Season 2, Episode 8: Orlando Figes: The Story of Russia

Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Orlando Figes, historian and author of The Crimean War (2012) and his new book, The Story of Russia (2022), in a fascinating discussion of Russian history and ideas about Russian history.

Together, they examine the 19th century Crimean War and the powerful light that the Crimean War, 170 years ago, sheds on the current conflict in Ukraine. More generally, Sachs and Figes explore Russia’s complex relationship with the West, and the ideas that Russian and Western thinkers and politicians have held about Western-Russian international relations throughout history.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Books by Orlando Figes
• Crimean War
• Vladimir Putin
• Anti-Russian Sentiment
• Nicolas II of Russia
• Wars Involving Russia
• Ottoman Empire
• Treaty of Paris 1856
• Lord Palmerston 
• The Crimean War Crises of 1853
• Anglo-Russian War
• Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Soviet Union
• Annexation of Crimea
• Ukraine War 
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Cossacks
• Russian Oligarchs
• NATO

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. In this episode, I will be speaking with Professor Orlando Fejus, award-winning author of Russian history, to discuss his newest book, The Story of Russia, and another great classic, The Crimean War, written in 2012. Professor Fijes is one of the world's leading authorities of Russian history and culture, and his profound insights of Russian history give us crucial new perspectives on the current crisis of the war in Ukraine and the relations between Russia and the world. Orlando, thank you so much for joining. I am a huge, huge fan of your writing and loved your most recent book, which we're going to be talking about, The Story of Russia. But I also want to talk about another great book of yours a decade ago on the Crimean War, which was published in 2012 and which taught me a lot, not only about the Crimean War, which I didn't know enough about, but also about the current war. I found your book on the Crimean War absolutely fascinating. Maybe I could just ask you a very open-ended question about how you view the Crimean War and its relation to the mess that we're in right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Well, if we're referring to the first Crimean War of 1853 to 56, there are very clear parallels. You know, Putin has long been an admirer, it seems, of Nicholas I. He's one of the four statues, Nicholas that is, in that Kremlin room with that ridiculous long table where Putin receives foreign dignitaries. The other three Tsars in that room are perfectly clear to understand why they're there, namely Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, both conquerors of land for the Russian Empire. Alexander I, who saved Russia but also Europe in the Russian version of history from Napoleon. But Nicholas I being the fourth, you would have thought is a slightly more problematic parallel. But politically, Nicholas certainly fits in with Putin's ideology. I mean, he came to the throne in 1825, Nicholas, on the on the back of the Decembrist uprising, which was trying to sort of introduce a Jacobin constitutional revolution into Russia during an interregnum, and failed. But Nicholas was left with this sense of threat, revolutionary threat coming from the West, and developed this police state to counteract it and high levels of censorship and control on materials coming into Russia. And it's a little bit like Putin with his fear of colour revolutions. So Nicholas had his ideology really easily put into the slogan of orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality, or nationalism. And I guess Putin would sign up much to the same ideology. But the thing that puzzles me as to why does he retain Nicholas as a statue is that his reign ended disastrously because Nicholas, for the defense of the Orthodox outside of Russia, I mean in the Russian world, as Putin would put it, decided to go to war against the Ottoman Empire in Europe, in European Turkey, to bully the Sultan into giving Russia the concessions Nicholas thought worthy of the Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans and the Holy Lands, found, unfortunately for him, that actually the Turks fought better than he presumed. But even worse for Nicholas, the Western powers intervened on the Turkish side. Nicholas thought that would never happen. He thought he had a sort of gentleman's agreement with the British, who at that time were really the only Western power that mattered. In fact, the British seeing a Russian threat, the Russian menace of aggression threatening British interests in the Near East, did intervene. And the two industrial powers of France and Britain, later supported by Piedmont, the sort of powerhouse of Italy, easily really defeated Russia, whose resources were much closer to the Crimea Peninsula where the Western Allies attacked to try to take out the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Much as in today's war in Ukraine, especially when one thinks of that line of tanks badly supplied by logistics in the early days of the war. The same thing happened when the Russians tried to get their material down to Crimea. They found on sort of bumpy Ukrainian roads and then corrupt officials everywhere that very little actually got through. And much slower than Britain and France could bring in industrial levels of munitions from Marseille, Toulon, and Havent and Portsmouth and the other ports, all supplying the Allied army. So the Russians were badly defeated and had imposed upon them at the Treaty of Paris of 1856 a peace which they considered deeply humiliating. And I guess it was humiliating and perhaps should serve as a warning to whatever peace can be imposed on Russia if this war should ever end in their military defeat, which for my money is the only end it can possibly have. Because the Treaty of 1856 effectively forced the Russians to demilitarize and destroy their own naval base, which had never been done to a great power before. The idea of the great power system, the concept of Europe, was you don't humiliate other great powers. And here were the Western forces effectively humiliating Russia and treating it as sort of they had treated China in the Opium Wars. I mean, they were that contemptuous of Russia as a European power. And that really hurt the Russians. It was deep humiliating. It created a new level of anti-Western nationalism with more radical forms of Slavophilism than had existed before. And it lived on in Russian collective memory as a sort of ignominious symbol of Western double standards, perfidy by the British, and bad treatment of Russia generally. But, and I think this is the reason why Putin actually, like many Russian nationalists, admires Nicholas, is that although he was defeated, he had gone to war against the whole of the West for the upholding of what Nicholas saw as Russian Christian principles. That the Orthodox were the true Christians, the ideology of Russia being, you know, Moscow III, Rome, that really Russia was the only true seat of orthodoxy and therefore was a sort of bigger spiritual civilization than just the borders of the Russian Empire, warranted this war for Russian principles. And there, it seems to me, is the disastrous parallel with Putin, that he may end up with the same fate.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Thank you for getting us started. I wanted to take the First Crimean War from the Western perspective, both from the British and the French perspective. One thing that your book brought out was the kind of mass rusophobia that already existed in Britain from the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps uh even earlier, and the press just went wild wanting to see the defeat and the humiliation, perhaps even the dismantling of Russia, and was part of the story, the mass public opinion, completely russophobic during the period. It reminded me of the press today, which I think is often a little unbalanced in its uh treatment of this. And then the French, I wanted to ask you about also, because if I remember correctly from your telling, the French in a way were provocative themselves at the beginning of this because they were really challenging what Russia assumed to be its right of overseeing the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire, and the French said, no, that's us. We will take our responsibility in the Holy Land. And so it was a rather direct challenge to Russia. Russia acted upon it, they gambled, they lost in the first instance, as you said. The reaction was very bad, both from the Turkish side and from the British and the French side. And then what I found quite remarkable was after Russia, and correct me if I misremember the details, but after Russia had occupied the Danubian principalities in this first move to reassert Russian rights over the Christian populations, then was forced into a retreat. The British and the French said, aha, now we can go on to really do damage. We can't let them just get away with this with a retreat. Now we have to defeat them. Then, after the long siege of Sevastopol, Palmerston, the prime minister, said, Well, we've won that. Now let's go all the way to the Caucasus, let's dismantle this empire. And after reading your book, I imagined that Boris Johnson had his own statue of Palmerston in his office, that he was the Palmerston of our time. And I wonder what you think of that.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Well, A-grade summary of the book and the story. Thank you, Geoffrey. Well, I think one has to go back on the British side, this Russophobia you refer to, I think we have to go back to the fact that, you know, Russia was sort of nowhere on the European scene until the beginning of the 18th century. No one took it seriously as a European power. Peter the Great, with the conquest of the Baltic coast, began to make a mark, and then Catherine the Great, with her conquest of South Ukraine, New Russia, as she called it, and as it was known until 1917, the provinces of southern Ukraine presently occupied by the troops from Hersan through to Mariupol are what was once known as New Russia. And then, of course, the annexation of the Crimea itself in the 1780s. So that rapid rise of Russian power, and then the shock for Europe that Napoleon had been defeated as much by the Russians as by anyone else, and there were the Russians in Paris and the Cossacks swanning around as lords of Europe. This was suddenly a great threat to Western powers. And then when the Russians started to throw their weight around against the Ottomans in Europe, as you say, trying to assert Russian primacy of interests in the Holy Lands, above all, in the Holy Lands disputes, which went on and on and on. I mean, there's about 15 volumes of diplomatic papers just covering the Holy Lands disputes. So it was a long-running dispute with, as you say, the Catholic ultramontane influence in France, which the new emperor Napoleon III was trying to cultivate because of, I guess, his need for popular basis of support and the church was useful. That acted as a provocation, I guess, or as an escalation of a political crisis that only encouraged Russian aggression further in European Turkey. But as you say, because of that background of Russia's growth and its sort of bullying tactics towards its neighbors, in an area where the British had such clear imperial interests of their own, with the route to India and all the rest of it, the press, which was a new sort of factor in politics in Britain and across Europe from the 1830s and 40s, I mean, the new print technologies, railways, were making national newspapers possible and also giving those newspapers real political clout. And the British press was, as it is, I guess these days, quite jingoistic, if I can use that anachronistic term for the 1850s, and loved bashing the Russians as sort of as as the menace, as the great threat to civilization. And that was a sort of discourse that had been going on in Europe for some time because of not just the encroachment of Russian power and threats of aggrandizement in Europe, but also because of their policies of enforced conversion to orthodoxy in areas of Poland and Ruthenia where the population had been Catholic. So there were a whole number of issues going on whereby 1848, and that again was another factor worsening this confrontation between the West and Russia, because the Russia bashed the Hungarian uprising of 1848-9, sending in a quarter of a million troops to do so. And Kasuth and the Hungarian revolutionaries were fated as great heroes across Europe, fighters of freedom, all sounds familiar. So all of that had made Russia into the sort of the hate figure of progress, civilization, democracy, and liberty. So that by the time that the press waded into the crisis of 1853, the British establishment was deeply uncomfortable about going to war against Russia. It was another Christian power. Queen Victoria was certainly against it. She liked the idea of the Russians giving the Turks a good beating.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

And if I may say, Nicholas seemed to expect we're another Christian power, of course. Europe will side with us vis-a-vis the Ottoman uh powers.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Absolutely. Not just because it was another Christian power, but because he it was a monarch. He'd spoken to another monarch. Because he didn't think that public opinion mattered, because he was dismissive of it. Right. He didn't have it. He was an autocrat. So he thought what really matters here is the monarch and her really senior ministers. And he thought he had those on side because he'd made this mission to London in 1844 when he thought he'd got a sort of gentleman's agreement with the British about the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, it was bound to fail. So he wanted to dismantle the Ottoman Empire with the agreement of the British so that there wasn't chaos and a series of wars in Europe and the Near East over the spoils. But he was taken by surprise, as we know. So yeah, as you say, with Palmerston, it became a real pretext to take the war to Russia, but then use that opportunity to dismantle it. And I think Palmerston came up with this idea of effectively it was an early version of containment, the containment policy. A hundred years before. It was the idea that you had to sort of halve away from the Russian Empire, as you say, the Caucasus. So you went and supported the Chechens and the Shamil tribes that were fighting against Russia in the Caucasus. They tried to get parts of Siberia to break away. It was like, in a sense, almost a world war, because they thought they could take bites out of the Russian Empire to dismantle it. And therefore, the Russian threat to the expansion of the British Empire in Asia would not be so great anymore. So there is a strong tradition of Russophobia there, which I and I think the word russophobia is completely legitimate for that context. But it's now obviously used in a very different way.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

It's so interesting, by the way, your discussion of Russia new to the scene, this great power, is not unlike the China hate that we're seeing right now in the United States, also, which is maybe a not bad analogy. Britain's attitude in the 19th century, who are they? We're the empire. We run the world. This is Pax Britannica. Yeah, it's partly that.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Yeah. I think with the case of Russia, there's something else at work there, which isn't the case with China, which is, you know, Europe for it to have this sense of itself as a civilization has to have an other to define itself against. And Russia was the other.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Oh, I think that's very much a US position right now, which is China's definitely the other, with Russia as a sidekick.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yes, and I think we can see, you know, the othering of Russia as the Asiatic barbarian at the door. I mean, that sort of discourse, which has become very strong in this war, is, you know, especially with the talk of visa bans and the Ukrainian side sort of saying you have to earn your privilege to come to Europe. There's a very sort of West-East division going on there. And you know, you could even argue, I suppose, that the whole NATO expansion was based on the premise that the other is Russia. It was always, as the Russians have always argued, an anti-Russian alliance. So it's the defense of the West against the Russia. And that sort of othering, of if you might put it that way, of Russia was definitely a part of that long tradition of Russophobia in the West. And I think some of it, a lot of it actually, I think, carried into the Cold War. That the American view of Russia was that they equated Russia with the Soviet Union firstly, and then they tended to see it as the enemy, the thing that threatens our freedoms.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Can I ask you about this extraordinary memo? I think it's real and legitimate by Michael Pogodin, his uh famous memorandum to Nicholas about the hypocrisy of the West. And just to read briefly from it, he writes: France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality. None of this disturbs the balance of power. But when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power. France occupies Rome and stays there several years during peacetime. That is nothing. But Russia only thinks of occupying Constantinople, and the peace of Europe is threatened, and on and on. And then he concludes we can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice. And then supposedly in the margin, Nicholas writes, This is the whole point. It's extraordinary. It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

I mean, it could be Putin, couldn't it? I mean, and so much of his discourse, his anti-Western discourse, not so much anymore, but in the early years, certainly after 2007, when he made that sort of landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference, so much of his rhetoric has been about Western double standards, hypocrisy, and so on.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

I share the feeling. I think that hypocrisy is stunning. Bombing Belgrade in 1999, breaking it apart, breaking Serbia apart, and then saying there's been no war in Europe since the Second World War and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Well, yeah, I mean I can go along with that to a certain extent for sure. Yeah. I would agree that the Russians had certain grievances about the way they were treated in the 1990s by the West, and Kosovo was very painful for them and humiliating, and the West missed a number of opportunities to improve relations, really.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

I happened to be lucky in a weird way an advisor to Gorbachev back in 1989 and 1990. So I I loved Gorbachev because I loved his vision of a common European home and one family, and he's a, in my view, a man of great peace. And then I was advisor to Yeegor Gaydar and to President Yeltsin, and also to Kuchma, actually, uh, in the first years of Ukraine's independence. And I'm an idealist. I thought, okay, we're making one world. Everyone's gonna get together, and I really am an idealist in that way. And then I watched step by step all of this break apart and come asunder again, and really resented the NATO enlargement and thought, oh God, here we go again. And it just kept going and going and going. So for me, this hypocrisy business, I have to say, I feel, I feel the pain on the other side of it.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Yeah, sure. I mean, talking about Gorbachev, let's not forget Gorbachev supported the annexation of Crimea by Putin in 2014. Let's not forget that Gorbachev continued to support it until 2019. I'm saying that not to sort of attack Gorbachev. Exactly. Because I share your admiration of him and certainly his vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Euros. But I say it just to point out what a broad spectrum of political opinion in Russia shared this feeling that Putin voiced in the period up to 2014, certainly, of Ukraine in particular being a problem.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Crimea features so deeply in the Russian mind, not only since it uh has had the naval base in Sevastopol since 1783, I think. 1784, okay. Good to know. That's why I'm asking you. You know, and I'm learning. But of course, uh Crimea plays uh part of the founding story of Russia itself. And could you explain that? And I think it actually is also, therefore, an extraordinarily sensitive and important part of our current conflict.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Because Zelensky says we're gonna take back every inch, including Crimea and so forth, and it just seems to me, whoa, this is uh pretty explosive.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

To be honest, I think Crimea is so important to the Putin whole project, maybe not to the Russians to the same degree as a people, that if Ukrainian forces were to be marching into Crimea with NATO support in terms of armaments, they would deploy tactical nuclear weapons. I think there's a really, really serious possibility. That's how important it is, by which that would come under the definition of an existential threat to Russia. The Crimea is really fundamental to the imperial notion of Russia's. Identity that Putin has been developing. The reason why I sort of wrote this book in many ways is because I have become increasingly concerned by the disconnect between the way we teach Russian history and see it and the way the Russians see their own history. And their historiography, which is essentially imperial because the standards of Russian historiography were set by Keramzin, Solovyov, Kluchevsky in the 19th century, and they all share this same vision that Putin has that Ukraine and Crimea are all part of Greater Russia. So that's the sort of starting point. And it seemed to me that when in the first scene of the book Putin unveiled this monument to the Grand Prince Vladimir in Moscow in front of the Kremlin, and the Patriarch Kirill, who was very much behind this sort of initiative, emphasized that the importance of Vladimir's conversion to Christianity at Hesonesis in the Crimea was the point at which Russia became a civilization, a state whose continuity runs right through to the present day. And of course, that was to claim not just Crimea but Ukraine as part of this spiritual civilization that began with that conversion to Christianity in a way that the Ukrainians would completely reject and did reject. They have their own statue of the Grand Prince Volodymyr, as they call him. So we have Vladimir Putin against Volodymyr Zelensky and the statue named in two different ways. And for the Ukrainians, this figure, about whom we know very little, to be honest, was the great visionary leader who took Ukraine into Byzantium and therefore Europe by his conversion. So it was his conversion for the Ukrainians, the founding moment of the Ukrainian nation state. I mean, this is as um, to be honest, this is as far-fetched a mythology as many of Putin's. We can talk about Ukrainian statehood if you want, but the point about Crimea is that it's it's really the point at which this all ignites, really, because it's not something the Russians would give up. Because of that history going back to 988, because of the importance of the peninsula for, you know, the sort of southern empire of the Russian Empire, with all those jewels of Rococo, Enlightenment, civilization in Edessa and Sevastopol. Sevastopol itself being so important to the Russians because it was the seat of their naval base for the Black Sea. Then, of course, it was a hero city, partly because of the Crimean War, partly because of the Nazi invasion of Crimea and its liberation by Soviet forces. So it was one of only 13 hero cities after the war. And of course, then the other thing, which so many Russians feel strongly about when it comes to Crimea, is it was their main holiday destination. The Crimea is where you went for, you know, your package holiday essentially. So it had all sorts of uh sort of emotional and historical meaning to the Russians that the propaganda could work on. And I think that's really why the annexation of Crimea met with such almost universal acclaim from the Russians, and Putin's standing went up to about 80% at that point. I think the war in Ukraine is a very different matter altogether, but the Crimea certainly has that power.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

And Khrushchev's gift administratively of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 certainly made a mess of things ex post. Maybe you could explain to people what what actually happened because it's such an odd oddity.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

But it it is an oddity. Khrushchev was himself Ukrainian, and 1954 was the 300th anniversary of the treaty by which Russia and Ukraine. Well, what exactly happened by that treaty is exactly the controversy. Because for the Russians, in supporting the Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky in his holy war against the Poles, Catholics, for the Russians, this was the moment at which the Ukrainians submitted to the Russians. Khmelnitsky had made a one-way pledge. It wasn't reciprocated in the symbolic rituals, it's important, these things. But for the Ukrainians, that treaty was the beginning of a looser sort of voluntary act of union. And indeed, the Cossacks in the late 17th century, who are now actually fated by many Ukrainian nationalists as the founders of Ukrainian modern statehood, and that's part of the sort of historiography of Ukraine. If you read Mikhailo Khrushchevsky, that's how he presents the Kemelnitsky episode and beyond. Actually, the truth of the matter is that in the late 17th century, many of those Ukrainians built up the idea of Russia. They were buying into the idea of Russia. But whichever way you look at it, 1654 is obviously then symbolic. I mean, whether it was the beginning of the Ukrainian nation, which I don't think is a tenable historical argument, or whether it was the beginning of the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, which was done in the end with a certain degree of coercion, and then Ukraine reduced to just a series of provinces of the Russian Empire back at the Great in the 18th century. 1654, nonetheless, is an important moment. So to mark that moment of the unity of Russia and Ukraine, Khrushchev gave Crimea, transferred it from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Federation. Uh uh sorry, not Federation, um, Republic, Socialist Soviet Republic.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

All within the Soviet Union, didn't it? All within the Soviet Union. Didn't didn't matter at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

It didn't really matter because no one thought the Soviet Union was going to break up. And and the connections between Ukrainians and Russians were so integral. I mean, if you can imagine it uh from America, it's a little bit like England and Scotland around the same time in 1702 had an act of union, and now, in a similar way, the Scots are arguing with the British as to whether they can leave the Union. Right. Because if they can't by referendum, then what sort of union is it? It's not a voluntary union, it's just another empire. And in a sense, Russia with Ukraine has the same issue because it is a colony of an empire, as it developed until 1917. But, you know, once the Soviet Union had collapsed, and obviously, I mean, the fact of the matter is that since 1991 it's been a completely independent sovereign country. So whatever ideology is used by Putin to justify an invasion, I mean, it doesn't count for anything. But symbolically and historically, you can see that there's a similarity there. But, you know, the Scots uh everywhere in England, everywhere in London, I mean, and likewise the Ukrainians were everywhere in Russia and Russians everywhere in Ukraine. And there were so many connections between the two, no one imagined that it could break up. And I think most Ukrainians still see that as a real tragedy.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

I want to bring the US into the story, which isn't part of this story for most of the history, and of course, until the 20th century, and then at the end of the Soviet period, we have this actually remarkable essay by Zbign Brzezinski written in 1997, where he notes that Ukraine is, he calls it a geographical pivot for Eurasia. So he he almost states in a very clear way who controls Ukraine controls Eurasia. This is playing on Makinder about control of the central island of the world. It seems to me that US strategists following Brzezinski, and Brzezinski was certainly no friend of Russia in any of this, a great Polish American, a brilliant man, but certainly with a Polish perspective on Russia, which was not one of love. Now we're in a we're really in a conflict for where Ukraine fits in this. And from Russia's point of view, that's our neighborhood, that is our strategic power, that's our access to the Eastern Mediterranean, that's everything. From the US, well, this seems like easy pickings. You know, the Ukrainians want out, they want the West, we move in, why not even move NATO in? And this seems to be the explosive brew that was set off.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Yeah, and it was always going to happen if NATO moved into Ukraine in the sense that even in the 1990s, you know, I mean, Yeltsin was deeply troubled by the issue of Ukraine when it was first mooted that Ukraine, you know, might become some sort of auxiliary member of NATO and all the rest of it. So it's always been the most sensitive issue for the Russians in a way that other areas, like say the Baltic Republics and now Baltic states, I don't think ever really was. And I think it is because of the Brzezinski quotation, you know, who controls Ukraine controls Eurasia, that Russia can't be a great power in effect without Ukraine. It is for the Russians, I think, what's at stake here. Because unless Russia is able to diversify its economy, unless it's going to have access to world markets through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, its economic future doesn't look very great. And there's a sort of uh dystopian novel by Sarakin in which he sort of presents Russia of the future as basically a vassal state of China, and all it is is a sort of pipeline running gas to China and consumer goods by a reverse pipeline to the West. And it's run by these Apritchniki. The novel's called The Day of the Aprchniki. And the Apritniki are like the oligarchs, and they they just administer this and kill anyone who gets in the way. And you know, that that's in a sense what Russia's future might look like if it doesn't diversify its economy and if it doesn't increase trade and all the other things that control of the Black Sea would give you. But is that really what's behind this invasion? I mean, regardless of all of these pseudo-justifications for it, I think even NATO expansion is a pseudo-justification for it. But you know, certainly all the Russian world stuff and and the rest of it are pseudo-justifications for what really is just an imperial war and a land grab. They want the land corridor to Crimea. And I'm sure that that's what they will stick out for. But it's an ugly war, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Yeah, one thing that I would say of as I speak to uh a lot of Russian, both economists and foreign policy types, uh, very, very frequently. They view the NATO issue not as a subterfuge but as a fundamental thing, that this is really a battle for Russia's Western-facing side, and that it really is Brzezinski's vision for the US to go in, and that better, more prudently, why don't the two sides find some space so that we can live without direct conflict? I have to say I find that pragmatically right that pushing so hard was a risk of explosion. Actually, I guess uh Putin said to George Bush in 2008 in Bucharest at the NATO meeting: if you actually expand NATO, we take back Crimea. Yeah. It was at least reported in the press. No nonsense. We're not gonna lose that. From a pragmatic point of view, I wanted to come back to the first Crimean War uh just for a moment. I loved the description that you gave, uh really beautiful description of the subtle differences between Palmerston and Napoleon III. Palmerston, let's go on, you know, after this horrible siege, which was not an easy battle. And by the way, I was surprised also to learn from you the British did not do very well militarily in that episode. They were much better at the Navy than they were on land, and the French were much better on land. They had the logistics, actually, the Napoleonic logistics. So that was fascinating to see. Exactly. Fascinating. But at the end, Britain absolutely wants to go on, and Napoleon III ends up saying, nah, not so bad. Let's stop here, and actually becomes best friends with Russia afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Fascinating. Well, indeed, indeed, because I don't think uh there was much appetite for it in British public opinion, because the war, from their perspective, had been a disaster. I mean, with all the bad supplies, lack of warm clothing, they thought it was all going to be over in a few days, and in fact, it went uh through two winters, and they were knitting and doing all sorts of things on a voluntary basis to make up for the incompetence of the government, which was highlighted for the first time by a national press. So the British were only too pleased to have the war finish when it did. I mean, Palmerston, you know, probably was on the extreme end of the belligerent party to dismantle Russia so that it couldn't threaten the British Empire in the Near East. Um, but yeah, the French were more pragmatic about it, and uh the uh rise of Germany meant that the isolation of Russia, which I think had been intended for a longer period than it turned out to be, came to an end quite abruptly for the Russians and the French when uh the German Empire was established in 1871. And of course, that uh terrified the French. They'd been defeated by the Prussians, and they they needed an ally in the east to uh make sure Germany didn't get too big. And so that was the beginning of the Russian-Franco alliance, which was then later joined by the British, and in a way, you know, that Triple Entente, as it became, which was the alliance that fought the First World War, was in a sense still fighting over unresolved issues from the Crimean War, especially the the status of the Slavs in the Balkans, and that is after all where the First World War begins in the Balkans. So, you know, these things uh never quite get resolved, and they're they're still there, aren't they? They're still there, you know, even after 1991. If the question of Russia is still a problem, what do you do with Russia? I agree with you that 1991 was a real opportunity to redraw the security arrangements for Gorbachev's vision of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Euros. But for a number of reasons, uh Russia was left outside of that.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

I can tell you, it was so strange for me. I was advisor to Poland in 1989, economic advisor, and I recommended various things, and everything I recommended, Orlando, was accepted, usually within eight hours. And I thought, oh, I'm so good, you know, this is uh this is remarkable. I said, we need a stabilization fund. Yes, sir, we need this, we need. And then two years later, Yeltsin, through uh Yeegor Gaider, asked me to help, given what had happened in Poland, and I said the same things, basically multiplied roughly by five times, because that was the scale factor of Russia. Everything I said was rejected. So, but I said, we just did this in Poland. No, no, we're not doing this. And it took me years to really appreciate Russia was the other. Poland was ours. Yeah. So of course we helped, but Russia, are you kidding? We're not gonna go that far. Yeah, and so there was something quite deep right from the start, actually.

SPEAKER_01 37:57

Yeah, and do you think it was, I mean, my sense is it that part of that was what we've already touched on, that Russia was seen as I mean, Russia was seen as the equivalent of the Soviet Union, right? I mean, I mean Exactly. You know, Russia people often confuse Russia and the Soviet Union. I mean, you know, there were all sorts of horror stories of Western leaders going to Ukraine and asking them what part of Russia they were in. You know, so so there was a great deal of ignorance about the history and the geography of Russia, and there was also this sense that the Russians, or this sort of prejudice that the Russians were somehow the perpetrators of everything that had happened under the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before. And no one stopped to think about the Russians as victims of the Soviet system themselves. Oh, that's correct. And whereas the Poles and the Ukrainians and everybody else, especially the Baltic states and Georgia, could portray themselves as nations defined by their liberation from Russian control. So in Tbilisi in Georgia or in Estonia, you had museums of occupation to cover the period of Soviet rule. You know, Russia couldn't do that, and just as it couldn't really blame the Stalinist repressions on another, which was an occupying force, as the Ukrainians did with their justifiable outrage at the Cholodomor, the terror famine of the 1930s. So, I mean, really, I mean, what Russia needed in the 1990s, it seems to me, was a sort of marshall plan because you had an effectively an enemy state which was defeated, humiliated, traumatized by its defeat and humiliation, and by the economic chaos it went through in the 1990s. And yet it had nuclear weapons. So, how did it not occur to them that you needed to help the Russians overcome their history, democratize themselves by building civic institutions, political institutions, political party? I mean, where are all of these institutions for democracy?

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Orlando, this is exactly what I argued. And I was a student of Keynes, and for me, Keynes is economic consequences of the peace, 1919. And he said, do not humiliate the defeated. That in 1919 we got it wrong. In 1945, we did much better. Now we are here in 1991. Do it again. And the message could not get through. This is my experience, actually, that Washington viewed Russia as an enemy, a nuclear power enemy. We are not going to rebuild, we're not going to help, we are going to be the dominant power, and that's that. And it, I think, played into what you write about so beautifully: the resentment politics of Russia, which is so deep and so much part of Russian history. And for real reasons, often, and sometimes for imagined reasons, but extraordinary.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Yeah, absolutely. But none of that is justification for the invasion of Ukraine.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

Right. It's an explanation, though.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

It's a part explanation, yeah. And it's but you know, those resentments are, as you say, deeply rooted in Russia, and they are, to some extent, self-generated from that history of sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the West in terms of civilization, technology, and all the rest of it. And they're partly generated from this sense of resentment that they never got the acknowledgement or the thanks that they were owed by the West for saving them from Napoleon or saving them from Hitler. Exactly. But you know, all of that was then amplified by the propaganda and by these stories that have been used to structure their history. So that's what I was trying to get at in the story of Russia. That essentially it's the same story told over and over again. It's it's that the West is hostile to Russia and will try and destroy it, and they will use Trojan horses like Poland or Ukraine to attack it. And so that, you know, infamous essay by Putin of July 2021, which in a sense was the declaration of war, that's the story he tells. Like as soon as Ukraine has tried to break away from Russian control, it's fallen into the hands of hostile Western powers. And it makes sense to the Russians because that's the historiography they've been brought up. That's the history they've been taught in schools, that's the story they've seen on their cinema screens. I mean, it's essentially the story of Alexander Nevsky, isn't it? Uh Russia is threatened by these Teutonic knights, these medieval Teutonic knights who want to convert the Russians to Catholicism, i.e., destroy Russia because it's holy Orthodox Russia. And uh they need a strong leader in Alexander Nevsky to turn it round and defeat them. There you are. That's how the story goes. And it's just that now Putin fancies himself as the Alexander Nevsky, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

Well, Orlando, thank you for giving us a uniquely informed, beautifully written story of Russia. I really want to recommend to every listener read the book. In fact, read the two books, in fact, read all of Orlando's books, but the two that we're featuring in our discussion today, the Crimean War will give you a background and an insight and a mirror and a perspective that is absolutely remarkable. And it's a great story, and you tell it brilliantly. And the story of Russia is really a magnificent read because you go back a thousand years and Russia has many, many key historical moments and reinvents or reimagines its past for the future and constantly is grappling with the meaning of Russia. And you explain that better than any place by far that I've ever seen. So I love the two books. I want to thank you very much for joining the book club with Jeffrey Sachs for this discussion. And I hope that we can continue this fascinating discussion. I'm sure there are going to be lots of events ahead where we're going to need your historical perspective to help guide us in a safe and prudent way. So let me thank you for being together and for the wonderful discussion. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Thank you for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 44:25

Thank you. Next time I will be speaking with Glenn Denning, Professor of Practice at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss his latest book, Universal Food Security: How to End Hunger While Protecting the Planet. Professor Denning teaches courses on global food systems and sustainable development policies and practice, and has advised governments and international organizations on agricultural and food policy in more than 50 countries in all parts of the world. Together, we will discuss what we need to do to achieve a genuinely food-secure world. What are the key priorities to transform our global food systems? This will be an absolutely exciting discussion with Professor Denning on his wonderful new book. Thank you for joining in the conversation. Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.