1 Putin s Playbook A speech for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council March 12 th, 2014 Angela Stent Russian and Foreign Policy Expert Terry: Our speaker who maybe has become familiar to some of you in recent days as she has been doing a lot of media for reasons that I m sure you all understand. Angela Stent has been studying the Russians and I guess the soviets for some 30 years now, so it comes with a great deal of perspective which I think is often really important particularly for country like Russia where history plays such a big role. Angela Stent is director of the Center for Eurasian or East European Studies at Georgetown University where she is also the professor of government and Foreign Service. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and the London school of economics and she also earned a masters in Soviet studies from Harvard which covers a lot of bases and that s all before she started working. She s written several books and her latest book is out just now and it s really about the US Russian relationship and that where I d like to start because I think a lot of us are curious to see how the US is going to react now to this situation we have in the Ukraine. We know that John Kerry is being sent to Paris to speak with to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov I think on Friday. I think were in sort of a mess right now and I don t think we know how to get out and I m curious to see how you see this playing out right now. Stent: Well I m delighted to be here, good evening. How does this work out? I think there s no easy way out. I think right now the US is using a mixture of incentives but also sort of sticks and carrots to dissuade the Russians from holding this referendum and from continuing to occupy Crimea, but I think it s too late to do that. I think probably what Mr. Kerry will convey to Mr. Lavrov is the possible consequences the West will impose, the economic sanctions maybe more military activity, trying to deter the Russians. But the real answer is we don t have that many levers and that presumably by sending the troops into Crimea a couple of weeks ago and enforcing this referendum,
suddenly holding a referendum announcing to be held so soon, Mr. Putin must ve understood to some extent the nature of the potential consequences and he must ve thought for him to make sure that Crimea join Russia and that a whole Ukraine, an territory intact Ukraine would not, in the future, be able to join the west. So we are pretty constrained. Terry: Explain for us if you will, what is it about Ukraine and Russia? I understand the port, Sevastopol, and the Russian black sea fleet. But it s more complicated in that, what does Putin see in Ukraine that were not seeing? Stent: Well first of all Ukraine and Russia have a long history together so in 1654, what was then Ukraine, I mean it s very complicated when we talk about Ukraine maybe I should back up. The current Ukraine, the borders of the current Ukraine only date after the end of WWII and they have to do with the settlement that was made at the end of WWII and so the western part of Ukraine was, before it was part of the Austro- Hungarian Empire. In the interwar years it was part of Poland, part of eastern Poland, and the western part of Ukraine was always part of Russia. And in 2008, by the way, when president Putin was talking to President Bush is a very contentious NATO summit in Bucharest he said to him, George you don t understand Ukraine isn t a country and has never been one, the western part was always part of Eastern Europe but most of Ukraine was always part of Russia. The Russian state was born in Kiev a millennium ago. So there have always been very close ties between Russians and Ukrainians. Crimea was always part of Russia, if any of you have ever read Chekov, or some other Great Russian literature you ll know the Russian aristocracy, even later on maybe the middle class, used to vacation there, it was defiantly a piece of Russian land, always was. And then in1954 for reasons that we don t completely understand Nikita Kristof, decided that he would give Crimea to the soviet socialist republic of Ukraine as a present for Ukraine and Russia having been united 300 year before, never think that one day toe Soviet Union would collapse and there Crimea would be. So it s been very hard for Russians in general to accept that Ukraine is an independent country and is different from Russia, very hard in these 22 years and it s been even more difficult for them to accept that Crimea is not part of Russia and is a part of independent Ukraine. Ukraine has a special significance for Russians more than any of the post-soviet republics do. Terry: Now red game for us if you would, course none of us want to see this, could we get to a point where we have armed conflicted over Ukraine. Stent: I think that s absolutely impossible. I mean we never came to armed conflict with the Soviet Union we are both nuclear powers. Armed conflict with Russia, it s inconceivable, because of the nuclear weapons involved. And that is why our leverage is limited and we can certainly have extra military drills. NATO can show its face more in the region but were not going to come to armed conflict with Russia. And I think one has 2
to say that for Russia, Ukraine is more important than it is for the United States or any other European country because it s right next door and because it s been part of Russian history. Terry: So if he doesn t stop in Crimea and moves into eastern Ukraine, what happens then? Stent: well then you d have to have the most escalation you could, presumably at that point the rest of the Ukraine is admitted if not completely in the European Union completely but very close to it, and maybe has been admitted to NATO. Although at this point Ukraine says it has no interest in joining NATO and has said it wants to be neutral, that s probably the maximum you can do and then you can build fortresses and prevent Russia from moving any further west. But you know the Georgia war, on the smaller scale, where Russia marched in, provoked the Georgian president, he then fired the first shot. The Russians than moved in, they than declared these two entities, statelets if you like, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as being independent, we don t recognize them. But Georgia is an occupied country and you can t get them out of there. Terry: So Putin gets what Putin wants? Stent: In the post-soviet space, more or less yes. You know we have some other frozen conflicts; Moldavia, there s a region called Transnistria its been occupied by Russian troops since more or less the collapse of the soviet union after a brief civil war its again doesn t answer to what the capital Chisinau says it s really under Russian influence. Yeah, I think again there s again at least a tacit agreement we would ve like the west, US, and the Europeans to support the independence and sovereignty of all of the 12 countries, I m excluding the Baltic states now, but the 12 countries in the post-soviet space but there is a limit to what we can do. And I think one of the problems has been, and this is why Russia has been able to exercise this much influence, is none of these countries has been able to develop efficient, and effective and transparent mechanisms of government and they all have more or less corrupt systems controlled by a few people and Ukraine in many ways squandered 22 years by not establishing real, transparent and effective state institutions nor a consensus on national identity. Now it s not easy when you have Russia out there because Russia doesn t want these countries to establish effective, good governments. But that also makes them more vulnerable to Russian influence. Terry: So there is a reason that we call our program tonight Putin s Playbook because I think that probably uniquely amongst major countries, Russia is a very much a creation of its leader. Even the Chinese have a Politburo and some other collective leadership and of course we have these pesky things called elections where people can get kicked out and most other Europeans seem to do that too but Russia is really the creation of 3
one man. He s been around since 1999 when he started calling the shots, so it s very hard to imagine what that country would look like without this man. Angela Merkel apparently told Obama that he s lost touch with reality; our own Hilary Clinton equated him with Hitler. So who is this guy Putin? Stent: Who is Mr. Putin? Yes. The question was asked of him when he first came to power who is Mr. Putin? And the answer is, well there are 3 possibilities. Spook you know KGB agent, economic modernizer, and the third one was empty suit. When he first came to power nobody could really figure out who he was. And I talked to American and other officials who met him when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990 s and they said he was someone who was very quiet, he was very efficient, he did was he was supposed to. But he really didn t make much of an impression on people and he was sort of handpicked I think to succeed President Yeltsin because I think those that picked him thought he would be compliant and do what they wanted him to do. And this was a huge mistake. If you go back into his biography so he grows up in post-war Leningrad, his older brother had died during the war. In a poor household, he grew up in one of these communal apartments where you had lots of different families living in them. He was apparently not a good student; he got into trouble a lot. He had problems as a child. What apparently saved him was that he learned samba which is a mixture of judo, it s a sort of martial arts and that taught him discipline. Now the other thing we know about him was that at age 16 he went knocking on the KGB s door and said I would like to join, which most teenagers even in the Soviet Union didn t do, and they said go away and come back. So he studied law at Leningrad State University, he did join the KGB. Then probably the high point for him were the 5 years he spent in Germany working for the KGB between 1985-1990 working for the KGB working at the middle level, he was only a lieutenant colonel so that wasn t so high. Now the important thing to know about that is he spent precisely the 5 years in Germany when Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union there was also this flummox. There was all this discussion about we have to change the system, people were running around and speech was getting freer, he missed all that. What he did experience was when the Berlin wall came down angry crowds of East Germans in Dresden, the city where he was, coming and ransacking the headquarters of the local Stasi, East German secret policy. And he stood there defending the building from the mob and apparently trying to shred all the documents so that the people couldn t get them. So he comes back to Leningrad before the Soviet Union collapsed, and he s out of work because the KGB is sort of crumbling. He then works at the university there briefly; he then works for the mayor of now renamed St. Petersburg, a man called Anatoly Sobchak and it s interesting because if you talk to Henry Kissinger for instance, Kissinger will tell you he went to St. Petersburg early on in the 1990 s and was picked up in the airport and his chauffeur was Vladimir Putin. Then apparently Putin than turned around to Dr. Kissinger, and said oh you know we both worked in intelligence. Well Henry Kissinger was in army intelligence during World War II. So anyway and then he sort of 4
transitioned from the KGB to be in charge of foreign economic contacts in St. Petersburg, he was deputy mayor, that s where he got his start in capitalism. That s where he met all these people many of whom are still with him today in the Kremlin or outside the Kremlin and they were all in business together or working in the foreign economic contacts and then the mayor whom he was loyal to, and he was a more democratic mayor, he was defeated in an election in 1996 and that was a great shock for Vladimir Putin because he saw an election he thought some of the campaigning tricks were dirty and he realized from this, it s not very good if you don t know who s going to win an election you know before you go into it. Lesson learned. Don t have an election you cannot predict. After that he was sent to Moscow, he had a meteoric rise. He did have many positions; the last one was the head of the domestic intelligence services and he was handpicked, as I say, to take over for Boris Yeltsin. Now when you talk to him nowadays or listen to him, and I ve been part of a group that for the last 10 years, it s a group of foreign Russian experts, we go to Russia every year and we have dinner with President or Prime Minister Putin when he was there. So we have heard from him a lot of different stories but the image he wants to portray to you is that when he came into office Russia was on the brink of the abyss. The economy defaulted in 1998, the country was very weak. He claims that the country was very weak, he claims that Russia was about to fall apart and he saved it. And it is true that from 2000-2008, Russia had very high growth rates, 7% per year. Putin was very lucky, oil prices rose and rose until they were $140 a barrel before the financial crash in 2008. So he was lucky but he also had lots of people around him who implemented very sound macroeconomic policy, they had a big reserve fund. So he sees himself as the restorer of Russia, as the person who came and put Russia back on the world stage that brought stability to it. He feels that the west has never appreciated this, he feels very ill done by the west. One more thing, I know you have many more questions. In 2009, when President Obama when to Moscow on his first trip he met, then the president was President Dmitry Medvedev, but he had a session with Prime Minister Putin. And they sat down to breakfast and they asked a polite question he said you know how did we get into this situation and he got a 90-minute lecture from Vladimir Putin about all the bad things the United States had done to Russia how we had broken all our promises so it s not surprising that the Obama-Putin relationship did not get off to a good start. Terry: So I only really know one good story about Putin but it illustrates this sense of hurt and humiliation in the face of the United States and the loss of their super state. So I used to work at Time magazine and in 2007 Time made Putin Man of the Year, Person of the Year. The deal there is that they send out the editor of the magazine and the editor of Time Inc. who supervises all the magazines Sports Illustrated, Fortunes and so forth, it s a big job, and the correspondent. And they went to Moscow to meet Putin and the Kremlin set it up in his dacha outside of Moscow. They were picked up in a car, driven to the Dacha, there was an interview in the afternoon and then they were having 5
dinner in the evening. And the Kremlin had prepared a white card with embossed gold lettering with the menu for the dinner with whatever it was snow crab, reindeer Carpaccio, and beef stroganoff. So they had this in hand, they sit down for the interview, the interview doesn t go very well and it wasn t from the time folk because they had just elevated him to person of the year, they wanted to make us look good. But Putin was very truculent and kept hitting on this fact that America doesn t take Russia very seriously anymore, which by the way was probably true at the time but he felt this very strongly. And so he went into dinner and they served the first course which was the snow crab and Putin sits there for a while, toys with the salad, doesn t drink any wine. Then he stands up, he says we re done here and walks out. He doesn t say goodbye, he doesn t say thank you, he doesn t tell them what to do and he leaves the Time guys sitting around the table. So they are wondering what the protocol here is when you are left sitting without the head of state. But no wait staff appeared and then the penny dropped, there was no second course or third course, in fact the kitchen had probably never prepared another course. Putin, KGB man, was sending a message; they did exactly what he thought they d do. They got up, left, went back to Moscow and their first call was to the US Embassy, you ll never guess what happened to us, and of course that message was sent back to the state department and the message was sent. You had a story about Angela Merkel, there s something quite cold and almost nasty about this man. Stent: Well I mean he was a KGB agent. The story about Angela Merkel was an interesting story, this is a woman who grew up in East Germany and speaks Russian and understands Russia quite well. And I think one of the first times, and this again she visited him in Sochi but it was one of the country places and I guess from her file they realized that as a child she had a fairly traumatic experience with a dog, so she was a little bit afraid of dogs. And so they arranged it so that she went into this very nice living room and somehow she was alone, and Putin has a big black Labrador who we did meet once, nice dog if you aren t afraid of dogs, and the dog rushed into the room and of course they happened to take a picture of her face when she saw the dog come there and that s really not how leaders expect to be treated. And the other thing about his is, he keeps a person waiting for hours and hours, not just visiting scholars, that s nothing, but you know top titans of industry, heads of all the major energy companies in the world. I mean that s just how he lives and I guess that s how the way he operates with him. Terry: I want to ask you about Snowden. What was the reason for keeping Snowden? He could of put him on a plane to Bolivia or where ever else was offering him. He knew this would aggravate the United States; it caused Obama to cancel the summit, what s the calculation there? 6
Stent: That s an excellent question, and I m assuming now that we don t believe something we ve heard from some members of congress that this was all prearranged; that Snowden was working for the Russians before he even left. I mean some of the people in congress have said that but nobody has provided any proof of that. I think from Putin s point of view it was a fairly rational calculation. This man lands in Russia. He has all this evidence that the United States is spying on its citizens, this is at the beginning now, I think from Putin s point of view he must ve looked at that and thought this is a great propaganda opportunities. Here is the United States lecturing Russia about we violate human rights, we don t respect people, we listen into peoples phones, we drug people or whatever and look what the United States is doing. And so there Putin stands up and suddenly he becomes the champion of human rights against the big bad United States that s violating people s human s rights. So I guess from his point of view that was a rational calculation. But he must ve understood on some level that there would be reaction which was the cancellation of the summit. But if you again look at it from his point of view as more and more of these revelations come out, one of the real casualties has been the US relations with some of its key allies, particularly Germany. The French didn t complain about it, the British obviously didn t complain about it, but the Germans did. So in a funny way, he has by harboring Snowden, he has seen the real tensions between the US and Germany which may or may not be repaired. I mean now obviously we are working together on what s going on with Ukraine, so that was his calculation and I do think by then he probably didn t care if there was a bilateral summit with Obama. What happened was when Putin came back to the Kremlin, the Obama administration and after president Obama s reelection; they really had put out feelers to Russia they wanted to think about a new agenda, however difficult the relationship between the two presidents and they were constantly rebuffed. They would send people to Moscow and they would get nothing. They d come back with no suggestions from the Russians. So I think that by that point it was clear to the white house also that the Kremlin wasn t very interested in gauging with them. Terry: So my final question, and I m sure there are questions from the floor, so I m curious, what is Putin s plan? So if you compare Russia to China, China does $550-600 billion dollars worth of business with us every year, that s a lot of money. There are all these trade links, we have some political disagreements with china but we have a bigger issue, which is we both need to get keep getting rich together, so that s fine. But Russia does $40 billion dollars of trade this year, less than 10%, all they export are natural resources and weaponry systems we don t need. Where is he taking this country? This is country that produced Tolstoy, Pushkin, Rachmaninoff, these geniuses of the arts. Today they are little better that a third would economy exporting their oil and timber, what s the plan? Stent: Well I mean I think where he s taking the country; some of it looks strikingly familiar to the Brezhnev where you have a country that s militarily strong I mean 7
obviously Russia military the same as the soviet union was, but where you focus on the muscular geopolitics and you re seeing this now in Crimea, but you have domestic economic stagnation. Putin has does nothing really to modernize the economy. Medvedev, when he was president, wanted to, said he wanted to but never did. There are too many vested interested that are living very well off all the rents from raw material. But you mentioned China, I ve been to China and spoke to Chinese specialists on Russia and they ll all say it is great Russia supports us on all the major foreign policy issues, Taiwan, Tibet and all over the world. But you start to talk to the Chinese about the Russian economy and about the way Russia is organized as a political system and they are extremely critical and sometimes derisory. So that s the question, where is he taking this country? Is it going to continue to be raw materials exporter and therefore vulnerable to flocculation in price and now the revolution in unconventional energy which in the end means that it ll be harder for Russia to survive like that. It has demographic problems, it has a physical infrastructure that is decaying and needs to be revived. And so I think that s a huge question that people have because in the long run the fundamentals are bad. But one thing we do know about Russia throughout its millennium of history is Russians always survive. We look at this, and having served twice in the government, you do all this planning you think about it, and you say well it can t go on like this, everything looks bad but they always come through it or do you see what you see now which is that more and more educated young ambitious people are leaving Russia. This isn t the soviet union anyone can leave, and they re living elsewhere be it in silicon valley, be it in Europe, be it in Los Angeles wherever and they re voting with their feet. Terry: We have a microphone here if you put your hand up we ll try to get to as many of you as we can. Q: Hi thank you for appearing here. I understand if I m correct that the population of Russia is decreasing, if this is true what are the long term ramifications of this? Stent: Yeah thank you for the question. The Russian population indeed declining and has been so since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two statistics, average male life expectancy hovers around 60, which for a country of Russia s level of economic development, is quite shocking. But the more shocking statistic is the male mortality rate for young men between 18-30 and those numbers resemble those of Sub-Saharan Africa. Now some of that is unhealthy lifestyle, we can all talk about vodka. People who don t take care of themselves physically, but there may be other reasons, no one can quite fathom out why. The birthrate has ticked up a little bit in the last couple of years and they have these pro-natalist policies because you have a whole cohort of people where population just isn t reproducing itself. There is some immigration into Russia particularly from central Asia and some of the surrounding countries and so that helps with the labor force. So one of the implications is a declining labor force if you go and 8
look at any construction site in Moscow or anywhere else, the people building the buildings are all from central Asia or maybe from the South Caucuses. And the other implications are the armed forces, the armed forces are getting smaller, they are trying to create a professional army but its father difficult. But another statistics and that related to the demography, it that about 40% of the young men that show up for the draft are considered not physically fit enough to serve in the armed forces. So yeah it s a real problem and immigration can maybe party solve it but not completely. Q: Considering the long history of the Turks and the Russians, and Russia s involvement in Syria, I ve heard nothing from the Turkish side on this issues just immediately to their north in the Ukraine and Crimea, would you please comment on the current state of Turkish-Russian relations. Stent: sure well Turkish Russian relationship has been complicated for centuries, after the collapse of the Soviet Union I think the Russians were very worried that Turkey would come in and appeal to the Islamic people of Russians and some of the central Asian states would be a rival to Russia, that didn t really happen. And the Turkish-Russia relationship is pretty good; there is a lot of trade between Turkey and Russia. I think Turkey is actually a number one destination for Russian tourists. In this current crisis first of all the Turks, from my understanding of Montreux Convention, they actually control a lot of the access and movement of the black sea, so they are a key player here. So one the only hand I guess they could ve said to stop the Russians from that they re doing. Well they can t do that and they won t do that. It s interesting that they ve offered, one of the ethnic groups in Crimea are the Crimean Tartars. They re about 12% of the population are a Muslim group. They re a Muslim group, this is their ancestral homeland, and they were deported by Stalin in 1944, accused of collaborating with the Nazis and they ve only slowly been able to come back, they really don t want to be a part of Russia. So I ve heard that the Turks have basically said to some of the Crimean Tartars, if you really have a problem, you can come and live in Turkey. But I think that Turkey have enough other problems. The Syrian refugees, Turkey s has the vaunted goal of no problems with any of its neighbors has not really turned out so well, so I think that Turkey is not playing a stronger role as one would ve maybe wanted, but they must be concerned about the repercussions of Crimea joining Russia. Q: Two part question, first, is it too late or could Ukraine save itself from at this point as some sort of Finlandization of its foreign policy. And secondly there are plenty of Russians in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, are they going to be in Putin s playbook as Terry mentions? Stent: These are two excellent questions, so on Finland, interestingly enough both Brzezinski and Kissinger have had op-ed pieces saying precisely this is a solution for Ukraine. It agrees that it s never going to seek NATO membership, but it also agrees that 9
it s not going to seek EU membership, which of course the EU has never offered Ukraine by the way, but that it will have closer ties with the Ukraine, it will remain strictly neutral and it will have ties with both Russia and Europe. But the problem is, that doesn t really deal with the issue of Crimea. I mean that would have to assume that Crimea isn t part of that Finlandized area in Ukraine although as a recovering Sovietologist and scholar of the Cold War, the concept of Finlandization in 2014 is really bad but I suppose realistically going forward a solution for Russia being able to take over anymore of Ukraine would be for Ukraine to say we don t want NATO membership, which they don t at the moment and that they want ties with the European Union but they ll be slow moving so de facto that might be what happens but I don t think that ll get Russian troops out of the Crimea. So in the northern Kazakhstan it s a majority Russian population and I ve read a little bit about some of the Russians in Kazakhstan saying ah maybe this isn t a solution for us. Unlike Ukraine quite a lot of Russians from Kazakhstan have actually left and moved back to Russia. I did actually notice that president Obama had a phone call with president Nazarbayev which the white house put the communicate two days ago saying they discussed the situation and agreed they all side shave to sit down and negotiate this so I m sure Mr. Nazarbayev himself must be watching this very carefully and wondering what s going to happen. Q: It appears that Russia is controlled by the oligarchs so you have a select few people controlling the country of which Putin is one. Can the country ever change as long as that happens, number one. And number two, because Russia has such tremendous oil and gas reserves, as long as they have such tremendous oil and gas reserves that dominate all of Western Europe, is there anything that can be done to reduce his power? Stent: Well again two very great questions. I mean, unfortunately those of us that study Russia, and study Russian history and study the Soviet Union tend to see these patterns of continuity and you go back and look at the czars, you go back and look at the Soviet system in Russia now and this pattern repeats itself, as you know small groups of people controlling most of the assets of the country being really very close to the leader and sometimes in Russian history the leader has actually been very weak but the different group of oligarch, clan or whatever you want to call them, want to maintain the myth that this is a strong person because this is what keeps the system going. Can you ever break out of it? I don t know I mean in the 1990s, everything was in flux but of courses they recreated an oligarchic system. I mean there is some speculation if there were really tough economic sanctions now and that some of these oligarchic groups felt that their assets were being challenged that they wouldn t have them anymore, that they wouldn t be able to travel to Europe of the United States to visit their bank accounts, then they might put more pressure of say we really need a leader that will do this. But we aren t there yet because most of the people who are in the close circles who support Putin because they own what they own, their assets, at the pleasure of the leader. Now 10
Russia does have lots of oil and gas. At one of these meetings I go to every year with Putin, I ask him is Russia an energy super power, and he says No, no energy super power is the wrong word, that is Cold War term. But then he paused and said But we do have more energy reserves than anyone else in the world, you know, and people know that. Europe gets about, it depends on the country, but in general about 40% of its gas from Russia, and gas is the issue not oil because oil is fungible you can get that from anywhere, but if you re on the other side of a pipeline and you ve got one person supplying the gas, you re much more dependent on them. And the question about Germany is that they are saying they don t want nuclear energy anymore. Will they in fact become more dependent on Russian gas? But what you re hearing now is because of the unconventional revolution in the United States and the shale gas revolution, we re becoming self-sufficient because there s more liquid natural gas that can be exported right now. In the Congress, they re debating loosening the restrictions to allow that, and that s a political football too. There are some people that are saying Well we can export all this L&G to the Ukrainians. Well we re not there yet and it will take a few years. But in the longer run the implications of the unconventional, particularly gas revolution, are that there should be lessening demand, particularly in Europe, for Russian gas. China is another question, the Chinese get a lot of energy from Russia but that s not what we re concerned about but that situation could change. So that situation could change. The Ukrainians and Poles for instance do have shale reserves and you do have US companies working on that but again it takes time to develop all that. So in the longer run I think the energy picture could be better in terms of lessening the dependence of many European countries on Russian gas. Q: I wonder if you could talk about your opinions about the prospects for democratization in Russia and what the west can and should do to encourage that. Stent: I mean that is a great question, the US and the European have put quite a lot of money and effort since the soviet union collapsed trying to promote democracy, trying to encourage NGO s to self-organize an we ve seen that in Russia the reaction has increasingly been to clamp down on that. Certainly in the last few years and particularity since the demonstrations in 2011 against President Putin which I think really worried him and I think he blamed the US for that, he blamed Hilary Clinton personally and there was more of a clamp down. So it s very hard to know what one can do obviously you have to try and promote exchanges between young people between older people, you know civil society contacts which is getting harder to do that it was before. I mean I have to believe that eventually Russia will evolve into a more democratic direction and the current system you have there, it s not going to last forever and this will change and eventually you ll get generations coming into power who want something different but it s going to be a very, very long process. 11