Reflecting on Post-Soviet Russia and America Today

Panelists compare 1990s Russia and the first decade of the 21st century with the U.S. political landscape today in a complex and changing world order.

This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

 

 

O’NEIL: Excellent. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Shannon O’Neil, and I’m the senior vice president and director of studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Maurice R. Greenberg chair. And it’s my pleasure to welcome you today to a meeting and the latest installment of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy Series, and this one is titled “Reflecting on Post-Soviet Russia and America Today.”

And let me just say a few words. This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy, and this is a program we’ve had here at CFR since 2021, when it was launched. And it really has been at the leading edge of policy and public conversations on democracy and on democratic reform around the world.

Now, when this project first launched, governments were grappling with COVID-19. They were grappling with pandemic and protests and the rise of misinformation and disinformation, of economic inequality, of all kinds of consequential elections. And today, as we know, these problems have not ended or even diminished. We see democratic institutions increasingly under siege in many countries around the world. According to Freedom House, global freedom declined for the nineteenth consecutive year last year in 2024. And the United States, as we all know, has not been immune to these democratic challenges. It has been downgraded by Freedom House, and it now trails France, Germany, Canada, Japan, among other nations.

So against this backdrop, today’s conversation and discussion will examine the parallels we can draw between Russia in the 1990s and the current U.S. political landscape.

Now, before I turn it over, I want to thank Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, who is joining us virtually by Zoom. I want to thank her for her generous support for this project that is going to continue in the years to come, as the mission and the work of this project is more important than ever.

Now I would like to introduce our distinguished panelists, and then I will turn it over to the conversation.

So, to start, we’re joined here in person by Timothy Snyder. Tim is a senior fellow here with us at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is an integral part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project—one of our scholars here. He’s also the chair of Modern European History at the University of Toronto.

We have two virtual panelists who are here with us, Angela Stent and Peter Pomerantsev. They are joining us virtually, as you can see, but you can see them well.

Angela is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is professor emerita of government and foreign service and a senior adviser at the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and Eastern European Studies at Georgetown School of Foreign Service. She is also a CFR member.

Peter, also there you can see, is a senior fellow for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.

And then our presider here on the stage is Kimberly Marten. She’s a professor of political science at Barnard College at Columbia University, and she, too, is a CFR member. So with that, I am pleased to turn it over to her.

MARTEN: Thank you so much, Shannon.

I’d like to welcome both the members who are joining us in person today and the more than 300 members who are joining us online. The plan is that I’ll have a conversation with the three speakers until about 1:30, and then we’ll open it up to thirty minutes of questions from members.

So, as Shannon mentioned, democratic backsliding is something that a lot of people have been talking about in the United States. We’ve seen this affect all kinds of institutions and funding and personnel that has an impact on foreign policy and on the U.S. standing in the world, and it may be leading us into a constitutional crisis.

So let me start with you, Tim, because I understand that today’s panel was your idea. You literally wrote the book on tyranny, and you have also, since about 2017, 2018, been warning us about the possibility of democratic backsliding. One of your recommendations in On Tyranny is to learn from peers in other countries, and I’m wondering if you can just tell us why you chose Russia as the comparison today, and what you think Russia in the 1990s might have as lessons for the United States today.

SNYDER: Yeah. Thank you very much, Kimberly. Thanks to Angela and Peter for being here as well, and thanks to Shannon for the kind introduction.

What I have in mind is above all making sure that we Americans aren’t too provincial. When you’re in a moment of crisis, there’s a tendency to bear down on yourselves and imagine that what you’re going through must be unique because it’s so intense. But in fact the people who are putting us through this intense experience have learned a great deal from authoritarians abroad. This is not what this panel is about, but I think the American opposition would be very well advised to also try to learn while there’s still time from oppositions and resistance movements abroad.

The third way the comparison is relevant, which is our subject today, is by way of analysis. If you can see patterns from other countries, either historically or in the contemporary world, it gives you a chance to not be surprised. It gives you more time to think and to react.

So I’m looking forward to Peter’s and Angela’s thoughts. They’re both extremely competent in particular aspects of this question.

I just wanted to raise six areas where I thought—and of course I’m looking forward to feedback from Steve Sestanovich and others who work on this question—but I can think of six areas where this comparison might be fruitful.

The first is metaphysical. I’m thinking about the state of Christianity in both countries. It’s very striking to me that Trump won American evangelicals by about sixty-five points and lost the rest of the country by about fifteen (points). That is of course not the same as the fragmented kind of Christianity which one saw in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, but I think it does bear some examination.

The second area is informational. In both countries there was a crisis and then the destruction of local news, which to me is an absolutely key institution of democracy, and that space was then filled in by centralized sources of disinformation, but centralized sources which also were very good in propagating big lies or fictions. I think the Russian fictions are more interesting, attractive, and effective than the American ones, but nevertheless we are in an era where the lack of local news harmonizes with the production of big fantasies that invite us into alternative realities.

A third area would be economic distribution. In both the United States and Russia, we see a tendency towards drastic and indeed unprecedented levels of inequality of wealth quantitatively, but also now we see, in the last few months anyway, a certain amount of the repetition of kind of smash-and-grab oligarchy—taking what you can under the shelter of a government that you’re influencing.

Which leads to the fourth area of similarity for me, which is the sort of oligarchical circle of rule, where you have a president who is rich and wants to be richer, but is not by any means the richest person involved, surrounded by people who are much richer than he is, who have things to offer him and who go in and out of a circle, which is hard to observe if you’re not inside the circle. That was something we saw in the 1990s in Russia, and I think it’s fair to say that’s something we’re seeing in the U.S. now.

A fifth area is the politics of provocation, the idea that there are dangerous and deadly people with dark skin coming from the south who are the source of all of your problems. That was something which Putin used in the 1990s—and not only—sorry, in the 2000s—and not only Putin; it was already there in the 1990s. And it’s something that we see now, with the very demonstrative focus on migrants as the supposed source of all the insecurities of the country.

And then the sixth area is international politics, the—for lack of a better conceptual generalizing word, the pursuit of multipolarity, which, in the case of both Russia and the United States, centrally involves making the United States less powerful rather than making other countries more powerful. So whether—in the case of the Russians this is of course a self-conscious strategy. It may not be so in the case of the Americans. But in both cases multipolarity is to be achieved not by making Russia better but by making the United States worse. And I think as an empirical matter, that is the best overall way to describe the first couple of months of what we’ve seen. It’s not that Russia is becoming more successful on the battlefield than Ukraine; on the contrary, it’s rather that the United States is acting in such a way as to prevent itself from being any longer the only superpower, and in that sense, aiming for multipolarity.

So those are the issue areas that I had in mind, and I’ll look forward to colleagues and to discussion.

MARTEN: Great.

Angela, let me turn to you. You are one of the world’s top experts on Russia, and you’ve got a really unique perspective on the evolution of Russia under Putin, when you served both in the State Department and on the National Intelligence Council. What do you think? Has Russia’s overall experience with democracy and authoritarianism in recent decades—what has it been? And does it hold any lessons for the United States today?

STENT: Well, thank you, Kim, and thank the Council for putting on this very interesting panel.

So, obviously the United States and Russia start out from very different positions, if we want to try and compare them. Just to remind everyone, you know, in its thousand-year history, Russia has never been a democracy and it’s never had the rule of law. The freest period in my opinion was the late-Gorbachev era and well into the Yeltsin era. And I’m really going to differentiate between Yeltsin and Putin because, with the exception of oligarchic rule—which of course Tim has already mentioned and I want to come back to—things were considerably freer under Yeltsin.

I’d make the first point about Gorbachev—there were—they did begin to open up; glasnost did happen, and Russia began to confront its real history. And I think that’s another thing—obviously under Putin we’ve seen a total distortion of maybe the most important historical moments for Russia, but under Gorbachev there was an honest attempt to reevaluate Stalin, to allow historians into archives, so that Russians themselves could begin to understand their own history better, which is a prerequisite I think toward moving to something better.

There were no checks and balances under Gorbachev. There was, however, the first competitive elections to the congresspeople’s deputies, and certainly if you talk to people, you know, who were around and active then, it was a much freer period than it had ever been before.

Now, if you go into the Yeltsin years, you had a further development of pluralism in Russia. There was much more freedom of expression, at least in the early and mid-’90s. The media suddenly was no longer controlled by the state. You had a wonderful television program in the 1990s called Kukly—“Puppets”—where there were puppets of all the leaders and they made fun of them. It’s really analogous—if you watch Saturday Night Live, cold open. In other words, you could really criticize the leadership.

Those were the good things. Unfortunately Yeltsin never really dealt with dismantling the KGB, the intelligence services properly, so they remained there. The concept of conflict of interest really didn’t exist there; it probably never has. I remember when Boris Nemtsov, one of the great opposition leaders under Putin, who did serve in the government under Yeltsin, first came to the United States. He gave a talk—I believe it was at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. He was the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod oblast—region—but he was also their representative to the parliament, the legislature, and when somebody asked him what about a conflict of interest, he looked very puzzled.

There was still no rule of law under Yeltsin, but they began to rewrite the legal code, and for some instances, in the criminal code the law I think was fairer at least than it had been before.

But—and again, Tim’s already referred to this—the great problem under Yeltsin was the rise of oligarchic capitalism, of great corruption, of great inequality in Russia between the very wealthy and the poorest ones, which is of course why the Yeltsin period has such a bad name among any—many Russians today, and Putin exemplifies that, obviously, when he talks about it. And the fact that a number of these oligarchs did own television and radio stations—I won’t say much about the media because I know Peter’s going to talk about it—but you had—you did have some competitive media, but they were still controlled by the oligarchs.

And then I would say really the Yeltsin legacy that is probably the most negative comment on his time in office is that he gave us Vladimir Putin. And why did he give us Vladimir Putin? Because he wanted to choose an heir that would leave his family alone, that they wouldn’t be prosecuted for their own corruption, that they would be left in peace. And in fact Yeltsin—in fact Putin did honor that. He didn’t go after the Yeltsin family. But what you have is a leader, Boris Yeltsin, by no means a democrat himself, although more pluralistic, who put the private interest of himself and his own family above, if you like, the interests of the country when he chose a successor.

And then—so let me now just say a few things about, let’s say, the early period. I thank you, Kim, for pointing out to me something that some of your Columbia colleagues have discussed—one of the differences, if you’re going to ask, is the Putinization of the United States—is it happening now? And there’s some ways I would argue in which it is, and in some ways it isn’t. And you correctly point out that Putin very systematically went after the media, the oligarchs, the universities, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and things like that. But he did it sequentially. He didn’t try and do it all at once. And what we have happening in the United States, as you began to say in the beginning, is everything seems to be happening at the same time. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of plan there. And Putin did have a plan, and he has continued to carry it out.

So you have—you know, he begins with the Second Chechen War, while he was still prime minister, and so he very brutally takes control again over the North Caucasus and then puts in power in Chechnya rulers—or a ruler, really, who is a warlord but essentially keeps the area quiet and where there haven’t been too many other problems. You have a systematic evisceration of free media in Russia where, to the point today, there really are no independent media in Russia. They either operate outside Russia or they just don’t exist. Increasing repression over the twenty-five years that he’s been in power, to the point, again—and much of this has gotten worse since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—but to the point where if you criticize anything about Putin or the Ukraine war, you can be arrested, you can be jailed—total intimidation of the population. The people who oppose Putin have obviously left—many of them; not all of them, but about a million people have left Russia since this invasion.

Also, attacking the universities—this is one thing that’s happening in our own country now. It’s been happening systematically under Putin so that it’s very hard to be at any major university in the Russian Federation if you’re at all critical of what’s happening, of the war.

And the law—again, no rule of law, and we’re now I think back to the point which is, as it was in the Soviet Union, where if a trial is at all political or has political connotations—and that’s a very wide definition in Putin’s Russia today—the verdicts are written before the trial begins.

And I would just—one other point about this is a couple of months ago I interviewed Vladimir Kara-Murza, a great Russian opposition figure who was jailed for 25 years and then released last year in a prisoner exchange, and he has spent a lot of time studying the prison, the political prisoners in the Soviet times, and he said, everything that was done to him—the procedure, the way they did things, the trials—really resembles what happened in Soviet times. And so that’s where we are today.

Maybe just one minute on how this compares to what’s happening in the U.S.—I mean, we still do have the rule of law. It’s being challenged all the time, but the courts are fighting back, and we have to see whether that works out. We have law firms fighting back, too. We have universities fighting back. But—and we have a Congress that could be doing much more and isn’t because there’s an intimidation factor here.

But I think the final point I’ll make on this is there was a quick piece about this op-ed in the New York Times yesterday—we’re at the point where I think, and obviously Tim Snyder has written a lot about this—if people don’t fight back, if they allow themselves to be self-centered all the time, and if they—you know, if they’re too intimidated to challenge what’s happening, then I think things could get much worse.

MARTEN: Thank you so much, Angela.

Peter Pomerantsev, you were a witness on the inside, including through your work on the Russian television entertainment channel, TNT, and you’re an expert on information warfare and how Putin has used the media not so much as a traditional propaganda tool but instead to try to convince people that there’s no truth out there, that everything is possible, and that nobody knows what’s real. Do you have any lessons from those experiences and that analysis for the United States today?

POMERANTSEV: Thank you so much. And I’m sorry I can’t be with you; I’ve come down with some sort of very protracted flu.

So, I’m often asked this question, and I agree with Angela, there are some very big differences. But actually in this, in the propaganda space, I think the similarities are the strongest and the lessons are the most apt.

And we’ve got to remember—look, when Putin starts his—when people around Putin start their various experiments with really sort of like reinventing Soviet propaganda, Russia is still a quasi-democracy, yeah? At this point there are—there is definitely pluralism in the system. So it’s not a million miles away from what we have here, despite the very different histories.

And I think there’s three things that come to mind straight away, where there are applicable lessons and something that we can learn from in the U.S.

The first one you’ve mentioned already—the sense of vertigo, really, from there being no truth. (Laughs.) It’s like somebody—the leader is lying; the leader is using forms of discourse that are sort of—I don’t know, they’re sort of epistemological terrorist attacks on the notion of a fact-based reality. They blow it up by just not giving a damn about the truth a lot of the time. No longer can you speak truth to power, which is the job of journalists, because a Putin or a Trump just shrugs. He just doesn’t care if he’s caught lying or caught doing something corrupt, or the norms are shattered.

You know, in my second book—this is not propaganda—I looked at this from the point of view of the way that instead of a fact-based discourse you have a preponderance of nostalgia. “Bring Russia off its knees” was actually a slogan that was already popular in the ’90s but that Putin put into the center of his political discourse. Of course in America you have “Make America great again.” And, you know, this nostalgia—which obviously you don’t need facts for a discourse of nostalgia—comes at the same time as any notion of an evidence-driven future falls away. I mean, now it’s very, very noticeable. Putin never talks about the future, you know? And actually, the protest movement that Kara-Murza was a part of, they were constantly trying to talk about the Russia of the future, talk about the—(speaks in Russian)—but also in a practical way, talk about economic reforms that you need to do, which are all anathema to Putin because his system is based on corruption, where those reforms are impossibilities to stay in power.

So pushing away any discourse of the future; pushing away the factual, evidence-based discourse that goes with that because you need facts to prove you’re getting to the future, and replacing it with the discourse of nostalgia, which means that part of the response is not just to sort of like throw facts at a leadership that doesn’t care about them, but think about how can we create contexts where facts matter. You know, the obvious things are, I don’t know—you know, social security and these sort of things that obviously people are focusing on. But it might mean thinking a lot deeper than that. How do we create discourses where facts matter?

I’ll give you a small example. My background is in TV, so I think about this in a very practical way. When Americans do debates—you know, primary debates, they basically follow the logic of the reality show. You know, you get points if you slag off—that’s a British word—if you sort of say horrible things about the other person on the panel of candidates. And you do that because you know that then they will answer and you have a little bit more airtime. the only way to create oxygen for yourself is to attack another person; they attack you back, you get into a discourse, suddenly you dominate the space. This is something that we know from reality shows. That’s how we design reality shows as well. And it pushes towards, you know, a conversation where there is no kind of like debate about future policies, where there’s no kind of time to sort of plan and debate how you would achieve certain effects in politics.

You could do your debates differently. You know, you could set the primary candidates a task and say, how would you solve this issue? Show us how you would work with the other side to achieve it, and so on.
So there’s many ways that we can think about changing the political conversation so that the future starts to reemerge.

And very much related to that, what Putin did as he sort of moved away from any kind of conversation about the future, any kind of conversation where evidence or facts mattered—all politics became about identity, about belonging. Tim mentioned the use of the Russian Orthodox Church. It really is much less about, you know, a moral philosophy. It’s much more about the Orthodox Church signifying the belonging to a type of Russian tribe. It’s very, very noticeable how in the discourse of someone like J.D. Vance, religion is conflated with belonging. It’s not about morality; it’s about are you a real American or not. So religion becomes one of the ways of creating the in-group, and of course, the out-group—you know, the foreigners or the opposition, and so on.

But again, a huge lesson there for media is to make sure that you break down these polarizing bubbles. If there is one thing that I think the Russian opposition media got wrong, was that they didn’t make enough effort early on to get outside of the Moscow bubble and reach the rest of the population. Alexei Navalny started to do that, and that is incidentally when Putin decided to have him killed. He dared to go into the provinces, to reach out, to get outside of these identity bubbles that were being created by the Kremlin propaganda, and I keep on waiting for somebody in America to do that. I am working with local media a lot, actually, in my work at Hopkins. And that is one source of hope, because local media do overcome these national identity narratives. They do—you know, you do get both red and blue people reading the local news. That’s one way. But I don’t think it’s the only way.

MARTEN: Thank you, Peter.

POMERANTSEV: I’ll pause there. I feel as if I’m stretching my time.

MARTEN: I have a follow up question for you all. And it’s a two-part question of two major differences that I’ve seen between Russia then and the United States now. One of them Angela referred to, which is the idea that Putin moved very slowly and stealthily and sort of took one sector out at a time, whereas, as my colleagues, Timothy Frye and Victoria Murillo at Columbia have pointed out, what’s happening now is that everything’s happening all at once, and very publicly, in the first ninety days. And so one question for you each is to think about, does this matter? Does it mean that even if it knocks people off balance in the United States, that there’s more of a chance to build coalitions and to have some sort of a reaction to what is happening domestically?

And the second question I’d like you all to address, so you can just sort of choose which part you want to take in the next five minutes, is that Russia in the 1990s was really suffused with violence. As Angela mentioned, there were two civil wars in Chechnya that involved a huge number of Russian military forces fighting on Russian territory, bombing Russian cities, killing Russian citizens. And then, of course, when we talk about the oligarchs, anybody who had any kind of assets that mattered in business had to deal with the mafia, with protection rackets. And the populace in Russia was reminded about this every day with very graphic pictures that would appear in the media of somebody being shot on the street.

So does either of these things—either the speed at which things are happening in the United States compared to the slowness of what happened in Russia and the incredible violence that was in Russia then that is not in the United States now—do you think this makes a difference? So, Tim, let me start with you, again.

SNYDER: Can we go in the opposite order?

MARTEN: OK, we can go the opposite order. Peter, what do you think?

POMERANTSEV: (Laughs.) Look, there are so many differences. So does that make a difference? One out of many, I suppose. But talking about the speed, this reminds me a little bit more about what we saw in Poland under the peace government, where they went quicker than Orbán. And maybe that was from a sense of weakness rather than anything else. But it’s also worth remembering something. Russia was going—Putin was going slowly because, in some ways, the plans emerged. You know, part of them we know were planned right from the start, because they published op-eds about their desire to centralize power. But also things sort of emerged.

But the main thing stopping them was the idea of an America, the idea that somewhere is a different sort of power maintaining democratic norms that you have to sort of pay obeisance to and imitate, and occasionally defer to. When America goes, you know, we’re talking about the speed of things, everywhere is going to speed up because there will no longer be that normative pole. So, you know, we’re going to have this sort of, like, very different speed movements happening.

MARTEN: Angela.

STENT: Yes. I mean, if we talk about the speed first, I do think that people have been thrown—in this country—have been thrown really off balance, because you never know what President Trump is going to do next, and the people around him. And therefore if you don’t know what he’s going to do next, then you can always think about, well, maybe you can help deflect it. We should remember that there is a Project 2025. And that some of what’s happening, or most of what’s happening, is described in this lengthy treatise that the Heritage Foundation put out. And therefore, that does give you clues about what might come next. And certainly, if you listen to someone like Stephen Miller, you know, who’s very prominent in all these things and has thought a lot of this out, particularly on the immigration, and deportation, and lack of maybe we’re going to go away from habeas corpus, all of that. That there are plans.

But I do think that it—I’m not sure that it makes it easier for people in the United States to come together in coalitions to resist this. But I think in Putin’s Russia it was different. It was not necessarily intended to throw people off balance, but more to intimidate them. And, you know, in terms of the levels of violence, obviously in the 1990s—particularly when the state, you know, no longer had a monopoly on, if you like, on violence—that did that did affect what was happening. And, again, inculcated in some people a really—a skepticism about what democracy meant, if that’s what it was. We don’t have those levels of violence in this country. We have some levels of violence. We certainly have elements of mafia structures, if we look even into the government. But, again, I think that probably provides more opportunities for people in the United States, at least, to push back.

MARTEN: Tim, any final thoughts before we open it up?

SNYDER: Yeah. Very, very briefly. I think on speed I would add one point, which is that the U.S. is doing something I think that Russia didn’t do under Putin, which is simultaneously making the state less functional in terms of its normal, everyday occupations, like building roads and bridges, making airplanes not crash, keeping you from dying of measles. And although the rhetoric isn’t admitting of this, I think it’s pretty obvious, at least to a lot of Americans, that the state is becoming less functional. That’s something that in general Russian government—even when it was the case that the state was becoming less functional, I think Russian leaders were much more careful about trying to present the state as being functional. And Putin certainly is very careful about that now.

Whereas we’re not careful about that. The state’s becoming less functional quickly. And at the same time as the organs of repression are also very quickly becoming much more ostentatious and visible. And that combination, I think, is different. And it leads to a possibility which we haven’t talked about, which is the American system buckling, as opposed to there being some kind of overall regime change that’s centralized. That the system—that the federal system or the or the federal government buckles in some way, that it fails. I think that’s something which is possible here, which didn’t happen in Russia.

On violence, how violent the U.S. is really depends on where you look. Our carceral system is considerably bigger than the Russian carceral system. You can say that’s because we have more criminals. I don’t think that’s the issue. But if it were, that would still mean we’re a more violent society. There’s a lot of violence in the U.S. system which is not necessarily visible from—you know, from where we are right now, but which is—which is present. And it’s also more decentralized, which opens up possibilities which, again, may not exist in Russia.

And then finally, I wanted to pull out and join together some very important remarks that Peter and Angela made about time. The politics of time is really, really important. It’s one thing which—and I’ve written about this elsewhere; I didn’t say anything today—but one thing which the Putin people and the Trump people, but also a lot of American governors and state legislators, have in common, is the attempt to suppress the past, to take all the things out of the past that make people in power uncomfortable, and to present their own constituents as always being innocent and right.

That’s nostalgia, but it’s a very specific kind of nostalgia because if you’re always innocent that means also whatever you do now is going to be innocent and you won’t be criticized for it in the future. And speaking of the future, that’s also incredibly important. I think the futurelessness of twenty-first century authoritarianism is very distinct. It’s different than the twentieth century. And it is something that binds the Putin people and the Trump people together, that they have—they’re not even pretending to give people any kind of a vision of the future. And, again, that suggests one of the ways that you have to fight back, if you’re going to fight back. You have to be able to pierce some kind of a hole in that and let some light in from the future.

MARTEN: Great. Thank you so much, Tim. And I think that the point that you made about degrading the functionality of government is something for us to really be watching because, of course, Putin’s initial popularity was based on his promise to restore order in a society where there was not order, there was violence, there was not a functioning government at very basic levels. And he largely fulfilled those promises. And that is how people in Russia came to accept authoritarianism once again. So now at this time, I would like to invite members here in New York and online to join our conversation with their questions. Let me remind everyone that this meeting is on the record. And let me ask you to please keep your questions brief so that as many people can be included as possible in the twenty-five minutes that we have left. Oh, and please identify yourself when you’re called on. Yes sir.

Q: David Nachman, currently unaffiliated. Thank you all for this incredible panel. And thank you, Professor Snyder, for all your work. We’ll miss you. We’ll miss you.

SNYDER: I’m right here. (Laughter.) I’m thirty feet from you. I mean, it’s sweet, but. (Laughter.)

Q: Well, we hear you’re heading off to Toronto semi-permanently, but we hope that’s not the case.

I want to touch on your sixth point. It’s one thing for Putin to seek a multipolar world. Why, given America’s strength if not hegemony in the world pre-Trump, would a president seek to diminish and create a multi—such a multipolar world? Does it have something to do with a difference that you’ve also touched on, which is the relationship between Trump and the state? Putin was able to embrace the state and make it his. Trump runs against the state, is constantly against the deep state, and has all sorts of institutional problems with it. And where does that take us in terms of differences?

SNYDER: I think that’s a wonderful question. And you’ve got the—I think you’ve got the right answer. And it is a big difference. I think that for all—for all the things one could say about Putin, one wouldn’t say that he doesn’t understand the concept of sovereignty. I think conceptually the people who run the United States right now don’t have the notion of sovereignty. I don’t think they actually understand the United States of America as a sovereign state. I think there’s nothing in Trump’s rhetoric which reveals that he has a sense of what a state is. In everyday speech we talk about transactionalism, but I don’t think we actually get to the depths of what that means. If everything is a transaction, then the only people that matter are the people who are at the table. There’s nothing underlying which sets—which puts your—which puts your country into time, which organizes its relationships, which gives it a name and a dignity. I don’t think that exists. I don’t think they have a notion of it.

And if that’s not obvious to you in the way they talk about America, think about how they talk about Ukraine. I think it’s not just that they’re indifferent to Ukrainians. I think they simply do not conceptually understand why Ukraine would want to be a sovereign state. I know I’m also—and I don’t mean that they’re foolish. They’re not. I just think that this is not part of their conceptual armamentarium. They don’t understand sovereignty. They don’t see what it’s for. And this hooks together with the oligarchy piece because if the point is for your clan or your group, or, as Russians used to say, your family—is if the point is to advance the interests of that, that’s not just in tension with the state, it’s just something else entirely.

And so I don’t think—it’s to be clear, I don’t think it’s the goal of the United States government to become less powerful. I think it’s the reality that the United States government has become much less powerful because so much of our power depended upon various ways of working from sovereignty. And as we give up on the notion of our own interest, we were unable to understand the interests of other countries, and therefore unable to do things which over the long run or the medium run make us a more powerful country.

MARTEN: Tom, I saw your hand next. Oh, you don’t—you don’t have a question? OK. Yes.

Q: I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group.

This is a question for Tim. On your first point, about how Evangelicals turned out en masse for Trump, I was very interested to recently learn that a majority of them actually don’t attend church. I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve studied, but I’d be interested in getting your perspective on that.

SNYDER: OK. I feel that my bluff has now been slightly called—(laughter)—because I was—I was hoping that there would be reflection on this point. (Laughter.) But I find it—so when you—there’s probably an expert on this in the room. But I find it interesting that so much of American Christianity is a series of tiny, essentially privatized, charismatic cults, as opposed to organized religion. I think the relationship between a big, organized church and a state is quite different than the relationship between 100,000, or whatever it is, individual personality cults and the state. Because it tend—I mean, this is just my, you know, Midwestern off-the-cuff sociological analysis. But it seems that having an individual without a structure prepares you for strongman rule in a way that—in a way that a structure, or hierarchy, and predictable sets of rules perhaps do not.

And then there may be a deeper—like, a deeper metaphysical issue here about an institution that’s been around for a long time will have some kind of implicit politics, which has to do with the state itself, whereas something which is only as old as the pastor is going to be much—in its attitude about politics—is going to be much about the person, rather than about the long-term institution. But those are just my intuitions. And this is something that I want to learn about. By the way. I mean, Anatol Lieven, with whom I don’t, I should say, agree about a lot of things, wrote an informative book about American nationalism quite a while ago, in which he made this point, I think, in a predictably correct way.

MARTEN: Steve Sestanovich.

Q: Steve Sestanovich. I’m a fellow here at the Council.

I want to introduce a term that we used a lot in talking about Russia in the ’90s. And that is—that I haven’t heard here today, although there been some vague references to it. And that’s “power ministries.” The deep state in Russia was a set of institutions inherited from the Soviet Union that were easy for Putin to control. Well, easy might exaggerate a little bit, but he had a natural advantage from the inside out in gaining control over Russian life, politics, economics, everything.

In the American case, you’re talking about institutions—well, the intelligence agencies, the law enforcement agencies, the military—that the insurgent authoritarians don’t have a natural control over, an inherited control over, but in fact have to gain control of them from the outside. Because, in fact, gaining—and doing so seems prima facie illegitimate, illegal, even. Whereas Putin didn’t have that obstacle. So I wonder whether I could get the panelists to talk a little bit about what it depends on to preserve institutional integrity of the deep state, so that—so that the deep state can save us. (Laughter.) I mean, that’s my fantasy. (Laughter.)

MARTEN: Angela, do you have any thoughts on that?

STENT: Having for a short time been part of the deep state—(laughter)—I mean, so clearly one of the problems is if a president comes along, or DOGE or whatever, and starts to try it, which is what they trying to do, to dismantle this and fires you, you have limited recourse. And, again, I mean, you can—you can get together with your colleagues, you can push back, you can file lawsuits. I mean, you can still do that in this country. But, you know, one of the things that has been quite remarkable is the speed with which so much of this has happened since January the 20^th. And then it’s also the appointment of people to head some of the deep state institutions, particularly the intelligence agencies, and then the people whom they hire. And there’s—you know, there’s a limit to what anyone else can do to push back against that. So, you know, they haven’t dismantled the deep state yet, the beneficial—(laughs)—aspects of the deep state. But it’s happening much faster than maybe many of us would have believed before January the 20^th.

MARTEN: I’ve been told we have some questions online.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Judith Miller.

Q: Hi. Thank you very much for this conversation. Quick question for each of you.

Angela, since all of these institutions, democracy, are under attack all at once, isn’t that a disadvantage because everyone’s fighting in his own sphere and they can’t quite get together to form coalitions that really do matter? Peter, since social media seems to rise because local media is collapsing, not because of what the state is doing but because of technological reasons—you know, the internet, et cetera, et cetera—how can the media really fight when it’s so disparate and there are so many different voices now which tend to reinforce polarization? And finally, Tim, what’s the answer to fighting, is it fleeing or fighting? Thank you. (Laughter.)

STENT: Shall I—shall I start off, Kim?

MARTEN: Sure, Angela, why don’t you go first?

STENT: Yeah. Well, I mean, you’re quite—and so one could actually say there is sort of method to this madness. We were saying that everything’s happening at once under the Trump administration, but that may be partly by design. As you hint, that if you do it all at once it becomes much more difficult, people from different branches of life, to get together and push back against it. And I think we’re still at the stage now where a number of institutions, both in the private sector and government, are trying to—have believed that they could somehow appease the people who are doing this, compromise with them, and then they would stop doing it. As we can see, that hasn’t happened yet. So I think that is an impact of this great speed with which this has happened.

MARTEN: Peter.

POMERANTSEV: So, I mean, actually we do know how to combat what you refer to as polarization. That there are many, many very good initiatives across the world. Some of them lie in the technological space. How do you—experiment with designing, I don’t know, the anti-X or the anti-Facebook. Sort of different types of social media platform that encourage collaborative, democratic discourse. They’ve been pioneered in Taiwan. Google’s got a fascinating experiment with something they call, not me, the Habermas Machine, which finds the commonalities and different arguments. So the experimentations are out there in terms of media. I’ve spent two, three years working with journalists in Hungary, and Ukraine, and Italy, and now in the U.S., actually, in Pennsylvania of all places, finding ways that you reach voters that are—that feel left out or forgotten. And it’s a very simple process of listening to people, and understanding their frustrations better than the propagandists, who will exploit those frustrations.

The problem is not how, yeah? The problem is who will pay for it. And this is what worries me about America. Because in Europe you do have an in-built mechanism to respond to this, through a tradition of public service media, especially northeastern Europe. I’m not saying the BBC is a panacea. That’s a very weird British kink. But there is it idea that this is how we do it. In America, obviously that doesn’t exist. In America, there might be a hope for what I call a Tocquevillian media tradition, maybe a newer role for churches, by the way, who often played a very depolarizing role in a lot of—in a lot of communities. So I don’t know where the answer is going to come from in America. But the problem is not how. The problem is who is responsible for it. And that I’ve yet to understand in America.

MARTEN: Thanks, Peter.

Tim.

SNYDER: Yeah. I wanted to—I wanted to start by saying something about Steve’s question, because I think it bears on the sovereignty issue. I think one thing that happens as you purge the power ministries is that they become less effective. So our power ministries are going to get better at persecuting Americans, but they’re going to get much worse at their actual functions. And that goes to the question of how it is that we’re becoming a weaker—a weaker country.

The question to me—this actually bears on—helps me make another point. I think one thing which is interesting and overlaps between the U.S. and Russia is a kind of—is a kind of cult of masculinity. But it’s a bunker boy cult of masculinity. So it’s a—it’s actually a cult of physical cowardice which presents itself as a cult of masculine prowess. I think that’s something that Trump and Putin have in common, although Trump, as in many other things, is even more striking. And so the they—so they do this sort of bully boy thing, where they try to intimidate people with words, but, you know—and so it’s meant to define masculinity in a certain way. But it’s—but it’s also a kind of retreat from actual physical courage.

And I think this is kind of—so it goes—so I’m going to Judith’s question now. So my wife, Marci Shore, in a number of press appearances talked about how much of a coward she is. But of course, I have to go home after this meeting because she’s on her way to Ukraine, right, which is a place that a lot of people—and it will be her fourth trip to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began. And there are a lot of people who—you know, who haven’t gone to Ukraine, including everybody at the top of the current administration. And it’s fair to say that none of—that they—that they never will. So she described herself as a coward, but is she really? Mr. Trump describes himself as a tough guy. But is he really?

And this this bears on the issue of American sovereignty and what Americans are actually going to be capable of doing. So my wife and I left the United States a year ago at a time when I thought Harris was going to be the next president of the United States. I do make mistakes. And that should be borne in mind when you, you know, analyze my comments—my comments here. (Laughter.) I was not aware until recently that Yale University was regarded as a bastion of resistance, but that’s cool. (Laughter.) They’ll be—they’ll be happy to hear it. But the work—the work, Judy, that I do inside the American resistance has not changed at all. And I will be—I will be very happily taking part in this democracy initiative and in in many others in this country, and in many others.

So when it comes to fighting and fleeing, I think one thing that Americans should recognize—and I’ll try to end this on a serious note—is that the fighting requires a lot of durability. You have to kind of—you have to keep at it. And this is something which our friends in Ukraine and elsewhere can help us with. They may be trying to move very fast. And part of the reason they’re trying to move very fast is to demoralize us, to prevent us from making coalitions, to prevent us from learning lessons that we need to learn. Whereas we have to stick to it. We have to keep going. So.

MARTEN: I see another question in the audience right here.

Q: (Name inaudible)—on the board of Yandex from 2007 to 2022.

I’d like to go back to conflating the—one, you know, that Russians had America—that kind of just the image of America the good kind of kept them slightly in order, versus now it’s all multipolar and nobody’s leading. And the Evangelicals and the Pope. One of the most optimistic things that has happened in the last few weeks is simply the election of a pope who seems to be widely loved, respected. He’s both got all the old virtues and understands the new world, including AI. There’s something there to kind of cheer people up, that—and the Catholic Church is not perfect, but they’ve acknowledged it. So I’d love your reactions to that, all three of you.

MARTEN: Tim, do you want to start?

SNYDER: I appreciate this. And, again, I feel like there would be people in the room who know more about this than me. But there was a long tradition—that J.D. Vance now represents, and Orbán is another example, but it goes back at least a hundred years in the emergence of modern secular politics—the that treats Christianity, and actually specifically Catholicism, the way that Vance does, i.e., that your neighbor is not—in fact, Jesus said your neighbor was—your neighbor are people like you. So the Polish nationalist Roman Dmowski, and there was another Polish nationalist called Zygmunt Balicki, who made this argument very explicitly. Like, our neighbors are people just like us. They’re the objects of our concern. Therefore, you know, the Jews, the Germans, or, in our case now, the migrants, whoever, they’re not objects of our concern.

That is a long and strong political tradition which involves turning Christianity, or Catholicism, into a kind of nihilism, right? You’ll be forgiven for everything, including completely misunderstanding the Gospels. And then you have, you know, a tradition which is represented by Francis and Leo, which is more literal about what the Gospels say, and which treats Christianity as something which could be, you know, broadcast into a moral realm, rather than as a creation of an us and them. I think that this choice was—let’s say this choice was a thoughtful one, let’s say, on the part of the cardinals. I don’t think this was any accident.

Will it make any difference? I don’t know. I think, by the way, the Vance position on what religion means dovetails with the sovereignty business. And it also dovetails with Peter’s work, because—which is very important and I highly recommend the three books. In that if—you know, if you claim to be religious, and meanwhile say that nothing is true, including your own—your own religious texts, you’re helping to create an environment of nihilism, in which things are—in which many things are possible that wouldn’t have been possible before.

MARTEN: Peter, did you want to add anything?

POMERANTSEV: I mean, I have to say that characters like, you know, Stephen Miller and some of the others mentioned today are ones in their sort of, like, strange mix of, should we say, trolling—which is a more modern word and wouldn’t have that word when I was in Russia—trolling and anger and theatricality and sadism are right out of the Moscow vestry. They’re very, very familiar. And they’re right out of a very old, you know, sort of various nineteenth century books about demons. So they’re very familiar characters. And we could talk about kind of the political psychology that has come to the top in both the countries, which, for me, is the biggest similarity, rather than anything structural.

But I think there was a question about Russia, America, these sort of strange global checks and balances which are now—which are now departing. I mean, really, what’s happening now, though, of course, is a sort of—a certain amount of salivating in Russia at the prospect of America and Russia, these two great masculine powers, descending down and destroying Europe. And you know, Russian propaganda is full of this. There’s these entertaining memes of sort of Russian and American bayonets stabbing sort of von der Leyen from two sides being pushed out by Russian troll farms. You know, you have Dugin, who I don’t take very seriously but is still, you know, an interesting form of amusement—of macabre amusement, talking about how finally America will use its regime change capacities that it’s used so much in the twentieth century against the EU. You have more mainstream figures like Solovyov saying finally America and us will tear Europe apart.

They may have got this wrong, by the way. I mean, you know, Trump’s foreign policy seems to reconfigure with every pronouncement and airplane that appears in his life. However, there is an objective policy priority there, which is to disable Europe as a cohesive economic force, you know, whether it’s about sanctions for Russia, whether it’s a strong trading bloc for America or a strong regulatory bloc for America. So there is actually a sliver of objectivity. And I daresay that instead of being some sort of check on Russia, America will now be not just not a check but a sort of catalyzer of all that is worst. And then we’re just on to this kind of vague hope that Putin gets carried away, which has become actually one of the last hopes that I hear about in Europe.

MARTEN: Thank you, Peter. And, actually, it was a very good question because, of course, the Catholic Church played an incredible role in Poland in undermining the Soviet-controlled system.

We have one more question online, I understand?

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Barbara Slavin.

Q: Well, thank you. I wasn’t sure I’d get through. Barbara Slavin from the Stimson Center.

My question is about competence. Many of the people that Trump has appointed are incredibly incompetent, Fox News personalities like Pete Hegseth. To what extent is that an advantage? One can sense a lot of anger within institutions like the Defense Department in particular against incompetence. Does that help us prevent them from ruining what’s left of our democracy? Anybody. (Laughter.)

MARTEN: Maybe Angela could go first and talk about the experience of whether competence was important for Russia in this time period and then ending with Tim.

STENT: So I think this is a difference with Russia. I think Putin has in general—and of course he’s appointed people that are close to him, although many of the most powerful people in Russia don’t have official positions and they’re close to him. But I think competence does matter to him as long as these people, again, are loyal.

And I think part of this question goes back to the first question, sort of, and Steve’s question about the deep state. I mean, if there are enough incompetent people in very high positions, again, in different branches of government, and there is more and more resistance to them in these various branches of the government, then maybe it will galvanize people, or if mistakes are made. I mean, at what point—at what point when mistakes are bad enough to endanger the country’s security do these incompetent people then get replaced by someone who’s more competent?

But at the moment—and this is an analogy to Putin’s Russia—what seems to count, again, is loyalty to President Trump, and one hears that there are even people now in the Defense Department who are being asked to sign an oath of loyalty, you know, not to the U.S. Constitution but to the president of the United States. And that’s, of course, a huge difference from what’s happened before in U.S. history and is something that—where Russia and the United States are looking increasingly similar.

MARTEN: Tim, thirty seconds to close?

SNYDER: The oath of loyalty, of course, takes us to Germany in 1934, which is not our subject today. But I’m just going to mention that that is the precedent which we all know about.

On competence—it’s very much Steve Sestanovich’s question, something else that I wanted to say about it—power ministries in our East European context is where you mount your loyal and capable people in order to do something decisive. It is very weird if you’re coming from an East European background to imagine the power ministries being deliberately controlled by folks who are not competent—they may be loyal, but ostentatiously incompetent people I think is a generous way to describe them. And I think the incompetence is the point, because they’re trying to change the nature of these institutions.

So DOD is not really meant to be an institution which protects the sovereignty of the United States, which in my view is something they don’t understand alone care about; it’s meant to be a domestic control force. And how do you get there? By appointing very different kinds of people to run it.

So, from Mr. Trump’s point of view, I think one of the most revealing things he said—and it goes very much to the heart of Peter’s work—that you have to think of politics as a television show in which at the end of every day I vanquish my enemies. And in that framework, the people who are in the power ministries or his appointees in general, they’re not going to be fired for incompetence. They might be fired for something else, but they’re not going to be fired for incompetence. I don’t think that’s the way it’s going to work because it’s about images; it’s not about sovereignty.

MARTEN: It’s two p.m. and, unfortunately, we have to end on time. Thank you for joining today’s meeting, and please join me in thanking Tim, Angela, and Peter for sticking with us today.

SNYDER: Thanks, guys. (Applause.)

MARTEN: Please note that the video and transcript of this session will be posted on the CFR’s website. Thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.