American journalist, an author whose most recent book is the brothers the road to an american tragedy which tells the story of the tsarnaev brothers. Last month Dzhokar Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 charges against him in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. She is also the author of the man without a face the unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin and words will break cement. The passion of pusy riots she has written on lgbt rights and helped found Pink Triangle campaign against the russian legislation on gay propaganda. Chev is the leading russian lgbt activist and has said for many years she was probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole of russia. Here tonight in conversation with masha gessen is peter finn, Washington Post National Security correspondent, join me in welcoming masha gessen and peter finn to the jcss. [applause] [applause] good evening. Its wonderful to be in san francisco, and im especially happy to be here with masha and a gifted and fearless journalist whose work i haveed admired for a long time, and we had the opportunity 00 Work Together when she blogged for the Washington Post. And lets jump right in. Russia has experienced a lot of trauma and turmoil since the fall of the soviet union and you witnessed most of it, and but as you look at russia now and the war in ukraine the assassination of Boris Nemtsov the crackdown on the Lgbt Community, an opposition that is completely marginalized, a docile media. How pessimistic are you about the Current Situation and the opportunity, if any for change . Guest very. That may be all i have to say on the topic. Youve gone through the list. I think its even worse than what you described. Its not just the war in ukraine. Its russia per perceive its as a country at war with the west so its a war thats going to escalate. I also think the next stage of the war is going to be a crackdown on what putin has increasingly been referring to as the fifth column, the enemy within the what he also called the national traitors. So theres going to be Major Political crackdown that will make the last three years of political crackdown seem like a dress rehearsal. A lot of arrests and possibly a lot more physical attacks like the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. Host you wrote in the New York Times the scariest thing about the murder of Boris Nemtsov is he himself did not scare anyone. And if he was politically harmless why was he killed . Guest i think he was killed as a message first of all. I also think that a couple of things about his murder. He was killed in plain view of the kremlin so he was killed on a bridge that cover this moscow recovery directly across from the kremlin, and i you so much as take out a zoom camera on the bridge youll have the police on you within an matter of seconds. Was in a group of bicyclists going under the bridge, and the president ial guard ran out to intercept us but a is was unusual to see a group of bicyclists under the bridge. So we see on the surveillance tapes there was a body lying on the bridge for at least ten minutes and nobody came to look at what happened. Host what does that say. Guest one other thing want to say. Like other people who are opposed to putin i try not to use the word opposition, i can explain why not in a minute. But like other people who are active eye posed to putin he was under constant surveillance and would have been that day because the following day there would be a protest march he had organized. So this is a murder that is very clearly took place in plain view of the kremlin the president ial guard, and the russian secret police. So at the very least it was a crime that as allowed to happen. At most a crime that was carried oust by the kremlin. But what is communicated is something that is also related to an occurrence in moscow a week earlier which was the socalled antimike dunn march. The latest of these kremlin organized and sponsored socalled popular movements or fake popular movements. This one is explicitly intended to prevent a ukrainianlike revolution in russia, as though russia had any chance of seeing a ukrainian type revolution. A lot of the people who marched in that 30,000 strong march in moscow actually carried plaque cards with a putter trite of nemtsov. The message of the march was that the clem lynn is forming in and unleashing a force paramilitary force, band of thugs for the very explicit purpose of attacking people who are opposed to putin. And their first target was nemtsov. Host is that organized by the kremlin. Guest yes. Host so you see them as directly complicit in the murder. Guest yes, i do. Host doo you think they directly organized this . Guest sort of clear chain of command is actually not necessary in an environment like that where the most important messages are messages of what kind of violence can be carried out with impunity. What kind of violence will be interpret as being done in the name of the regime, and to help the regime. Host and who are these people then . Do you have any sense . Are they part of the state apparatus . Are they pat of the fsb or people who support putin . Guest certainly putin supporters. I think theyre opposed to dunn. Host who they they have the free rein. Guest exactly and will join whatever entity will allow them to have free rein and engage in violence with impunity. Host if you listen to people in the kremlin and some in state media, they argue that theyre in an information war with the west and that were all swimming in a sea of lies. There are our lies, their lies, your lies, my lies and that theres no difference between the New York Times and russia today. Do you see that is how that is what is directing russian state media policy . Guest i think that is actually i think it goes deeper than that. Thats a really interesting question. Thats one of the few things they say that really and truly expressed their world view. I think they the people who run Russian Media or work for Russian Media really believe that were all liars the whole world is constructed exactly this way. Everything is bought and sold. Everyone is bought and sold. No one ever holds sincere convictions. Everything is said for a purpose or said in the name of the highest bidder, and theyre sincerely convinced this is not just the way they conduct their lives built in way that the entire world works. They interpret any message coming at them from the outside as an expression of that same event. Host is that top bottom or is that just leadership . Is everyone that cynical. Guest yes. I think its really what we have inherited from the totalitarian society. That is a part of the soviet legacy, where for 70 years we lived in a country where every word was used to they said democracy, they meant lack of democracy. When they said freedom they meant prison. And in 1984 host walk into a Russian Media organization, youll see people many who were born after the fall of the soviet union. Guest the fall of the soviet union was not accompanied by a disseptember belling of the that system of prop propaganda. Russian made decisions to avoid reckoning with it pest. Never removed soviet monuments never prosecutors the communist party. Thats an interesting story that russia assembled a case against the communist party to the tune of 80 volumes and then placed it under lock and key and decided to lead sleeping dogs lie. So the generation of people who grew up in the 90s had a schizophrenic experience of reality where their parentses on the one hand were going out and trying to make a living and trying to navigate a world that had become suddenly very difficult and very confusing and at the same time they were watching soviet movies on television when they werent watching lattin american soap operas and in the soviet movies everything was so clear and beautiful and everyone was so beautiful. Spiritually and physically, and all that seemed necessary to have happen is just to return to that imaginary period of total clarity. Host but the experience in Eastern Europe with prosecution with has been mixed and some people feel that kind of persecution could divide the societies in ways that would not be helpful to democratic development. Guest well, i think we should explain what husband straights. Its a process set into motion in countries like germany and the Czech Republic where people who held certain jobs in the communist Party Apparatus were banned from Holding State jobs so that metropolitan they were identified and officially disqualified. I dont know that that kind of reckoning always works but i am pretty sure thats the only thing that works. Host we had a version of that reckoning in iraq, which didnt work. When the baathists at all levels were tossed of government and the army disbanded. It may not be a parallel experience but guest i think its probably different experience when its done by a country under military occupation. Host true. And in when you talk about Eastern Europe and Central Europe you see the kremlin now making in some ways strange alliances with the far right parties and Eastern Europe. What do you think is motivating this . Guest the kremlin is completely politically on opportunistic. They have a mission and the mission is they have an idea so the idea is that russia is a country that is part of the traditional value of civilization at war with western civilization. Western civilization has been trying to force its deck depth values down russians thoses and the throats of other extra traditional values countries and russia is the only traditional values country that has the courage of its convictions. To go to war over traditional values. So thats the basic idea underlying russias policies. Theres nothing in that idea that has theres no political kernel there and allows russia to make weird political alliances because it seize itself as being in confrontation with the west, and any party in western europe that is opposed to the European Union is a good ally so that could be the far right or far left. Host so greece. Guest they brought the far right and far left together and russia was instrumental in that in france its the far lightning finland, the far right in germany, theyre reach ought to both sides of the political spectrum. Host so, lets how much of this is driven by putin himself . By the president . Lets get to a basic question what what drives putin put and what kind of russia does he want . Guest he wants to stay in power and plans to do it for life and he never plans to die. So that sort of creates a very high benchmark. Because he needs to stay in power eternally. And he needs he needs a lofty enough mission to make sure he stays in power especially so this idea that russia is a civilization state and this idea of a traditional view value civic, theyre suitable, theyre ambitious enough to support this plan for staying in power eternally. In terms of who is pulling the levers in the kremlin on the one handits right to acknowledge its closed system and we have on anecdotal evidence of what goes on in there. The fact that its a closed system is terrible and that it basically means its the kind of system that can only implode and cannot be affected by outside forces. From what i have seen and what ive been able to sort of the information ive been able to collect is a lot of are concentrate 0 a lot of levers are in putins hands. Host how difficult is it to report on putin or to gather information on him and to talk to people in his inner circle to talk to people in and just beyond that point. Guest not anymore difficult than to write the book on the tsarnaev brothers. Sways it was easier. Host real in . I think some people would be surprised it was harder to get inside the kremlin guest than getting inside the fbi . Yes. And the kremlin is full of vain mediocre people who actually that doesnt really make them different from the fbi but there were people who wanted to talk to me just for the glory of talking to a journalist. And i think didnt have a strong idea of discipline or loyalty that would prevent them from talking to me. Theres also a lot of work i did when i was writing the book about putin the man without a face was just looking very closely at his public statements because i think thats sort of part of what journalists should do. Theres a lot of information out there that sometime wiz dont take enough time to examine and interpret, and i think that putin was a very strange politician. A politician who hadnt had a Public Record before becoming leader of the huge country. He had been a secret agent his entire life. So he was able to communicate what he wanted the world to know about him when he came to power and it was actually manageable amount of information. They could his i could listen to every recording mideast his speeches several times over and still have time to write a book in a couple of years. But it was very interesting, for example to read closely his official biography which was based on a series of interviews he did with a team of three journalists, and he told the same stores over and over again. These are the stories he wanted to have out there and these were all stories about how he got into fights, and all the fights would always play out in the same fashion. So putin loses his temper and hits somebody, and then seems to calm down for a while and then loses his temper again and goes after that person when they least expect it. And you would get that story from putin and from other people talking about putin with the stamp of approval, and so basically wanted to communicate what he was a vengeful thug who had trouble controlling his temper. He said and it nobody wanted to listen. Host but he was talking about when he was a kid and guest and a kgb officer. He had someone else emphasize he was willing to risk his entire career to get into a fight on the subway in st. Petersburg. Host how formative was the kgb experience for system he spent a real testify a period of time before the collapse of the soviet union was a Lieutenant Colonel can in the back water in east germany. Not a prominent kgb operative. Guest not prominent but very committed and i dont think he left the kgb when he says he did. Host he said he left and then left again. Guest exactly. Which suggests maybe he didnt leave. And his story about leaving the kgb is infinitely changeable and changing and not credible at all. But he was born into the kgb. His father was an officer and then an active reserve a precursor agency to the kgb. He had ambitions of joining the kgb since he was a kid. He first trade to volunteer when he was a High School Student and was recruited into the kgb when he graduated from university and all he ever wanted was to be the secret agent ruling the world from the shadows. Didnt particularly want to be president of russia, ruling the country openly. Although he seems to have got an taste of it after a while. Host when he was in east germany when east germany when the wall came down and theres this famous moscow is silent. Theyre there trying to figure out what to do, and nothing is coming from moscow. How formative do you think that experience was for him . Guest i think its huge. Again, not so much playing the armchair psychologist as just listening to what he told us. Its clearly a really important thing that happened to him. He worked as a paper pusher in the kgb office in dresden. A small city in germany. Germany was being rocked by antisoviet protests. Protesters gathered in front of the kgb building, in dresden. Putin was afraid that people were about to storm the building. He called the soviet Army Headquarters in berlin and asked for protection, and they said we cant send anybody unless we get an order from moscow, and moscow is silent. And so he went back inside the building and started burning documents that were collected in the building, and he burnt them in the stove until the stove cracked from the heat. Host you are one of i mean among the people i know who have actually met putin. You were invited to the kremlin and which struck me has highly unusual. Guest struck me as highly unusual, too. Host if you could tell us what happened. Why you were invited and what happened. Guest so, i wasnt invited because i wrote a book about putin. But this happened about six months after the book came out. I was editing a Popular Science magazine and i was asked to send my publisher called me on a saturday morning and asked me to send a reporter to cover putin hang gliding with a siberian cranes, and i took a very really actually not a very brave stand. I said, look, were a Popular Science magazine. We dont have to do this. I have a story assigned on the siberian crane and the campaign to repopulate the population of siberian cranes, and if i send a reporter then the reporter will see something and then i will be obligated to put it in the magazine and you dont want me to put it in the agency and well have a problem. Lets just not see anything. And the publisher said, no, why dont you send a reporter, and then we dont have to publish anything. I said, that i cant do. If the reporter goes, then and brings Something Back i have to publish it. He said, okay in that case youre fired. And then on monday, went into work and signed papers about my firing and i tweeted probably some russian speaker in the audience i tweeted [speaking in foreign language] im not going to translate. It actually indicated that i was leaving my job and it was putins fault. And so he called me the next day host he called you directly. Guest called me on the phone. Host said this is vladimir. Guest and i thought this is like really inventive prank and i have to come up with something witty to say because this is going to be on youtube. But as early in the morning and i cant come up with anything. And he kept talking and he said, want to talk to you about my Nature Conservation efforts do you mind . And i said, no, i dont mind but how die know you are who you say you are. And he said, well, after we hang up the deputy head of my administration is going to call you and schedule a meeting and ill show up and you will know i am who i say i am. And that sounded reasonable. So i went to the kremlin and the amazing thing aside from just the experience of hearing from somebody who in a way i felt like i had made up. I spent all this time trying to get into the mans head but never seen him in person. So he was like the character in any book. Host right. Guest he was going to come alive. And i it wasnt the first time i wrote a book about someone i couldnt interview. The book before that was about a russian mathematician who solved a problem and refused the Million Dollar prize as the person who solved it. After putin and i got off the phone, i googled my editor and said putin just called. And she said, how flu meaning do you feel safe . I said im excited built but it would be more interesting if the but i really wanted to see what the person was like. Host and . Guest pretty much the person in the book. There were no surprises. I was hoping he would come alive and wouldnt be as twodimensional as the person i described, but he wasnt. But the highlights were basically two. One was that when i walked in the said, i like kitties and puppies and little animals. And that was meant to communicate that he really is serious about the siberian cranes, and the other thing what that he didnt know who i was. He knew i was editor of this magazine he liked and the idea of calling me in was to put me back on my job because he liked the magazine and if he likes somebody he thinks he owns it, which it what has gone wrong with russia. But he had not been briefed on me. He didnt realize i was an american citizen hitch didnt realize i had been in opposition journalist for a long tomorrow host or that you had written a biography. Guest yes. Host thats unbelievable. What kind of staff does he have . Guest well, the problem is that for him to know that book that critical of him had come out in 20 languages someone would have had to tell him and nobody wanted to tell him that. Especially after he called me. Host you said he struck you as twodimensional, and i think a lot of people would find that hard to fathom, because here is a man who he did come to power as president he has held on to power for 15 years. He has shown quite an able to wield it and to crush his enemies, and how does a twodimensional figure manage that . Guest its a really interesting argue. I keep getting into this conversation with a lot of people and its like the a great historian of russia and author of a biography of stalin, he mentioned in a recent article that i make a case for putin being an accidental president and mediocrity, and then but nobody no accidental person can stay in power this long, and i dont know where that impression comes from. Actually well, he has. Right . And theres no proof he is threedimensional or intelligent or skilled. And theres a lot of indications he is not very welleducated not very wellinformed man with very strong instincts for sort of playing people off against one another and for holding on to power but he is also in office in a country where the magic of office is huge. And where it was very proved very easy for him to dismantle the democratic mechanisms that existed when he came in and to set into motion all the totalitarian mechanisms that had been dormant. Host you mentioned the storks and thats just one of many stunts that we have seen. He has gone diving for antic quits, been with the tigers. Guest and the polar bear. Host and been in a submersible. Guest and driver submarine yes. Host what is this about . Burnishing a public image for the public . The bare chest this horseback owling of it . Guest his early first eight years were all about driving. Like flying a plain and piloting the submersible and then piloting an Aircraft Carrier and a submarine. And so i think those were sort of he was king of the world and transportation. And the king of the jungle period, which was the siberian cranes and the tigers and the polar bear, and these are always the largest animals of their kind. Very carefully chosen. And then there was the barechested sex symbol period of virility and now theres the war in ukraine. Host if we can talk about his popularity and there was an independent Polling Agency had his Approval Ratings over 80 . Guest 88. Host obviously the state media, all of that plays a role, burt at the same time there seems to be some connection there. That his popularity isnt entirely manufactured. Guest i think that its really difficult to talk about because all the language that we have to talk about opinion polls and popularity figures are all its all based on our experience of studying opinion in democratic societies. The thing is what putin has done over the last few years is setting in motion the mechanism of a to that totalitarian society, and one of the things that has kicked in is what happens to popular opinion in a totalitarian society. Its a matter of survival to know what to think and to say. And its very, very difficult to draw a distinction between what people say sincerely and what people say because they know theyre supposed to say it. Actually they know theyre supposed to be sincere and in fact its matter of survival to be sincere and theres a very, very small minority, roughly 12 to 15 that stays stably antiputin and antiputin kremlin policy, in opinion polls, that seems to have some resistance to that use one thing he with seen emerge in his latest term is this kind of statesponsored homophobia. Can you tell us what thes this antigay law what and what it does and i would you think it emerged. Guest i think it emerged almost by accident. What happened to years ago was that putin came back for his third term as president and he was faced with something unprecedented, which is popular protests and there were protests going on all over russia and he found them really genuinely frightening. The protesters didnt have any mechanisms for overthrowing putin or for even preventing his claiming any percentage in the election which he claimed 53 in the president ial election. But he is actually personally and historically very frying frightening. That goes back to the scene in dresden, and he felt like the kremlin lost control of the country. This was something he communicated to his close sub bored nantzs they let this happen. So they needed to mobilize the country against the protesters so he was throwing out random insults to the protesters if the thirst thing he said was they were personally inspired by hillary clinton. And that they the white ribbon that became the symbol of the protesters that a lot of people wore, he said from a distance its looked like a spent prophylactic and that people for some reason decided to pin these empty condoms to their lapel. Some sort of illusion to the lack of virility on the part of the protesters, i guess. And then he started to bait the protesters and that got attraction. Tim snyder called it a calculated cacophony. They throw out messages and then obsessed with feed back and polling numbers. So they keep track of what works and the gaybaiting worked, worked for very clear reasons. It was great shorthand for saying there are other theyre western, theyre not russian. Theyre enemies of russia. They are also part of what has been strained about russia and uncomfortable about russia since the soviet union collapsed because we didnt have any openly gay people until after the soviet union collapsed. So he said all of that to guyballets the protesters. And then that ballooned into the whole idea of traditional values and obviously im simplifying that and its a little more complicated, but russia has always the russian government has traditionally worked handin hand with the Russian Orthodox church especially in times of crisis. This is true during the soviet period the kremlin would reach for the church. Like during world war ii. Guest exactly. To fortify its position. So this was happening as putin was running his president ial campaign which is why pussy riot went to jail of they were protesting the fact the patriarch of the russian ore her to docks church was campaigning for putin. So i this unholy alliance came up with this idea of traditional val eyes civilization and the centerpiece was the antigay campaign. Host how was the Lgbt Community responding . Are people leaving or hiding or able to fight back in any way . Guest i dont think its possible to fight back. Not just because the Lgbt Community is still quite small and weak in russia but its impossible to fight back against the mon mon knowlight of are monolith of the russia state with all the media at its disposal. All means of a resupression at its dispose al. Nothing you can put up against that. So a lot of people have left and a lot of people have come to this country. I know hoff hundreds of people who have come just in new york city lbgt refugees in new york city, san francisco. A lot of people in d. C. Some people are trying to stay low and hope that this end inside the foreseeable future. Host obviously this affected you personalitily. You have had Death Threats in the past over the course of your career. You have taken great risks in reporting in chechneya among other places, and yet at this moment you finally decided you had to leave russia. Guest well report only chechneya is you go there and then you come would back and youre safe. Its like the fact that you can remove yourself from danger is actually part of what makes war reporting so appealing and addictive. When youre threatened in your own home thats also different. And basically i was it it was communicated to me the state would go after my oldest son who is adopted and they would try to annull the adoption. So that was even before i got into the technicalities and the issue of how this was legally possible, which i is as it turns out. Just the visceral understanding that could go after my kids was too much to take. Host and you mentioned the Orthodox Church. Russia has four official religions, right . And orthodoxy judaism islam buddhism. How are the other denominations responding to this closed political relationship now between the Orthodox Church and the kremlin . Guest a great question. Well the relationship actually the cooperative relationship is working with all the relations and you can see that for those of us paying attention it to, there was a recent photo to op with putin and representativeses of the four official religions carefully placed to communicate the hierarchy of religions. The rabbis farthest away from putin, and then the patriarch closest. But relationship between the more liberal wings of the of each religion and he more conservative and the traditional state controlled structures, which never went anywhere, basically mimics in all the other religions mimics what happened in the Russian Orthodox church where the more liberal wing has been all but destroyed in the last few years. Host and before we move on to boston, one final question in this area, and the west and the United States in particular over the last several years has struggled in how to what kind of relationship to have with russia and with president putin. We have had engagement and then we have had isolation we have had reset. We now have sanctions. Obviously youre not in government but is it appropriate to isolate russia to sanction russia . Or as others argue Steven Collins for instance, it is in the National Security interest of the United States, regardless of the form of government, in russia to have a working relationship with that government. Guest russia is an extremely mall if rent mall if lent partner. The latest example is the negotiations with iran. Russia participates it. It appeared to be participating as a partner in the negotiations and then the day after the negotiations were completed and the deal was signed, russia announced its unilateral decision to sell weapons to iran. So this is its a classic putin gesture. You have been had again message. Russia has no particular strategic interest in selling though temperatures weapons to iran. It does have a strong interest in communicating that message to the United States. So i dont see any argument for deal waiving partner that will dealing with partner that will be unreliable that will reliably be unreliable at every turn, and no certainly with ukraine we have seen that no amount theres nothing the west can do that can influence what putin does. So thats sort of frees the west up to do the right thing. Host which is . Guest which is not to be in bed with a dictatessor and nod to aide him and engage him and not to give him the honor of being recognized as a partner in any enterprise. Host and turning to the United States, and in particular to boston, you just published a book obviously on the bombing and i guess the question everyone asks, and this wont be the first time you have heard this but why did they do it . What did they want to achieve . Guest well thats yes thats the question that we always ask about terrorists, and the traditional answer, that has been given since 9 11, is you have to find the radicalization narrative, and that narrative which we get from both the fbi and a lot of the media coverage, is theres a Huge International organization that recruits a young man or two young men and takes them through identifiable stages where theyre first preradicalized and then radicalized and then become terrorists. This obviously didnt happen in this case. It actually hasnt happened in other cases either, but this case is really exposed the fact that it doesnt work that way. So its forced the government into rather uncomfortable position of using a new term, which we heard over and over again during the trial in boston, which is selfradicalization, so Tamerlan Tsarnaev razz calizeed himself. Its useless. The whole radicalization theory is not exactly meaningless but useless in that rat cal belief does not predict terrorist behavior. Most who have rads beliefs that support violence dont go and move on. A lot of some people who build bombs and set them awe dont have radical beliefs. So terrorism has been telling us for years. The fbi has been telling a different story. I think that what terrorism has been telling us is a that people like the tsarnaev brother fit the profile they see perfectly. They see immigrants, young men with a secular education, so not steeped in religion contrary to the popular image of this. Usually with a middle class background but increasingly i marginalized and asmall Social Circle within they form their connections. All of this is true of the tsarnaev brothers and also true of millions of other people, who also dont go and build bombs. Right . We keep coming up host is there an x factor, something that pushes someone over the line . Guest i dont think theres an identifiable factor. What die think is important to understand is what sort of what is so tempting on the other side and is that terrorism is a ticket to belonging its a tick to belonging to something great. You can go directly from being a nobody and nobody feels more like a nobody than an immigrant to being somebody who declares war on a great power and then the miraculous power of terrorism is that not only do you feel like you belong to a great entity and you declare war on a great power but the power accepts your declaration of war. The entire rhetoric which the United States and the entire personal world reacts to terrorism is rhetoric of war. They attacked us. Actually no. They set off bombs and committed horrible crimes, they killed three people. And injured 264 and 16 people lost legs, but they didnt attack the american nation. They set if bombs at the Boston Marathon. They committed a horrible crime and should be treated as criminals host we should criminalize this not make it a matter of war or conflict or whatever. Guest yes. I think that the like the spectacle from january the leaders of the european nations march through the streets of paris, which seemed sort of so inspiring at first sight is exactly the wrong reaction. Because why should they have the power to get Angela Merkel to march in paris . Host what should Angela Merkel or francois holeland do . Guest i thing that shy prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and treat them as murderers. Host at the trial itself, you have written that the you found a quality of lawyering at the trial really excellent. Guest extraordinary. Host amount you found it not satisfactory in getting to what we might call the truth. Guest writing about it was fun, thank you, but its the american Justice System is not designed to get to the truth. And that is its not a bad thing. Its just its anss a odd sir verial prosis and at any time designed to conduct an investigation. In france the judge can order wilts in and can propose questions to try to figure out what happened. The american process is designed to hear two different ideas and who makes the most convincing case and the point is to apportion guilt and assign sentence. The point is not to get a comprehensive picture of what happened. Thats the fbis job and the fbi hasnt done its job. Host but at the same time, if you look at what the defense did, we got a fairly simple narrative from them, which is, he did it, and their focus has been on not disputing his guilt but on preventing him from being sentenced to death. Guest which is exactly their job and theyve done it spectacularly. Its been amazing to watch. Also been amazing to watch the prosecution, which was even more of a surprise to me. Just the way that they selected witnesses. The way they staged the case. The way they always timed it to go from sort of mundane in the morning and incredibly emotional in the Late Afternoon to let the to have the jury good good home, pondering what happened at the marathon. And it was just like watching an incredible theater production and it was devastating for not just the people in the courtroom but for the entire city of boston which is why you heard victims coming out against the Death Penalty and just asking to have this thing over with because it is emotionally powerful. But why die find its unsatisfying . Because there are questions that havent been answered and that cant be answered in court. So one question is where were the bombs made . And the fbi testified in court they dont know where the boehms were made. They know they werent made in tamerlans t. A. R. P. And werent made in dzhokars dorm room. They were made somewhere else. Who else was involved . Was this person unwittingly involved this person who rents the space where they built the bombs or was this a solo accomplishment and we dont know unless the fbi tells us. The question is, what was this relationship between the fbi and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, somebody they interviewed at least three times as a terrorism risk. How come they he was then able to build a bomb . And set it off . Host i mean, janet who reviewed your book the New York Times, said you were a conspiracy their theorist for raising questions about the fbi because the fbi does thousands of assessments of people every year and the fact they didnt immediately recognize him is indicative from her point of view of nothing. Guest well i mean, Janet Napolitano is a conspiracist on conspiracies. The fbi specialist saw the likenesses of the brothers from surveillance takens and three days after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed they couldnt identify the brothers. Im assuming that even though i moon i know the joint Terrorism Task force in boston is not that large. The number of people who go out and interview real, live terrorism suspects is finite. Three days is enough time to show each one of those people the pictures they had isolated from the videotapes. Is conceivable they didnt show them the pictures . Absolute luff buts its a sign of incompetence, and incompetence may well be the biggest missing link that the fib is not disclosing. Host and throughout the proceeding in boston, and the defendant has sat there have you learned anything about him through this whole process . Guest he has sat there looking like he is a little older than the teenager he was during the marathon bombing. Mostly impassive. You cant truly tell anything about his emotional reaction except that he will not make eye contact with any of the witnesses. Its been really moving for know watch his relationship with the defense. Because he is under special administrative measures, or s. A. M. A particular kind of hell imposed on terrorism suspects. Its like extreme solitary. Basically he has no physical contact with anybody but Prison Guards and his lawyers when they come to visit. He can not have visits from anyone but immediate family and no more than once a week and he has to speak english to them because the fbi has to be able to listen in. He can only write one letter a week to the tune of three singlesided sheets of paper and only to an immediate family me and the fbi has to be able to read it. So he has almost no human contact and its very clear the defense the members of the defense team go to pains to have that kind of contact with him. Host but its only going to get worse. Assuming the gets a life sentence he will spend it at a super max in covers where the conditions will be as severe as you just describe, and guest yes, and host maybe prevent him getting the Death Penalty theyre saving him for hell on earth. In. Guest i think thats a distinct possibility and some people have asked the question, is principled opposition to the Death Penalty, which is what drives his extraordinary defense lawyers, reason enough to condemn him to a lifetime of total and profound isolation. Host on that happy note, well guest i knew we would behind on a hopeful note. Host well move to questions from the audience. First question up front. What kind of personal life does put put have . Married, children . Capable of having a personal life . Guest well, just around the time he was getting really serious about the traditional values campaign he divorced his wife. Which is actually its really not just funny but very interesting because its such a clear indication of how its not hypocrisy, its dedivision between the ruler russia and the rest of the country. It occur to hem the same rules he thinks should apply to the entire population should also apply to him. So other than that, his there are lots and lots of rumors about his personal life. I have not been able to corroborate any of them so i actually didnt include any of them in the book. Next question. Over here. Himasha. Im wondering if you can update on pussy riot today . The last i saw they were on house house of cards, protesting a fake Vladimir Putin. Guest so the two members of pussy riot who ended up spending time in jail, have emerged as i think really extraordinary activists. They have founded a prisoners rights organization. Theyre trying to work for both individual prisoners and Prison Reform. I dont think theres much hope of getting Prison Reform in russia before thats a regime change but they have been able to do a lot on behalf of individual inmates. They set up a clearinghouse for information. They get people to write about abuses in prisons and then it they get the they mobilize people to Pay Attention to a particular prison and start calling and writing and lawyers to start filing complaints, and they just save people from inhuman conditions or from extreme punishment in these prisons. They also have a very active international life, which includes an episodes on an appearance on house of cards, and they i think they have tried to use this well, and one of the things ive been impressed with is that theyve really tried to always find something they can talk about locally. So when they went to australia they met with local prisoners rights activists and asked them about what issues they should bring up in their australian media appearances and faithfully reproduced that message. The same thing when they went to new york and they asked to be able to visit prisons which was complicated, but they got a couple of visits in. And but the also met with activists. I think sometimes its a little awkward. But i think its a sophisticated and extremely well intentioned effort. Question down here in front. Hi. Putin actually homophobic or just strategic to focus on opposing gay rights . Guest well, i dont know that home hoe owe phobia rises homophobia rises to the standard of sincere conviction. I think he kind of hates people, and he is now vary happy to hate gay people. Next question on this side. Over here. I have a question also about words. For me, the strongest most influential part of the book for me were the closing statements nadia and Maria Mitchell question is in your studying, investigating, talking to them, did they create those closing statements alone . Guest oh yes. I recommend anybody to read them because those closing statements are so powerful. Guest theyre incredible. And not only did they create them alone but they wrote those closing statements at night over the course of a few days, after a nineday, grueling trial where they would get picked up from jail at 5 00 in the morning, be driven around a scorching hot city in a prison transport for hours and then delivered to court. The Court Hearing would go on for ten hours every day. They would then be driven back to the prison to get there at 2 00 in the morning with all the searches and stuff. So they would get three hours sleep. They were dehydrated because they couldnt get bathroom breaks in court so were careful not a to drink too much. They werer to tire conditions and at the end they were able to write these incredibly smart articulate moving statements. Ey on the right. Miss gessen. Youre such an inspiration to so many people. Guest thank you. One thing that struck me as rather odd as i was coming over here today is your tenacity in addressing people who abuse power, and yet you had taken on Vladimir Putin who seems to be one of the more fearsome people on earth and yet youre still alive, whereas it seems that a fellow named i believe, freddie gray and a fellow named eric garner and a bunch of other fellows who had the wrong skin color in this country have been facing much less fearsome people and ending up dead. Wonder if you had any thoughts on the plight of black males in the United States today and what our responsibilities as country might be. Guest i dont know i have anything to say besides the obvious. Part of the reason i always get this question which boils down to, how come youre still Walking Around . And one of the reasons im still Walking Around is that i have outlets. I have people people perceive me as being protected. If im knocked off it will be noticed. Theres costs to getting rid of someone like me, and you compare that to even other journalists in russia who dont get published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, who dont have their work translated into other languages who are much greater risk precisely because their anonymous. A question over here on the right. Do you still want to go back to russia . Say there was no danger to you or your family, do you want to go back . You made to go back to live . You know i am an experienced, i traveled back all the time. I still report from russia. It feels much better to be based in the states and to have my family in the states. But also im an experienced immigrant so i know that when you go you have to go and not think about moving back. So im not making any cause to move back to russia. Ive made my home in the states now. Hi there. I once was wondering if you could talk about independent journalism in russia. Seems to be slowly deteriorating. While this will be a very short answer. [laughter] there is basically one print magazine lasts. There is one webbased Television Channel that used to have satellite and cable outlets and thats pretty much limited to the web and the fact that its still auctioning is a miracle and a testament to the incredible strength of the people who run it. There are a couple of on line publications but they are increasingly difficult for people to access because the consumers which has been given him limited ability to block access to resources has blocked access to them which makes it difficult to edit in addition to be very difficult to read. You cant access the backend any easier than the front end. There was a very good and very big on line publication which was basically purged last year so its former editorinchief has gone into exile and is running a russian language publication amatzia with small Editorial Staff and a lot of reporters based on the ground in russia. And its quite good, but i think that and its another heroic effort. Its really sad that the most important on line publication now has to be run from exile and of course the moment will come when it will be blocked access to it. A question over here on the right. Thank you. Recently at the meeting with mikhail at stanford somebody towards the end he never had a chance to answer. Mr. Carter koski if everything will work out as you hope what will you do with 87 so just as one author that very recently read the gulags are fresh in mind the russian peoples minds gulags what do you think . Is put in the problem or the gulags of the russian mind that hasnt lived itself out yet is the problem because it seems that this country keeps on choosing the monsters to leave them. I think russia is a country that has been taking an incredible amount of abuse over the last century and when we talk about individuals who have been abused we never expect them to heal themselves and start being normal. For some reason when we talk about an entire society that has been abused we expected to heal itself and to become normal once it has the opportunity to have democracy. Well guess what, it doesnt work that way as it turns out and in russia as i mentioned at the beginning of our conversation russia made a series of choices not to address its own plans but its easy for us to talk about how it should have made other choices. No one has done that. We have never seen a country that is addressed its own crimes and research its own psyche the. It was a lot easier for soviet satellite countries which have the resources, the ability to tell the story that this was by someone else and they were were now rather than occupying power and could go back to being their great democratic wonderful selves. Russians would have to face up to the fact that they systematically committed horrible crimes against themselves for generations and most of the time you couldnt tell the executions from the victims or they were interchangeable. And as i said we have never seen a country do that kind of soulsearching. I can only imagine that if its ever done it will have to be done though there will have to be some sort of incredible inspirational political leader who comes out of nowhere and takes russia down this very difficult path. First of all thank you so much for being here. I very much enjoyed your talk as i imagine many of us have read my question to you relates to any advisers or close confidant of putin who he he relies he therefore strategic or domestic matters, policy and whether they even do exist or for simply just him running the show . I hesitate to talk about this because i think i have an idea of how it works. Some other people have other ideas of how it works. Ultimately we dont know how it works because its a black box and in the end its the most salient characteristic of the system. It is perfectly sealed and its isolated. A question over on the right. Hi amash appeared at a question on whether or not theres any sort of mentorship amongst young girls reject was in russia maybe may be with the older generation. I know thats kind of a harsh term but maybe in the 90s or early 80s . No. [laughter] i think you have a very beautiful picture of what is possible in russia. Its just a daily struggle for survival for people who are trying to do something in terms of the lgbt organizing in russia russia. There is one project that is really wonderful and maybe this is what you had in mind. Its called children 404 and on Line Community started by a journalist who started by writing a story about a lgbt teenagers and was so horrified at what she found that she started an on Line Community called children forward 404 which is the code you get when you go to a page that doesnt exist so that tagline is children 404 we exists. She gets dozens of letters a day day. She posts a lot of them. Some of the my pictures some of them are signed in some of them are not signed. Its mostly a way for teenagers to read and share with one another. She regularly i mean most of them are awful. Some of them are so awful that she gets involved in the situation and tries to get a kid out of the Psychiatric Hospital to which his mother has committed him or get a young woman whose father has hired someone to corrective leg rape her to a safe haven in that sort of thing. So that is a sort of a mentorship but its more about saving peoples lives on a daytoday basis. Actually theres a great documentary about this Community Called children 404. We are going to take one last question. I want to invite everybody out to the atrium immediately after the program where masha is going to be signing books. Masha in a man without a face you read about two horrendous terrorist attacks in russia. One was the department has to think it was moscow and the other attack was on a school outside of moscow, hundreds of children were killed. You conclude that the Russian Security services were responsible. My question is this do you think putin was involved or responsible or was it a rogue action of extreme elements . I have to dont think that the School Attack was organized by the fsb. I think the School Attack was a much more long classic lines of a rogue terrorist organization. What happened was in the end during the socalled liberation attempt to fact of the fsb the Russian Security police and the terrorists were working in concert because people were working whether by design or the general ethos was working to maximize the number of casualties. Now as with the Apartment Building bombings in august of 1999 there is a lot of evidence that points to the fsb. I would stop short of saying that i came to the conclusion that it was a fsb because i dont have enough information and thats the problem with it a but journalists especially being a journalist in the country where none of the Law Enforcement agencies or the civil oversight agencies do their jobs. Maybe there are amazing investigative journalists that can crack a case like that on their own. I dont think thats possible. Think journalists lack the tools for that trait i cant collect enough evidence. I can write about whats out there and whats out there seems to point at the fsb. I want to thank everybody for coming and masha gessen and peter finn thank you very much. [applause]
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.