Garry Kasparov: belief

Transcript context

…What if the provisional government of Kerensky had made peace with the Germans in World War I, before Lenin re-enters the country? Could you imagine a path for Russia where it, today, would be more or less like a normal European country? I think that if we try to make some projections into the future, you can hardly imagine Russia surviving as a state in its current borders. I’m not sure it’s feasible at all with all the pressure from China and radical Islam from east and from the south. But for Russia to find its spot in the family of civilized nations in the 21st century, it has no other choice but to work with Europe and the United States. Also, going back to this Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and now open war in eastern Ukraine, we can revisit early days of Russian history, going back 1,000 years, to remind people that there was another Russia. Actually, the kind of Russian civilization was Kiev’s Russia, and the trade republics in the northwest of Russia like Novgorod and Pskov. Those entities were fully integrated into European political and trade space. Maybe what is happening now in Ukraine, and what will happen eventually in Russia — it will be the final showdown between Kiev’s Russia and the pro-European Russia and the dominant tradition that was inherited by Moscow from the Golden Horde and Byzantine Empire, and Russia will reinvent itself and will go back to its original roots. We have a segment in all of these podcasts called underrated or overrated. I name something and you give me your sense of how important it is to you, or if it’s underrated or overrated. I’ll start with the Bulgakov novel, Master and Margarita. Overrated or underrated?…

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