Lessons from Soviet Foreign Policy with Sergey Radchenko
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Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia. And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the Center for Strategic International Studies.

Hello everyone and welcome back. I'm Max Bergman here with my co-host Maria Snegevayim and you're listening to Russian Roulette. Today we're joined by a very special guest, the renowned historian Professor Sergei Radchenko. Sergei is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and he is coming to us from Bologna, Italy. He has a real hardship post there in Italy. Sergei is an expert on the Cold War, Russian-Chinese relations and international security.

And Sergei's latest book is To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power. It's out now from Cambridge University Press. It's a fantastic book, and we have a link to buy the book in our show notes for those that are interested. Sergei, welcome to the pod, and thanks for joining us today.

Well, Max, thank you for the wonderful introduction. I'm looking forward to this conversation with you and Maria. I think maybe the way we'll structure the conversation, we'll sort of go into the book and then maybe try to pull some lessons out for policymakers today. Let's just get mired in it right away. Yeah, let's get mired in the muck of history. But maybe first, why did you write this book? Like Cold War history strikes me as really picked over

It's quite ambitious of you to kind of dive back in and try to write sort of a new history of the Cold War. That's right. What was the motivating factor? That's right. And Max, you know, today people are talking about another, quote unquote, another Cold War. But when I started this book 10 years ago, this was not really the conversation.

To go back to writing about the Cold War seemed like an odd idea. I got kind of lucky, I have to say, sadly, sadly, with how the world has turned out in the meanwhile, in the while I was writing this book. But when I started writing this book, I was focused on other things. So first of all, what I wanted to do was to retell the Cold War using newly available documentation.

And actually, a lot of people would underestimate how much has become available that was not in early Cold War history and in early post-Cold War Cold War histories in books like those written by Vlad Zubok and Konstantin Plishakov or Darny Westad, the big names, big historians of the Cold War.

Because in the 1990s, after a brief opening of the archives, things kind of shut down in Russia. And then they reopened after sort of 2010, approximately. 2013 is more, to be more accurate. So I had access to this

vast trove of archival documentation, mainly from Russia, but also I have to say a lot of that came from China, from materials that were never accessible or no longer accessible. And that allowed me to retell every angle of the Cold War with new information, with new evidence. And I thought that in itself was important, just maybe filling in the gaps, providing some new evidence on things we thought we knew about, or maybe we don't know enough about, etc. So

If you read the book, you saw that there's something like more than 2,000 footnotes, mainly documents, of course, references to archival documents, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documents that really tell. It's almost like a psycho history of the Cold War because I was allowed this remarkable access and I could get close and personal with the Soviet leaders in ways that was not possible before. So I read through everything.

thousands of pages of their conversations with their colleagues or foreign leaders, their speeches, various internal memos. And by doing that, you really reconstruct almost, you know, you get a really personal sense of who the people were, what mattered to them, what they cared about. So this is the first reason, right? That's the first reason. But then is that sufficient? Well, while I was writing this book, I realized

there was also a new interpretation at hand. And my interpretation, which is quite unconventional, is that what the Soviets really cared about, above all, during the Cold War, was their legitimacy. And that legitimacy

arrived through external recognition, especially as the domestic sources of legitimacy started to fall away. We can describe, you know, we can talk about why this happened, but certainly by sort of 1960s, late 1950s, early 1960s, this process was well underway. What the Soviets really wanted was recognition, external recognition, and the focus on that subject

When I say external recognition, I don't mean diplomatic recognition. I mean, the Soviet Union was widely recognized diplomatically, but I mean recognition of their greatness, their status, their great superpower. They wanted to be recognized as such. And that drove their foreign policymaking really from Stalin all the way to Gorbachev and, as I argue in the book or in the epilogue, even beyond that to the present day.

You know, my father, both my parents were European historians, and my father used to say that you always wanted sort of a generation gap to really have the good history of the period. That, you know, people who write the history sort of right after the Cold War or right after an event

or in the decade, they're too close to it in some ways. The archives haven't really opened up. And so you really get that in this book. You have a sort of a degree of, I don't know, detachment, but separation where you're not vested in some of the ideological battles that happened. And also you have additional great material building off the work of previous historians, but also the archival work.

Sure. And history will be written and rewritten. And this is not the last word. I'm sure in the future, we'll have more people return to the subject when even more documents open up and somebody will come and say, look what Sergei wrote, Sergei Rechenko wrote and back when in 2024, this is rubbish because we have new evidence and we'll tell a new story.

So I think that's important. And the second point I wanted to make here is that you're exactly right, Max. When people were writing about the Cold War in the immediate years after the Cold War, that was a generation that really experienced the Cold War directly in many ways, could not really disconnect themselves from it mentally, emotionally, and so on and so forth. Now, I'm not that young. I was born during the Cold War, but I matured in the 1990s as a person.

And then in 2000s, really as a historian. So I represent a different generation of historians. And yes, I do have a different take on many of those issues that were debated in the 90s. Let's maybe dive in. And I know Maria is going to want to pick up on the last point you made. But why do you think the Soviet leaders were so preoccupied with prestige? Because I think that's the great revelation in this book of basically how insecure they were. And it's really a through line that you kind of pull out.

And I don't think that's something the U.S. policymakers really reckon with or really absorbed that much into their policy approaches towards the Soviet Union, maybe a bit. But I'm curious, why was that insecurity there? Good question. You know, we can go very deep into history to try to figure this one out. But I should say, without making generalizations about the Russians, I should probably go ahead and make a generalization about everyone in the world. That is to say, we all want recognition. We all want recognition.

some sort of sense of self-actualization, which is why, by the way, in the introduction to my book, I talk about Maslow and hierarchy of human needs and things like that, which has been criticized. But nevertheless, there is this point about recognition. People like Francis Fukuyama have written about it, right? Greek philosophers have written about it, the part of the human soul that desires that.

recognition, that desires glory, and so on and so forth. And that was certainly something that drove Russian foreign policymakers even before the Soviet period, and then Soviet foreign policymakers, and then again, the Russian foreign policymakers. Now, the reasonable question to ask is, why are they so preoccupied? Why them, so to speak? Why them? Why is it that the Russians want nothing so much as

greatness. They're such suckers for greatness. They want greatness. Why is that? And there must be historical reasons that are connected to the rise of Russian empire, this notion of being the great power that a lot of people living in Russia internalized

and that still guides or influences their outlook on the world. Are they the only people who have that? I think the Chinese probably have something like that. In fact, one of the contributions of my book, I think, is that I talk about the Chinese leaders in very much the same terms.

as I talked about the Russian leader, say, their desire for recognition, their desire for prestige and glory, and so on and so forth. Does that not also apply to the United States of America? Okay, I don't talk about that in the book, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that it exactly applies to the United States as well. So I think it's a universal issue. The problem, of course, in Russia's case or the Soviet case is that their great ambitions were never matched

by sufficient means. And so they struggled all the time. They had greater ambitions than the means allowed. There's a great story in one of the Soviet films about this. There's a guy, remember that film? What is it called? The Prisoner of the Mountains, right? The Prisoner of the Caucasus, rather, right? Mm-hmm.

Caucasian Plenitsa, where this guy makes a toast, saying, let's drink to our ambitions being matched by our means or something like that. And I think that's what the Russians should drink to because they always have had this gigantic gap between their massive ambitions and insufficient means.

I wanted to give you a great quote on that, Sergei. When you write that Soviet leaders pursued greatness in the sense that Rodion Raskolnikov pursued greatness when he killed the pawnbroker lady in assisting the Dostoevsky's crime and punishment. Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right? Could you comment a little bit on that since I thought it was a great quote and it really captures the essence of the book?

So thank you, Marie. I do bring in Dostoevsky. He does appear in the book, rightly or wrongly. Of course, I do think Dostoevsky is a fantastic writer, and I highly recommend to everyone, in addition to reading my book, to also read Dostoevsky. But in Crime and Punishment, there's this well-known story about Raskolnikov, Fedor Raskolnikov, the hero or antihero of the story, going in and killing this old lady on

on purpose to steal the money or to rob her and also her sister by accident. Her sister was there, he just killed her by accident because she was there to witness the crime. And then he suffers mentally from that. He has this whole, you know, the rest of the book basically recounts his internal suffering. And at one point he has this monologue, Raskolnikov's monologue, where he says just what you mentioned, Maria, where he says, am I a trembling creature or do I have the right? Что

что я вор стражащая или право имею in Russian. Now, that is something that, you know, where basically Raskolnikov is saying, I mean, Raskolnikov is trying to rationalize why he killed this woman, right? I don't want to go too deeply into this, but he says, well, if Napoleon was in my place and he needed money, would he stop before killing an old woman? No, he would kill the old woman and, you know, he wouldn't worry about it. So why am I worried? Do I not have the right? So in the end, it's a kind of a dialogue between Raskolnikov

and himself really, between Oskolnikov and God or something like that. And he's saying, surely I have the right to do whatever I want, right?

in Nietzschean terms, the Superman. And so what I do in the book is I use that thinking to talk about Soviet leaders, because throughout the history of the Cold War, they had this conception that they had the right to do certain things that the Americans were allowed to. And if the Americans are allowed to do certain things, why is it that the Soviets were not allowed to do the same things? For example, Rousseau sending missiles to Cuba,

He talked about that pretty much in those terms. The Americans had missiles, nuclear missiles, in Turkey and in Italy. They were aiming their missiles at the USSR. And then they resisted the fact that the Soviets sent their missiles to Kremlin. Who are they? Why is it that they think they have the right to do that and we don't have the right to do the same thing? That's not fair. That's not fair. But what I say in the book is that, by the way, even by raising this question in the book,

in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov recognizes that he doesn't have the right. He doesn't. If he raises this question, do I have the right to kill the grandmother? The answer is he doesn't. He doesn't because he has to raise this question. So in my book, I argue if the Soviets raise these questions, do we have the right? Why is it that we don't have the right? Well, if you raise this question, you probably don't have the right. That's the problem. That is the problem because you don't have the means. You don't have the means. And that is the tragedy of Soviet foreign policy. They thought they had the right

And they really tried to get there, but they didn't have the means to really compete with the United States. And it was tragic for the Soviet Union, it was tragic for the Russian people. That's a great point. And one other difference with Raskolnikov, I'll mention something that you flag in the end of the book, is that it seems that Raskolnikov actually did learn his lesson at the end of the book. But it doesn't strike me like the Russian leadership ever did.

And that's my question, the other question that I wanted to ask you. Much of the analysis of contemporary Russia has focused on personalities, like the role of Putin personally. But it seems that in your book, one's reading realizes that the role of structural factors or something else, some other driving factors, seem to be more important. So you do engage a lot with the differences between Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev's personalities.

But there seems to be that many of them have this internalized deep insecurity in common, in the sense that this insecurity overcomes the personal differences and does seem to contribute to parallels in foreign policy. Is that right? Could you comment on that?

Well, I think personalities do matter. I think there was a great difference between the way Stalin ran things and how Khrushchev and Brezhnev did things, as opposed to how Gorbachev did things. If personalities did not matter, then how would change happen? Because a lot of the change that did happen came from above, from leaders. So it is very important to look at their personalities.

personalities. Now, the useful thing about the book is that I have the evidence to do so because of the new archival records, or bring in that to show precisely how they differed and what they thought about issues like war and peace or revolution or the future of communism and so on and so forth. But Maria, you mentioned structural factors, and I think that is also very true, right? So the Soviet Union

was nuclear superpower, and that certainly impacted its behavior on the international stage. For example, the presence of nuclear weapons. Did that not affect how the Soviets made their foreign policy from the time they got the bomb, i.e. August 1949, all the way really going beyond the Soviet Union even to the present? Does that not matter? Of course it matters a great deal. Factors like

economic constraints. Do they matter? Yes, they matter a great deal. In fact, I would argue probably even more than I showed in the book, certainly for the Soviet collapse. Your economic constraints were really, really fundamental to understanding why the Soviet project wound up. And then, of course, that continuity of that, you know, striving for recognition, striving for greatness. Does that ever go away? It never goes away.

The irony is, even when the Soviet Union collapses, you have the emergence of Boris Yeltsin. He is seeking some sort of place of glory next to the United States. And in fact, his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of independent Russia, notes something to the effect of, well, we have to basically get the Americans to recognize us as their partners, because that's where our greatness is going to come from.

So you have this kind of expectation that somebody will recognize Russia as this great country, great power.

It deserves this recognition. Why? Well, Roshuv asks this question at one point in the book I talk about. In 1963, he quarreled with the Chinese, right? And Fidel Castro came over to Moscow and they had that conversation. And later, Fidel asked Roshuv, why are you quarreling with the Chinese? Is it a question of ideology or something? And Roshuv said, it has nothing to do with ideology. But what it's really about is the Chinese want to play the first fiddle. They want to lead in this communist orchestra.

Whereas we think we deserve it. We had the communist revolution, we defeated the Nazis, we sent Sputnik into space. We are the real thing. Who are the Chinese? Who are the Chinese? So that sort of thing, that idea that you deserve greatness, that I think is there from Stalin to Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, all the way to Putin. You see, is it a structural continuity? Should I say it as a structural factor? I'm not sure, but it's clearly there.

Maybe you could pick up on the Sino-Soviet split, because I think it's quite fascinating. And I think modern day policymakers sort of have interpreted that split in kind of a universalist way in some ways, saying that, oh, there's this inevitable tension between Russia and China.

You can wedge the relationship, you can pull a Nixon goes to China. Maybe in this case, Biden may be going to meet with Putin, could have a stable and predictable relationship. Washington talks about getting you in reverse. And I guess I found this part of the book very fascinating that, you know, you point to it. This was kind of a fight between leaders post-Stalin over leadership of the communist world.

And I guess the question for you is maybe you could describe how that Sino-Soviet split came about. And then do you think there's sort of any inherent tension between Beijing and Moscow that will sort of always exist given the large border and mutual racism between both societies?

that can be wedged by policymakers? Or is everyone just sort of reading way too much into what was basically a clash of personalities that then continued throughout the Cold War period? Well, thank you, Max. That's a really deep question. Of course, you know, answering is going to be a big challenge as well for me. If you go back to the creation of the Sino-Soviet alliance, that's sort of 1949, 1950.

Stig Brodersen: China, under Mao Zedong's leadership, deferred to Stalin. Why that is, is I guess Mao personally recognized that Stalin is the leader of the socialist commonwealth. He had a strange relationship with Stalin. He almost saw Stalin as his father of a kind, not a good father, but a bad father, and nasty father, but one to whom you should still defer because he's your father, basically. So you have this respect.

this grudging respect from Mao towards Stalin, although he didn't really like Stalin and Stalin mistreated him badly, by the way, when Mao was in Moscow, December 1949 through February 1950. But then Stalin died. So you've got the signing of the alliance in February 1950.

And then in March 1953, Stalin dies, you have a collective leadership that emerges eventually, Khrushchev comes to the top, basically as the key, as the top dog, so to speak. And Khrushchev actually tried to appease China because Stalin tried to exact quasi-imperialist concessions from China, various joint enterprises they were called, and special rights and so on and so forth. And that was clearly

Well, humiliating, really. It was humiliating for Mao Zedong. So Khrushchev actually returned some of those enterprises and tried to rebuild the relationship on a more equal basis. But immediately they developed a conflict because Mao at this point feels that he's the strategist-in-chief. His country may be quite poor and backward, but it's still a great country with, as they like to emphasize, 5,000 years of history.

great civilization. And Mao, he sees himself as a philosopher, as a warrior, as a philosopher. I mean, he published stuff, right? He wrote stuff. He's deep at many levels, you know, quite murderous, but very deep philosophically. Whereas Khrushchev doesn't match up to that level, right? So Mao feels like, no, this is, I can lead now, I can lead. So I think there's a

a lot to be said that this personality conflict drove the initial split, but there are other factors, as you mentioned. So the Chinese feel like the Russians were looking down at them, and that was actually quite true. The Russians did see, or the Soviets saw them as younger brothers and kind of mistreated them in some ways. And then you have the struggle for leadership with

that developed in the socialist world, where the Soviets feel like they have the mantle of leadership and the Chinese are trying to claim that mantle. That continues all the way until the late 1960s. In 1969, we actually have a border conflict that emerges between them. They actually fight a border war. So there are all sorts of complex factors that played into the Sino-Soviet split. Now, the remarkable thing is that the Sino-Soviet alliance, which is the communist alliance that was supposed to be eternal and unbreakable, basically started to fall apart

almost immediately and clearly fell apart after 10 years.

which is an interesting lesson. Now, project the second part of your question, you'll fast forward to your own day. China and Russia today claim that their relationship is at their historical best, which is probably true, probably accurate, even, I think, closer in some ways than it was in the 1950s, because tensions existed back then and also was very unequal relationship. Today, it is still unequal, but I think the Chinese have more respect for the Russians

than back in the 50s the Soviets had for the Chinese. And the two economies are mutually complementary. The Russians are providing natural resources to China, the Chinese are providing technology. There's a shared strategic vision. There's a shared vision of the world.

and kind of a shared fear or dislike of the American, what they call the American hegemony. So there's some, would that be ideological? You know, I don't like the term ideological, actually, for maybe we can discuss it later. But there are some similarities, commonalities in their view of the world.

But one thing that you can say today is that today it is more of an alignment and not an alliance. It's not a military alliance. They don't have a mutual defense clause like the Soviet alliance of 1950. And also the two sides, I think, learned something from history.

And what they learned from history is precisely what you alluded to, Max, and that is when their relationship is bad, third parties come in and take advantage of that. From between 1969 and 1972, you had Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who basically played on the sign of Soviet contradictions to achieve rapprochement with China and then later detente with the USSR. And so that is something that they're aware of today. And that is why I think they are very careful in not compromising their relationship too much. And

and, you know, yielding to each other and respecting one another in ways that actually continues to sustain this relationship going forward. One of the, I think, sort of fascinating things that I learned from the book was basically Brezhnev's, I guess, inherent sort of racism, but view of Europe as Russia being a European power, a European player, being European, tried to sort of build ties with Nixon based off this sort of basically common European slash whiteness

And what strikes me is that where we are today is Russia is sort of more isolated from Europe than ever. Putin's really trying to build up this kind of Eurasian focus and really a focus more eastward. But it strikes me that part of what your book has sort of told me is that Moscow is inherently westward looking and looking toward Europe, looking towards the United States. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Brezhnev, but also how you see the kind of

current state of Russia sort of being more isolated than Europe than since the early days of the Soviet Revolution.

strikes me as sort of a real historical, in some ways, anomaly and a situation that might make the Kremlin and many in Russia fairly uncomfortable. Yeah, so thank you for raising this. Brezhnev, of course, was fairly racist with regard to China. And I have so much evidence to show that in the book, which is equally disturbing and maybe, you know, well, I guess disturbing is the right way to characterize it.

but not so uncommon, frankly, for that generation of people. Yeah, so there is this view of Asia as inherently backward. There's a very Orientalist view of the Chinese as being particularly devious and then tricky, etc., etc. And so Brezhnev sees himself as this European. And indeed, he also sees Americans as Europeans, which is slightly odd. But he reaches out to Nixon, trying to establish a dialogue as a European with a European.

It all sounds really bizarre, but readers of the book will see what this is all about. But he basically sees that in opposition to Asia, to something that you cannot trust, to something that is vaguely threatening, to something that is, you know, to people who are out to basically bring us all down. And so he's looking for that European partnership with the United States, first and foremost, or West, you know, Soviet American partnership, condominium.

and then, you know, also with other European powers. So Brezhnev, yeah, Brezhnev, like other Soviet leaders, maybe with the exception of Stalin, who was a little bit more tricky in this regard, saw himself as European. Gorbachev even more so. I mean, Gorbachev was really European in so many ways, the way he thought about the world, etc. Then we come to somebody like Putin. And of course, Putin has evolved, right, over the years, because he

started with a very different outlook on Europe, in particular in Germany. And he had his great friendships with the likes of Schroeder in Germany or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. So you couldn't say that he's some kind of, he just did not understand Europe or did not want to or did not see himself as European. I think very much for a long time, he saw himself as a European.

I think what he's trying to do, of course, Russia now has burned bridges to Europe and has turned to Asia. Now, Asia, of course, today is not the Asia of the 1960s, 1970s. Today you have China, which has its problems, but nevertheless is economically and technologically an advanced power. And so Russia does have a lot to benefit from this kind of engagement.

So Putin is not entirely completely out of his mind by doing this pivot to the east. It's not all that remarkable. But I think what he does want to do, and that's just maybe a guess on my part, or I'm speculating here.

I think he's trying to reshape European politics in a way that will allow Russia's return to Europe on its own terms, on the kind of terms where it can be sort of a victor, one of the players that define how European history moves forward. Russia, not of 1991.

but Russia of the Congress of Vienna, or Russia of 1945, when it was in a position to really structure Europe in the ways that recognize Russia's own prominence. So I think that is what he's after. It's not that he's completely turned away from Europe. I think he's turned away from Europe in order to come back to Europe, but on different terms, if he is successfully. I don't know if he will be, but I think that's the design. Yeah, I think just a quick thought is that...

that part of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in some ways, was an effort to, I think, not just absorb Ukraine, but to send the signal back to Europe that you need to deal with us. And a really European focus, and it's a real backlash. It's a real blowback of this war is that it's really isolated Russia from Europe. And we'll see if there's negotiations, if Russia tries to sort of claw back its position inside of Europe. But Maria, over to you. Thank you, Sergey. On that note, that Putin is ultimately trying to reshape the European politics.

I wanted to ask your opinion about some other explanations of Russia's assertiveness that are very prominent in the analysis of the recent developments, such as NATO expansion. From your work, it seems that

The Soviet Union slash Russia have historically been sort of after reshaping the European politics in the way that maybe NATO enlargement did not necessarily radically alter that, as many of the commentators have suggested. So what's your take on that? Indeed, is this just a long-term strive of the Russian leadership to reintegrate Russia and to make Russia part of the European security and ultimately reintegrate?

own Europe as a result, or were there indeed some of the decisions made in the early 1990s, for example, by the West, that ended up being quite detrimental? So that's another deep question. And I do talk about NATO enlargement in the context of that debate of the promises that were made and supposedly not kept, that Putin complains about all the time.

I look in particular at what James Baker, US Secretary of State, told Gorbachev when he visited in February 1990, and they met. We have all the documents, right? But what I even focus even more on is how the Soviets then reacted and what internal debate they had after February 1990. Was there a deal or was there not a deal? And I make a very interesting argument in the chapter

which I think readers will appreciate, about the Soviets not really behaving in the way that they thought there was a deal. In fact, Gorbachev continued to demand way beyond February 1990 that

Germany, United Germany stays out of NATO and so on and so forth. So I think this is a very complicated debate, which you really need to grasp all the evidence. And the way Putin does that is he simply cherry picks particularly arguments that suit his purposes. Is that so remarkable? No, people do that. But Putin does it particularly well, I think, in making this argument. But the reality, historical reality is certainly much more complex. Now, this is as far as NATO enlargement debate, which I do touch upon in the book. But I

But if you go forward to where we are today and ask this question, well, were there security concerns that Russia had about NATO enlargement? Some people will say, no, no, security concerns, they're all made up. Putin totally made this up. That is not the case. I would say that it's actually more complicated because I do accept that Russia may have security concerns.

The question is how they understand security. In fact, jumping back to 1990, there was in May 1990 an interesting debate whether or not withdrawal from East Germany was something that threatened Soviet security. And the Soviet military were saying, yeah, of course it will. We paid so much for East Germany. We're not going to withdraw from East Germany because that would

undermine our security. And people like Anatoly Chernyayev, who was Gorbachev's foreign policy aide, argued at the time, look, we have a nuclear bomb. Who's going to invade us? We have nuclear weapons. That doesn't make sense. So that's, again, you have Russian views, two Russian views, but they're very different in the way they define security.

So, going back to where we are with Putin, security can be variously defined, and I do not exclude the possibility that there are certain segments of the Russian establishment, including in the military, who perceived NATO enlargement in the 1990s and into the present as a security threat. Is that the reason why Putin invaded Ukraine? I think that would be a very, very simplistic argument. I know we have people like John Mearsheimer and others who put this forward, but I think that ignores

A variety of other evidence, including Putin's own lengthy pronouncements in his various articles about Ukraine, where he clearly has imperial proclivities and wants to see Ukraine as a part of this reconstituted Russian empire. Is that not important as an explainer of his motivations? Of course, it's hugely important. So again, we're coming to this question of multiposality, different reasons contributing in different ways to

to ultimate decision-making. And it was always like that. In fact, in the book, I argue that sometimes the Soviets were thinking about security, and other times they were thinking about legitimacy, their recognition, competition with China.

and so on. So a multi-causal approach is something that historians like, partly because we have trouble constructing hierarchy of causes sometimes, you know, and even people like Stalin or Putin or Rousseau or Brezhnev, sometimes they themselves did not know exactly why they acted. All of which is simply to say, Putin invaded Ukraine for a variety of causes. And I think saying that he did it for this reason, but not for that reason, and that's it, I

I think that really limits our debate. Can I ask, how do you see Putin relative to the other Soviet leaders that you analyze and break down in your book? Do you see him as kind of a continuation, a clear through line, given his background in Soviet intelligence, his antagonism toward the West, his desire for recognition by the West? Do you see that as a clear through line or do you see Putin as sort of pivoting?

in a new phase, a new era that is very different than in many respects than the leaders of the Soviet period? Well, Max, I think it's both. I think in some ways, Putin continues the well-established tradition of this notion of striving for greatness and maintaining or expanding Russian imperial might, etc. I mean, that is something you can go back to the Soviets, or you can even go back

further into Russian imperial history, and you find that. So it's hardly surprising that Putin represents that, right? He thinks in those terms and compares himself historically to people like Peter the Great, for example. Now, in some ways, he's different. So one thing that I argue in my book is that the Second World War had a huge impact on the way that Soviet leaders thought about security and how they thought about the world, in particular,

that played a role during crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 or the crisis over Berlin that sort of lasted from '58 until the high point was in 1961. Nikita Khrushchev was involved in the Second World War. He was a Stalin grad, right? He had the recollection of the horror that happened there. B, he lost his son. He knew what war was like. He knew what a nuclear war would be like. He received reports about this from his scientists, people like Igor Kurchatov.

And at one point, as I recall in the book, he was worried when he received those reports saying nuclear war would be just absolute horror like we have never seen before. He said, I could not sleep. But then I realized we'll never have to use those weapons and I could sleep again. But anyway, all of which is to say that these are people who were indelibly shaped

by the experience of Stalinist purges, by the experience of the Second World War in a way that Putin wasn't, because Putin is a very different generation. Putin, I think, was shaped by the experience of Soviet collapse. And that is very, very important for seeing how he approaches reality and how he approaches the world. So there are changes, there are differences. And also, onto

In terms of previous careers and the things that the, like, for example, Gorbachev's proclivity towards intellectual debates and his wide knowledge of literature and philosophy and so on, his aversion to the use of force, that played a role, right, in the way that the Cold War ended.

Putin's experience in the KGB probably had a very different role in the way that Putin approaches policymaking today, whether inside Russia or beyond its borders. Sergei, on that same note, since we're on to Putin, maybe we can talk a little bit as to what Putin goals, after all, in this war in Ukraine.

And to what extent do you think they aligned with this historic strive for greatness that the Soviet leadership's embraced? Or some analysts have suggested, maybe he's a gatherer of lands who wants to research Russian hegemony and historic neo-abroad, which may be part of the broader desire to achieve greatness, but maybe just a smaller goal vis-a-vis that.

How do you see Putin as a historical figure and what is he after based on what we already know about the Soviet leaderships and Russian foreign policy goals from your great book? Thank you, Maria. And we'll need two more hours to talk about it. But to summarize, in the book, I talk about how you obtain recognition. And you can obtain recognition of your greatness through two means, two ways. First, you could be recognized as, let's say, a

America's great partner. Brezhnev wanted to do that. He wants to be recognized as Nixon's great partner in crime, so to speak, or he wanted to be part of that condominium. You could also be recognized as America's great adversary. America, by the way, is the recognizer. It has to recognize in both situations, either as a partner or as an adversary. And being recognized as the key adversary also has a legitimating aspect for

Russia if you are being recognized as the great adversary. I mean, think about Putin being recognized today.

as America's adversary over the last three years since the invasion of Ukraine. We're in a very different ballgame here compared to the time where Putin was the kid in the back of the classroom and Russia was a regional power of no global significance. So we can see now Putin being legitimated through narratives of Russia's malign greatness. That, I think, in this way, Putin's invasion of Ukraine actually did feed into this notion of recognition. That's one.

Second point I wanted to make about this is Putina's getting on in years, right? He's already beyond 70. He's looking now, what is he looking for? He's looking for a legacy. He's interested in his legacy more than anything else.

That's where I found it so difficult to understand his invasion of Ukraine. Because you would think, okay, if you look at it from the economic standpoint, there's no economic benefit. There's so many, obviously, hideous, murderous war that cut Russia from the West and created so many difficulties internally, etc., etc.

That doesn't seem like wise policy. But if you're Putin, if you're thinking about your legacy, as you said, Maria, as the gatherer of lands, as somebody who will historically be judged as the person who recreated the Russian Empire, and you think that's a good thing, well, that's what you're focused on, because you're thinking about the afterlife, so to speak, and not necessarily focused on the present. So that

That would be my reading. Yeah, and I think that leads to maybe a dark place for the prospects of negotiations, particularly if there isn't sort of a real stomach in the US and other European capitals to continue supporting the Ukrainian war effort. Because right now, I would think that time isn't actually on Putin's side. On the one hand, you could say the war is favored toward Russia, a longer war. But if there's sort of a

a pause, a ceasefire. And then, you know, it's five years, seven years until round three happens. Well, as you mentioned, you know, Putin might be 80, he might be dead. So do you think his search for historical legacy? And of course, he wrote that essay in the summer of 2021.

is really driving him. And, you know, if you then have to accept another 100, 200,000 casualties, economic decline. Well, if you can capture Ukraine, be seen as this great czar, well, that's all worth it for him. So where does this leave you when thinking about the prospect for negotiations right now? Are you think it's going to happen?

Where's your reading on the probability there? Well, I'm a little bit on the pessimistic side. And that is because if you put yourself in Putin's shoes, so to speak, you recognize that Russian economy is facing serious constraints, but you're not really concerned all that much about the economy in your pursuit of greatness. But you also realize that you've put so much effort into this war. You have burned the bridges with the West. You have already paid the

price, made the down payment, so to speak, in the form of sanctions. Those are not going away anytime soon. You have killed so many people, sacrificed so many people. So you've paid a heavy price for that. For what? For a strip of land in eastern Ukraine, right? Nobody knows where it's located. Nobody goes there. There's nothing there.

So maybe if you were a gatherer of lands, then presumably you would want to have something more than that strip of land. In the very least, you would want to have de facto control over Ukraine, if not...

outright annexation, certainly control over the government in Kiev. And perhaps he's hoping that even in the course of negotiations, he can arrive at something like that, i.e. a pliable government that will defer to Russia's wishes and also send the message, I mean, if that were to pass to all of the other former Soviet lands, they better defer to what Russia wants, because Russia gets its way in its so-called sphere of influence. So I think that is what Putin is striving for.

And in this context, and this is a longer-term game, in this context, some kind of calls for short-term solutions or something that we can solve in 24 hours or even six months, to me, appear unrealistic. Even if we do have peace negotiations, my thinking is that these peace negotiations are likely to drag out for a long time. Think about the Vietnam War and how long those peace negotiations once started went for years and years and years before they finally were concluded.

I think Putin is approaching this from a longer-term perspective, as you say, Max. I just don't see how we can have a quick solution here. But I do recognize that there are some constraints there, and we understand that.

Putin presumably understands that. The economy is not doing well. Interest rates are going through the roof. There's an economic slowdown. Russia is facing manpower shortages, just like Ukraine has to rely on the North Koreans and so on. And of course, for now, it is still able to fight this war because it has the proceeds from the sale of oil, primarily oil, but also some gas. Now, prices for those raw commodities went down. Russia would find itself in an even tighter spot

And maybe Putin would have to recognize the realities. But at the moment, I just don't see him going there. What I see him doing at the moment is playing along with Donald Trump and his call for peace negotiations while hoping that he, in the chaos that ensues now that we have the Trump administration and they're all over the place doing various things, nobody knows what exactly they're doing.

In that chaos, there's a Russian saying to catch fish in muddy waters. So you can have muddy waters and so you can catch fish. And I think that's Putin's strategy in a nutshell.

Well, Sergey, we're going to have to leave it there. But fascinating conversation. In reading your book, we, I think, learned so much going through Cold War history that you think you knew. It makes me really want to sort of fast forward 25 years, hopefully gain access to the Russian archives to see what the hell is going on in the thinking with Putin in the Kremlin. I can't wait. You know, if we survive that long. Yeah, hopefully we can live that long where the archives open up and we get sort of full access to understand, like, what the hell was the decision making process? What were they thinking?

And probably a lot of what we think now will be confirmed, but then there'll be a lot that we are thinking and presuming that probably wasn't true at all. And so I really recommend everyone going out and buying your book, reading your book, because it also tells you a lot about the present day and how to think about Russia and not just Russia, but sort of international relations in general. So congratulations on a really fantastic piece of work. Well, thank you, Max. And thank you, Marie. I really enjoyed the conversation. Great. And if you haven't already to our listeners, please...

please go and subscribe to our show. Please give us a favorable rating on whatever platform that you're listening to this podcast on. We really do appreciate the ratings and they help people find the show. And lastly, be sure, as always, to check out our sister podcast, The Europhile, which will go deep into the coming collisions between the U.S. and the European Union, which are probably about to get really interesting. So go check out that podcast. And Sergey, once again, thank you. Maria, thank you. And we will see you next time.

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