Particularly announced wednesday by Vladimir Putin shifting Greater Authority to parliament which has left many wondering what this means about putins own plans to relinquish the presidency or not in a few years. So we are especially fortunate to have with us this evening an expert on putins russia, joshua yaffa who is the moscow correspondent for thenew yorker. Been covering russia for much of the past decade and his new book between two fires truth, ambition, compromise in putins russia offers a truly fascinating and revealing look at the impact of the putin era has had on above all the nations psyche and the moral struggles and calculations that Many Russians confront. Josh has written a very nuanced portrait ofrussia. Nothing like the simplistic view of that country, oppressed people lorded over by a kgb trained dictator area josh describes a people who fall somewhere between oppressor and oppressed, prone to compromise and accommodation with the state but still double and resourceful enough to try to turn the system to some advantage with mixed results. In his book he highlights the story of a number of individual russians who struggle to balance the strict and often arbitrary demands of a modern authoritarian regime with their own personal desires and conscience among the people he writes about our director of the countrys Main Television channel, an orthodox priest, a chechen human rights activist and a ukrainian zookeeper plus several others. In joshs telling these cases exemplify the persistence of a russian archetype, the wiley man as a leading sociologist put it. Someone prone to adapt to a repressive system by going along with it while also trying to circumvent its rule. Josh it interest in russia goes back to decades. He started learning russia in college and first visitedas a student in the summer of 2001. After getting a masters degree in journalism in International Affairs he worked as an associate editor at Foreign Affairs and then moved to moscow eight years ago. He reported from their first for the economist and several other publications before landing at the new yorker in 2015. Josh will be in conversation this evening with julia yockey who spent time covering russia for the new yorker as well as Foreign Policy between 2009 and 2012. In the year since julia has written for the new republic, the atlantic andcurrently covers National Security and Foreign Policy for gq magazine. It is and gentlemen please join me in welcoming bothjosh and julia. [applause] hello everyone. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. If you everybody for coming out tonight to see the wonderful gretchen sorin. We go back quite a number of years especially the time when josh had opened moscow to get his accreditation of the Foreign Ministry from Foreign Affairs magazine when i was accredited from the Foreign Policy magazine and they said josh, are you a girl . Anyway, this is a really, congratulations on what is a really terrific and really important book and as we were talking state i was saying to you im so glad youve written us because weve read too many books and weve also read so many books about and articles about the dissidents , opposition and thats like maybe 10 percent of the population. Dont hear a lot about the people who make do, who get by and as a rush of water im so glad youve written this was such a rich topic but i wanted to ask you about why you decided to write about this. And where the idea came from. Thanks for the generous introduction, thanks to you all for being here. The idea came to me slowly as i found i wasnt exactly able to capture what i was seeing and feeling about russia, maybe because i wasnt understanding the whole picture at first myself. When i arrived with that dichotomy that you mentioned of looking for the oppressors and looking for the oppressed and either wanting to label everyone a stalin or a neil stockholm one that makes for Good Journalism to appoint or easy journalism which from my perspective starting out was the same thing as good. But with time i realized i wasnt doing justice to the countries, to the people, to the place as i was beginning to understand it. There was a lot left out of the russian story or in fact the majority of the real russian story was left out of the picture i didnt totally have a conceptual framework for understanding what russia was and if it wasnt this battle, of perpetual unavoidable battle between putin and the opposition say or whatever form that takes throughout russian history, and so the prism of the wiley man which we can talk about in a bit will take up much of the prologue of the book was a way for making sense of what was going on in Russian Society and helping you understand the way that most people, like people everywhere in fact, this is not unique. To russia, that was the other , i dont want to say in because its so obvious and banal to a certain degree but underappreciated by me. How much dynamics by peoples lives in russia, are ultimately so familiar and universal to people who are simply trying to get by, todo , who have some notable, quite notable or at least understandable ambition or their life and what they want to accomplish and its about doing so in whatever reality they happen to be in. They cant change that larger macro reality but they can try and through our lives and this idea of liveliness , get accomplished what they can and in so doing often times they change through the process of those compromises and in aggregate society only changes overtime. And its also i think we were all drawn to this story of oppressor and oppressed because its an easy story but its a sexier story, this in a conflict and its also the prism that we see it from which we see it here in the last period of in many countries, theres a dictator, their Saddam Hussein and theres moammar tanabe and all the people who because theyre against cannot be they must be good and virtuous and then we dont know where to put her. Does this give you an insight into why things like that happen . Know, but it made me realize the more interesting for me field of journalistic inquiry was exactly that gray zone. Thats often times left unexplored but became an interesting psychological i guess problem for me to understand how it is that individuals navigated those circumstances and the characters in this book i purposely chose people who i couldnt come to some final conclusion about. Were they good or were they bad mark they were people who defied my categorization i would welcome other peoples choices in that regard and i wouldnt argue that objectively uncharacterized double but they were by me and thats what interested me and then thats how they ended up in the book, searching for the kinds of characters where even after sending how many hours them over months in places, years, i still couldnt them in the box of are they doing something noble or venal, related to be commended or criticized and i wasnt sure myself was important to me that thats where i landed with much of the charactersor rather the experience of the characters themselves. It didnt allow me to reach some kind of conclusive moral position. Before we get deeper into this you want outline what the wiley man, i think you are going to read something of what the wiley man is, who he or she is. Ill read a page and ahalf or so from the prologue. At the start of 2012, i moved back to moscow to work as a journalist covering russia for foreign audiences the economist and new yorker. In the western imagination russia is a nation held captive by a dictator interested in his power and profit. As the story goes putin boards over a population of 145 million people, locking them in a cage welded shut by propaganda and repression yet over the course of several years as i reported on a period of major turmoil and change for russia, three protests the winter i arrived, extravagant reparations for the winter olympics, the annexation of crimea, standoff with the west over the war in ukraine, fallout from allegations of meddling and collusion in the us president ial election and the combined total of sanctions and economic crisis, im ordinary russians who showed no sign of somehow being held against their will. These were not necessarily enthusiastic putin supporters or even people who voted for him. Instead they treated the putin state as a given, neither good nor bad but simply there like an element in the earths atmosphere and went aboutconstructing their lives around it. Governments of course exist in america and europe as do all manner of external structures and constraints that people myself included must constantly navigate. The pressure of conformism is universal and ever present. A feature of existing in the world. The presence of the state an order of inevitability of its demand me as particularly acute in russia read one cannot live in ignorance or indifference to the urges and caprices of the state. It was to their advantage to guess what it wanted from you to deliver that while also being clever enough to extract some benefit for yourself. This roughly speaking is the predicament of the wiley man, being the sociologist who came up with the concept in an essay in 2000 read for whom the state contains both the threat of great hardship and the promise of incomparable opportunity. I came to understand that in russia the 2 forces, state and citizen speak in dialogue. A conversational timber often missed by the foreign year. Lovatos onetime student who became a respected sociologist and pollster in his own right wrote that for Many Russians , the state is not simply a technical apparatus but i symbolic institution embodying and developing basic understanding of human nature. The state takes on a pantheistic importance donated by men in its image it is also an omnipresent force whose power exceeds that of its creator. In moscow in my travels around the country and usually proud and brilliant men and women, activists, economists, journalists, Business Owners who believe the best if notthe only way to realize the vision was in concorde with the state. It was hard to believe they were wrong nor was i confident i would use any differently. There was my friend with a graduate degree from oxford who cameback to moscow to take a job in the state run think tank, a place where smart professionals thought of good ideas half of which were implemented and the other half of which , those with more worrying political implications were discarded. I would have lunch with a youth activist who had been unable to resist the offer to take a seat in parliament where he was quickly told to Vote Along Party Lines or risk losing funding for his youth programs. For a while the most fashionable job in moscow was working on the statefunded urban beautification projects , expanding pedestrian zones, renovating city parks, launching bike sharing and rethinking public transport routes. Such initiatives made the city more monday with time similar effortexpended around the country. Even in the absence of order democratic reforms if anything russias politics tax and opposite unmistakably regressive direction the city became more desirable, attractive, enjoyable places to live and debate immersed among my friends in moscow. Is it laudable to lend one talents and expertise to the state no activity real change on a local level or does this only help perpetuate an unjust andinefficient system. The question was never really settled and service and again, areferendum on the permissibility of compromise. Harnessing the resources and power of institutions we ultimately consider malevolent to achieve something good then the joke is on them or you . Although the glock is a mostly unhelpful metaphor for understanding putins russia i found myself returning to one thing yvonne learned in the camps. If youre stuck inside an unjust system is it cheating it a bit and therefore your own purposes entirely irrational, evenvirtuous . Maybe there are no good answers to these questions and an impossibility captured in a russian saying, between two fires, the condition of stuck between two forces bigger than yourself and making it out the other side is just about the best outcome available. The more i thought and wrote about the way people actually live and work in putins russia the more i realize it was largely impossible to separate them into two caps, the oppressed and the oppressor. Yes obvious victims and those whose resolute positions and great frustration and hardship. Just as they were unambiguously corrupt and sadistic who used the state authority to line their pockets but who got off on and acting all manner of petty cruelties most of the people i encountered were neither. They were strivers, nimble and resourceful who usually set out with virtuous, thoroughly understandable motives. What fascinated me where the compromises and prevarications required in bringing those motives to life and how overtime those in session and change a person and the very rationale that motivated such action in the first place. Thank you for that. So i see some people shaking their heads about already some of the compromises you described and i just want to start by saying or asking you about what you said earlier where this is not a phenomenon you need to rush, and weve seen this a lot under the Trump Administration that people who were very much against it, a lot of people who were never numbers who thought i could help the country, blah blah blah. How do you see, did you come down on any side of where are the red lines or any of these people . I want to interrogate this concept a little bit more. Whats the line between buddy who is coopted and a collaborator . Do we need people like nepali , its a rambling question when you need them and i applaud them and they have my admiration. I have no beef with them, the opposite, i hold them in great esteem, i just dont think there necessarily the most effective or elastic journalistic prisons for making sense of russia not as representatives. As far as where the redlines lie, in this book i purposely didnt draw them. Thats different than what i might say about my own life and my own political and social context. I think there are a lot of interesting parallels to the kinds of compromises i described in the book and the reason people go for them in the first place, but theyre hoping to achieve and what they think they can achieve and where they are right, where compromise does yield at least some version of the thing they were searching for and where it goes totally arrived or they themselves emerge so sweet and jaded from the process that they are not thesame person they were when they went in. The big difference that i see and maybe you see more and the audience can name some also is a singular role at the state plays in russia. Thankfully doesnt exist here. Theres actually a welcome degree of diversity in American SocialEconomic Life outside of the state and in russia not the case and that makes this question of compromise more inevitable than here. I think here i can understand it but its not as it there really wasnt any other choice for person x or y realizing their motives or theirprofessional ambitions or whatever. The one factor that struck me thats so simple and obvious and it wasnt until it was pointed out to me was what i learned when i was reporting the chapter about the theater director who was and is a very celebrated avantgarde experimental theater director who or a time when the boot in states had a shortlived interest in supporting our guard art forms he benefited from the largess and use state money to put on some remarkable productions, interestingly many of which were explicitly critical of the very state that was paying for them. But as one of his friend said to me about why he would have done this, why he would have put his hand out and taken state money from the government that he found objectionable at least and the person said in russia you dont have the choice of making a movie with state funding or without state funding, that would be an easy choice. Make the movie without state funding and your conscience is clean. Thats not theoffer on the table. Offer is do you want to make a movie or not and if you want to make a movie, theres only one way to do that currently in russia and when you put the question that way it becomes a lot harder and certainly impossible for me to sit and judge surrender, taking money from the kremlin to make thesemovies. Hes a film director or stage and film director born in a certain time and place. He only has one shot in the prime productive years of his career, why shouldnthe make the kind of films he wants to make . This is i guess more of the comments in a question but ive been surprised personally to come back from russia to the states where russian dissidents and journalists are lauded as heroes and martyrs because they stand up to the state. Because they refused to make the kinds of compromises you make in your book and yet things get difficult year. You see so many people making, running to make compromises that are so much, the bar is so much lower. The stakes are so much lower. Isnt why not go to jail, do i not get killed, do i make a movie or not make a movie, its like and i pay my mortgage and have a life nice lifestyle or not pay my mortgage and have a lesser lifestyle and their more than willing to make that compromise i guess to turn that into a question its you live in both worlds, you settle both worlds, the us and russia read do you understand why we fetishize those two extremes in a place like russia . Were obsessed with you all we want to know is what hes thinking, what you want, what he said, what it means and the hero martyrs. Why were not interested in i hope people are more interested when they buy your book because youve made it so interesting but do you have an insight into why we fetishize those two extremes . I dont think its just in russia, those are our analytic proclivities anywhere but going back to Greek Literature if the idea of the hero and antihero and making roles more digestible and understandable so im not sure particular it is to russia so who can make it so easy. Hes such a perfect comic book super villain that its hard to resist the urge to make every story about him cause Stories Framed about him are just so good, so juicy red they sell well. Theyre fun to write and he makes it too easy. Im beginning to suspect by design. Hes very happy with that. With that arrangement and his positioning in