Interviews by Andrew Jack, founder of the Pushkin House Book Prize
Where did your interest in Russia come from?
I studied Russian in school because I liked my teacher, fell in love with the literature and wanted to go there. I first visited Pskov Region when I was at university as a way to keep up my language by volunteering at an orphanage in a village, and then lived there for a year after graduating. When I moved to Moscow in 2010 I worked at The Moscow Times as a business reporter, then for other publications before doing my masters at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. I was in Moscow when the full-scale invasion happened, went to Yerevan and lived in Armenia for almost two years. While there, I went back to The Moscow Times as editor in chief. I’m now in the UK: editing, translating, reporting, writing, and hosting a podcast.
Why did you decide to write your book?
I’d always wanted to write a book, but I recognised I needed some sort of experience before I started pronouncing on Russia. When I thought I had accrued that experience, I realised my unique selling point was Pskov. I knew a lot about it, had a lot of friends and acquaintances there, and had spent a lot of time there. It’s always very striking when it comes to Russia that there are lots of books about Kremlin politics, spies and hackers. And books by foreign correspondents are usually from a very Moscow-centric perspective. I wanted to write something different: on Russia from the bottom up.
What were your impressions?
When I lived in Pskov Region it was mostly in a pretty remote little village 90 minutes from Pskov. I was very struck by village life – so different from life in Moscow and St Petersburg – and how most Russians live: the rituals of washing in the banya every Saturday, putting logs onto the wood burning stove every few hours in winter. The scale of the depopulation always struck me as extraordinary: not only as a backdrop to people’s lives, but something that determines how they think and behave. There was also a very immediate sense of history: from the remains of collective farms and ruined Soviet-era buildings to the abandoned manor houses of the Tsarist period with their oak tree alley, gardens and beautiful churches.
How did the local residents react to you?
They were overwhelmingly friendly and interested. Of course, you get people who are hostile, who realise you are a westerner and immediately have a whole set of assumptions. That’s probably got worse since I’ve been going there. But, often, people open up more to you because you are a foreigner.
When was your most recent visit?
I last went back in spring 2023 to complete my research for the book. It was maybe a bit of a risk but I spent 2 weeks in Pskov. I was questioned for over an hour at the border when I arrived in Moscow. That was unnerving, but it didn’t seem as if I was being singled out. I tried not doing anything too political when I was in Pskov, I drove rather than taking trains, which are monitored. I didn’t stay in hotels, where you have to register with the police. And I didn’t stay very long in any one place. It’s when you hang around for a long time that people start to get suspicious. The bureaucratic wheels take time to engage.
What were the attitudes to the war against Ukraine?
It was a very disturbing experience being in Russia. Living in Armenia, the war was all I could think about, there were a lot of people who had fled Russia, and, at The Moscow Times, we were writing about it all day long. It dominated life. But Russia was the easiest place in the world to forget. People didn’t want to talk about the war, because they were scared or it was too difficult. But it was just under the surface: there were a lot of new graves for paratroopers when I visited a cemetery near Pskov that is used for military burials; and a woman I interviewed told me her boyfriend was recovering from a wound he received in Ukraine. I generally believe it’s fair to say that something like 10-20 per cent of Russians are very active supporters of the war, 10-20 per cent oppose it, and then there’s a big group in the middle who are not interested, don’t think they bear any responsibility and just want to get on with their own lives. Of course, such disinterest is a form of complicity.
How important is state propaganda in shaping views?
It’s obviously important, but I do think it’s oversimplified. I find it much more interesting to unpick why people are susceptible to propaganda, and which bits they absorb. For example, what people think about the Second World War and its relevance today. One woman I interviewed was born in the 1930s and lived through the Nazi occupation of Pskov Region. The war and how it was viewed in the Soviet Union shaped her entire life, as well as that of her husband, who was just too young to fight. Now, they are the only residents of a village in Pskov Region, are regular watchers of state TV, and support the invasion of Ukraine. They very much see the fighting as continuation of what ended in 1945.
How do you judge the current situation?
Researching and writing this book really underlined to me that, in order to understand what’s happening today, you have to look at what happened in Russia in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s the key to making sense of Putin and his appeal.
Has Pskov Region changed in recent years?
The beautification of Moscow, which began in the early 2010s, has gradually trickled down to parts of Pskov Region, with new pavements and revamped parks even appearing in some small towns. Pskov itself is overflowing with good coffee places and nice restaurants – whereas when I went there for the first time in 2007 it was almost impossible to find somewhere to eat. However, I’m not sure this really corresponds with higher living standards. In the villages, depopulation continues. There are some city-dwellers who come for the summer to live in dachas and bring a bit more wealth to the countryside, but it’s not a solution to the problem. People have to be living in villages for them to be alive. Of course, Russia’s wartime economy has redistributed wealth to poorer regions of the country like Pskov – but I haven’t been there recently enough to see the effect of this.
Would you return to Russia?
The world I inhabited in Moscow for almost a decade has gone. There are no journalists left, and my Russian friends, most of whom oppose the war, have emigrated. You can be nostalgic about it, but that world doesn’t exist anymore. I would like to go back some day, but, realistically, I don’t see that being possible in the near or even medium term.
What’s your next project?
I’d like to write another book, but obviously writing about Russia when you can’t go there is difficult. In the meantime, my 3-month-year-old baby is occupying a lot of my time!
How did you become interested in Russia?
When I was 15 and studying the language at school, my father persuaded a Russian colleague to let me stay with his family in a pokey flat in the suburbs of Moscow. That trip made me want to be a journalist because I was so intrigued by the fact that official rhetoric was one thing and I could see that in practice life went completely the other way. I fell in love with Russian literature, ended up studying it for A level and did some conversation classes at university before going to work there for a year as a part-time nanny, part-time TV researcher. I went back to run the BBC's radio office in August 1990. I was only supposed to be there for a year, but it was such a great story that I ended up staying three and a half years.
What intrigued you about the Orthodox Church?
Without being an Orthodox Christian myself, I was quite fascinated by the alternative world it offered. Russia was so grey and bleak, but inside the churches was almost a fairy tale world with the beautiful singing in the liturgy, the candles and the icons. It was quite an intoxicating, sensuous atmosphere. I started to focus on it properly with the Pussy Riot affair in 2012. That made me think about the relationship between the church and the state: why had these young women been treated so incredibly harshly for a 40-second performance which they themselves thought had been not nearly as dramatic as they hoped. I started to pay attention to this new Kremlin-speak about morality and western influences being very harmful to Russian society and traditional family values. I was also very shocked that the Russian Orthodox Church was doing everything possible to block legislation to protect the most vulnerable people in society.
How did you go about your research?
Originally the book was going to be reportage: an Orthodox road trip. I wanted to go from tower blocks in big cities to far-flung villages and I was thinking I might be able to join a group of volunteers who rebuild churches in the far north of Russia to meet ordinary Orthodox believers and see what they thought about the war. I realised it probably was not really a good idea. I'd done a lot of traveling all around Russia so I could draw on previous trips, but it took quite a while to come to terms with the fact that I may not be able to go back to Russia for a long time. I went to other countries to talk to people in the Russian Orthodox Church, and spent three months in Vienna at the Institute of Human Sciences doing historical research.
What is the message of your book?
It's the story of a thousand years of Orthodox Christianity in Russia. I wanted to try to understand how Kirill, the country's top cleric, became a handmaiden to one of the most vicious periods of modern Russian history. Why was he was sprinkling holy water on soldiers going into this meat grinder war? I thought the answer must lie in history and politics and in the way that theology has been distorted, and to some extent in corruption. I went all the way back to 988 because I thought it was important to show how the church was always at the right hand of power and took a pragmatic approach. The title, The Baton and the Cross, was inspired by a poster I saw on a wall in St. Petersburg: a large black cross made from two police batons and underneath the word “repent”. I saw the church as a weapon to control the population at home and to terrorise populations abroad. The main message is about the way that the church has always been in a toxic relationship with power.
What surprised you most during your research?
I hadn't understood how the church had been neutered or weakened under Peter the Great. He admired the attitudes to religion he'd seen in Holland and in the UK, and he felt the church had too much power over Russian society and was holding it back technologically. But along with that came this pernicious idea that the church should serve the state and loyal clergy should report on anything they heard in confession. You can trace a line from that to the Stukachi, the snitches of the Stalin era who are rampant again, with parishioners informing on priests who don't recite the victory prayer or people saying things that could be construed as an insult to the Russian army. Catherine the Great came into office with lots of interesting ideas about getting rid of serfdom and thought the church had too much land and wealth and should be encouraged to do more for the poor and to educate people. But at the end of her reign, the church was being used as an arm of imperial conquest instead.
How religious are Russians in practice?
People say they're Orthodox, but then when they're asked if they believe in God they say ‘no’. A 2023 poll suggested only 15% of Russians identified as highly religious, and less than 5% go to church regularly. Orthodoxy is quite often seen as a badge of identity. One pastor I quote said in those difficult years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people asked ‘what makes us Russian now we're not a superpower anymore?’ The church came to the rescue, and people could say ‘we’ve got these onion dome churches, our unique civilisation, Moscow as the third Rome’. It made them feel a sense of national pride. It is particularly egregious to have these diatribes from Patriarch Kirill about the ‘degenerate West’, gay pride, Nazis in Ukraine and how corrupt morally Ukraine is, when you know Russia's got far higher divorce figures, higher abortion, higher alcoholism. It’s not this spotless beacon of Orthodox Christianity it is made out to be. Church attendance figures are higher in Ukraine as well.
Do you think Putin is a believer?
I really have no clue because I can't see into his soul. But in 2009 he visited the artist Ilia Glazunov who had painted the tableau Eternal Russia, which portrayed Grand Prince Vladimir’s canonised sons Boris and Gleb, who were murdered. They had chosen a Gandhian path of non-resistance. Putin didn't seem to know who they were. When the guide explained, he sneered and said, "What? They just lay down without a battle with their enemies. They're not for us. They must never be emulated." A Russian priest who was telling me about this was really outraged and said it sheds light on Putin's religiosity because it's ignorant, highly selective, arrogant, predicated on violence and shows how he treats the church as an ideological appendage to his Russian world vision. Putin has performatively got better at crossing himself in church but his actions are at odds with the gospel. It's a kind of orthodox shell empty of content.
What are your next projects?
I'm doing a documentary about the role of faith on the front line and what the church in Ukraine can do to help a war-traumatised society. The next book I do, I would like it to be somewhere where I can travel on the ground, without worrying that I'm going to get the people I interview into trouble – something which constantly preys on your mind in Putinland. So it might be in another part of Europe. It's hard when you've devoted so much of your life to trying to understand Russia.
How did you become interested in Russia?
I was a late bloomer. I was a history major in college, and my focus was more on Germany and central Europe. When studying in Germany at the University of Tübingen in 1984, I found myself with nothing to do and no place to go during the winter break. There was an ad for a very inexpensive trip to the Soviet Union. And so I spent 10 days in Moscow and Leningrad. I saw things and I met people there that were more exotic and interesting than anything I encountered in Germany. I started studying Russian and in 1987 was an exchange student at Leningrad State University. By the time I made the decision to go to graduate school, I knew that I wanted to focus on that part of the world. My first book, Beyond the Pale, the Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, was about ethnic relations and what an emerging civil society looks like in a multinational empire.
What drew you to researching dissidents?
I was curious about how people who live in authoritarian or non-democratic regimes think about and eventually act on their options for public political engagement. The book is really an attempt to do an intellectual and cultural history of the movement: both the ideas that it generated and the specific forms of sociability within the movement, the human relations among the protagonists as they struggled over two decades to place constraints on what the Kremlin could do inside the USSR. I never dreamed that question would be as relevant to my own country as it has become in the last few months.
What are the key insights in your book?
The grand strategy of the dissident movement was to leverage the existing Soviet constitution and the legal system in an attempt to contain the power of the Soviet state. The dissidents did not aim to topple the Soviet regime. With a handful of exceptions, they couldn't even imagine the Soviet Union could collapse anytime in the near future. The movement’s main impact was to show to the Soviet population and to the world that this was a regime that was incapable of observing its own laws. That produced a certain delegitimising effect which contributed to the hollowing out of the regime long before it actually collapsed in December 1991. I think that helps explain the breathtaking suddenness of the collapse. The book shows how a relatively small number of people – roughly a thousand active, committed dissidents – could have a completely outsized effect on both the history of the Soviet Union and the arc of history in the second half of the 20th century.
How did the dissidents engage with each other?
Adult friendships were vital to the movement. Lots of important gatherings took place in people's apartments, when you could simply drop by if you were the right person for evenings of sharing the latest samizdat texts and listening to shortwave radio broadcasts. This being the Soviet Union, there was plenty of alcoholic lubrication involved as well. It was the networks of circulation of samizdat that really were the lifeblood of the movement: it couldn't have gotten off the ground without samizdat and eventually tamizdat and what they came to call radizdat – the broadcasting of underground texts over radio. Most dissidents felt very strongly that they were not doing anything illegal, that they were acting emphatically within the bounds of the Soviet constitution, and therefore they didn't care whether they were being overheard. They wanted to be heard. The state refused to engage in any kind of dialogue or to respond to any of the hundreds of letters and petitions sent by dissidents to the Central Committee, the Politburo, or the attorney generals, so they were desperate for communication with the regime. And for many of them those moments came during interrogations.
How did the KGB respond?
The KGB had extensive experience dealing with other kinds of domestic troublemakers – nationalists, monarchists, neo-Leninists, etc. – but they were puzzled by this group of people who demanded fidelity to the Soviet constitution as a matter of principle. They did not have a ready toolkit. When Yuri Andropov became chairman of the KGB in 1967, one of the first things he did was to found a new division specifically to deal with the dissident movement. It didn't take long for the KGB to conclude that the dissidents were puppets of western intelligence services who were feeding them ideas, financing them and using them to conduct an insidious form of psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. That conclusion never wavered. I can say with a high degree of confidence that there was almost no direct support because I've seen declassified CIA analyses of the Soviet dissident movement. They offer a rather pessimistic appraisal of the movement’s staying power and its capacity to influence Soviet policy. The CIA loved having a thorn in the side of Soviet leaders, but they were not investing in it in any significant way except the financing of the various shortwave radio broadcasts.
What was the KGB’s approach to persecution of dissidents?
In the post Stalin era, the KGB tried to move away from the “dungeons and torture” legacy of the NKVD. They arrested dissidents, put them on trial and in every single case got the guilty verdicts that they wanted and knew they were going to get because they called up the judges and told them what verdicts to assign. But these were not Stalinist show trials. The defendants were not tortured and most refused to plead guilty. The public relations fallout was horrible for the regime. The KGB was creating martyrs and heroes, elevating to global fame people who had been entirely obscure. So the legal system was not producing the effects the KGB desired. Starting in 1968, they shifted to a strategy of cutting people's salaries, firing them from their jobs, making sure their children would never get into a university. There was widespread use of involuntary confinement in psychiatric prisons and hospitals. It became an even more lawless landscape.
How did you carry out your research?
There is a phenomenal number of book-length autobiographies by participants in the movement – 150 of them by my current estimate. This is a gold mine but it's also a huge problem. These are all people who knew each other very well. These intense bonds of friendship helped sustain the movement’s existence over some very troubling years of harassment and persecution by the KGB. But they also made it difficult to expand into a mass social movement because levels of social trust in the Soviet Union were notoriously low. What really opened up the larger vistas for me was working with transcripts of interrogations that were preserved in the archives of the KGB. I was unable to gain access to the KGB’s central archive in Moscow, but I did find excellent materials in the KGB’s branch offices in some of the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union.
What surprised you most?
The greatest insights were from the inner history of the movement, which had largely been shielded from view precisely because dissidents did not want to expose each other to additional persecution by the security apparatus. There was a significant cleavage between those who preferred a purely conscience-driven approach to protest where everybody should follow their own moral intuition, and others who argued that, to have a real impact, the movement needed an organizational structure, leaders and assigned roles. That contest raged for quite a few years until the main figures who embodied the conscience-driven approach were arrested and exiled after they protested on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Prague. In the immediate aftermath, the first dissident organisations were born. Ironically, even the so-called organizational wing of the movement was essentially improvisational. There was deep resistance to any kind of written charter or formal membership, not because they feared additional KGB harassment and punishment but because in their own activities – and despite being eloquent advocates for the rule of law – dissidents didn't want to be constrained by rules. Soviet dissidents were, in this and many other ways, Soviet people. We will not really understand them and their collective life if we continue to see them as Western liberals who were accidentally born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.
Did that limit their power?
The movement consisted largely of small face-to-face groups who were not interested in outreach or trying to build bridges to other segments of the Soviet population. This was overwhelmingly an intelligentsia movement. There was a high degree of unacknowledged elitism within the movement, and that’s one of the reasons why it was relatively isolated from the rest of the Soviet population. As one dissident joke put it, it's a small world if you don't count the peasants and the workers. At the end of the Soviet and early post-Soviet era, dissidents managed to establish important public institutions to carry on their legacy – the Memorial Society, the Andrei Sakharov Center and the Moscow Helsinki group. But as Arseny Roginsky, a former dissident and the long-serving head of Memorial, said, the greatest challenge was to find real resonance and sympathy within the Russian population.
What are the implications for Russia today?
The fact that the dissidents did not generate wider sympathy in Russia was evident when Putin liquidated all three of the aforementioned organisations in the buildup to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. There was barely a ripple of public protest against this crackdown, which was done quite deliberately in order to pre-emptively silence and destroy the institutions that would have most likely served as platforms for criticism of the war. That really represents the final death of the dissident movement – at least for now.
How did you become interested in Russia?
I learnt the language in school with a brilliant teacher, although he was quite an unpleasant man who once cleaned the blackboard with a schoolboy’s blazer with the boy still inside it. I studied Russian at Cambridge, did a doctorate on Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Enlightenment, and then taught at the University of East Anglia and Birmingham University. Wherever I went, they seemed to close the Russian department down. Interest was on the decline from 1972 until my retirement. There had been this explosive growth after the Sputnik and the hydrogen bomb. Everyone said ‘Oh my god, the Russians are years ahead of us. We're all doomed. Everybody's got to learn Russian. We've got to catch up with the Russians.’ Then the bubble burst.
How did you get involved in translation?
My first translation was for the Potato Marketing Board, and I scandalised them by sending a bill for £100. After a hiatus of a few decades, I went to a conference in Moscow on how to encourage British schools to teach more Russian. It was lavishly funded by some unwise body and had zero impact. At the end Valentina Jacques, the editor of Soviet Literature, who was looking for native speakers to replace her aged Russian translators, asked for volunteers and everyone put their hands up. She said, "I can only pay you in non-convertible rubles." One idiot kept his hand up. I thought translation might be fun. And so it proved.
How did the Navalny project come about?
Normally a publisher gets in touch and says “I've got this text I want translated, how much do you want and when can we have it by?” This was the other way around. I won the PEN Translates! prize for Anna Politkovskaya’s book Putin’s Russia in 2004. Someone who had been in the audience got in touch 16 years later and said “There's this project, but I can't tell you who the book is by. It’ll all be shrouded in secrecy because lives could be at stake". It wasn’t difficult to guess what it was. I had a Zoom call from Alexei Navalny a couple of days after that. He was in Germany, and it was only a bit over a month after he'd come out of a coma but he was surprisingly together. He subjected me to a burst of flattery and über-charisma and said how wonderful it was that I was going to translate his book. He had my dog-like devotion from then on.
How did you get his writing to translate?
I worked with his literary agents in New York, and started getting bits and pieces of text. He was writing quite steadily in Germany. Then of course he went back to Russia, which rather startled the agents. He was taken to an FSB holding prison and given pencil and paper there. Then in mysterious ways his text was smuggled out. Gradually it got more and more difficult. This went on in dribs and drabs for four years. There was a lot of stuff on Instagram. I translated everything as soon as I got it and sent it back speedily because you were never quite sure what was going to happen next.
What were the challenges of this translation?
Security problems made it difficult. Normally when you translate a book you'll do a first draft which is rubbish, and a second draft which is at least accurate, and then a third draft where you're trying to make it begin to read like English. Then you print it out and all the things that you thought were fine actually turn out not to be fine. The printout gets covered in red ink and you write in all the amendments. You end up reading the text from start to finish three or four times. With this translation, I really didn't get to read it in its entirety until it was typeset. Normally you have plenty of time to read and reread but in the end we were very much up against the clock.
Were there any last minute surprises?
Just when I thought I'd finished and it was ready to be sent off to the printer, another 30,000 words of text arrived which the publisher wanted translated in a week, which was a physical impossibility. I got in touch with my good friend Steven Dalziel and he came to the rescue. Between us we got through the new text and it was slotted in. The thing that surprised me in it was Alexei’s writing about his religion. He mentions that when his daughter was born he decided materialism wasn't enough to explain this small bawling phenomenon, and he became quite religious. The end of the book is very Christian. He became a martyr for truth.
What did you think of his style of writing?
I loved it. I enjoyed translating it. I'd seen Alexei on YouTube when he seemed very serious, but talking to him personally you got a real sense of his personality. That was very helpful. Translators are trying to be actors, to do the voice. Readers have been struck by the fact that, considering how grim the circumstances were, he always found something to laugh about.
Were any words difficult to translate?
I have a stack of specialist dictionaries, but one word I had trouble with is “sukhari”. In the end, I translated it as toasties. Alexei describes prisoners going to great culinary lengths with little bits of dried bread and notes the things they would put on them. He was in a cell doing this when another prisoner suddenly realised, “I'm making toasties with Alexei Navalny”. He said it was always a good moment when someone discovered he actually existed.
How would you compare Navalny and Putin?
I think Putin was following everything closely, and Alexei tended to be pleased when the next turn of the screw came because it showed Putin was scared. The thing that came over was just how positive Alexei was. I've always felt there's a resentful negativity fuelling Putin: he seems incapable of smiling properly. Alexei was just bursting with positive vibes. Two very different human beings.
What do you consider the central message of Patriot?
Don’t compromise with evil, and never give up.
Do you have any concerns about your own safety?
I am aware of being watched, kept an eye on. Putin relies on intimidation. I went to a talk by Vladimir Kara-Murza recently and somebody asked him if he wasn’t scared. He said you just cut yourself off from that. Either you're going to live your life and do your work or you aren't. I mentioned at a talk that four of my authors have been murdered and somebody asked if I thought I might be next. I don't expect so, but the work has to be done. Giving voice to people who ought to be heard strikes me as a worthy occupation.
What are your next projects?
I started off translating fiction, short stories and novels. As the years have gone by and Russia has got more and more grim the work has been increasingly non-fiction, political commentary and memoirs. One or two of my authors have been silenced by intimidation. One or two are under the radar. Right now I’m working on an unusual novel set in the Middle Ages, about the birth of scientific thinking in Europe and how the pioneers tended to get martyred as heretics. The power of a reactionary Catholic Church was under threat and it was lashing out, devoid of new thinking and trying to return everything to the way it had been before.
What is your background?
I was born in a little town on the border between Russia and China. When I was about one year old, my parents took me to Sakhalin Island. I was 15 when I first went to the United States thanks to a piece of legislation called Freedom Support Act, a US government-sponsored programme. I was placed with a family in Texas. We were taught to admire the wonders of American democracy and partake of freedom, and enriched by this wonderful experience, go back to Russia and make it into this wonderful new democratic place. That obviously did not quite work, but I'm still very grateful to the American taxpayer and to Senator Bill Bradley, the programme’s key advocate, for coming up with this idea because otherwise I would never have left Sakhalin. I later went to Hong Kong, then London for my BSc at the London School of Economics and PhD, and then I lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales before settling in Italy.
What inspired you to write this book?
I was working on Soviet relations with Asia, because I had amassed a huge collection of Chinese documents that no historian had had access to, and I thought I would build on that. But then around 2013–14 the Russians suddenly declassified vast troves of archival records on the Cold War. When I saw what was there, I thought I would have to write a broader book. We thought we knew everything about the Cold War but it turns out we didn't: there was a lot more to learn from the new evidence. So I spent months and months in Moscow collecting documents, which led to led me to arrive at a different interpretation of the Cold War. It is one that a lot of people will find very controversial, but it spoke to my understanding of the evidence in front of me.
What is your central thesis?
We used to think that the Marxist-Leninist ideology was what explained Soviet foreign policy. Yet I found that formal ideology – the things you might have gleaned from reading Pravda editorials and speeches by top party leaders – mattered but little in policy decisions. What defined the Soviet approach to the world was a striving for recognition and, through recognition, legitimacy. Some say the Soviets had an inferiority complex. And yet, in some areas, the Soviets were not inferior. They were a major military power. They had nuclear weapons and they could, in their eyes at least, claim a certain position in the global pecking order. The striving for external recognition implied that they knew that power by itself was not enough. They wanted their power, and their position in the world, to be legitimised by other great powers, especially by the United States and China.
What about the idea of the multipolar world?
We find this term already in the 1994, in a joint Sino-Russian declaration. In 1997 Beijing and Moscow pledged to facilitate a multipolar world and built up a “new international order.” This was almost thirty years ago. The rhetoric is remarkably similar to what we hear Putin and Xi Jinping talking about today. The idea of a multipolar world was at least in part a reaction to Russia’s diminished status post-Cold War, and reflected a need to find some worthy place for Russia, even if the country was no longer number two or on a par with the United States. President Boris Yeltsin had hoped for American recognition of Russia as a major partner, and initially expected American deference to Russia’s wishes at least in Europe. For example, he expected that the United States would accept his opposition to NATO’s eastward enlargement. By the mid 1990s it became clear that Russia could not count on this. And so you have a reorientation of Russian foreign policy away from the great Bill-Boris relationship towards more of the multipolar approach that Evgeny Primakov had valued in his time, this idea of engagement with the east, with India and China. But this idea preceded Yeltsin. It was, after all, Gorbachev, who re-engaged with China in the late 1980s, developed close personal ties with India’s Rajiv Gandhi, and even tried to bring China and India into a triangle with Soviet participation, a would-be precursor to BRICS.
What parallels do you draw with Putin’s policies today?
Putin's approach to international affairs has some of the same obsessions and concerns that drove the Soviets in their time during the Cold War. He still desires recognition. He feels that Russia is endowed by virtue of its special qualities to occupy a special place in the global pecking order. The major point of continuity of course is the nuclear arsenal. Putin wants Russia's greatness recognised and the way he interprets greatness is somewhat similar to the way the Soviet leaders perceived it: that their neighbours defer to them, that they have a sphere of influence in their immediate neighbourhood, that everybody listens to them because they're so dangerous and can destroy the world.
What are the implications for the war against Ukraine?
Putin decided that the way to project Russian power and therefore reacquire recognition as one of the great powers of the world and perhaps the main power broker in Europe was to begin a war against Ukraine. There's certainly a continuity to the Soviet preoccupation with weakening Europe and breaking up NATO. The end goal is pretty clear. The purpose is to come back to Europe but on Russia's terms: ‘We've won and you all have to accept it and deal with Russia on these new terms’. The emphasis is on recognition that Russia is not just a kid in the back of the classroom or a regional player or a gas station with nuclear missiles but a major power that holds the fate of Europe in its hands.
How to interpret Trump in his relations with Russia?
In the late 1940s Stalin learned, quite to his disappointment, that the Americans did not think in 19th century imperial terms. For the United States, it mattered that the Soviets imposed a communist government, for instance, on Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. But Stalin resented what he saw as U.S. interference in his sphere of influence. Such interference, he thought, meant that the Americans were not willing to recognise the Soviet Union as an equal power. The vision of Yalta fell apart very quickly and this led to the Cold War. Yet today we have an American president who thinks more like President McKinley: that America should control the western hemisphere, and the east and Europe can sort themselves out. Trump doesn't seem to care all that much for what’s happening in Ukraine. That’s good news for Putin because he feels that thereby his so called sphere of influence is being implicitly or even explicitly recognised. The difference is that whereas in 1945 the Soviet Union was in a position to project power into the heart of Europe, today the Russians are stuck in Eastern Ukraine, not making a lot of progress. Indeed, Ukraine itself is a powerful country with a modern military. You also have Western Europeans who collectively represent a much greater force than the Russians could ever muster. So the Europeans and the Ukrainians have agency. But to my mind, unless they can actually rally, it will be very difficult to achieve the outcome in Ukraine that we all hope for, if America keeps on with its current policy of trying to coerce Ukraine into a very unfavourable peace.
What is Russia’s view towards China?
They have a certain fear of China, but one also gets a sense that the current relationship is very close. This relationship took the better part of the last 40 years to construct and so it's not just about Xi and Putin. It has deeper roots and a shared understanding that a conflict – like what they had in the 1960s and 1970s –isn’t in their interest. They understand that the last time they had a conflict, they were both taken advantage of, with the United States playing them against one another. They have broadly compatible domestic political orders. It's also clear that the Russian and Chinese economies are broadly compatible and their trade is not insubstantial. So there are economic, political and historical reasons to stick together. I don't think they truly fundamentally understand each other's intentions. They have to cope with a certain absence of trust, a legacy of a very complicated, often fractious, relationship between two imperial powers that spans more than three centuries.
What surprised you most during your research?
It was fun to discover occasional smoking guns that clarified an aspect of history that we did not understand. For example, I found evidence in the Chinese archives that showed Stalin authorising the North Korean invasion of South Korea because the Soviets intercepted American cable traffic and were able to figure out that the United States would not defend South Korea. This shows the importance of intelligence intercepts for policy making. Another piece of evidence concerned the Cuban missile crisis. The new evidence shows just how worried Khrushchev was about the possibility of an accidental nuclear war with the United States. He fumed at the Cuban leader Fidel Castro for suggesting a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S. Khrushchev thought Castro’s position was completely crazy and, for his part, he decided to de-escalate, even earlier than we thought. In principle, Khrushchev was willing to pull the plug on his Cuban misadventure just two days after John F. Kennedy’s public declaration of “quarantine” around Cuba, though, as we know, it took several days of negotiations before he officially “blinked”.
What is your next project?
It’s a book on how the Soviet Union and Russia have used energy as a weapon of foreign policy, from the late 1950s through today. And then I might do a comprehensive history of the Russia-Ukraine war if at that point the war is over. The key thing is going to be to extract myself from the immediacy of the moment. People will move on and maybe in a couple of years it'll be possible to at least write a comprehensive history based on oral testimony. I like that kind of contemporary history. There are many things that are still uncertain but it’s fun to be the first historian attempting to impose an interpretation on events that we have just been living through.
What first interested you in Russia?
It goes back to the dawn of time! Aged 15, I started learning Czech to annoy my German teacher when we were studying Grillparzer’s play on King Ottokar being happy to be taken over by the Austrians, which I thought was very unfair to the Czechs. I cycled to Prague that year, the first bicycle to go across the German frontier since the war. At Cambridge, the Byzantine expert Nikolai Andreev told me I was an idiot not to study the great Russian language. I took an early Intourist bus to Russia in 1960 full of Australian communists. I went to Kazan on an overnight train, but noticed a man wearing a heavy raincoat in the hot weather following me. He and another KGB agent sent me back to Moscow with a soldier.
When did you first become interested in the Crimean Tatars?
I took a minibus load of students to Abramtsevo in 1969 where we had to give a concert. We sang about the news: the Prague Spring, Solzhenitsyn and the dissident movement that sparked off the Crimean Tatars led by the war hero General Grigorenko. The audience was paralysed with shock and I was summoned to a big committee of the KGB which threatened never to let me back into the Soviet Union. So I became interested in the background, but it wasn't until really Putin took over Crimea that I got seriously interested – by which time unfortunately it was too late to revisit.
Why did you decide to write your book?
The Russians had reprinted Alexander Smirnov’s 1888 history of Crimea, which is actually very good, except that it concluded that the best fate possible for the Crimean Tatars was to become part of the Russian Empire. I thought there’s a lot to be retold here, so I started reading about it and became fascinated. I learned from Georgia that the smaller, the country the more complicated the politics. The Crimean Tatar language is related to Turkish, which I had always fiddled with but never learned it properly even though I've got a Turkish daughter-in-law and Turkish-speaking grandchildren. So I had to improve my Turkish and adjust to Crimean Tatar.
How easy was it to conduct the research?
There was so much destruction that there are hardly any Crimean Tartar manuscripts left. The Russians burnt all they could find after an 1833 law was passed forbidding the possession of any writing in the language. All that's left are the court judgments and the trading documents. But luckily when the Tatars came back to Crimea in the 1990s, they began really feverish work recovering everything they could and digitising it, so it wasn’t really a hindrance that I had no access to archives in Crimea and St Petersburg. The Ottomans published quite a lot, and there is material in archives in Leiden, Calcutta and Cairo. The British consuls’ reports are very boring – they were determined to write to not offend. But the French consuls had a whale of a time, and wrote dramatically. Nantes has a wonderful archive: most came out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s when De Gaulle exchange them for Georgian museum treasures.
What surprised you when conducting your research?
The cultural interests of some of the khans are striking. They could be extraordinarily brutal but were also highly educated: they were musicians, poets, spoke perfect Farsi and Turkish. Some were extremely interested in building bridges and aqueducts. They were very tolerant. That was part of their Mongol heritage: the early khans would go to church, there was no discrimination, Jews were allowed to have their own courts. Their judges were incorruptible and there was a belief in education: teachers were paid well and girls were schooled. They had the highest literacy rates in the Ottoman empire. They also had impressive technical achievements in warfare: we still don’t know the secret of their short bows that could be faster than bullets. They were very lightly equipped: the Poles would arrive on heavy chargers and the Tatar troops would fight them stripped to their underpants riding ponies. They also had an extraordinary intelligence service and strong commercial skills: they would send out German and Lithuanian captives as spies ahead of war to learn about their enemies’ fortifications and to estimate the value of their houses to work out how much they could seek in ransom or to sell exemptions from looting.
What’s your assessment of the Crimean Tatars?
They are very unlucky. They've been missed out in history because nobody quite knows what they are, whether they're part of the Ottoman Empire or whether they are really an independent country – a bit like Canada or Australia as dominions in the British Empire. Some wars the Tatars fought with the mother country. Some they fought on their own. Some they refused to fight for the mother country like the Australians before the Boer war. We've never expelled anyone from the Commonwealth, but the Ottomans got so fed up with the Tatars that they expelled them and handed them to the Russians. Their historical weakness was that they switch sides terribly easily, at the drop of a hat. The other mistake they made was basing a lot of their wealth on slaving. And they took white Christian slaves, which the Ottomans rarely did. Nobody really likes my title 'Seditious and Sinister' but I thought it at least attracts attention. It was symbolic of that attitude towards them by others.
What is your view on the different contemporary claims on Crimea?
After ethnic cleansing, Crimea is now probably 75-80 percent Russian. Nearly all the Tatars have gone. For some it's quite difficult because they've got Russian passports. The only thing they can do if they have the money is get to Azerbaijan, where at least they understand the language. Within Russia, they're not popular, and they tend to get drafted into the army. That’s terrible for them because one side or the other is going to have them shot for desertion. The Crimeans have been reduced in size so often that you think the gene pool must now be too small for recovery. There's a big enough core in Ukraine, and they've discovered their links with Ukraine. If you slant the history sufficiently, you do get a Ukrainian-Tatar union. Very often the Tatars and the Ukrainians were in alliance against the Poles and in alliance against the Russians, but every now and again they turned.
What are your next projects?
After I'd finished the book, I found to my fury that I'd missed something very important. In Dalston in a little restaurant, the leading Crimean Tatar novelist had been writing novels at night in Turkish for 60 years while serving Turkish lunches and suppers by day. He is the only Crimean Tatar to leave a Solzhenitsyn-like series of stories. I'm translating a sample of his work to see if I can interest a publisher. I’m also retranslating Turgenev’s Smoke. He’s such a smooth stylist. It’s a classic, and I usually find something previous translators got wrong and how they plagiarise each other. I am having the diary of Tatiana Korsh (granddaughter of a Moscow theatre-owner, then a doctor who died young, treating Serbian peasants) tested in Germany for a DNA match to Anton Chekhov: there is strong circumstantial evidence for believing she may be Anton Chekhov's daughter. If the DNA match is positive, there is a rather sensational story to be told.