Industry, americas cabletelevision company, as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Reading everybody. Welcome to politics and prose. Im bradley graham, a coowner of the bookstore along with my wife lissa muscatine. While theres certainly been a lot of news this week, much of it of course about the start of Donald Trumps trial in the senate, but some important things have been happening in russia as well, particularly an announcement by Vladimir Putin shifting Greater Authority to parliament which has left many wondering what this means about putins on plans to relinquish the presidency, or not, in a few years. We are especially fortunate to have with us this evening an expert on putins russia, joshua yaffa, who is the moscow correspondent for the new yorker. Yorker. Hes been covering russia for much of the past decade, and his new book between two fires offers a truly fascinating and revealing look at the impact of the putin era has had on, above all, the nations psyche and the moral struggles and calculation that Many Russians confront. Josh has written a very nuanced portrait of russia, nothing like the simplistic view of that country as an oppressed people lorded over by a kgb trained dictated. Josh describes the people who is also in the middle between oppressor and oppressed, wrote to compromise and accommodation with the state but still nimble and resourceful enough to try to turn the system to some advantage mixed results. In this book he highlights the stories of a number of individual russians who struggle to balance the street and often arbitrary demands of a modern authoritarian regime with their own personal desires and consciousness. Among the people he writes about are the director of the countries Main Television channel, an orthodox priest, a chechnya and human rights activist, and a crimean zookeeper, plus several others. Hes telling these cases that example fisa persistence of a russian archetype, the wily man, the leading sociologist once put it, someone prone to adapt to a repressive system i going along with it while also trying to circumvent its rules. Josh interest in russia goes back two decades picky started learning Russian College and first visited it as as a studen the summer of 2001 and getting a masters degree in journalism and International Affairs he worked of it as an associate editor at Foreign Affairs and they moved to moscow eight years ago. He reported from the first to the economist and several other publications before landing at the new yorker in 2015. Josh will be in conversation here this evening with julia ioffe, a a russian born americn journalist who herself spent time covering russia for the new yorker as well as Foreign Policy between 20092012. In the years since, she has written for the new republic, the atlantic and currently covers National Security and Foreign Policy for gq magazine. Ladies and gentlemen, please join in welcoming both josh and julia. [applause] hello, everyone. Thank you so much for the wonderful introduction. Thank you, everybody for coming out tonight to see the wonderful josh yaffa. Josh and i go back quite a number of years, especially the times when josh showed up in moscow to get his accreditation at the Foreign Ministry from Foreign Affairs magazine when i was accredited from Foreign Policy magazine and they said, josh yaffa argue a girl . Anyway, josh, this congratulations on what is a really terrific and important book. As we were talking backstage i was thinking im so glad youve written of this because we read so many books about putin. Weve also read so many books about and articles about the dissidents, opposition and we dont, thats like maybe 10 of the population. We dont hear a lot about the people who are in between who make do, who get by. And as a russia watcher im so glad you have written is because its such a rich topic ottawa to ask you about why you decide to write about this about why and where the idea came from. Thanks for the generous introduction and thanks to you all for being here today. The idea came to me slowly as i found i wasnt exactly able to capture what i was seeing and feeling about russia. Maybe because i was in understanding the whole picture first myself when i arrived two russian with that dichotomy that you mention of looking for the oppressors and looking for the oppressed and i do want to label anyone stalin or neo, and that makes for Good Journalism to a point, starting out with the same thing which is good. But with time i realized that i wasnt doing justice to the country come to the people, to place that i was actually beginning to understand it and there was a lot left out of the russia story. In fact, the majority, the real russia story was left out of the picture. I didnt totally have the conceptual framework for understanding what russia was then, if it wasnt this battle perpetual into paternal unavoidable battle between putin and the opposition or whatever form that takes threat russian history. And so the prism of the wily man which we can talk about it a bit which takes up much of the prologue of the book was away for making sense of what was going on in Russian Society in helping me understand the way that most people like people everywhere in fact, this is not unique to rush and that was the other i do want to say inside a cousin so obvious and banal to a certain degree, but maybe underappreciated by me was how much the dynamics that guy peoples lives in russia are ultimately so familiar, so universal that people are simply trying to get my come to make do, who have some quite noble or at least understandable ambition for the life and what they want to accomplish, and set about doing so in whatever realities they happen to be in. They cant change that larger macro reality but they can try and through compromise and this idea of why yumminess, get accomplished what they can and in so doing oftentimes they change to the process of those compromise and an aggregate society certainly changes over time. Is also i think we were all drawn to the story of oppressed and oppressor because its an easy story but its a sexier story, koffler, also the prism that we see get from which we sit here in the west, right, in many countries, there is a dictator of Saddam Hussein and theres Moammar Gadhafi and all people who are against him good because theyre against gadhafi they must be good and virtuous. Some elect Aung San Suu Kyi happens and we dont know where to put her. It is give you some insight into why things like that happen . No but it made me realize the more interesting for me field of journalistic inquiry was exactly that gray zone thats oftentimes left unexplored but that just came an interesting psychological i guess the problem for me to understand how it is that individuals navigate it, the circumstances and the characters in the book i purposely chose people who i at least couldnt come to some final conclusion about, with a good or bad . They were people who defied my attempts at categorization. I would welcome other peoples choice and that regard. I would argue they are objectively on categorize a bowl. They were by me and thats what interested me and thats how you ended up in the book. I was searching for the characters where even after spending how many hours with them over months, in some cases years, i still couldnt put them in a box of with the doing something noble or venal . What did he be committed or criticized . I wasnt sure myself and it was important thats why landed with each of the characters rather than the experience of the characters itself, didnt allow me to reach some kind of conclusive moral position. Before we get deeper into this, do you want to outline i think youre going to read something about what the wily man is or who he is or she is . Ill be up page and half or so from the prologue. At the start of 2012 i moved back to moscow to work as a journalist covering russia for foreign audiences at the economist and was time for the new yorker. In the western imagination rush is a nation held captive by a dictator interested only in his own power and profit. As the story goes putin lords over population of one and 45 Million People trapping them in a cage welded shut by propaganda and oppression. Yet over the course of several years as i reported on a time of major historical turmoil and change for russia. Street protests the winter i write, extravagant preparation for the toy 14 Winter Olympics in sochi, the annexation of crimea, the standoff with the west over the war in ukraine, follow from allegations of meddling inclusion in the 2016 u. S. President ial election and the combined total of sanctions and economic crisis. I met ordinary russians who showed no signs of some of being held against their will. These are not necessarily enthusiastic supporters or even people who voted for him. Instead they treated the putin state as a given, neither good nor bad, but simply there. Like an element in the earths atmosphere and then when i constructed lives around it. Governments exist in america and europe, as all manner of external structures and constraints that people, myself included, was constantly navigate. The pressure of conformism is universal and ever present, a feature of existing in the world no matter where you find yourself. What the presence of the state and the aura of inevitability of its demands struck me as particularly a cute and russia one could not live in ignorance or indifference to the urges and caprices of the state. In fact, it was to advantage to guess what it wanted from you and to deliver that were also been clever enough to extract some benefit for yourself. This, roughly speaking, is the predicament of levada wily man. Try to being a sociologist who came up with the concept and as a and 2000. From the state contains both the threat of great hardship and the promise of incomparable opportunity. I cant understand that in russia the two forces state and citizen, speak in dialogue, conversational timber often missed by the foreign ear. Gudkov who became a respected sociologist imposter in its own right wrote that for Many Russians quote the state is not simply a technical apparatus of largescale administration what a symbolic institution, embodying and reproducing the basic understanding of human nature. The state takes on almost pantheistic importance, though made by man in his image it is also an omnipresent force whose power exceeds that of its creator. In moscow and in my travels around the country i met fiercely proud and brilliant men and women, activists, economists, journalists, this is owners who believe the best if not the only way to realize the vision was in concord with the state. It was hard to believe they were wrong, nor was i confident i would choose any differently. There was my friend with a graduate degree from oxford who can back to moscow to take a job in a state run think tank, a place were smart Young Professionals thought up good ideas. Half of which were implemented and the other half of which those with more worrying political implications were discarded. I would periodically have lunch with youth activist who would been unable to resist the offer to take a seat in parliament, where he was quickly told to Vote Along Party Lines as the kremlin dictated or risk losing the funding for his youth programs. For a while the most fashionable job in moscow was working on statefunded urban beautification projects, expanding pedestrian zones, renovating city parks, launching bike sharing programs, rethinking public transport routes. Such Initiative Made the city undeniably more pleasant and humane. With time similar efforts expand to other cities around the country. Even in the absence of larger democratic reforms, if anything, russias politics tacked in an opposite, unmistakably regressive direction. It cities became more desirable and enjoyable places to live. Time and again the referendum on compromise that repeated at regular intervals. This harnessing of the resources and power of institutions to achieve something good in you. Although its an unhelpful metaphor to understanding prudence rush i found myself returning to one thing they learned in the camps. If you are stuck inside an unjust system isnt cheating it a bit here and there for your own purposes entire lee irrational virtuous response . Maybe there are no good answers and the possibility captured is saying measuring between two fires, the condition of being stuck in the middle of two opposing forces bigger than yourself. Making it out the other side was just about the best outcome available. The more i thought it and wrote about the ways in which people actually live and work in prudence russia, the more i realized it was largely impossible to separate them into two camps, the oppressed on the oprah service. Yes, there are obvious victims and those whose resolute unyielding positions brought them great frustration and hardship, just as there were corrupt and sadistic to use the states authority nearly to line their pockets or who got off on petty cruelties. Most of the people i encountered were neither. Theres strivers, nimble and resourceful he usually set out with virtuous and understandable motives what fascinated me were the compromises required in bringing those initial motives to life and how over time those concessions can change a person in the very rationale that motivated ones actions in the first place. Thank you for that. So come i see some people shaking their heads about some of the compromises you described and i just want to start by saying or asking you about what you said earlier where this is not a phenomenon you need to rush and on. We seen this under the Trump Administration that people who are very much against him, a lot of people who were never trumpeters, who thought if i could help the country, how do you see come elected you come down on any side of come aware of the redlines for any of these people . Are there are monetary get this concept a little bit more. Like, what is the line between somebody who is coopted and a collaborator . Do you need sure, you definitely need them and i applaud them and they have my admiration. My eye have no beef with them, the opposite, held them in great esteem. I just dont think they are necessarily the most effective or less journalistic prisms for making sense of russia. Not is representative. As far as where the redlines lie, in this book i purposely didnt draw them, that is different than what i might say about my own life and my own political and social context. I think there are interesting parallels between the kinds of compromises are described in the book and the reason people go for them in the first place what theyre hoping to achieve and what they think they can achieve and where they are right where compromise does yields at least some version of the thing they were searching for and where goes totally awry or that they themselves emerge. Sort of squeezed and jaded from the process they are not the same process person they were when they went in. The big difference that i see and may be you see more in the audience can name some also is the singular role that the state plays in russia that thankfully does not exist here. There is a really welcome degree of diversity in American SocialEconomic Life outside of the state. In russia that is not really the case. That makes this question of compromise more inevitable than it is here. I think here i can understand it but it is not as if there really wasnt any other choice for person x or y realizing their motives or their professional ambition or whatever. One fact that really struck me so simple and obvious but yet it wasnt until it was pointed out to me was what i learned when i was reporting the chapter about the theater director who was and is a very celebrated avantgarde experimental director who for a time when the putin state had shortlived interested in supporting the avantgarde and you state money to put on some remarkable productions, interestingly many of which were implicitly or explicitly critical of the very state that was paying for them. But as one of his friends said to me about why he wouldve done this, why he wouldve put his hand out and taken state money from the government that he found objectionable at least in the person said in russia, you dont have the choice of making a movie with state funding or without state funding. That would be an easy choice. Make it without state funding and your conscious is clean. Thats not really the offer on the table. The offer on the table is do you want to make a movie or not. And if you want to make movie there is really only woo one way to do that currently in russia and when you put the question that way it becomes a lot harder and certainly impossible for me to sit and judge him taken money from the kremlin to make these movies. Hes a film director who was born theater and stage director born in a certain time and place. He only has one shot at a prime productive years of his career, why shouldnt he make the kind of films that he wants to make . And this is more of a comment than a question, but i have been surprised personally to come back from russia to the states where russian dissidents and journalists are lauded as heroes and martyrs because they stand up to the state because they refused to make the kinds of compromises you describe in your book. Yet come as soon as things get a little bit difficult here, you see so many people making like running to make compromises that are so much the bars so much lower. The stakes are so much lower. It is unlike to go to jail do i not good go to jail, do i get killed or not get killed dislike, can i pay my mortgage and have a really nice lifestyle or not pay my mortgage and have a slightly lesser lifestyle and they are more than willing to make that compromise. So to turn that into a question is, you live in both worlds, you straddle both worlds, the u. S. And russia, do you understand why we fed us those two extremes in a place like russia . We are obsessed with hooton. All we want to know what he is thinking, what he wants, what he said what it means and then the hero martyrs, why