M. Gessen: belief

Transcript context

…But Russia has been next to some semifree countries. It’s a European nation, right? It’s been a part of European intellectual life for many centuries, and yet, with the possible exception of parts of the ’90s, it seems it’s never come very close to being an ongoing democracy with some version of free speech. Why isn’t it like, say, Sweden? [laughs] Why isn’t Russia like . . . I tend to read Russian history a little bit differently in the sense that I don’t think it’s a continuous history of unfreedom. I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history. That’s a 20th-century phenomenon that has a very specific set of conditions. I don’t read Russian history as this history of Russians always want a strong hand, which is a very traditional way of looking at it. I think that Russia, at breaking points when it could have developed a democracy or a semidemocracy, actually started this totalitarian experiment. And what we’re looking at now is the aftermath of the totalitarian experiment. But it’s striking to me, if I speak to non-Jewish ethnic Russians living in the United States — where they have access to all the media — most of them still seem to be pro-Putin, right? And Putin is not a democratic leader. He is, in numerous regards, a pretty nasty autocrat. Russians living in this country — again, non-Jewish, non-Armenian, whatever — seem to support him. What accounts for that ideological strand in Russians?…

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