Old Russia's Shadow Looms in 'Kremlin Rising'

DATE June 8, 2005 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Peter Baker and Susan Glasser discuss their book
called "Kremlin Rising"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

After spending four years as The Washington Post's Moscow bureau chiefs from
2001 to 2004, my guests Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have a very interesting
fix on Valdimir Putin and Russian politics and culture. Baker and Glasser,
who are married to each other, have written a new book called "Kremlin Rising:
Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution." Baker is now a White
House correspondent for The Post; Glasser covers terrorism for The Post.

Peter Baker, Susan Glasser, welcome to FRESH AIR. How would you describe
Putin's style of leadership now? I mean, it's not democracy. On the other
hand, it's not communism.

Ms. SUSAN GLASSER (The Washington Post; Co-author, "Kremlin Rising"): Well, I
think, you know, in a way, we're looking at something that people have
characterized as neo-Soviet rather than Soviet. It's very much a country in
between run by Valdimir Putin. And the system that he has constructed is very
much an updated, retooled-for-the-Internet era, sort of authoritarian system
run by the Kremlin.

GROSS: How's authoritarianism retooled for the Internet era?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, I mean, I think what that means is that, you know, you
could call it a kindler, gentler or, at the very least, more sophisticated way
of controlling events. In other words, you don't need to arrest everyone who
tells a joke about the leader in the Kremlin. You don't shut down the
Internet. You don't close the borders. People are free to travel, to live,
to work. But the pressure points, the--any potential space for political
opposition for dissent is what the Kremlin has been paying the most attention
to over the last four years, as it's reconstructed a new system of centralized
state control.

GROSS: Peter Baker, what comes under that category of dissent, the kind of
dissent that Putin's administration has been cracking down on?

Mr. PETER BAKER (The Washington Post; Co-author, "Kremlin Rising"): Well,
they don't want to see dissent on television, in particular. That's the most
important thing. Vladimir Putin came into office because of manipulation of
television, what they call Project Putin. That's what the Yeltsin people
termed their campaign to install a little-known, midlevel KGB officer. And
because he came in through television, he realized that television was the
main instrument of power in this new Russia. So the very first thing he did,
in effect, was take over television. He used to go home at night, bring home
videotapes of that evening's news, watch it and then come back to the Kremlin
the next day and give them his judgments. And soon enough, within a year or
so of his taking office, all state television--all national television was now
under state control.

GROSS: And how has he changed the election process to produce the results
he's wanted?

Mr. BAKER: Well, that's also been very important. Obviously, television
drives elections because you only see a candidate they want you to see. But
they've also created what Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst in Moscow, calls
imitation democracy. They have, you know, campaigns and ballot boxes. People
dutifully go to the polls and cast their ballots. But, in fact, if they have
in a race a candidate who's a threat to them in any way, they manage to find a
way to knock him off the ballot by some sort of phony court challenge, or they
use what they administrative resources of the state to prevent him from giving
speeches or to make his life difficult, or they find tax charges. That's one
of the favorites they use these days to go after people who seem to be a
threat against them.

GROSS: Well, Putin actually canceled gubernatorial elections. When did he do
it, and what was his excuse for doing it?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, in a way, we see this as one of the signal events, really,
of the Putin era and, really, sort of the end of the counterrevolution, the
definitive end of the democratic experiment started by Boris Yeltsin because
what President Putin did was really extraordinary. He took something that
they had been planning in the Kremlin for months and even talking about for
years, which was canceling gubernatorial elections, and they used the pretext
of the terrible massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan in Southern Russia, right
near Chechnya--and President Putin used the excuse of that and said, `Well,
therefore, to combat terrorism, it's necessary for me to cancel elections in
all 89 regions of Russia.'

Now what canceling gubernatorial elections in far Siberian would have to do
with cracking down on the threat from separatists, fighters and terrorists in
Chechnya is very unclear, even to the Russian people. But it was a sign, I
think, of how Project Putin had succeeded over the last four and a half years;
that even opposition from governors was not made publicly because by that
point it had already become, in effect, too dangerous. And they were more
interested in keeping their jobs than in speaking out publicly against such a
move.

GROSS: So what did it accomplish for Putin to cancel the gubernatorial
elections?

Mr. BAKER: Well, it helped create what he called a vertical of power. In
Putin's mind, everything flows from the top. It's a monopoly of power which
everybody answers ultimately to him and the Kremlin. So he appoints these
governors, subject to the confirmation of the regional legislatures, but
that's really a formality. And now they have to answer to him in a much more
direct way. They already did in an indirect way because he had managed to
sort of emasculate some of their powers over the preceding several years. But
then he just basically got rid of the fiction that they were an independent
source of political power in Russia and made them subservient to him. He's
also, of course, gone after the business community in the same way. He's gone
after parliament, in effect, the same way. Any source of independent power in
Russia had to be tamed or eliminated.

GROSS: What do you think motivates Putin? Is it just the sheer desire for
power? Is it ideology?

Mr. BAKER: Well, you have to understand where Putin comes from. He grew up,
of course, in what was then Leningrad in a poor family, the grandson of
Stalin's cook. You know, he was a childhood hooligan, frankly, in his own
words, a tough who got into fights in the streets all the time, until he sort
of matured a little bit in his teen-age years and realized that watching spy
movies and reading spy books--that that was the future for him. He really
began to idolize the KGB. At age 15, he showed up at the local KGB recruiting
office in Leningrad and said, you know, `I'd like to join up.' And the rather
indulgent officer said, `Yes, son, but, you know, you don't come to us. If we
want you, we'll come for you.' And they did eventually.

So his outlook is very much shaped by his experience as a KGB officer for 16
years. He served in the secret service. He never saw, in any of the
interviews he's given, anything wrong done by the KGB: the persecution of
dissidents, the great terror. None of these things ever has been indicated in
his public discourse as a problem with the institution he helped serve. He,
in fact, sees it as an institution in service of the state. And so his view
is shaped by that. And what he wants to do is rebuild that state, rebuild the
great Russia that used to be, again, not the Soviet Union necessarily, but
just the idea of, you know, a power in the world and a power at home.

GROSS: You know, I find it interesting that Putin was motivated to join the
KGB because he loved spy books. And I'm thinking, in the United States, all
those spy books of the Cold War era--you know, the KGB, they were the
villains, they were demonic, you know. Who'd want to join the KGB based on
American spy fiction? What spy books was he reading?

Mr. BAKER: Well, it's not--they're not the villains, obviously, in the era
that he grew up in, and they're not even the villains today to many Russians.
He was particularly...

GROSS: I mean, was there a lot of spy fiction...

Mr. BAKER: Of course.

GROSS: ...in Russia when he was growing up?

Mr. BAKER: Yes. And what's really interesting is you'll see a lot of it now
coming back on Russian television. It wasn't there for about 10 years. In
the last few years, now you're seeing a revival of Soviet-era spy novels, spy
books, spy fiction and that sort of thing. The one that particularly
influenced Putin was called "The Sword and The Shield." It was about a
heroic Soviet agent who went under cover in Nazi Germany. And he really
idolized the hero of that, a guy named Yogan Vice(ph). That was the
character. And, in fact, this character in the series of "The Sword and The
Shield" once said, `My ambition is to have as few people as possible in order
to--to order me around and have the right to command as many as possible.'
Ironically, then when Putin became president, he told Russian interviewers
something that almost sounded exactly the same thing. Somebody asked him--a
Russian journalist asked him, `What's the difference now that you're in the
Kremlin?' He says, `In the Kremlin, I have a different position. Nobody
controls me here. I control everybody myself.' So this was a very formative
period for Putin.

GROSS: My guests are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post.
They were the paper's Moscow bureau chiefs from 2001 to 2004. Their new book
is called "Kremlin Rising." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Peter Baker and Susan
Glasser. They covered Russia for The Washington Post from 2001 to 2004. Now
they've written a book called "Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and
the End of Revolution." Susan Glasser now covers terrorism for The Washington
Post, and Peter Baker is a White House correspondent for The Post.

Did you have any personal meetings with Putin?

Mr. BAKER: We did. Each of us interviewed him on a couple of occasions,
along with other American correspondents, both in the Kremlin and in his
private dacha, or his residence, outside of Moscow.

Ms. GLASSER: Yeah. He's a--very poised, very articulate and very, very
skilled at reading and memorizing, it appears, his briefing book. The thing
that is most striking when you meet Putin in person is his ability to answer
in long, long sentences and paragraphs that go on forever. He's almost
Castro-like in his ability to speak for hours and hours. The first group
interview that we had--American correspondents had with Vladimir Putin was in
2001, not long after his famous summit with President Bush when President Bush
declared that he had taken the measure of Putin's soul and found it to be
worth looking into. And right after that meeting, Putin invited us to the
Kremlin library for a long session. We were kept waiting for several hours,
and then once the interview began, it just never stopped. It went on and on
and on past midnight, actually, on a weeknight. And this is, as we were soon
to learn, sort of a trademark Vladimir Putin performance.

Mr. BAKER: I had another one that lasted almost four hours.

GROSS: Wow.

Mr. BAKER: Four hours of talking. Can you imagine President Bush or any
American president talking to interviewers for four hours?

GROSS: Now that might sound like a really great thing, but on the other hand,
that could be--just as an interviewer, I know that could actually be the sign
of something really bad, which is that sometimes guests will, like, talk and
talk and talk and talk, and you can hardly get a word or a question in. And
what they're saying isn't necessarily interesting or revealing. It's just a
barrage of words. So...

Mr. BAKER: That's right.

Ms. GLASSER: No, it was a very grueling enterprise, absolutely, but, you
know, there were a few revealing things that we saw consistently with Putin
when he did meet with the press. And one of the most interesting things was
that this is a very cool character, by most accounts. You know, he's a very
disciplined guy. He's into, you know, the Eastern martial arts. He's a very
tough, calm, controlled guy. The one thing that consistently made him almost
furiously, madly angry were questions about the conduct of the war in
Chechnya. And then you would see a completely different character take over.
His face would literally change, and he would get very angry. He would
reprove me. Twice I asked him about Chechnya in group interviews, and he got
very angry. And he said, you know, `We've told you again and again.'

Once in a press conference in Western Europe, he actually threatened a forced
circumcision of a French reporter who dared to ask him about human rights
abuses in Chechnya. And the translator was so shocked that the translator did
not actually translate that part of Putin's answer. And the European
diplomats who were sharing the stage with him therefore didn't even know until
afterwards that Putin had made such a very crude remark, and it took like a
whole day for it to become clear. So he's a guy with a real temper, and that
did come out in these sessions.

GROSS: The first time President Bush met President Putin, President Bush said
that he was able to get a sense of Putin's soul. And one of his connections
to Putin, one of the things that he really connected to about Putin, was that
Putin was wearing a cross. Now, apparently, President Bush made a false
assumption in his interpretation of this, and you tell the story in your book.
Would you tell us the story of Putin's cross?

Mr. BAKER: Well, President Bush attached great meaning to this story. When
they met in Slovenia for the first time, Bush had clearly been briefed a
little bit about some of Putin's history. And he brought up this story that
Putin had told interviewers about how his mother had secretly baptized him
during Soviet times and how she'd given him this cross that he had kept with
him. And Bush was very impressed by this and asked Putin about it. And Putin
says, `Yes, yes, this is true. This is true.' And then Putin tried to turn
the conversation then on to Soviet debt, but Bush wanted to keep on this
conversation track for a little bit, and it seemed to obviously impress him.

Now mind you, President Putin, for as important as this cross was supposedly
to him, didn't actually have the cross with him. But he understood that this
was important to President Bush, and so he elaborated on this in their
meeting. And at their next meeting in Genoa, in Italy, Putin made sure to
bring the cross this time, and he showed it to President Bush. `See, here's
the cross that we had talked about.' President Putin even told him a story
about how once when his own dacha burned to the ground, the one thing that he
wanted to make sure was saved was his cross.

Now it's debatable actually how religious President Putin really is. There
are some people, including some of our colleagues, fellow journalists, who
believe he is quite religious. But he made very little public show of that in
any real way. And in an interview once with The Wall Street Journal, he was
asked if he was religious, and he sort of hemmed and hawed and basically
didn't answer the question. So, you know--but he understood, as a former KGB
officer, what's important to the other person across the table from him, and
he understood that was important to President Bush.

GROSS: The presidencies of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin have been
defined in a lot of ways by terrorism. Before we talk about how Putin's
administration has been defined by terrorism, would you just, like, briefly
remind us of the two biggest terrorist incidents in Russia during the Putin
administration, the one at the theater and the one at the school?

Ms. GLASSER: Yeah, well, that's right. I mean, in many ways, Putin's
presidency has been defined from the very beginning by the war over the
separatists southern republic of Chechnya, which is a majority Muslim
republic, historically part of the Russian empire since the late 18th century.
And basically there's been, you know, sort of on and off fighting ever since.
And, you know, what's happened is that you've seen the marriage basically of
that separatist movement with the sort of broader global Islamic extremists.
And that has resulted in two particularly horrific mass terrorist events in
Putin's presidency.

In 2002, in October, a group of heavily armed Chechen rebels took a Moscow
theater hostage in the middle of the showing of a popular musical called
"Nord-Ost." Nine hundred people were taken hostage. And I'm sure your
listeners all remember the terrible ending to that siege, in which 129 people
were killed when the Russian special forces stormed the theater, and they used
a mystery knockout gas in order to accomplish that seizure. And,
unfortunately, the rescue effort was botched. The doctors didn't even know
what kind of gas had been used, and 129 of the hostages died, almost all of
them, according to the doctors, from the botched efforts of the gas.

And then fast forward a couple years later, last September in Beslan, Russia,
on the border nearby with Chechnya, the first day of school, all the children
in their best outfits, and they're lined up for the beginning of school
assembly. They're just finishing that. And, again, a band of Chechen rebels
and fighters from neighboring republics pulls up in military trucks. They
storm into the school, they take it hostage, and there's a terrible denouement
two days later. And, you know, literally hundreds and hundreds of children,
their teachers and parents were killed in this small town in Southern Russia.

GROSS: Now Putin told his share of lies around these terrorist incidents.
What were some of the lies that he told?

Mr. BAKER: Well, basically the Russians would give out misinformation all
along the way. In Beslan, for instance, the most recent one, the school, they
said that only--they lied about how many people were caught in the building,
basically. They didn't want to admit that there were 1,200 children and
parents and teachers trapped in this building under hostage. They said it was
something like 300-and-some people. And the parents and the people in the
town, they knew this wasn't true. They were so angry. And I think that sort
of, you know, galvanized the people down there to be angry at their own
government as much as they were at the people--at the cruel and brutal people
who had taken their children hostage.

They lied about so many things in the "Nord-Ost" thing as well. They, first
of all, wouldn't tell us, anybody, what the gas was, and they said that
the--everybody who died there died of previous complications of their health
or things like that. A--death certificates, they were issued for the people
who died from the gas--were were either left blank or they--under `cause of
death' or they would put something like `terrorist incident,' which, of
course, wasn't true.

Ms. GLASSER: Well, I think what we found is that both of these incidents
ended up sort of crystalizing what kind of a system President Putin had
constructed. In particular, in Beslan, I was so struck by what happened
during the final culminating battle, which raged for the most part of a day.
And, you know, at the time that that happened--and there were loud bombs
basically that went off, which triggered this fighting. And both sides, to
this day--there's some recriminations as to what really happened. But CNN and
BBC went live. That meant that viewers around the world could see this
horrible struggle taking place in the school. And, you know, you could see
live some of the most powerful and gut-wrenching pictures I've ever seen in my
life of burned and bloodied and dead children being carried by the townsmen
out of the building.

And on Russian state television, because the Kremlin was silent and there were
no orders on what to say and what the official line was, they ran soap operas
And what that meant was that the Russian people had soap operas and the rest
of the world saw what was taking place in this Russian school. And to me this
was just such a poignant and sad reminder of the nature of political
discussion in Putin's Russia, which was that it wasn't allowed. In the
absence of instructions, it was safer to run a soap opera than to allow the
Russian people see their children being killed.

GROSS: Susan Glasser and Peter Baker are the authors of the new book "Kremlin
Rising." They were The Washington Post Moscow bureau chiefs from 2001 to
2004. She now covers terrorism for The Post; he covers the White House.
They'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, the story of a Russian rock station and what it says about
the country's culture and politics. We continue our conversation with Peter
Baker and Susan Glasser, former Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post
and authors of "Kremlin Rising."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Peter Baker and Susan
Glasser, authors of the new book "Kremlin Rising," about Vladimir Putin's
Russia. Glasser and Baker, who are married, were The Washington Post's Moscow
bureau chiefs from 2001 to 2004. He's now a White House correspondent for The
Post, she covers terrorism.

The '90s seemed to be about the rise of the big business moguls in Russia and
the rise of the Russian mafia. Are those days over?

Mr. BAKER: Yes and no. You're not going to see the sort of no-holds-barred
gangland, you know, murders and that sort of thing that you saw in the
'90s....

Ms. GLASSER: Although that did happen right around the corner from us at the
local sushi joint.

Mr. BAKER: Right.

Ms. GLASSER: But that's a different story.

Mr. BAKER: Right. But it's not as pervasive, it's not as...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. BAKER: It does still happen, you know; there's still crime in New York,
but, you know, it's not as pervasive, it's not sort of what runs the country
the way--but it's still a very corrupt country. And you still have a very,
very select group of people who have billions of dollars who are, in fact,
getting wealthier every day. Putin has not destroyed the oligarchy, as they
call these tycoons from the 1990s, simply because he put Mikhail Khodorkovsky
in jail or drove Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky out of the country.
He simply created his own oligarchy, an oligarchy that's loyal to him.

Today there are something--well, as of a year ago--I've forgotten current--but
as of a year ago, there are 33 billionaires living in Moscow, more than in any
city in the world; more than in New York. I think that number's gone down a
few because a number of them now are in jail or have fled the country. But
there's still great wealth among a very select number of people in Russia. So
that system has not been destroyed. It's simply been co-opted.

GROSS: In your new book, you profile several people whose stories reflect how
Russia is changing, and one of the people you write about is Mikhail Kozyrev,
who was hired by Boris Berezovsky and Rupert Murdoch--Rupert Murdoch who owns
Fox, Fox News, FX, The New York Post, Europe's Sky News. So Mikhail Kozyrev
was hired to start a new radio network. First of all, I didn't know that the
Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, had partnered with Rupert Murdoch to start
a radio station in Russia.

Mr. BAKER: Strange bedfellows, huh?

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. GLASSER: Well, that's right. It's a little-known tale. And they
certainly didn't want to make a big deal of that in Russia where Berezovsky
has been exiled. Basically, he helped bring Putin to power. He was a key
adviser, you now, in the inner, inner circle of the Yeltsin era. He helped
bring Putin, this obscure, unknown guy--literally, 2 percent in the polls
when they started out--and he made him president. And then he had a falling
out with Putin, and he's been living in, you know, self-imposed exile in
Britain ever since. And yes, he was the one who started this radio station.

GROSS: How did they come up with the format for the station?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, this is really a fascinating, to me, look at the fertile
ground that existed for Vladimir Putin to come to power and take advantage
of, because basically there was, by the end of the 1990s, a general fatigue, a
sense that all things Russian were bad, a rejection of, you know, everything
about the Soviet Union and Russia--that was all thrown out. Everything
Western was good, you know. `Eat Snickers; forget about our bad Soviet
chocolate.' You know, that was the idea that existed in popular culture, in
marketing, basically in every sphere of public life. And, you know, people
were tired of that. By the end of the 1990s, they felt that they hadn't
necessarily gotten anything good out of that, so the ground was laid for sort
or resurgent patriotism, even nationalism. And that's where this radio
station comes in.

And they used the techniques of Western marketing. They did a bunch of focus
groups. You know, they wanted to start a radio station, and they tested three
formats. Two of them were Western pop music type formats. The third was
all-Russian music for the Russians, very patriotic. The idea was nationalism.
And that's the one that tested off the charts, and they decided to go with
Russian music for the Russians.

GROSS: And you say that Kozyrev, who was running the station, ended up being
accused of flirting with Russia's demons of racial hatred, mindless chauvinism
and subservience to dictatorship. How was that reflected in the music?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, I think Misha Kozyrev found that to have a patriotic
Russian radio station was not nearly as simple as he thought, and he
immediately found himself sort of in this swamp of modern Russian politics.
And, you know, there was this whole cadre of sort of underground dissident
rock groups in the 1980s that he had grown up, you know, listening to on
secretly passed around tapes that they called magnizidots(ph) in homage to the
secret books that were called somnizidot(ph). And he really worshipped these
groups. You know, they helped inspire basically a whole generation--sort of
the Russian gen-X--against the Soviet state. And many of these groups were
based in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.

But what happened to them was that as they experienced the fall of the Soviet
Union the new Russia, many of them turned to outright racism or chauvinism.
For example, one of the groups that Misha Kozyrev had particularly loved when
he was growing up in the 1980s was a band called Alisa. They were--just
absolutely drove the Soviet authorities crazy. They had an anthem called "My
Generation" that was probably the most popular of all the underground songs of
the 1980s, really sort of an underground Beatles, they were. And what
happened was they became complete hard-liners, far, far right nationalists
over the course of the 1990s.

In the year 2000, Kinchev, the front man for this group, released a hit
album that was called "Solntsevorot" that had a big swastika on the cover.
And Misha Kozyrev decided that, you know, that wasn't acceptable for his radio
station, and he wouldn't play it. But there were many other songs and albums
that did appeal really to the darker side of the new Russian that he did end
up playing and becoming very popular on his radio station.

GROSS: Is the station still on?

Ms. GLASSER: The station is still on. It's quite popular. It's sort of a
Russian alternative rock station. But it has a lot of imitators and a lot of
more mass market type patriotic stations that have succeeded even more.
Basically, he came up with the formula, and other people improved upon it,
made it more mass market and were willing to make compromises that this guy
was not.

GROSS: So, I mean, do you think of it as still being chauvinistic and
expressing racial hatred?

Ms. GLASSER: I think that that's a big--a constant problem, really, for them,
is what kind of Russian music do they want to play, and how has the society
shifted. And many of the popular underground groups of the 2000s, for
examples, these days, are groups that are very anti-American. You know, there
was even a hit song in the clubs a couple years ago called "Kill the
Americans." That was a very popular group, and that is who the audience is
for this radio station.

GROSS: That song's a hit in a lot of countries now, isn't it?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. GLASSER: Different variance on the same theme, I'm afraid.

GROSS: Yeah. Well, listen. Now that's Putin's Russia is no longer really a
democracy, do you think that Russia might be a threat again to the United
States at any point?

Mr. BAKER: Well, it's certainly serving its own interests, and we
shouldn't--you know, Americans need to be understanding of the fact that
Russia is going to look out after its own interests first. There was a
competition, in effect, in Ukraine last fall, last winter, between Russia and
the United States. Russia very actively, Putin very intrusively tried to
shape and mold that election the same way he had in his own country, and
Ukrainians rejected that. They turned out in the streets in massive numbers
to say that they were not going to stand for a stolen election.

The United States did not participate nearly as directly, but it did fund
NGOs, non-governmental organizations, that trained activists to fight for
civil society, how to run political campaigns and the like. And so it became
a real sort of almost Cold War style confrontation for at least a few days and
weeks.

Now that's not going to happen a lot, all the time. There is an interest in
both capitals at the moment at keeping the relationship good. But Putin wants
to make Russia a great country again, a power, if not a superpower. And you
have to remember, of course, Russia is still the only country in the world
with enough nuclear weapons, other than us, to destroy the entire world in a
space of 20 minutes. It's still, you know, the only country in the world that
borders or comes close to all of the other axis-of-evil countries, if you
will. They're neighbors with North Korea. They're right next to Iran.
They're right next to Syria, Iraq. They have funded and helped and aided many
of these countries in the past. There are people in Russia, even if the
government isn't, who continue to help these countries. So there a more
assertive, a more neoimperialistic Russia poses a challenge for the United
States if the relationship isn't managed.

GROSS: My guests are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post.
Their new book is called "Kremlin Rising." We'll talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Peter Baker and Susan
Glasser. They were the Moscow bureau chiefs for the Washington Post from 2001
to 2004. They've written a new book called "Kremlin Rising." Susan Glasser
now covers terrorism, and Peter Baker is a White House correspondent for The
Post.

You know how in the United States, a lot of Americans are fighting about
interpretations of America's recent history, the Vietnam War, the meaning of
Watergate, the meaning of Deep Throat. Is Russia fighting about its history,
about the meaning of communism?

Ms. GLASSER: Absolutely. This is one of the third rails of modern Russian
politics is very much about history and competing interpretations of it. And
I think from the very start of our tour in Russia, we were shocked to find a
really radically alternate history than--here in the West, there's this great
narrative, right? You know, `The Berlin Wall falls. Freedom comes to Russia.
Yea, democracy. Done, close chapter.' And I think what really happened
while, to a certain extent, the world's attention was focused elsewhere,
especially since September 11th, was that a competing vision of history has
taken hold in Russia, and it's very different than the one that most of your
listeners would be familiar with about modern Russian history.

In this version of history, which we were to hear again and again, the
collapse of the Soviet Union was not a great victory for freedom and
democracy, but, in fact, the reverse. It signaled the beginning of chaos and
catastrophe and an era of dangerous dislocations. President Putin himself,
during his one and only campaign speech of his re-election last year, called
it a national tragedy on a colossal scale, the break-up of the Soviet Union,
which is a very radically different interpretation of the fall of the Soviet
Union than the one that we hear in Washington.

Mr. BAKER: And just last month, in fact, elaborated on that theory in his
state of the nation address. He called it, in fact, the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th, century, the fall of the Soviet Union. That's a
rather extraordinary...

Ms. GLASSER: Completely ignoring the terrible consequences of Stalinism in
his own country, of the Holocaust, World War II. You know, a very dramatic
historical statement and battle is being fought. And actually, I was so
interested in this question of what kind of history was being shaped and,
presented to Russians today that I decided to spend a year going to an
11th-grade Russian history class in a school in Moscow. And what I found was
very surprising to me as I attended these classes. I expected sort of maybe
an old-style teacher and a new generation that was very uninterested in the
Soviet Union, that really wanted to move forward, that, you know, would be the
first capitalist generation, the first democratic generation, and that's not
at all what I found in a school on the outskirts of Moscow.

Instead, as I went there over the course of the year, what I saw was a group
of students who had been told by their disillusioned parents that the Soviet
Union had really been the source of all greatness in Russian life, and that it
was only in the 1990s that the country had begun to suffer. And these kids
were too young to remember themselves, whereas their teacher was constantly
trying to remind them of the costs and the human toll of living in a
dictatorship, which she remembered. But the students wanted to live in a
great country, and they identified greatness with the Soviet Union from the
very first day in which the teacher asked the students to raise their hand.
She asked them, `Which side would you have been on in the revolution in 1917?'
And the largest number students raised their hand, and they said, `Lenin, the
Bolsheviks were right.'

GROSS: Have you heard any Russian rationalizations either from Putin's
administration or from people who you met, rationalizations for the mass
imprisonments of people during the Soviet era, rationalizations for the gulag?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, what's most interesting is that people now acknowledge
that fact, which they didn't even as recently as 15 years ago. We had
colleagues we worked with in our office in The Washington Post in Moscow who
are the exact same age as Peter and I, and who had been told nothing in school
as recently as the early and mid-80s about Stalinism and the gulags. So in
that sense, today's students are aware of those horrific abuses, but it tends
to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders and a sort of, `Well, this isn't
1937.'

In fact, when I was interviewing people in the city of Ivanovo about President
Putin before his re-election, I asked them if they were concerned about the
rising authoritarian trend in society, the rollback of freedoms that I figured
that they would appreciate very much since these were slightly older people.
And you know, they're very cynical people about politics, I think, having been
so ill-served by a succession of leaders. Most of the Russian people I met
would just sort of shrug and throw up their hands, and that's what these
people did in Ivanovo. They said, `Well, in any event, it won't be
dictatorship like Stalin.' And so there's a real desire in society to close
the book on that, to excuse it as not the product of a system but as some sort
of terrible aberration in 1937.

Mr. BAKER: And you have to remember that Stalin looks different to Russians
than he does to us. You know, in America and the West, Stalin is put in the
same, you know, category perhaps as Hitler, and there's certainly, by the
death toll, a comparison to be made. In Russia today, you know, polls will
show that as many as 25 percent of Russians say they would vote for Stalin
tomorrow for president of Russia. That's an extraordinary thing. Imagine if
that were true in Germany. It would be an international outrage.

We would walk down the streets of the old Arbot, and you'd see in these
touristy shops, you know, selling vases with Stalin's picture on it. And
you'd go to the May Day celebration, you'd still see all these old folks with,
you know, Stalin signs and so forth.

We had a dinner party once. It's not just relegated, though, to the older
folks. We had a dinner party once with some friends, including a Russian.
And the point of Stalin came up in the conversation, and she said, `Look, you
know, Stalin wasn't so bad. The USSR wasn't so bad, you know.' And we said,
`Well, how do you think Stalin will be viewed in history?' She said, `I think
he's going to be viewed as a hero. He got us through World War II.' So even
among young people, this is still the view today among a certain part of the
population.

GROSS: My guests are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post.
Their new book is called "Kremlin Rising." We'll talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guests are Peter Baker and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post.
They were the paper's Moscow bureau chiefs from 2001 to 2004. Their new book
is called "Kremlin Rising."

The subject of anonymous sources has been on a lot of people's minds right now
between the Deep Throat revelation and the Newsweek retraction of the story of
a guard at Guantanamo flushing a Koran down the toilet, so I'm interested in
what you think of anonymous sources and how they should be used since, you
know, you worked in Russia, where I'm sure there's a lot of people who are
still uncomfortable talking to the press. I mean people were terrified to
talk to the press during the Communist era, 'cause they could have been put in
prison for that. And now, you know, Susan, you're covering terrorism and,
Peter, you're covering the White House, and I'm sure, you know--I know those
are subjects in which there are typically a lot of people who are willing to
talk but not on the record. And you both work at The Washington Post, so I'd
love to hear your thoughts about the relative importance of anonymous sources
and how you think they should and should not be used.

Mr. BAKER: Well, I think, obviously, anonymous sources is a big issue. It
should be a big issue in our industry, and I think it's healthy to talk about
whether they're overused. Actually, studies have shown that in American
media, they've actually gone down since Watergate, the number of anonymous
sources cited in the major media. But I think they still should be used as
sparingly as possible, and we probably all have failed to be as rigorous as we
ought to be in excising them from our stories.

In Russia, you're right, it's interesting. The consequences of speaking in
Russia, as opposed to America, if you're outside of the political accepted
dialogue, are more severe. At one point, we were writing about this case
involving the oil tycoon who was jailed and how they were trying to take away
his company. And the head of the union of oligarches, one of the most, you
know, prestigious men in the country--he's certainly a man of means and
prosperity and not somebody who had much to worry about--told Russian
television, `I see who's behind this move,' he says, `but I'm very scared to
name names now. I have six grandchildren, and I want them to be alive.' Now
that's somebody who has a reason maybe to be anonymous.

And in America, you know, the consequences of speaking out on the record are
far less dire most of the time, and therefore, we ought to find ways of
remembering that and pushing our sources to be, if not even on the record, at
least more explicit about where they come from, you know. If you can't say
what official, at least try to say `White House official' as opposed to say
`administration official,' but that's something the Bush administration always
insists on. If you want to say `a congressional official,' try to say at
least `Democratic source on the Judiciary Committee' or something like that.
Try to be as open as you possibly can with the readers. But it's something we
all need to be constantly vigilant about.

GROSS: Do you think if people have to identify themselves as a White House
official as opposed to just an administration official that they'll be less
secure coming forward and more afraid that they won't remain anonymous and
that they'll lose their job? And even if losing your job isn't like being
sent to the gulag or being executed, it's a pretty major thing.

Mr. BAKER: Yeah, I mean, look. If somebody were telling us something that
was genuinely controversial and it put them in jeopardy of their job, I would
be as amenable and sympathetic to, you know, discretion as possible. But what
happens, unfortunately, as a regularized bit of business in Washington, is
things that are being said that are not putting anybody's job in jeopardy,
they're forcing you to day `administration official,' say, as opposed to
`White House official,' and there's no reason for that frankly.

GROSS: So to sum up, you think when a story is revelatory that an anonymous
source is very important and should be given the right to anonymity, but when
it's used on a regular basis that it's just become--it's gotten out of
control?

Mr. BAKER: It is. That's right. I think too much business in Washington
today is done through this cloak of anonymity where it serves nothing. Most
people actually know who these people are on the daily, you know, background
briefings. You have ridiculous scenarios where a top official, the secretary
of State, the national security adviser, you know, some other important
official will get up in front a room of 50 people, that briefing is
transcribed, you know, there's a tape of this, and yet it's always referred to
in the transcript as senior administration official. Everybody in Washington
ultimately knows who this person is, and the only person who doesn't know is
the average reader.

GROSS: So I think what you're saying is some of the official White House
briefings have to be listed becase the--as anonymous.

Mr. BAKER: Yeah, oh, absolutely. Absolutely. They complain about anonymous
sources, but they absolutely use them to their own advantage. And right now,
the White House Correspondents Association is raising, you know, a campaign to
try to convince the White House to do less and less of that. It's gotten out
of control in the five years since we've been gone.

GROSS: So you're trying to convince the White House to use less anonymous
sources?

Mr. BAKER: Absolutely. Absolutely, especially for the regularized, everyday
kind of stuff. You know, what happens is people in the White House will say,
you know, `On background, off the record, Bush is great.' You know, we don't
need that to be off the record or on background. This should be preserved for
situations of great sensitivity where either because of, say, you know,
diplomatic relations or somebody's job is at stake. Those are the kinds of
reasons where we ought to, you know--we're imparting genuinely confidential
information.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. BAKER: But most of the time, too often in Washington, it's actually just
the normal course of business.

Ms. GLASSER: Well, that's right. I had someone say to me yesterday, `On
background, we have no comment.'

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BAKER: Crazy. It's crazy.

GROSS: Well, one last question. You're married. Was it good to be--well,
was it good to be married and covering the same beat in Russia? Was it
complicated to divide up the stories? Did it work out well?

Mr. BAKER: Oh, it was very easy. Anything Susan wanted to cover, she would
cover, and I would do everything else.

Ms. GLASSER: We're incredibly lucky to be able to work together. That's the
way I look at it. And really, to be there--you're so far away, you're
thousands of miles away, you're--an eight-hour time difference. And, you
know, I've been so blessed, really, to have a partner like Peter that we can
share everything with and really have a back-and-forth going about everything.
So that worked out well for the paper, and it enabled us to write this book,
which also is a wonderful thing for us.

Mr. BAKER: And we met at The Post. That's where we first got together. In
fact, Susan was, for a little while, my editor, and we discovered that we work
pretty well together. It's a nice--it's a blessing to have a kind of
partnership that works both in personal and professional lives. And we hope
to do it again.

GROSS: So you don't believe in the kind of personnel rules that would require
people who are working together to have one of them leave the organization if
they were in love or married?

Ms. GLASSER: Well, I think what newspapers have found is they'd have a hard
time having foreign correspondents if that were the case.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BAKER: Yeah.

Ms. GLASSER: It's a very, very demanding job. It's pretty much around the
clock. And I think one of the ways we were able to do it is because we were
married to each other. And actually, The Post has a number of married couples
in their foreign bureaus, I think, for exactly that reason. It's just an
incredibly demanding 24-hour-a-day job, really.

GROSS: Well, it's great to talk with you both. Thank you so much for talking
with us.

Mr. BAKER: No, thank you. This was great.

Ms. GLASSER: Thank you. It was terrific.

GROSS: Susan Glasser and Peter Baker are the authors of the new book "Kremlin
Rising." They were The Washington Post Moscow bureau chiefs from 2001 to
2004. She now covers terrorism for The Post. He covers the White House.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

We were so sorry to hear the news that Anne Bancroft died. I wish that we had
an interview in our archives that we could have played back today, but it's an
interview that we never managed to land. We'd like to close with a recording
we're very fond of from the soundtrack of the 1983 remake of "To Be Or Not To
Be," which starred Bancroft and her husband, Mel Brooks, as actors in Poland
during the Nazi occupation. Brooks and Bancroft were married in 1964. Here
they are singing a popular tune in Polish.

(Soundbite of Brooks and Bancroft singing "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Polish)
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