his sense of russia's direction could be preserved i absolutely agree because i think that. the personalization of this regime has been in many ways accidental that there are some who believe that putin or it has some grand plan for power and so forth i don't believe so i think actually this is been much more responsive as you say to the moments and changes and individual circumstances but absolutely we now have a system which is basically built around the shape of one man and it's very hard to see how my friends build around the shape of one man i think there's some truth in that there's a lot of mythology all systems have a lot of mythology about the moment at the moment both sides in the u.k. trying to mobilize their sort of particular image of how they think the british system ought to work well likewise in russia yes there is absolutely this personalization but i think it is actually true that this is a system which has come to depend on the central of the of one man not least as the sort of final arbiter of all kinds of different disputes within the at leat the

countrywide welting that i mentioned in the beginning of the program it is coming on september 8th and it's going to involve all 84 regions of russia not just moscow and those regions have huge disparities in terms of social economic political development i know that you've been planning a lot about the moscow developments and we will talk about them in a moment but i'm just curious as an expert on russia have you looked at all into what's happening election wise beyond moscow i call pundits and i like to say we're talking grand terms but no i mean i think seriously if you look at it local elections are very much about local issues woman thing else and it's quite interesting that we have a situation in which you the way the old the old identifiers of quite what united russia stood for beginning to break down. and therefore i think that most of these elections really going to be in some ways referendum on just how well the local administration is is seen as deep. with what are sometimes serious crises sometimes

not and doesn't this sort of mean that where we're trying to hold people will be voting against the regime but i think this is this is why it's important and this is why in some ways the the whole issue of the protests in moscow absolutely very important but they're also a distraction for what local elections are meant to be about which is precisely it's about local issues the reason i'm asking this is because in several of your interviews are heard you say that russian elections i'm not real elections and admittedly there is still fraud and manipulation going on some of it being caught on camera installed at the expense of the state but there also i would say some positive developments i mean last and a year ago the whole gubernatorial elections in the far east where canceled because of the fraud and arguably this is a much more unusual than protests in moscow don't you think that there's perhaps a day attention is being skewed from russia as a whole as

a country to you know just a couple of individuals who are aiming for that attention. i wouldn't want to make that i mean to go would go into my point about elections not being real elections my point in that is that i mean there is no in my opinion truly meaningful opposition within this is the systemic opposition parties the cold minutes the so-called liberal democrats and so forth secondly there is a huge mobilization of administered resource before it's not just about stuffing ballot boxes it's also about precisely who gets what posters and so forth now that does not mean that this is not democratic. in the sense of that there is no democracy this is not a no for a terrorism pretending to be a democracy this is a a strange system that is something between this is change system dad was clinically dad 15 or 20 years ago and that is trying to make something of itself i mean it's not you know sort of looking from the top down it's china to pull it solved by the bootstraps that's

a critical difference and i think that's how you should consider the trajectory is it getting better more transparent or is it you know getting worse this is one reason why unfashionably optimistic about russia trajectory in a way we have 3 different processes the kind of coming together there is and this is the sort of the story of often sort of deeply corrupt or lazy local elites who just simply want to continue to hold power so then there is the fact we do have pressure from russians to actually have a say in their in their own lives and what matters around them and then it doesn't necessarily mean they're anti kremlin i mean you know for some it's absolutely that they want more of the same and so forth but nonetheless the point is our voices need to be heard that lets me just as you can tell the 3rd element which is which is actually the kind of the role of the kremlin which again is too often characterized simply as well we want to control what's going on it's not this is not a regime in my opinion that wants to just simply rig everything it wants it needs

enthusiasm it needs legitimacy it wants change on the control what it once had was to improve the system but it was. to kibitz perhaps sometimes too tight control of the process is that a fair summation it is you now i want to ask you specifically about the moscow developments in moscow elections and the response to them i personally decided that i'm not going to be voting because i think the system out for italy demonstrated its bias and if you look at the pauls the majority of moscow it's sort of tend to agree of bab they look positively at the protest necessarily supporting any specific candidates how important is that distinction people wanting a fair process versus people who are rooting for specific political personalities what do you think the moscow protests are all about yeah i agree if this is not specifically about india yashin or any of the other kind of specific kind of i mean

obviously some will but the protests manifestation as a whole is precisely because only a terribly clumsy way in which the these candidates were just excluded on the most grounds the issue is just simply we have posters everywhere saying almost in september we got a chance to choose and yet we're not being allowed to choose it's not about the specific candidates and that is it for me is a very positive sign because it actually says that apathy is not dominant russians do not feel that the structures do not matter in the slightest instead they just saying no they have elections let's have elections and these many problems you won't be voting the frustrating things i understand that president putin's district doesn't have a kind of a pro fishel candidate he's in charge choice between the communists the liberal democrats who are into the just russia i don't know if he'll be voting. well i think for now here try to kind of stay above the 5 but how do you think this thing

may be conceptualized in the kremlin because this ultimately will define the course of action because if that thing is seen as you know. a couple of troublemakers supported by the west trying to stir trouble that calls for. you know course of action but if you actually see that as a social demand for you know an evolution of the electoral system to require something else yeah i mean this is one of the things which from from point of view of it outside observer it's an incredibly hard to really get at what actually what is what is going through the minds of the people that relative handful of people who are making decisions the interesting thing is that i think that just as this is a dispute in the struggle in wider society about the future of russia this is also kind of an intellectual dispute that's going on behind the kremlin walls there are absolutely those who seem to genuinely believe that this is a result of subversion supported by the by the foreign powers and such like and there are others who i'm sure know full well that it's not and it's that struggle

that the rhythms backing out of almost a sort of a security driven approach compared with the social political driven approach and on this particular point the security people seem to have had the upper hand now what we don't know is whether or not. when decisions are made about ok well how do they go with a decision movie made well that was a stupid move it was crazy unnecessary protests or whether it was actually decided that yes we have to admit this in the bud we'll have to wait and see now speaking about security response there is a lot of speculation in moscow about why the authorities chose to ask only the situation because indeed they were very have a hand and sometimes violent more than a 1000 people detained some of them in pretty cruel and brutal way and one of the theory that at least resonated with me was expressed by alexander by enough of the carnegie moscow center who said that both the opposition and the authorities see that as a task from the for future elections specifically parliamentary elections in 2021

and the presidential vote in 2024 and he said just 30 there 30 is decided to preemptively. surgery as he put it on an abscess died as not he had dangerous and give themselves. sort of a training exercise for how to put down a future of revolution do you agree with that do you think the russian opposition non-systemic opposition as you put it has and now if you actually put together revolution i don't think there's any prospect of that i don't think the russian people want to revolution they want change but that's a very different thing from a revolution if they are if you are somewhat what i think of revolution i think 1917 they maybe think 991 that's not examples that really commend themselves to them and to be honest the authorities or the moment the coercive power they could me if that is indeed the assessment that was made if it was

a well we think we're going to face this that speaks to something that i've been feeling which is actually that one of the problems of the moment is you have an elite i mean how do you define that. this feeling nervous and jumping the doesn't know what the future holds as a whole issue about what happens in 2024 you know whether or not putin remains in power all of these things leaving them feeling particularly nervous and therefore they tend to overreact and i think particularly after we had the. church case and then we also had the case of the journalist people who move but it is a very we 2 way too often we need to show a strong current you mentioned those cases before i even put them in bus with but i think there is a huge difference between what happened in the you could sit and work and they were on gloves because there is a fairly i mean genuinely to mastic and local issues and the authorities have to respond to them but when it comes to the opposition it's also quite clear that the 0 they opposition is not being fully transparent because some of the people of

those rejected candidates are genuine city activists with proven track record of meaningful c.d.o. work and some of them are just being loud and trying to you know attract attention or take aim at the kremlin i would suggest that the protest is something that the kremlin or the authorities may view totally different way perhaps through the prism of national security which is you know the ultimate priority here for all governments and russia show but look i mean again i would absolutely agree that i'm sure that the majority of the high profile candidates who are trying to stand in these elections were not doing so because of the excitement well you're talking about. but that it's entirely normal for people to regard local politics as a stepping stone for national politics the whole thing about that. there are certain countries but i think russia has somewhat different tradition don't you think so i mean from a point of view of society as a whole do you think it's worthwhile to make saab those. you know those causes i

mean if you really want to have genuine democracy more transparency in the system doesn't it make sense to kind of grow it from from the grassroots and. allow this broader representation at least on the local level and in this case the local level is the entire city of moscow the thing about democracy is that it is not the state's job to decide what is the right not the states job in the great britain bad in russia things don't work quite the same right i think no i mean i look i appreciate that there oversea going to be differences between countries but when it comes down to it it's for the electorate decide no this candidate he's not standing for the right reasons and therefore i'm not going to vote for him or her or actually sure this person is regarding this as a sort of a stepping stone but still i think they can do some go to whatever it's a really dangerous position when the state the signs of these persons reasons not good enough mark we have to take a short break now but he will be back in just a few moments stay tuned.

join me every thursday on the all excitement show and i'll be speaking to us of the world of politics small business i'm show business i'll see you that.

welcome back to worlds apart with margot professor at university college london mark here very prolific writer but there is one book i as a. payroll propagandist concepts that this is your treaties and put in a published earlier this year called we need to talk about putin why are we and why do we need to do that well the subtitle of the book is why the west gets in row. the we is the the outside world and this book which i freely admit is many ways simply a rant and that isn't to say why everyone else gets it wrong and why i am right tackles many over think the very dangerous myths that surround putin and as a result of that russia are heard you say da book was in part a response to your frustrations about how russia is being portrayed in the western

media and the amount of caricature is in cliches that misguided it is discourse and yet in chapter 3 you make a reference to put in type $1.00 and you go on to claim that it is quote trying to get us to treat russia as if it were much more than 1.7 meters tall. is that analysis well i mean that is actually a cheap shot obviously but it is a way that a straight shooter has written for a general audience the fact that actually russia is a country with an economy the size of italy which is nonetheless seeking to sort of punch its weight as if it's a global power in the world but if you're making it about size and russia is still the largest country in the world in terms of its territories at least you know on the level you got your matter 1st misaligned but what i'm watching i think it's a perfectly adequate metaphor in that sense i mean sure russia has a launch country but simple signs in this respect of a coin

a phrase doesn't matter well i well in fact do you claim that it does because you're not trying to only taking a person's immutable characteristic such as hi but you're actually applying it to his whole country and inferring something from it we should leave me to ask how tall are you. i only. find 11 i mean on a map which is the only answer now with the. only 10. to 21 line of the book somehow i can credibly important but the one to point that i make a great selling is not about to war even himself it is understand the point not just about food and i mean i'm happy making fun of putin because i mean i find it to be the oldest cliche out how they are i mean it's the most i mean it's essentially you're making it an argument about penis envy you're saying that putin is short and that's why he's trying to make russia greater than it is show you that this and that only read the bill clinton for you know for trying to just know that

for you to think that your is a narrative about russia that's highly ironic to have that in the book no no i mean can you sort of someone who hasn't read the book were thinking that somehow this is the sort of central strand one throwaway line the crucial point is nothing to do with penis envy or whatever it is to do with actually the kind of. totally predictable post-imperial issue of when a country which was once a superpower literally overnight suddenly goes through this the psychological trauma of becoming another power i mean for in fact one of the rest of the world thinks that he is negligible or a problem it is not about putin himself it is about russia is about a country that actually suddenly has to kind of get. some kind of understanding which new place in the world and in the process is actually doing surprisingly effectively a job of actually getting the world to treat it as if it were much larger stronger richer than it really is you know obviously claim that russia is not

a great country by any objective measure and the measure that the you most often mention is g.d.p. the size of the economy you just mentioned it here i want to ask you as a historian do you think a country like russia that it's very non-linear development where it's huge asymmetries with its size with its weaponry with this cult of its interests and ambitions can it really be imagined by such a yardstick as g.d.p. you know no single yardstick and encompass it and i think i was mentioning i mean again maybe i'm being overly pedantic i mean i think russia actually is a great country i say it's not a great power obviously all countries have a whole variety of different sort of asymmetric strengths whether it's soft power whether it's location it's more that you might say i find that in the west there is too easily either. treating russia as if it's some kind of developing world country which is totally negligible importance or conversely at the other end treating it

as if it has this massive existential threat to the point is one that one and i do on that g.d.p. issues not that i think that is the single the own you know benchmark of everything but on the other hand it is one of the few objective standards we do very well look i interview a lot of prominent economists on this tour and every one of them complains that g.d.p. . is reductionist even when you talk about a country's economy russia has proven the record of doing more with the last how do you come for that there is a huge intellectual capital here in terms of imagination entrepreneurial ism but as president secondly just in the nuts and bolts terms it's the fact that because for example the russian military mines russian you know you don't have a sort of a dollar for ruble comparison makes no sense a really russian defense spending is about triple in real terms what the straightforward sort of an international measure would be and the russia can also develop certain technologies in in a very sure the amount of time and i don't know if you take put into words at face

value but what he's actually arguing right now is that russia has nuclear superiority over the united states imagining sam if that's true and i don't think you would be lying about it in his state of the nation address he's to legally stick for that if that's true that's an enormous achievement for a country that was on the brink of collapse just a couple of decades ago isn't it well no i would say it's not i mean i would say that's actually a depressing indicator because that is not what russia needs what an earth does nuclear superiority mean how many times you need to blow up the world how many tons are enough i would suggest one will do the point is this obsession with security which is frankly increasingly antiquated because nato is not about to roll across the borders or whatever it is to me a problem and i think it's going to i decide it's a tragic problem because there's so much that could be done in russia that is not being done precisely because of the continued heavy spend on the defense talk about that because in your book you provide your take on dave aleutian of thinking

especially his approach to foreign policy and you talk about all those familiar things nato and dominik security conference but one thing you never mention is libya even though everyone in moscow would tell you that this was a tit moment for. personally and for russia. i mean there are many people who believe that putin made a decision to come back to presidency in 2012 precisely because of how he processed the libyan affair you don't think it's important at all you know i do and i think it fits into a much much wider thing that i do talk about in the book which is putin's belief not without reason that the basically the west is sanctimoniously hypocritical that the west talks about the importance of you know international norms and following all the rules and so forth and you have to think north of those rules when it is in its own interests and that's something that is clear putin is both angry about and most and feels that she represents

a challenge to russia the wave of fairness for process and kremlin. they showed the absolute negligence if not to say stupidity oh western thinking western foreign policy because if you have a president like obama arguably the most educated the most risk averse of the american presidents not only destroy him he's just another arab country of giving so little consideration to geo strategic factors libya's geographic position its role in constraining the african migration and the consequences that migration can have on america's closest allies in europe doubts that realisation is really scary and shows that the west is incapable of foreseen obvious dangers to itself let alone dangerous to russia i mean what ends up to war and some existential anxiety on russia's part seeing what was done to one of the most prosperous countries on the african continent because it's essentially been turned into one large slave

market and nobody nobody faced any count ability now i mean you're absolutely right in this no way no one will get me to defend western policy over only being in that respect but i think coming certainly in in my conversations with the people in moscow who are more connected into the sort of security scene. it's not just simply that the west messed up in effect the west as most go sees it play bait and switch they persuaded the russians to go along with what seemed to be very very limited military action and they use that as an excuse to basically nurture regime change campaign and the campaign that have major repercussions for the west itself not just for libi i mean who cares about those inner arabs but for the west itself because the migration crisis is going to attack the west for years to come the consequences a massive and you also. kind of have this mantra. the west needs to stand united to face off to russia that is supposedly waging

a political campaign against the west but done she think that perhaps western actions are also objectively can she be doing to russia's great fear of insecurity and of course i mean and this is this is a part of the book which actually i'm making it clear that there is this is not about russia being the geopolitical villain there are things it does that i think all maybe villainous shall we say but on the other hand the whole point is to also try and give people a sense of how the world may look from a different perspective and absolutely from from a different perspective 11 can see you know even under barack obama actually the united states becomes a more and more embroiled in foreign adventures in foreign adventures that were for the drone and so for the highly destabilizing measures. and in in that case there is inevitably going to be a sort of a pressure on russia to feel that won't we know we can't rely on international order to provide our own security do you understand all correctly that if the west

wants russia to change its posture. to change its posture 1st is that a fair summation. i'm a little hesitant about saying who has to go 1st but the tragedy i feel at the moment is we have a system in which basically both sides a locked into into processes i mean a microcosm let's look at the american sanctions regime which has no clear off ramp this is not done something that we think is wrong these are the sanctions and if you fix it the sanctions go away it's basically we don't like you the russians would argue it's always been this way but now now this is just the last draft well i mean obviously i mean you know one can get into the whole with the russians feel that way yes and there is also an element of russian victimology i would suggest that you know what i mean when it comes down to it it is not actually that i think one can say oh the russians are all bad this certainly is not the case that the west is all good there are absolutely things that the west needs to be doing and what i would like to see is much much less of the totally counterproductive

rhetorical struggles we see against russia that it's you know it's become an easy way of getting certain audiences to approach you is to come up with cheap russian bashing and that helps no one markets always great pleasure talking to you think you are for indulging me with this conversation my pleasure and. our viewers can keep this conversation going in our social media pages and i hope to see you again same place same time here in the wilds of part.

2 what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation let it be an arms race in this on off and spearing dramatic. evolved to only going to exist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very chaotic at a time time to sit down and talk. with the whole make this manufacture consensus instead of public wealth. when the ruling classes protect themselves. in the final merry go round certainly the one percent. whole middle of the room 6. 1000000 real new.

during the great depression which i'm old enough to remember there was most of my family were unemployed working. there wasn't it was bed much worse objectively than today but there was an expectation that things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hopefulness there isn't today today's america was shaped by the turn principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy attack solo doubt engineer elections manufacture consent and other principles according to no on chomsky one set of rules for the rich officer said. that's what happens when you put her into the hands of a narrow sector of will switch rule is dedicated to increasing power for chills just as you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks

about the modern civilization of america. i. ready ready ready ready ready am sure to stop at the continuing to grow. i just never know very good about the idea of bringing shoulder room into the world because i didn't feel like things were in very good shape. life was just going to be a lot of software program. there is no reason in the world you take things that are already made the. move is a move something else that. everybody's scared to talk about is certifiable is

really dependent on us addressing this issue and if we can't even talk about it and we can't even have a conversation of that it then. we're in trouble. ready is wrong and school is russia commemorates the victims of a militant seats 15 years ago when over 1000 people were taken hostage we talked to survivors of the deadliest terror attack at the country's modern history as they revisit the site of the massacre. destroyed jeans show blue to. apply to put at the supply wish were supposed to be broken or should. have been speeded. suppressed should. tens of thousands take to the streets across

the u.k. as prime minister bars johnson's.