I have great pleasure in welcoming and
introducing Bridget Kendall and Gabriel
Gatehouse. Bridget is Master of
Peterhouse Cambridge. She is a fluent
Russian speaker and was Moscow
correspondent for the BBC from 1989 to
1995. She was eyewitness to some of the
most momentous events in Russia in
recent years and amongst other things
I believe has interviewed Boris Yeltsin
not once but twice. She is the first
woman to win the prestigious James
Cameron award for distinguished
journalism in 1992 and was made an MBE
in 1994. I'd also like to introduce
Gabriel Gatehouse who is a foreign
correspondent for the BBC and who
started his career in the Russia service
in the BBC. He has, as well as covering
events in Russia, covered extensively
events in the Middle East and the Far
East and in 2012 won the Royal
Television Society Award for his
reporting on the Rohingya disaster for
Newsnight. More perhaps closer to home
in 2011 he won a Sony Gold Award for his
coverage of the wedding of the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge. We are lucky to
have them speaking for 45 minutes. We
will then have 15 minutes for questions
afterwards. Thank you very much.
BK: So it's a particular pleasure for me to
be back in conversation with Gabriel
because our careers have intersected at
various points, usually to do with Russia.
GG: Always almost, I think I was
going to rush off the first time just
about time you were leaving as Moscow
correspondent, and I go back quite
regularly still, I think. BK: Well that's very
nice for me because since I've got my new
job at Cambridge in 2016 I haven't
been back to Russia, I've been too busy
in Cambridge. But Gabriel you were
there a couple of weeks ago.
GG: I was there in January and if we're
talking about Russo-British relations
I think probably it's no secret to most
people here that they're not in a great state
at the moment as Russians see it there is
a lot of paranoia in this country about
what the Russians are up to and a feeling
that the Brits, certainly the
British establishment ascribed to them
all manner of perfidious deeds. And
indeed we have had some of
these examples: the poisoning of the
Skripals etc. etc. And when you
speak to Russian diplomats and people in
in positions of power in Russia, even
privately, you get this really strong
sense of a duality. There's a,
there's both a sense that they want to
convey that they feel that Britain is no
longer a powerful nation and slightly
pathetic even. You definitely get
that, but at the same time this idea that
that we are actively perfidious and
trying to do them down and and pulling
the strings behind the scene to try and
keep Russia contained so you get this
dual attitude and it's both very
tiring and a shame in a way
especially for somebody like me who came
first to Russia at a time when even
though times were difficult in the mid-
90s there was a lot of, kind of, mutual
respect I think.
But I saw a quote at the
beginning of the exhibition from Lord
Melbourne who's speaking to the future
Tsar Alexander II which I thought was a
brilliant quote, it said: "Two nations forced
to love, esteem and admire each other." Now
it really doesn't feel like that at the
moment but I wonder what it felt like to
you Bridget when you first went in
the 1970s. BK: so that was from
the mid 19th century that quote? GG: Yes. BK: So 1970s we're
talking about right in the middle of the
Soviet period I went there as a student
for a year in 1976 to 77 and back again
in 1981-82 just before Brezhnev died.
"Forced to..." what was the quote again?
GG: "Esteem, admire and love" BK: Yes, not really.
I mean actually we didn't realize it was
the height of the Cold War and this is
interesting if you're thinking
about the passage of history and
relations between two countries because
I thought at that moment when I arrived
in 1976 we were in detente. It was the
era of so-called detente.
Ostpolitik had just got underway to
improve relations between the two
Germanys. Nixon had been not just to
China but he'd been to Moscow and arms
negotiations got underway again and of
course most importantly there had been
the Helsinki final act the Helsinki
Accords that came at the end of the
negotiations. It was felt we're
pushing relations on a much better track
and I think there was a feeling that the hot
the danger of a hot world of the Cold
War had receded. Both sides had realized
that it was too dangerous to contemplate
pressing the nuclear button. MAD range,
mutually assured destruction, is a
doctrine. And therefore there was a sort of
tacit agreement on both sides that
they're probably not going to go to war.
The high point if you like was the Cuban
Missile Crisis of '62 and by the mid-
1970s it just felt like
everything was being regularised. Of
course subsequently what we found out
was that it only appeared like that and
actually relations were steadily getting
worse and the conflicts
had been exiled to the
periphery so this was what was then called
the Third World. Regional conflicts in
Angola began in '75, the whole of Central America and
then of course in Afghanistan and the
big change came in 1979 when the Soviets
went into Afghanistan, the kind of Crimea
moment of its day. You know if 2017,
Russians annexing Crimea has defined
today's UK Russian or Russia-West
relations then in those days the big
jolt came when we suddenly wake up to
the fact that relations had steadily
been getting worse. GG: And as you were
saying, as you were saying earlier these
themes of Afghanistan and Crimea do
keep cropping up. BK: It's really amazing actually and this
this exhibition brings that back.
The points of tension between
Britain, particularly Britain, and Russia,
on one hand Crimea. In the 18th century
Pitt the Younger was very worried about what
the Russians are doing. Catherine was
busy turning the colonies of Crimea
into her fiefdom. There is the most fantastic
map, by the way, in the British Library,
which shows, it's got a beautiful picture
of Catherine the Great and the Crimea
and the Ottomans and the
Crimean Tartars at the moment when it was
shifting into Russia's orbit. Then of
course the Crimean War in the 19th
century. There's a wonderful picture
downstairs by a female artist of
soldiers from the Crimean War which so
imprinted itself on the British public's...
GG: It's very powerful that picture. BK: and of course very important because of the role of Florence Nightengale.
And then, you know, in our era the Crimea has
come back again. But the same
with Afghanistan, the worry about
Russian aims in Central Asia stretching
across from the Middle East and then in
South Asia, Afghanistan, what is now India,
Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that of
course came back. So actually looking at
history helps you understand that when
these resonances happen in our age maybe
we're not even quite aware of how
important history is but it's there
underneath. Some people remember, the
historians remember, but for the rest of
us it's a subterranean tension which
just comes back again. GG: I'm interested to
hear a little bit about
how people, just ordinary people,
interacted with you when you're a student out there in
the 70s because I felt from when I started going to Russia in
the mid-90s, to today, a marked change in
the way people reacted to me both
as a Brit and as a BBC correspondent. In
the mid-90s you got a lot of respect
for being a BBC person. You don't get
that now, you really don't.
The Russian state has very
effectively sold the narrative that the
BBC is kind of the same as RT (Russia
Today). And that it is a state broadcaster
and therefore just a mouthpiece of the
state. It's basically a state propaganda.
And of course from their point of view
you can understand why they would
believe that because it's very difficult
for them to believe that the state
broadcaster would not be taking orders
from Number 10 Downing Street. But
you know, from the time when you were
reporting on the coup and Gorbachev in
his Crimean dacha who came out
afterwards and said you know I found out
what was going on by listening to the
BBC Russian service you know the
attitude... BK: He always would give me an
interview. He'd say I'll always give you
an interview because of the coup. GG: Wait you
were behind the coup? BK: So there's two things. There's the Soviet
era and how rare Western visitors were
treated, so were students. We were treated like
people from outer space. Especially as I was
in a provincial town and people had very
little idea of what was going on, the
facts of what life was like in the West.
They would say things like, 'how many cows
does your father have?' as a measure of
wealth and it's very rural. GG: But you know
in the 90s you've got the same thing.
I studied in Petrozavodsk which is
north of St. Petersburg, sort of
northwest Russia,
a logging town. This was the mid-
late 90s actually and I remember they
invited me to their dacha
and I said how lovely it was for this
Russian tradition that people had these
summer houses, these dachas, that they
could go to and grow you know and they
were kind of allotments, a lot of little wooden shacks.
BK: They needed them in the 90s GG: And I
said what a love like what a lovely
luxury this was for you lot that you
have this tradition and she said to me,
ah but in the West you have villas and I
tried to dig a little bit into,
what do you mean
villas? So it turned out that they were
getting their information from a programme
called Beverly Hills 90210. BK: I think this
theme of prosperity is an interesting
one because when people did glean
information from the West and I
mean they understood from the clothes we
students had that we had things they
didn't have. You know in those days
jeans and biros and automatic umbrellas
were very popular. And, you know, makeup
and latest music and all kinds of things.
And they didn't have that so it was very
difficult for the Soviet state to say
they lived in a better world when they
could see tangibly that we had things
they didn't have. But nowadays you know
that's all gone because Russia's now a
market economy and it functions, you can
you know get better stuff and, you
know, it might even be cheaper, might even
be better, better made depending on where
it came from and what you're talking
about in Russia. I mean I was talking
just on Tuesday to one of our
students who's going to Novosibirsk
for a year and I said well you
know you must be careful you must think
about getting warm enough clothes
because you just will be miserable if
you're too cold and you really need a warm
coat and don't be scared- wear fur
because really in Siberia nothing does
it except fur in my experience. And I was
sort of saying, you know a good place to go
is Helsinki, you know, thinking
back to my time and she said no I'll
wait till I get to Novosibirsk and then
I'll find a Russian to take me to the shops.
We'll probably find things that are suitable. And that's so different now
and I think that that does inform,
you know, for those of us who are old
enough to remember the Soviet Union
there was a certain complacency in those
days that we knew our world was better.
And we knew our world worked better and of
course in many ways it did because the
Soviet Union was so nonsensical and
dysfunctional that was true both on the
propaganda level and on the way politics
was organized and on the way the economy
worked and nowadays you know it's not
quite so clear.
GG: But I remember saying as a sort of green
and perhaps slightly idiotic student in
the 1990s to one of our teachers at Kazan
State University and I said to her
something idiotic like: you know,
but back in the Soviet Union, you know,
you had to queue up for cabbages and
now you've got everything in the shops.
She said: yes we have got everything in
the shops but most of us can't afford it.
And that I think that experience of
the 90s, to me it felt like, and now it
feels like, many Russians saw that not
just as a betrayal of the promise of
what could happen after
the Soviet Union but specifically a
Western betrayal and I think to include
Britain in that as this system that
held out this promise and that
then didn't deliver or only delivered
for a very few. I think that
plays in very strongly to, that
psychological element plays in very
strongly to this low point that we've
reached now in relations and the fact
that you know, if I speak to the Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova,
I can guarantee you that
she would literally be shouting at me
within 45 seconds. It's quite noticeable
that there is a lot of anger and I think
it stems from that moment in the 90s when things started to go
horribly wrong when you were interviewing Yeltsin twice.
BK: Mr. Putin was the one I interviewed but yes I
think, I mean I get a little frustrated
when Russians today say, 'oh it was so
much better in the Soviet Union'
because the year I spent in Voronezh in
the mid-1970s it was not better. It was
tedious, it was boring, it was stultifying
for everybody. The State ran
everything, decided what job you did.
We shared four people
to a room so we were pretty crowded in
the hostel, character forming for 10
months. 2 Russians, 2 Brits and at the end
of the year they were all weeping, the
Russian girls, because they were being
sent off to work in far away village
schools up to their knees in mud to pay
back for their university education- no
choice at all. And then after that
whatever job they got after that there
would be no choice. And getting things to eat
was difficult, we used to go around
hunting in shops. There was no meat, there
was no fish, there were no fresh
vegetables in the winter.
You couldn't even buy a needle to darn your
cardigan. I once said I need to darn my
clothes I'm just going down to the shop
to buy a needle. They all laughed at me and
said, 'don't be so stupid you can't buy that.'
You know they are so deprived and
people have forgotten and they hear the
stories from their grandparents and
it's through rose-colored spectacles,
very often it's about life in Moscow and
not in the provinces and I think
that I understand the
frustration of people who feel they
can't afford things now but actually
a lot of things worked on the
black market in those days and it was
also a question and what you could
afford and of course who you knew
because if you had an in into the party
then you got a hold of things that other
people didn't get. So I feel I feel quite
sorry really that history is being
rewritten in that way and it comes on to
another point which was, one thing about
being in the Soviet Union was after a
while you tried to navigate, to pass
the official view, as you had been talking
about Soviet Russian officials, to the
private view and there was this huge gap
between them, you know people who would
be really monosyllabic and never smile
at you know in a official capacity
if for some reason you managed to go
home with them they would be so warm and
lovely and quite critical of their
country and that, I don't know if that
exists now. GG: Well I think
it did for a long time but I
think the slightly surreal nature
of Putin's Russia post-2012, post his
return for his third presidency and especially
post Crimea and eastern Ukraine where
official Russia has played this kind of
knowing wink-wink nudge-nudge game of,
you know, little green men in Crimea
nothing to do with us and then a year
later saying, well of course it was us
and we'll give them all medals.
And Russians are expected to, when
they see the little green men going into
Crimea and they hear the official
denials, of course, they also this is
rubbish. But they have to
juggle these two realities in their
heads at the same time, they have to both
believe the denials of their,
of the state but also their
knowing, they're not idiots and
so what you get is this kind of dual
reality. I've been
working on a five-part series
about this guy Vladislav Surkov for
Radio 4, who is the guy, the man
credited with creating Putinism,
this sort of Machiavellian semi-
democratic state and he really
pioneered what I think has morphed
into what we like to call the post-
truth world, this idea whereby you
saw a democracy and yes it had all
the props and the actors, it had
democratic elections. It had opposition
parties, it had a vibrant press, but all
of them were in a way just stage props
and so now what you have is instead of
Russians being able to
separate their public persona and
beliefs and their private, if they
thought no one was listening, in to two
separate things you've got people are
confused because they can say anything
they want but these two things are
swimming together in the same pool and
it's very confusing and I notice it with
my friends who
would describe themselves as liberals,
would probably not describe themselves
as Putin supporters but at the same
time I will have conversations with them
like they will say, 'do you really believe
that Russia had anything to do with
Skripal? I don't think so' and I mean I don't know
I don't have independent
sourcing on the Skripal thing but
you know just look at Russia's
recent form, it's not a stretch of
the imagination at all. But my Russian
liberal friends are really wrestling
with this because I think truth and
fiction are these two sides of the
Russian psyche that they got so adept at
separating, under Soviet times, have got
really mixed up now and I think it's
difficult. BK: Well I suppose, you know, I
suppose in this country we can
sympathise with that more now than we
might have done because we're in a
very confusing moment. I was on the
train on the way here and I made a list of
ways in which I thought if only
Russia and Britain could get on better,
actually we've got lots in common. I mean
it's true though because for a start
there are, I mean just on a superficial
level there are the royal links, there
are the cultural affinities, how much we
like each other's literature and culture.
Particularly things like children's literature which
goes very deep into a nation and that's
part of the story that we do in the end
see Russia as part of the European
mainstream culturally. GG: And Russians us,
I mean you can go to an
estate on the outskirts of a provincial
town and you will have a sensible
conversation with someone about
Shakespeare. BK: And we were wartime
allies, that was very important for them.
It is for some people here too,
and then there are
other ways in which we... these
common strains that come back not just
places like Crimea and Afghanistan but
actually we also have lots of ways in
which we sort of face the same
challenges or we have things that run
through our lives, and our
country's lives, which seem to me rather
similar. So our sense of our historical
identity, and you can see this in this
exhibition, running through history,
it's very tied up with monarchy.
So you know, 1,000 years of Russian
history is partly about 1,000 years of
the Russian Orthodox Church but it's
also about Prince Vladimir who converted.
So it's that line of monarchy that
runs straight down from history to today
which is what makes you feel that you're
Russian and similarly I think in
this country you know we as children we
learn about the kings and queens it's...
GG: We divide our periods...
BK: It's Alfred burning the cakes. It goes back very
long way so that's very interesting.
Because of course, and it's so strong
this identity if you think about it that
both nations could even have German
monarchs and it doesn't shake their
identity so we had the Germans in the
18th century and they had Empress
Catherine who was a totally signed up German.
GG: The key difference on
the monarchy side of things, of course,
is that we had a revolution then brought
them back and they had a revolution
and didn't. BK: So we both had revolutions,
ours was in the 17th century, didn't last very long.
We reverted to the monarchy. The
Russians had a revolution, they lost
their monarch, well their monarch was executed, our
monarch was executed and then they had
70 years of Sovietism and now they
haven't got a monarchy back. GG: Although
they do have Putin. BK: They have Putin
because they sort of want a tsar
GG: But the problem is he doesn't have an heir.
BK: Look at the coronation it's a
tsar's coronation, that's all the trappings
are there. And you know maybe part of the
confusion you're talking about is
about a country which had its guts
ripped out of it in terms of identity by
the Soviets, they didn't even have a
nationhood, it was Soviet, it was another
entity , it was the Soviet, the
Soviet citizen, it wasn't a Russian...
GG: Well it then developed into quite a strong sense
of identity I think. BK: Yeah but you know,
as soon as it was possible
after the Soviet Union collapsed people
tried to recreate 'Russian-ess' and that's
what Putin is trying to do too but
actually it turns out monarchy is very
important and it's not there so that
makes me, that's one of many reasons, that
makes me think we're looking at Russia
in transition and we don't know where
that's going. But then there are other
things that I think are sort of
beguiling when you think about Russia
and Britain that we have in common.
I mean this is also, you know, this isn't
a new thought but it's an interesting
one to play with, it's about the
post-imperial syndrome so that we're
both empires, we're both struggling with
the fact we're no longer empires and you
know Britain lost its empire after the
end of the Second World War through
exhaustion it just had to give it up and
then there was the Commonwealth and now,
you know, some people say well we can get
the Commonwealth back, well frankly the
Commonwealth has moved on, you know,
talk to, go to Australia and New Zealand
they may debate very much how
much they should trade with China but
they're looking at their neighborhood.
The Russians, similarly, it's
very hard for them... Putin we see
that all the time he doesn't think these
are proper countries around the edge.
GG: He said that about Ukraine. BK: They're still part of his empire.
This leads to a difficulty in identity.
What's Russian-ess
when every ninth Russian is a Muslim and
a non-Russian and similarly in this
country are we British, are we English,
are we one nation, are we four nations?
It's again, it's a post-imperial problem.
Are we a federation, are we a single
unitary state? Russia also says it's a
federation but it behaves like a single
unitary state and actually it's really
quite interesting if only we could
admit this about ourselves to each other
we could have quite a useful conversation.
GG: We should all be more like the Germans where we
look at our history boldly in the face. I would argue in a way
that the Russians are almost slightly
better at getting over their
post-imperial hangover than we are. I
would suggest especially in this kind of
sort of rather frenzied Brexit period
where we seem to be coming face to face
with some rather hard realities about
our ability to project power abroad and
get people to do what we want them to do.
I would say that maybe the Russians
have faced that a little bit more
directly as a result of the fall of the
Soviet Union. I was
very struck, I was thinking about this on
the way in
that you talked about monarchy being a
sort of thread that runs through it and
provides with a sense of national
identity or historical identity and the
Russians of course you know cut that off and
didn't bring it back and perhaps that's
one of the key differences, that sense of
continuity has been lost. That
absolute sense of two breaks in 1917 and
1991 and the chaos that was the 90s and
if you look at RT for example that the,
Russia Today, that this channel is a
propaganda channel, it's got a very clever
slogan which is, 'Question More'. It's a
propaganda channel aimed at Britain and
America... 'Question More' and I think that's
very clever because we do need to
question more. They... all the best
propaganda has come from an element of
truth, right? We do need to question more.
We need to confront our own history more
in Britain to find out who we really are.
The Russians in a way have been so
forced to question, they have to question
the validity of the Soviet Union
massively after it collapsed and
realised that it was entirely rotten
from the inside. Then they questioned the
capitalism that they adopted throughout
the 90s because it was so chaotic and
now they've realized that actually they
don't believe anything because everyone's
lying to them. So they've been through
that whereas we're kind of just starting
I think and they're looking at us so
that's where this fascinating
character of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's
Rasputin, you get the sense of him kind
of looking at the West in it's sort of
contorted difficulties over Brexit and
Trump and this post-truth world and
sort of looking at us and slightly
smirking and thinking, 'we've been here
already, we've been through this, now you
see how you like it'. BK: So it's becoming a
conversation not about Russia but about
us. It's an interesting one because it comes
down to a question of values. So the
Soviet Union had an ideology which
didn't work and lots of people, in the
later Soviet Union anyway, when they
would reach their teenage years would
look around and say this doesn't work,
you know this isn't an equal society.
There are all those party members who
have special shops and things.
You know, my father's been penalised
at work and it's not fair,
suddenly I realised this world doesn't
work and then you have the private
sphere and the public sphere and
gradually the cynicism or the
disenchantment grows to the extent that
when Gorbachev lifts the lid just a
little when he comes in in 1985 the lid
blows off because there's so much
frustration, pent up frustration,
and private criticism that it can't last.
But that was right because the Soviet
Union didn't really work and the values
that it espoused it didn't live by. The
question is, the values that Western
societies have, is Mr. Putin right when
he says, well you say you have these
values but you don't live by them. You
know you say you have human rights you
don't really... Britain the epitome of
hypocrisy and so on and where we may
not be perfect but you're no better in
fact in some ways you're worse because
you're not frank about it.
GG: That's the very center of Russian foreign policy.
BK: Lots of people who think no that's not true there are
values, maybe we don't live up to them
but we aspire to them and actually, you
know, the big question about Russia today
is perhaps there are a lot of people in
Russia who'd like to think like that but
they're not really allowed to. You know
they're expected to play along with a
narrative. You say question more,
well you know in Putin's Russia there
are lots of things people aren't allowed
to question. If they start to challenge
or cast aspersions on the
Russian state or the Russian presidency
they run the risk of being hauled off to
the courts for a Twitter comment. GG: Well I
think that the clever thing about
Putin's Russia was actually most people
are allowed to question most things
although they're not allowed on some
platforms. So you won't you be allowed
to question certain things on
state-controlled television, for example.
But you'd be free to do so in an online
newspaper or even in some print
newspapers. BK: Until you're not and then you're in trouble.
GG: Until you start to start pulling at the
financial threads and then it's cut
so if you get close to that
that's it you're allowed but
you, you
can question more it's just that your
questioning isn't going to do... it's not going
to change anything you know...
it's not gonna change anything.
I think that's one of the
differences. BK: I mean an interesting thing
that I see in Russia today is, and it comes
back to this idea of national identity,
that something very very... I remember Putin,
I used to go to a yearly conference run
by the Kremlin and Putin would talk to
us at length at the end of it, it's
called the Valdai Conference and one
year he said and this was about 2011, I
think it was 2011. It was just before those
and said, 'we want you to go
massive protests when people came out on the street
Mr. Putin', which was a moment when the
emperor began to lose his clothes which
I think profoundly shocked him.
GG: He thought it was
Ukraine, he thought it was an Orange
Revolution. BK: He thought he was out and
instead he managed to win the next election
and announced his victory with tears
running down his cheeks. His Press
Secretary later said, 'oh no it was a cold
wind'. Anyway so there he was and he
said the thing about Russia today is
that it's too cynical. You know, people
are sold on materialism in the
post-Soviet world now we've lost Soviet
ideology it's all evaporated and people
just think you just need to get rich and
you need to make money and they haven't got
an idea that holds the nation together
so I've been working and thinking what
should our idea be and we need to have a
sort of Russian... and you know that, you
know he's talking about values he's
talking about something to make the
nation, for people to really feel
enthusiastic and passionate about and
not have this empty cynicism you're
talking about. And he talked about
nationhood and religion and you
know, out of this came the even
closer relationship with the Orthodox
Church. Two years later there's
the whole debacle in Ukraine, not
unconnected to all of this. And they
pushed the idea now of Russian
nationhood and you get these after
school clubs where children are taught to,
trained to fight and use rifles and even
taken off to Ukraine to fight.
And the young children and
the teachers there really sincerely
believe in Holy Mother
Russia and they say we are preparing
for a holy war so there is a sector of
the population, I mean I suppose that
they remind me of the Trump true believers.
The kind of 20% who just buy into
this idea. GG: But I went to one of these camps in
2016, I went and it was just before the
election and we were doing a piece for
Newsnight about Russians who
are preparing for a third world war
conflict with America. So we went
to one of these. It was run by the party
Rodina, it's nationalist, it means 'motherland' party.
Young kids, teenagers paintballing basically with a
nod and a wink that you know once you've
learned to paintball you can use a Kalashnikov.
And you know, great telly pictures.
Looks like Russia is preparing for war.
And then afterwards I'd talk to
teenagers and I was like, 'yes does it
feel very tense to you?' They're like, 'no not really'.
I was like, 'but you watch television and
they've got all these reports about America.'
'You watch Russian television? We don't watch Russian television, it's full of nonsense.'
So I had high hopes for the new generation of
Russians that maybe they could both go
paintballing paid for by the state and
then ignore all of this nonsense. So maybe it's just us older people.
BK: I think this is very big question about
Russia today. You know
you were talking about this dual
mentality of on the one hand wanting to
stick up for your country and not
believe that they could do something so
awful as poison these people in
Salisbury and on the other hand... GG: they're
proud that they did go and poison... literally the
two things that are happening: 'How could
you believe that we would do? 'Isn't
it great how clever our security
services are?' Then, when they
massively messed it up-
'Well that's a bit embarrassing', you know so
there's a weird dichotomy- these two ideas
that cannot both be true and yet
they're sort of holding them in their heads
at the same time. It's a very
odd place to be but I wanted to pick
up on something that you said earlier.
You were talking about transition and
Putin, we talked about the fact that
there was no heir, that there is no
obvious replacement for him and this
is the driving force, or the
stultifying force in Russian politics
because sometimes in the West we think
of the Kremlin as this very monolithic
thing where Putin decides everything and
tells everyone what to do but it's not
really like that. There's lots of
factions in the Kremlin. They call them
the towers of the Kremlin,
they fight each other
for influence and control and but
Putin if you like is the institution
through which they all exercise power
and without Putin they don't
have a means to exercise power and they
need... BK: But he is the tsar and you can't
declare who the next king is till the
king is dead right? GG: but at least if the king
has a son you know who he's going to be but with Putin
you don't know and actually I think all of
the, well not all of the, but a lot of the
entrenchment and the souring of
relations that you see between Russia
and the West is due to the fact that
they don't know where they're going,
they've got no succession plan so they
need to keep pushing harder. They need to
keep it so, so the liberalism is,
you will remember this, that
when Putin first came in there was talk
of Russia joining NATO. I mean that
that would be absolutely unthinkable
these days. You know NATO is portrayed in
Russia as their greatest enemy that is
constantly pushing in on their borders,
encircling them and incidentally this is
a narrative that I suspect
through RT and other means is seeping
into
the British kind of alternative
consciousness. If you speak to a
lot of Corbyn supporters you will hear
that narrative that comes out, you
know that NATO's encircled Russia. Young
people, I've got a nephew like that, and
and I'm like where is this coming from
and I think it's coming from there.
And it's all happening because
they've got no succession. There's no,
there's no idea of any way forward so
it's this is kind of conservatism that...
BK: I remember once talking to a Russian
political scientist, she'd been an
advisor to Yeltsin, you probably know her
Lilia Shevtsova.
She became, she was sort of close to,
she was a very respected figure in
Moscow through the 90s and she was
around with early Putin. He had a lot of
liberal advisors in those days, economic
advisors, because he was trying to have a
better, sort out the Russian economy to
get people to pay taxes and, you know,
make the country more profitable again
and he did it, amazingly with the help of
high oil prices as well of course but
she had, she was wary of him but
I think she could see good things.
She could see that the people who
initially around him were doing the
right thing and he was trying to reach
out to the West to get investment. He was
prepared to forgive NATO for having
gone into Kosovo, without a UN resolution
by the way, and over Russia's objections.
So that was quite a big thing for Putin
to do, to try and make friends with the
West again. But just when he first came
in. And I remember in, I think 2003, I
remember seeing her and she said, 'it's no
good it's not going to work. He's taking
us down a blind alley, down a 'tupic'.' And
I said, 'why?' She said, 'because he's taken the
low-hanging fruit of the economic
reforms.' He portioned a flat tax so people
began to pay to income tax for the first
time. He'd done a few other things-
regularised some things and she said, 'now
he has to do the hard stuff, now he has
to bring in various reforms which will
really liberalize the economy and he
dairn't let go and therefore
he's just doing what everybody in
Russia has always done through the
Soviet Union, which has retained this
very strong central to control so that
you're in charge because you don't let
go because then you're not in control
anymore and she said, 'it will never
develop.' GG: It's interesting this was 2003. BK: It was just before
Khodorkovsky was arrested. It was just
before he sacked his
reformist Prime Minister Mikhail
Kasyanov, he'd inherited from Yeltsin
known as Misha 2% because everyone thought he
was on the take. But he was a reformer
and he brought in a terrible Prime
Minister called Fradkov who was
totally, as we used to say,
unreconstructed, and set the whole thing
down a course which we're now on where if
you look back on it you could say Putin
had a choice between the economic
reformers, some of whom is still suckling
round him a bit, and
the people who run the
security apparatus, that's the army, the
KGB, the interior ministry troops, the
same people who organized the coup
against Gorbachev
in 1991 and they said to him you
can't let go of control and he... that
was his background, KGB man, and even though
he brought in Medvedev for four
years as a sort of stand in president
while he was Prime Minister between 2008
and 2012 he didn't really let go and I
remember being at a meeting where he
said, well I'm giving you Medvedev as a
president, he's younger than me, he's a
different generation, he comes from a
different background. This is your test
in the West to see if you can
collaborate with him. Well it wasn't a
real test because he was never going to
let go. GG: You were telling me about 2008
when Georgia happened. BK: Yeah so that's their line.
We were talking on the phone more about this. So
Medvedev comes in, this puppet president
and Georgia has a very excitable
president called Mikheil Saakashvili, some
of you may have seen the YouTube clip of
him eating his tie. They like
to show that on RT a lot and the
Russians claimed that he started a clash
in South Ossetia so they had to send
troops in and they'd been having
exercises on the borders with tanks,
it's April, so they were poised to go in
but we know that story now, that's
exactly what they did with Ukraine so
you know the Russians can hardly be said
to be innocent in this game. Anyway it
all happened at the moment when the
Russian invasion was announced at the
time of the Beijing Olympics and Putin
as Prime Minister was in Beijing so he
was several hours ahead of Russia when
they rang him up and said what are we to
do? Send in the tanks. GG: So he makes the
decision not the president.
BK: The president meanwhile, young Dmitry Medvedev was on
holiday fishing on the Volga River.
[Laughter]
GG: Have you ever noticed how Dmitry Medvedev speaks
exactly like Putin. He's adopted his clipped vocal
mannerisms. It's like he's... BK: well he's got no choice either.
I was at a meeting with him as part of this
conference that year and he said no I,
you know, I'm very frustrated. I don't
want to be a war president I want to
deal with the Russian economy that's
what I like doing but I was rung up by
the defense minister who told me we'd
invaded Georgia. So that's the way Russian politics works.
GG: I don't think he wants to be president at all, but in
2012, well 2011 just before those
protests happened that you that you
spoke about earlier there was a real
question for a little while about
whether Medvedev was going to stay and
whether the elites in Moscow were
going to achieve keeping Medvedev in
place and that could have sent
this whole topic that we're talking
about, Russia-West relations, down a very
different alley. I think it's quarter to - yes right
BK: We should stop talking to each other
and take some questions.
GG: Right, anyone who wants to ask anything put
your hand up and I think there's a
microphone at the back - 2 microphones.
Don't be shy.
Yes, you sir.
Q1: Hi. I am a Russian person who lives in
Britain for many many years actually
when you were a BBC correspondent in
Russia. And I also
lived in Ukraine and I think that
we all agree that the situation around
between Russian and UK has really
started from Maidan which you were
actually covering in a very good
manner for somebody like me who lived
there for many years and knows
the situation very well and can relate
to both British view and Russian view
and Ukrainian view I thought that you
were actually one of the very few people
who understood the situation very well.
So now to the question. During
Maidan period it was kind of up
and down all the time and whenever it
would be coming down suddenly
every time somebody would almost like
throw in a match and another shooting
would happen, another
explosion. Something constantly kept on
happening in exactly the right time and
out of probably the most of these events the
most prolific one was of course shooting
of people in Maidan which is still kind
of not really clear who. But I think the
answer to that question really indicates
the power play of that situation, right?
So for me it's very interesting
considering that you are there and you're
a BBC correspondent. What is your view?
Who was actually shooting from Hotel Ukraina
GG: Well they, they
shot at us actually. I saw,
we were outside, we were staying at the
Hotel Ukraina and that morning, the 20th
of February 2014, five years ago
yesterday, it started in a crazy way. I
was woken up by gunshots. I went out and
looked out the window. I saw a protestor
lying face down on the cobbles. I
couldn't swear that I could see the
blood but anyway he was, he was dead.
He'd been shot and another protester
ran up and dragged him by the legs and
pulled him to cover. We went down, it was
very very confusing but most of the
shooting was happening at street level
between the riot police and special
interior ministry forces and the
protesters, most of whom didn't have guns,
most of whom just had sort of baseball
bats and pointless plywood shields but
then at some point suddenly I saw a
curtain twitch up on the sort of 18th
19th floor of this hotel and a shot rang
out in it and it was definitely coming
in our direction and it seemed like
somebody from there was shooting at both
sides. That is the sort of
conclusion that I came to. I went
back a year later. I met a guy who
claimed that he was one of the
protesters and that he'd actually fired
one of the early shots. He said he'd met
a shadowy figure on Maidan a few weeks
earlier who'd sort of groomed him, that's
the way he put it. He said, you know, if it
comes to it they were ready and then somebody
had given him a shotgun. He'd fired from
the conservatory building just around
the corner.
But it's very difficult to figure out
exactly what happened.
But there was definitely a sense that
there were two forces, the
protesters and the
riot police and then there was this
kind of third force and that is slightly
borne out by recordings of snipers that
that have since come out and one pair of
snipers that obviously was unknown to
the government snipers who were all around.
The Ukrainians claim that Russia
organised these snipers. Ukraine and
Russia at war, you know, there's a lot of
propaganda going on both sides. My answer
to you is I don't know. What I do know is
that I covered Maidan, the
protest there and then I covered Crimea
and then I covered eastern Ukraine.
I was in Sloviansk when the policemen
took over the police. Now I can tell you
that Maidan was a real revolution. There
were people there, they were normal
people. I was just revisiting some of the
footage just the other day. It was sort
of families gathering sacks of
cobblestones to build barricades. This
was on the 19th of February the day before
this happened. I can tell you that the
stuff that happened in eastern Ukraine
in Sloviansk and even more so in Crimea,
that was not a people's revolt. That was
a rebellion by some people
for sure were locals, but local security
forces. And then there were Russians that came in as well. So there was a qualitative
difference to those two rebellions, if
you like. Now to answer your question as to
whether somebody brought Maidan to a
head on purpose, I don't know. I genuinely
don't know. QI: But do you think it's a possiblity? GG: Of course it's a real
possibility, sure.
Yes, there's a lady at the back
Q2: It's something you touched on a little
bit earlier actually about that
kind of duality of the, how can you
say you know, oh we
weren't poisoning anybody and yet how
great could we be. You know when I
read, when I hear the news
and I do think that, I think but how
can you believe that. You know and so I
try to think if it was me and I was
was saying xyz would I then
sitting there and my government
suddenly start believing the BBC over
here. But I guess I just always assumed
that maybe they, you know, the information
we got and the information that they get
in Russia is somehow different, you
know, and so I guess I just wanted to see
if you actually think there is that duality...
I mean the question of how on
earth would that ever get resolved is
not one I'd want to post you because it's almost impossible to
answer but from a cultural, you know,
you've got more of a cultural
insight into what's going on. GG: I don't know
if, I mean certainly what they see
on TV in Russia is very different from
what we would see here and I think in
both cases you know we're not... no
narrative is completely unbiased, right?
We all come from a cultural perspective
and no information is without that tinge.
But I wonder if, Bridget, you think that
this sort of public-private dichotomy
that you spoke about in the Soviet Union
was like a sort of practice run for this
weird post-truth world that we're all
living in. BK: I remember when the Soviets
invaded Afghanistan. I was on a, I went
to a conference in Armenia from Moscow
that summer. And the air hostess was very
nice. And she said, 'oh come up you
know look in the cockpit, you can watch
the pilot'. And so we sat there chatting
and at a certain point, you
know, very friendly, and she said, 'come on
tell me why was it that the Americans
invaded Afghanistan?' You know, just in
December 1979 and I wanted to say, 'no no
no it was the Soviets not the Americans.'
And so I mean there is a bit of that now,
You get the sort of feeling that, you
know, you meet people who say, 'oh but
clearly it was Porton Down I mean look
it's Salisbury, it's right next to
Porton Down. The logical thing is the
poison came from there, clearly. You
know if you're on one or other side of
the divide it is a bit like the
looking-glass.
It depends which way you look at it. So
it's an interesting thing about
propaganda isn't it? And it
certainly made me think about how in the
late Soviet era, because so many things
didn't stack up in the Soviet Union, so
many things were clearly lies. Our
marvellous grain harvest, we have done
better than ever.
Shops are empty. You know you can kind of
tell it's not true. But nowadays it's
just much harder and modern technology
makes it hard too. GG: The more information we
get the harder it is to figure out
what's going on. BK: I think that people have,
there are more people in our society who say I
don't know what to think as well. You
know, I'm not sure I really believe what
I'm being told. GG: Somebody a couple of
years ago in Russia told me something. I
was asking a similar question to them
that you were asking just now. And they
said to me about watching Russian TV,
they said we don't really watch Russian
TV to find out what's going on
we watch Russian TV to find out what
people who matter are thinking. Because
that's a really important thing to know
if you live in a society like ours and I
thought that was a very sensible answer
to that question.
Yes, the gentleman over there.
Q3: I was interested in your comment about the
transition period. I'm talking about the political system.
When the Soviet Union collapsed liberal democracy was at
the peak in the West and now they question,
but the Russians have gone directly from
one system to another without trying
liberal democracy so what is it from the,
from the people's point of view
that made them not interested at all
and rejecting that system and you know
where do we go from here? BK: So I think when
the Soviet Union collapsed they rather
hoped it would happen very quickly and
it didn't. The 90s were very painful and
it was very difficult to unravel 70
years of this terrible communist
experiment and many people suffered a
lot. Lots of people, in a normal
society they'd have lost their job but
this was, you know, a world where there
was no welfare state so they went to
work but they weren't really paid or
they might be given a bag of oranges or
a slab of meat. Life was terrible, you
couldn't get medicines. I had friends who
died early because of lack of medical
care at that time. Everyone was
traumatised. I remember talking to a
representative from the World Health
Organisation who said if you look at the
shrinking of the Russian population in
the period between 1986 and 1996, which
had gone down by a million or
something. He said you normally only see
that in a war zone.
It was terrible attrition on ordinary
people and they kind of bore it. They
went to their dachas and they dug
potatoes to eat because there was no
other way to do and that has
informed their view of Putin. GG: And of us
because we said it would all be fine
and it wasn't fine.
BK: So the oil prices went up, their
economy did better. He put out pensions.
Salaries were doing better. You could
get good jobs and they want that and
they want to keep that. His problem is
he's always running against himself so
every time he runs in an election or, you
know, people look at how their life
is going, inflation is going up and, you
know, jobs are not as good and now he
wants people to wait longer till they
get their pension and they're feeling
disillusioned with Putin because it's
not as good as it was in 2008. But that
does explain, I think, the terrible 90s.
Why words like 'democracy'
and 'liberal' became dirty words in
Russia. They felt the disillusioned, they felt
these were empty promises.
That's one thing. The other is, as I said,
I think you have to think about these
deeper cultural currents and monarchy I
think is a very important one in Russia
and they lost a sense of what held them
together and they went through this
trauma you know, you thought you
and your aunt in Ukraine lived in the same
country. Suddenly you need a visa
to go and see her overnight. You know
it's very destabilising. So they feel
that having a tsar is a comfort, makes
them feel better about themselves. The
third thing is that a lot of things have
changed in Russia since the end of the
Soviet Union and maybe they haven't got
liberal democracies that you see in
Western Europe but they've got a hell of
a lot more than they used to have.
Russians are much better informed. They
can travel and admittedly they need the
money but they can. You just
couldn't travel in the Soviet Union. GG: A lot of them
have the money. BK: You go to the
Siberian cities and there are travel
agents who, you know, sell you a
little vacation in Turkey or in Malaysia or in
Egypt in the winter, it's fantastic
in comparison to what it used to be. You
couldn't even leave your town. People can
get the books and the videos, they can be
connected to the world we're in. They feel
connected and they are connected and a
lot of them have left and come here to
study or work and are informed and that
is also affecting the country because
they send information back whether it's
by private email or some of them work
for news agencies that feed back into
Russia. It's not a closed space anymore
and that has had a profound effect I
think on modern Russia which is good
news and there are lots of things,
practices that were brought in in the
90s which maybe didn't work very well
but they've set the seeds for something
which could bear fruit later. So there
was a big discussion about free press
and they invented a law on the
press which actually wasn't a bad law.
It's just that it was never followed. But
it's there and I mean there are other
things. There's the idea that elections
should be free. I mean that they should
be, your vote should be a private vote, a
secret ballot. Well now there's a lot of
intimidation on people from
their work places to go and vote because
most of all Putin's worried about
turnout because there's no other viable
candidate.
So the real test of how Putin does in
the election is how many people bother
to go and vote at all at the moment. But
people are under pressure but I don't
think that they've lost this sense that
they should have the right to choose
their leaders. They don't believe they
can make them accountable at the moment.
But I don't believe, I'm a long term
optimist on Russia. In time, if the right decisions
are made that this is an option that
they could just take. It was seventy years and
Russian democracy had never taken root.
It hadn't really been sorted out yet, you
know, there was only the germ of it before that,
how many years of Russian tsars and
autocracy before that. It's just
going to take a long time. GG: There's a
wonderful story about the 2011
parliamentary elections which were
widely falsified and because United
Russia, Putin's party, didn't do very well
and so on results night the news
editors of the television channels were
phoned up from the Kremlin and told what
percentage had, they were supposed to
report, had voted for United Russia in
each of these provinces. So they all took
this call and they all knew that they had
to do this otherwise they'd
be out of a job that's the way it worked.
But they asked the question okay and
what numbers should we give for
the other parties and they were like
well we don't care about that just
report. So you had all these
fantastic things where they would put it
up on the graphic and they would add up
to 146%. Because they had
inflated the figures for United Russia
but not deflated the other things so
these are mini acts of
dissidence from people working in state
television so it's not all monolithic,
you know there are people who care
about this stuff and they're like this
is nonsense and we're not going to have
it and if we possibly can we're gonna
show it... BK: So one last historical
thought so you know what why did the
Soviet Union end? It ended because a
leader died, Brezhnev, and then it took a
few years before Gorbachev came along
but eventually a leader came. He did
something different and you know why did
Stalinism end? It ended because Stalin
died and then you know three years later
Khrushchev was denouncing him in his
secret speech and he and his Prime
Minister were coming to Britain on a
visit. The photo is downstairs.
And there was a thaw for a year, that
didn't last. But it set the seeds for
something later so when does the current
situation in Russia end? It ends when
Putin goes and then who knows what will
happen. But all sorts of things
could happen. GG: Can I post a counter
thought to that and then we probably
need to wrap up but the guy that I've
been doing this series about, Vladislav
Surkov, Putin's Rasputin, the
hidden hand of Putinism, the inventor of
Putinism. He has a different job now.
He sort of slightly runs the war in
Ukraine. He's a much diminished figure. He
used to be the second most powerful man
in Russia but he is not anymore
and you don't hear much from
him and I was trying to get an interview
with him for this series and of course he said no. But
his unofficial spokesman, just as I was
putting this thing together, one day
just pinged me a link on my phone and I
click on it and it's Surkov. He's written
an article and his take on that exact
point that you just made there is
quite the opposite. He says Putinism will
long outlive Putin and will remain... he
would say that, it's his system. So Putinism
will long outlive Putin and you all
in the West are going to end up living
under it too. So there you are.
[Applause]
