened all of these My History Parks where school kids, military cadets are all sort of taken by the coachload to be told what they should think about Alexander Niewski or what they should think about Peter the Great or what they should think about Russia's relations with the West or what they should think about the colonization of Siberia so you know all of these things become part of the ideology and then are activated to carry out policy because they will fit the national story. That's how it works and you know there's no other way they can do that ideologically than through history I believe”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As double standards. Because they apply one set of rules to us and then live by a different set of rules. That's what these sort of Russian nationalists learn from the Crimean War debacle. And so I think Putin comes out of that stable, but that means that that radical nationalist Slavophilism then carries with it and is indeed expressed through a number of historical interpretations And they have to be made clear in order to delineate what is the ideology of Putinism.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Putin is a very Slavophile leader, by which I mean that he defines Russia's interests in opposition to the West, not just as different from the West, which is the original more benign interpretation of the Slavophiles when they were sort of basically intellectuals worried about the westernization of the Russian language when they felt that Russians were losing their sense of national identity because they were aping the West. Putin's Slavophilism is rather more radical than that. I would put it in the category of those late 19th century Slavophiles like Danilevsky, who argued in the wake of the Crimean War defeat in the middle of the 1850s that the West is our enemy. that we as Russians need no longer measure our success by Western standards, and that we should reject all Western so called universal principles as just hypocritical.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of the weakness of parliamentary traditions, because of the weakness of free speech and assembly, because of the history of Russia under autocracy for so many centuries. So history for the state is a substitute for that because you can outline what your ideology is by referring to your interpretation of history.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, you know, Putin defines it as sovereign democracy, which means we call it democracy, and then you have no right to tell us what the content of it should be. I mean, we have elections. We can fix them, but there are elections. You fix your elections, we're a democratic society, but we want to be sovereign and define our democracy for ourselves. Of course, that's a very different view of democracy from the way we in the West as liberal Democrats, if you like, would see it. So the normal discourse and understanding of political concepts just isn't developed in Russia.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's because history takes the place of normal political discourse. There's very little tradition, and certainly under Putin there has been very little space for even agreement about what terms like democracy mean.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because it's hard to tell how Putin would actually explain all of that because the implication of his essay is and everything he's argued is that they have a sort of illusory nationalism, illusory sense of their nationhood, which has been all pumped up for them by enemies of Russia in the West. But on the other hand, you know. There are many other ways one could explain that. So it's not clear exactly where he comes from on that.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has to come back to your question, a rather long winded way, that has real resonance with many Russians. who've been brought up on this story of Russia, taught in schools embedded in Russian historiography, and since then pumped out through every propaganda channel, film, TV, books, novels, and the whole lot, that Russia is vulnerable to attack. From the West, and Ukraine is its most vulnerable point”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's then moved on from that to argue, and this I think is more, I think this is closer to his real thinking. He argues in that essay that every time Ukraine after the middle of the 17th century, and it was reinforced, Every time that the Little Russians, as he would call them, tried to break free from the great Russians, the Russians, to assert their independence, they fell under the influence of hostile Western powers. So he cites the Poles and the Lithuanians in the 18th century, the Austrians in the 19th century, the Germans in the First World War, the Allied powers in the Russian Civil War, the Nazis in the Second World War, then NATO today, he would say they've all been doing the same thing, which is encouraging Ukrainian nationalism to turn Ukraine against Russia.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a nation state, although there were two moments, but you know, very brief moments in the revolution and the civil war when there were Ukrainian parliamentary and then nationalist governments in situ, but they didn't last very long. Or you could say they should have what they had minus new Russia and the Donbass. So one way of looking at Putin's sort of strategy is to say he's trying to reclaim those historic Russian lands. But, you know, he hasn't really made clear what his war aims are or why he's fighting. He began with the whole question of its historically justified war because Ukraine is us. Ukraine is just a variant of Russians and so should belong to us.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the boundaries were. I mean, the idea of the Soviet Union was that nation states were gone, that you could have a cultural nation, but otherwise you were all part of the same political entity, which was Soviet. So the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 then raised a whole set of new issues about Ukraine because those southern areas of new Russia and the Dombass were claimed by Russian nationalists like Solzhenitsyn, like Sobchak, who was Putin's mentor, as historic Russian lands. So, in that essay, I referred back to from 2021, Putin makes the argument there that if Ukraine wanted to leave the Soviet Union as it voted to do so in 1991, then fine, but it should leave with what it came in with There are two ways you can see that. You could say it came in with nothing because Ukraine didn't really exist.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's from that point that Ukraine is brought back into a Russian fold and under Catherine the Great is made a regular part of provincial administration and she then leads the conquest of what becomes known as New Russia, which are the areas that have just been annexed, minus the Donbass. So New Russia was all of the coastal area on the northern littoral of the Black Sea. So for Matiasa through to Mariupol. And they were called New Russia until 1917. So that becomes another dispute about what is the place of Ukraine in Russia's legacy in its territorial claims. Because under the Soviet Union, it didn't really matter so much.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they had their own sort of quasi-states, really hetmanates in the area we now call Ukraine. So there was a hetmanate of Don Cossacks and Zaplesia Cossacks. And Zaporizian Cossacks were fighting because they were Orthodox against Poland and Lithuania and invited the Tsar to support them. Well, the Tsar Alexei at this point, we're talking about the 1640s, early 50s, was very reluctant to do that. But interestingly, it was the patriarch Nikon who wanted Russia to back this Orthodox war fought by the Cossacks against the Poles in Lithuania as a sort of holy war. So, I mean, this is quite, you know, resonant with what's happening today. I mean, because a major source behind this war is Patriarch Kiril, who would also say, He has said that the invasion of Ukraine is a holy war.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And from that point in 1240, much of Ukraine actually took a different path from Russia. I mean, the western territories were brought into the orbit of Poland-Lithuania, which is one of the great medieval states. You have a number of Catholics in western Ukraine. But from the 17th century, Ukraine was brought back into the Russian fold because of the Cossacks, essentially. And the Cossacks were, again, they're not particularly Ukrainian or particularly Russian. They're sort of multi-ethnic caste of warriors who carry out everything from brigandage to fighting for anyone who'll pay them.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The story that Putin tells the Russians, and it's the story that basically Russian imperial historiography told the Russians from the 18th century, is that Ukraine was little Russia. Ukraine was part of Greater Russia. It had a dialect, but not a language. And it's capital Kiev was the foundation of modern Russia. But that was the first state. So it's a source of Russian civilization for the Russians, as well as a source of their Christianity. And although for much of Russia's history after the fall of Kievan Rus in 1240 when the Mongol occupation overturned Kiev and subjected most of Russia and about half of present day Ukraine to Mongol rule, Indirect rule, basically, they collected tribute”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I think in that way, Zelensky's in a bit of a corner, really, because the nationalist element is now so universal in Ukraine. I mean, the Ukrainians I've spoken to, the idea that they might... Sort of give recognition that Crimea is now Russia, even Donbass is now. I mean, this is something no one, I don't think, in Ukraine is prepared to accept. I mean, having said that, I think the occupied territories of Donbass contain a lot of people who are mainly old. They've lived there all their lives and they don't have mobility They say it's a shame that half the city was destroyed that they live in, but I don't think they feel that strongly about it because they just want to go on living their daily lives. Most of them are Russian speakers. So they're not politicized about it in the way that younger Ukrainians are.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And felt very angry at the way the West just sort of accepted it as a fait accompli. But, you know, since 2014, Ukrainian national identity has strengthened immensely. You know, Putin may say Ukrainians are not a nation, but boy has he made them into one by invading them again. And I think part of that national unity is an uncompromising determination to reclaim Crimea. Well... As I have already suggested, I'm not sure that's possible without nuclear war. And so at some point, I fear there's going to have to be a compromise. and the West will probably, I suspect, at some point, have to start leaning on the Ukrainians to do what nobody wants to see them to do, but may become inevitable, which is trade land for peace.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think for the Ukrainians, it's a simple, principled matter of this is the territory that is ours, this is our territorial integrity. This is what has been internationally recognized. This is the security guarantees we supposedly had in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. So everything about modern-day Ukraine is based on the borders of 1991. Crimea is integral to that. But fear that it would be too late now for the Ukrainians to get back Crimea and partly because the West has been so sort of almost complicit, really, in the annexation. I mean, I so I mean, I've felt very strongly at the time, having a particular investment in Crimea because I wrote a book on the Crimean War and had already by that stage built connections with Crimean Tatars and other people in Crimea.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, I mean, there wasn't much effort after 2014 because the Ukrainian army was very weak. The regime was very weak and because the West basically was very weak in its response to the annexation. Since then, there's been quite a bit of NATO investment in Ukraine, which is part of the problem for Russia, because they see NATO turning Ukraine into a sort of anti-Russia, as Putin put it in the essay I referred to.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an attack on Russian soil, but it's, I mean, he's declared the annexed territories Russian soil. But it's more than that. It's an attack on the Russian soul.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's really quite fundamental to the Russian sense of their historic roots, but also their Europeanness. So for all those reasons, I think it's a sort of, it's a red line for Putin in his conception of the origins of Russia, in his conception of what Russia is And so I think if this war gets to become a sort of fight over Crimea itself as the bombing of the bridge suggests it might if it goes on from being simply an attack on the logistics of the Russian army if the Ukrainians want to take back their borders to 1991 pre the 2014 invasion and if NATO is prepared to back them to that point I think we're going to get into a very dangerous area of escalation I wouldn't be surprised if it was a question say of Ukrainian troops actually marching into Crimea I think at that point Putin would”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for the Russians, it's particularly important because of that Christian civilization that begins there. It's also important, I think, for Russia in a more modern context because it's a place where so many people in the Soviet Union went on holiday. It's a great resort. It's the South. It's the good life of summer. It's also the seat of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. So that's absolutely crucial to have that for Russia, that access to the Black Sea and the ability to dominate the Near East, which they had with Sevastopol from the late 18th century, really. And I'd say also it's terribly important to Russia because it sort of connects Russia to Europe in itself in a way that it couldn't really claim. Other than through Crimea because It's Crimea that made Russia a Black Sea power, gave it access to the Mediterranean.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The truth about Keevan Roose is that it was a multi ethnic open steppe territory with all sorts of people roaming across it. And ethnicity didn't really connect the people of Kievan Rus to anything that one could trace to the modern day. But as foundation myths, they're terribly important because they both root the foundation of their nations to Crimea.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, of course, for the Ukrainians, this is absolute nonsense because they, as they said at the time, had their own monument, albeit built in 1853 under the Russian Empire, and they would see that. Entry into Byzantium, which effectively is what happened with the conversion to Christianity. As the foundation of a modern Ukrainian-European state. In other words, we elected to join Byzantium. That was a window onto Europe. So there are two conflicting foundation myths here. And in a sense, you could root the war to a tussle over whose foundation myth is Is true I don't think either is true actually. I think”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the last part of your question is easy enough to answer in the sense that it really was the prestige accomplishment, as he sees it, of his regime. To connect Russia back to Crimea physically in a way that it hadn't been previously, although of course they had the naval base that they rented, so to speak. But yes, Crimea is absolutely crucial. My book starts in 2016 with the opening of this hideous kitsch nationalist monument to Grand Prince of Vladimir or Volodymyr as the Ukrainians would call him the ruler of late 10th century Kiev and Rus who converted for himself and his people to Christianity and he did so in the Crimea in a place called Her Sonicis which is just outside Sevastopol and this for Putin was as he said in that speech on the opening of the monument the foundation of the modern Russian state”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I know my ration is slightly better than he does in some ways. But there's nothing wrong with that essay factually. It's just it's a very weird interpretation to make and it's completely irrelevant because actually, you know, Ukraine has been a fully independent sovereign state since 1991 and Russia accepted that for a very long time. So it was a very bizarre thing then for the president of Russia to come out with. And that did strike me as ominous. But I wouldn't claim that I predicted the invasion by any stretch. No.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I was shocked by the scale of the invasion, by the Blitzkrieg on Kiev and the general all front attack surprised me. But I had been aware, as I think most people were, that there was a growing likelihood of the conflict over NATO expansion, whatever it is that triggered the invasion in Putin's head. So I think it was a partly a response to that sense that we needed to unpack the ideas that Putin had about Russian history. I think that the immediate sort of sense that I had that this was coming was that now infamous essay he wrote in July 2021 on the so-called historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which did strike me as a sort of just, well, now we see it as a justification for the war, but it did read like a declaration of war at the time, if that's how he genuinely felt, then...”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For its purposes was so very different from the way we saw Russian history, certainly the way I had taught Russian history for 35 years, that we needed a book that would be not just a sort of concise history of Russia over a thousand years, which I hope is an enjoyable read, but a book that would look at the sort of driving ideas of Russian history and the mythologies about the past that have been used by rulers over the centuries to legitimize what actions they take and project a future for Russia. So I felt that there was a need for that because of this growing dissonance really, disconnect between how we see Russia and how the Russians see their own history.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was my lockdown book, so I delivered it in November of last year. And then hurriedly, you know, as we altered the publication date. Rewrote the last chapter at greater length. And the cutoff point was the 20th of April. But you're right that it was in a way a response to the worsening situation as I saw it from the beginning of the invasion, which let's not forget was 2014.”
2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2022-10-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Story of Russia, with Orlando Figes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT