This is Democracy – Episode 133: Russian Democracy Protests and US Policy

[0:00:03 Speaker 0] This

[0:00:05 Speaker 1] Is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial inter generational and inter sectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy. Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we’re going to discuss questions and controversy surrounding democratic change and resistance to democratic change in Russia. How do we understand the current state of Russian democratic activism and the resistance to it? How can history help to better inform our understanding of these issues and what role can and should the United States and American citizens beyond the U. S. Government play? When we think about controversies over democratization in Russia today, we have with us a good friend and one of the most important and highly respected writers on Russian affairs, as well as US affairs professor Michael Kim Ege.

[0:01:07 Speaker 0] He’s a

[0:01:07 Speaker 1] professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund and chair of the advisory council for the Kennan Institute, which is one of the foremost think tanks for Russian affairs and U. S. Russian relations at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C. From 2014 to 2017, Michael Kittredge served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, where he held the Russia Ukraine portfolio. And, as I’m sure will come up in our discussion, those were eventful years to be overseeing Russian Ukraine affairs. Is that correct, Michael? Eventful to be sure, yes, a pleasure to be with you both. Uh, Michael is the author of a number of important books, books that are major works of scholarship and policy. Also fun to read. His first book, The Conservative Turn, looked at Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the lessons of Anti Communism for Americans and put that actually in a broader global framework. His second book was on Philip Roth. Of course, if you write about Lionel Trilling, you have to write about Philip Roth in History’s Grip, Philip Roth’s Newark

[0:02:13 Speaker 0] trilogy

[0:02:14 Speaker 1] and then Michael’s most recent book, a book that’s received a lot of attention and I hope will continue to receive a lot of attention. Uh, the abandonment of the West history of an idea in American foreign policy. Most recently, on January 26th of 2021 Michael has published a major article in the New Republic magazine on Russia’s restoration questions of democracy and autocracy in Russia today and what role the United States should play. Michael, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for having me before we turn to our discussion with Michael. We have, of course, our scene setting poem for Mr Zachary Suri. Zachary. What’s the title of your poem today?

[0:02:57 Speaker 0] It’s a long

[0:02:57 Speaker 1] one. Russia

[0:02:58 Speaker 0] is approached by U. S. A. In a bar, maybe, or moonlit cafe.

[0:03:03 Speaker 1] Wow, I I love the direction your poetry is going. And Zachary. So let’s hear. Let’s hear this one. I think this is going to be really interesting.

[0:03:13 Speaker 0] Russia is approached by USA in a bar maybe, or Moonlight Cafe. I am the giant tests of continents. Watch as I wash my mountains from dirt into two different seas. Come and see my

[0:03:26 Speaker 1] nation. Bruise a

[0:03:27 Speaker 0] 1000 different teas. Find them, My friend in my Phoenix is my Poughkeepsie. Jeez. Russia lays her hand upon the shoulder of the child and rolls her anger inwardly from exuberant. Too mild. You have not seen what I have, son. I have watched your mountains run 10,000 times within my years. You do not know the melody of tears. And have you seen the choruses of continents collide?

[0:03:54 Speaker 1] You may have watched from

[0:03:55 Speaker 0] tower tops as your Children fought a far, but our

[0:03:59 Speaker 1] Children all were dying

[0:04:00 Speaker 0] Then, as we watched their fleeting star and have you watched them sink into dust and give up their memory to poetry America, The lady of the torch, she stands right up and cries. You may know more deaths than I, but heavens, those are lies. And in this tavern or coffee house in Monaco, Zagreb Mother Russia lost her voice and could only shake her head. You may know of greater woes and paid twice more the devil’s fee. But you gray an aging crow. You know nothing of liberty. I wrote the book of government and carve that declaration. Now tell me once again, how historic is your nation? The true sailor of the step?

[0:04:44 Speaker 1] She keeps her cards

[0:04:45 Speaker 0] there at her feet for in truth, she already knows that her freedom has us beat. It is stored deep down away in her vast treasuries that 1000 years of hoping far too steep for cracked freedoms. Double centuries.

[0:05:02 Speaker 1] I love this dialogue, Zachary between, uh, Russia and the United States in this in this tavern, I guess they’re drinking vodka and beer or some some Malange of those. What is your poem about Zachary? My problem is really about

[0:05:16 Speaker 0] the way that we as Americans like to think ourselves the progenitors of democracy. Uh, when when in reality, countries like Russia, which we often condescend to as inherently autocratic, have actually much longer democratic traditions and and much longer traditions of of creative thinking than we do necessarily.

[0:05:37 Speaker 1] Michael, that seems a perfect point of departure, for for our discussion. Um, one of Zachary’s points, I think, is that there’s a long history that influences contemporary debates about democracy in Russia. How should we understand this current moment? How do you as a historian and a policy expert, How do you How do you explain it? Well, begin by by paying a compliment to Zachary’s poem, which is the sort of music of the poem. These are two hortatory nations that have long traditions, not just of foreign policy ambition but a foreign policy ambition with missionary energy. Uh, and that’s an interesting parallel between between the two countries in terms of the of the moment that we’re at, you know you can start with with the United States and then turn our gaze to Russia. United States is in a period where a lot of the fundamental foreign policy questions are up for grabs. Of course, we have a president who has been inaugurated a few days ago, who was previously a two term vice president, long experience in the Senate and very established foreign policy views. And we have a number of very, very pedigreed and experienced figures who are sort of gathering around President Biden and his foreign policy team. But I think it would be foolish to dismiss the last four years as some kind of fleeting operation. I think Donald Trump put a lot of American foreign policy into question. Some of that is internal, and some of that is the perception of allies, partners and adversaries. Uh, and it’s not clear many of the answers that the Biden administration is going to give in the next 6 to 12 months. That makes it in effect especially interesting that Russia has done, I think, what we wouldn’t have expected Russia to do a year ago, what we wouldn’t have expected Belarus to have done before this past summer, but Russia has entered into one of its perennial phases of deep political questioning. No, I don’t think that Russia is yet at a revolutionary moment. It could come to that. That may be the beginning of a trajectory, Uh, but over the course of last weekend, it’s not just the numbers of people that came out. And it’s not simply the fact that people came out to protest Putin and the criminal across the country. That’s happened before. I think that there was a new willingness to confront, to confront the police, to throw snowballs, uh, to sort of communicate either impatience or disrespect or genuine anger. And that’s a new dynamic that’s a new forest. And so that’s, I think, what we really have to first try to come to grips with as a Russian dynamic and then in turn what that might mean for U. S foreign policy. I have to say I particularly enjoyed the stories of the snowballs being thrown at authority. It really that really appealed to me. Um, Michael, how do we understand the role of Alexei Navalny? Because he seems to be a pivotal figure, at least in the contemporary manifestation of what you’re describing, is public anger toward the Putin regime. Well, first, I would make a few points about what Navalny is not or is not up to. Now, as a political figure, he’s not a Fidel Castro or Jake Guevara. He’s not a Vladimir Lenin, although being used as a historian by the fact that Navalny arrived in Moscow via a budget airline from Germany. It does have the slight echo of Vladimir Lenin arriving in ST Petersburg in 1917 via a German train. But Navalny is no Lenin. He’s not a revolutionary in the sense that he doesn’t have a party or a movement behind him, and I think he also doesn’t have, uh, an ideology. Uh, and he might be a sort of profit, the figure who goes first and you’ll then in turn, sort of later stages of this revolutionary moment. If that’s what it is, you’ll see a sort of genuine political leader or revolutionary emerged. But that’s not Navalny, although at times that images, I think, superimposed onto him by some Western observers. I think what Navalny is in the Russian context is too profound things. He’s a decent man. Uh, he’s courageous. Uh, he speaks a kind of direct truth that official Russia does not at all speak. Uh, and he is an anti corruption activist. I would use the word activist rather than politician. Uh, in the case of Navalny, he, um, has the skills of an investigative journalist. He turned up in the video that generated the protests. In addition to his arrest, he turned up a set of new documents. Images sort of presented to the world. Really? Uh, the photographic evidence of Putin’s overpriced and and Gaudi Palace on the Black Sea. Uh, and in that sense, he allows, um where he does not allow Russians to forget the truth. That’s before their eyes that their government is immensely corrupt, uh, and that the regime is fundamentally kleptocratic. So Navalny’s most important political role, as of now, is in the elucidation of the problem. He has shown Russians what the problem is, and you could say that that problem is Putin, or that problem is the system that Putin has created. And the core argument of Navalny’s video is that Putin does not serve the needs of the Russian people. He may claim that he may wrap himself in the garb of a Russian nationalist, but that is not the truth. And I think he’s enormously effective in the conveyance of that message. Yeah,

[0:11:16 Speaker 0] let’s take a step back, though. What degree of of political freedom or freedom of speech exists in Russia today? What has been the nature of Democratic activism in the last 10 years or so in Russia?

[0:11:30 Speaker 1] So if we compare it to ourselves, I think what is first apparent are the are the limits and the hindrances Uh, there is This is a long, long dynamic in Russian history what you could describe as arbitrary rule, uh, in the Kremlin. So at any moment, if you’re a theater director, if your newspaper editor, if you’re a teacher, um, you know, Professor, what have you You could fall into disgrace, uh, and into real trouble. Unlikely that you would get killed. That does happen occasionally, but it’s more that you could lose your or or be incarcerated, and the state sort of reserves that power, which is the power of intimidation. What the state has signaled the Putin regime has signaled is that you cannot do certain things. You cannot go after, uh, in public, the wealth and power of the Kremlin elite. You can’t speak about Vladimir Putin’s family. Uh, you can’t sort of air the dirty laundry of these figures in public. Of course, that’s precisely what Navalny has done, and it’s one of the reasons why he was arrested. But to answer your question properly is accurate by Russian standards. In other words, not with the U. S or Germany or Australia as a reference point by Russian standards. It’s actually a fairly free phase and has been, of course, after 1991 it was an anything goes period where you could mark the regime. And, you know, even when Putin came to power, there was a famous caricature show where Putin was made fun of and presented as a puppet. Uh, and that was pretty swiftly taken off the air. But you know, Russians have access to the Internet, much more so than Chinese to, uh if you want to tell jokes, if you wanna make your points about politics clear in private circles and semi public circles, all of that is possible. And of course, Russians travel prodigiously uh, and you know, have access, especially those who can read Foreign languages have access to the world’s media. So in that sense relative to the Soviet Union, what you see is a much, much freer Russia, and that, in fact, is one of the problems that Putin is going to have to navigate in the next six months. For the next 12 months, he can start to rescind those freedoms, but I think those have become very familiar. They’ve become very, uh, expected in Russia. I don’t think the Russians would look kindly at having those having those taken away. So it’s, uh it’s a freedom up to this one very specific point where you shouldn’t be critical of the regime. And I think most Russians, you know, Navalny accepted no those rules and and and play by them. But it’s certainly not complete freedom. Mhm and why Michael, our citizens now in large number and and it’s certainly not a majority, but but still it is a large number, uh, and often in very difficult weather conditions in in Irkutsk, 20 below zero, going out and throwing snowballs at the police. Why why are they willing to challenge this this red line that you’ve described it was that’s been very clear that you don’t go to the point of criticizing the regime. I think in the end, it’s a mystery. Uh, and I think it’s one of the most fascinating mysteries in the history of politics these threshold horizons that people have when it comes to accepting certain things, accepting repression, accepting poverty, accepting difficult circumstances and for most of human history, people are accepting those things. And then you have these remarkable moments where there is the refusal to accept any longer. Uh, and in terms of actors that are internal to Russia, I don’t think that it’s the charisma of Navalny. I would in fact not focus all that much on the person of Navalny. Interesting as he is, I think this is a long term process, and I think it’s a twofold dynamic that Putin has created where there is, uh, an official apparatus. Sometimes people marvel at this with Putin that he sort of created this and runs it so smoothly an official apparatus of media propaganda and disinformation. Now, on the one hand, you have the free Internet, which I mentioned a moment ago. On the other hand, on television you have a kind of neo Soviet dynamic where the news is managed and all kinds of untruths are, uh, systematically propagated. Now there’s a risk with that kind of propaganda. This happened in the Soviet Union that people slowly start, start to disbelieve it mistrusted, uh, and maybe they mistrusted because they’ve read an article in The New York Times or because they’ve traveled somewhere. Or maybe they just missed mistrusted because they see a deteriorating living standard in their own life. And the official news is telling them that everything is on the up and up. So that’s one, uh, you know, sort of real problem that Putin has created for himself. And the other, I think, is more, uh, more structural that you have a decline in living standards for the first eight years of Putin’s rule 2000, 2000 and eight, you have rising oil prices. You have Putin who did in a sense, come in and stabilize the country. After Yeltsin, he kicked out some of the oligarchs which I think was a popular move in Russia, and I think it was possible to believe then that This was a kind of Russian style modernizer, not an autocrat, not a nationalist, but a modernizer now on the autocracy he eventually delivered on the nationalism. He’s happy to deliver. He simply hasn’t delivered on. The modernization standard of living is deteriorating. Uh, and you could make us a final point. Uh, the argument. And I think this was visible in the protest that for a younger generation, to have seen 20 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule and to know that the Constitution has been manipulated in such a way as to make Putin’s rule sort of permanent as long as the man lives, Uh, you know, there’s that’s, I think, where the threshold has, uh, has been most acutely confronted. I don’t think a young 25 year old Russian necessarily wants to live with 20 more years of Putin as a as a leader or 20 more years of Putinism. And that’s I think, the calculation. It’s too much. He’s been in power for too long. Uh, you know, the lies have have have have come back to, uh, to haunt Putin in some respects, Uh, and there’s a calculation that a lot of Russians are making about how worth it. It is, and they’re coming to the conclusion that it’s it is necessary to confront. But to return to my initial point. I think it’s a bit mysterious, as it wasn’t Belarus this summer, as it was in Ukraine in 2013, a bit mysterious. Why these moments happen when they do. It’s so fascinating, Michael, because it is one of the truisms of history that moments of upheaval only look inevitable in retrospect. And and I think that’s what we’re living through now. And we, of course, don’t know where where it will end. One of the points you make so well in your New Republic article that I commend to everyone is, um, that that the next step is unpredictable. We’re not sure we cannot assume that the uprisings will will grow. We cannot assume they’ll go away. There’s so many possibilities that I think is the context for your analysis of American policy. How should, uh Biden administration be thinking about this? Assuming which we know is true, that they care? How should they be approaching this issue? Well, it’s a huge challenge for the Biden administration. I think that, uh, they probably didn’t expect. They knew that Russia would be a big issue in a big problem, but they didn’t expect that the problems would make themselves felt this immediately. Uh, and in such a confusing way, I think that their instincts, in some respects, have been just right so far. And here would refer back to the phone call between Presidents Putin and Biden yesterday, for which we have received, of course, typically two very separate readouts from the Russian and the American government. But, uh, you know, in that, uh, in the readout that we have, you know, Biden has been emphatic about the principles that are at stake, and that is the good tradition of American foreign policy. I would say, uh and very relevant to what’s happening. Uh, and the terrain on which I think this should sort of remain for the U. S. In other words, us is affirming. Have the right to free elections in Russia. It’s affirming the right to freedom of assembly. Uh, it is stating the truth about navalny, which is that this is a political trial that has, you know, sort of nothing to do with Russian law, uh, and is a perversion of justice. And I commend the Biden administration for speaking directly about this, and they should continue doing that as long as this, uh, you know, the situation obtains where I think they have to be more careful, uh, and more considered is in the intersection of democracy promotion, American style and the geopolitics of the entire region. I think that the U. S. Government here universities and think tanks and American citizens, I think have a different, um, set of responsibilities in a different set of options. But for the U. S. Government, you cannot extract yourself from the geopolitics of this relationship. So the idea that we can go into Russia and be a sort of neutral party and say, Well, we’ll mediate between the Russian government and civil society, and we’re going to sort of be the vehicle by which civil society triumphs in the situation. Uh, that, to me seems not just naive, but implicitly quite dangerous, because important as these protests have been and I think they’re going to grow in size, we’ll see more this weekend. And when the weather gets better, uh, they’ll grow even further. The president of Russia does remain Putin. He’s the one in charge of the nuclear codes. He’s the one in charge of the Russian military, and he is the point of contact for, uh, the U. S government. So you can affirm principle. You can hope for the best. You can speak the truth. Uh, maybe there’s a sort of media agenda that the US could develop for Russian speakers that can cut through some of the lies and propaganda of Russian media. But that’s as far as I would take it. I think, uh, from the Biden administration’s perspective, I think it’s very important to remember that the agency here in terms of Russian politics, Russian democracy, that’s the agency of the Russian people. Uh, and it’s very difficult, I know for Americans not to get excited about the possibility of a widening democratic initiative. But if you do that and forget the geopolitics of it, uh, you could set both us and Russia down a very dangerous path, Michael, just to to complicate that even further. One of the other challenges, it seems, is that President Biden has inherited a long list of bad behaviors threatening behaviors by Russia, for which he wants to take action. It seems the most recent being Operation Solar wind Where, uh, which we still don’t know the full magnitude of. But it was a major major hack of American military civilian commercial websites and information orchestrated by the Kremlin, for which the Trump administration did not respond. Uh, the Biden administration is going to want to respond to this. How do we balance the It seems almost necessary, um, strong, forceful response to Russian attacks on the United States without at the same time creating an easy enemy for Putin to rally people around absolutely well. The first analytical step is to disassociate Navalny from from these problems. In these policy challenges, Navalny from an American perspective is not the solution to the problem of Russian meddling, hacking and the many things that Russia does to undermine the U. S. In the Middle East, in Europe, in Asia and elsewhere. It would be naive to the point of delusional to say that we can solve these problems by encouraging a political triumph of navalny over Putin. I’m not aware of people making those arguments, but I exaggerate for the sake of of analytical clarity. All right? Absolutely. The Biden administration inherits something very, very troublesome. Uh, with, uh, with Russia right from the get go. And it’s it’s all of the things that you’ve mentioned in addition to President Trump for the last four years, really having muddied the waters, not just with our allies but with the American public that he’s politicized the Russian issue. President Trump was impeached the first time because of efforts to manipulate American politics using on the first level information from Ukraine. But it’s very possible, I would say, even probable, that that was Russian disinformation from the intelligence services that made its way to Ukraine and then via Giuliani and others, uh, into the bloodstream of the American body politics. So I think Biden has got to deal with all of the the sort of cyber and national security threats that Russia presents. Uh, and he’s also got to educate the American public on the way in which Russia is a foreign policy problem. It’s not a political football to be kicked around in the United States. That’s all, uh, enormously challenging. But that I underscore is not a navalny issue. That’s a U. S. Policy issue that we work on with our allies. And when it comes to the hacking and solar winds and all of that, this first and foremost is a question of domestic resilience. So we should be thinking about you know, how we organize the relevant agencies of the U. S. Government. How we message to the American population how we alter legislation, perhaps, or create new agencies policy instruments for dealing with this kind of hacking and meddling and, uh, an interference. But don’t tie it into two, need a bundle and say, uh where, uh, where Russia is. The problem. Navalny is the solution, Michael. One of the people you and I both revere as a scholar and historian and policymaker of us Russian relations, of course, is George Kennan, Uh, and you’ve published actually a whole book on Kenan’s influences with reflections from many different perspectives. Kenan, uh, famously wrote that the best thing the United States could do in its relations with Russia is actually be the kind of example that we want to be and use our example to over the long term influence, the opinions and thoughts of Russians. What does that mean today? Assuming there’s there’s still some logic in that. What does that mean for us in our difficult Democratic moment in the United States? Right. Well, Kevin, as always, was sort of ring in my ears when I wrote the New Republic piece, and I I paraphrase him in one particular way without citing him. I’ll confess to a fellow academic, but, uh, you know, this is this is journalism after all, But, uh, I say when it comes to democracy promotion in Russia, the U. S. Government should do nothing. Um, you know, that’s may be an overstatement, but that is a direct paraphrase of what George Kennan said, uh, in the 19 fifties and 19 sixties, that, and also after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the role of the United States is not to bring democracy to Russia. And I think Kenan was probably skeptical, given his reading of Russian history, that there might ever be democracy in Russia, which is interesting. But of course, debatable. Debatable point. I wonder Jeremy and Zachary if we haven’t already scored an enormous victory in this respect, and it will take a long time to piece together the chronology of what happened with Navalny and why certain things happened when we’re only at the beginning of trying to understand it. But what I mean by this is that we sent the best possible signal to the Russian people in the last couple of weeks. Not on January 6, but in the last couple of weeks by having the inauguration that we had, Uh, in the end, the vice president did show up. The Republican members of Congress did show up. The president gave, uh, you know, sort of normal, sensible, appealing speech. The day passed without incident was not violent, and since then Biden has been installed as president. One can’t underestimate the importance of this, and I mean not for American politics, but I mean internationally and for American diplomacy. What is a Russian looking at that? See, if you’re frustrated with Putin, you’re annoyed by the fact that you really don’t have a say via elections. You sort of know that Putin has put these fences and enormous amounts of policing and military power between himself and the Russian people. It’s very, very difficult to get rid of him, and you look at the United States and you see that it is possible in that country to have an election to change command change rule to have a peaceful transfer of power. Let’s put a footnote by that phrase, but in the end, that’s what it that’s what it was. That may have helped American diplomacy more than anything else vis a vis Russia. And I wonder if that’s not a cause of the protests in Russia, which, after all, do come after the inauguration a couple of days after the inauguration. I think that that’s the lynchpin, you know, that should be understood as a part of American strategy. It’s not just a ritual that takes place, and it’s not just a detail of American politics that you have this constitutional order and it does function. That’s the foundation, and how you communicate that effectively is a very difficult problem. I don’t like the missionary zeal as we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, where you sort of pound your chest and you know point very directly to yourself. But certainly you would want to use government communications, other means to make sure that Russians see what’s happened here in the last couple of weeks because it is remarkable. Uh, and it does contain for them, I think a certain kind of, uh, of inspiration. And indeed, that was there in the very speech of the of the president on Inauguration Day, the example of our power on the one hand and the power of our example on on on the other. So that sort of neo Kennedy asked phrase, uh should be understood not just as rhetoric, but really a strategy, right? I I think George Kennan would agree with you very strongly. And sometimes our moments of difficulty in the United States and how we come through them are even more important than the than the way we’ve done it in the past. It’s showing people that even in more difficult situations, we can still affirm some basic democratic principles and basic democratic practices. I think so. I mean, I think that this goes back to the history of the Cold War. Uh, and if you think of the turbulent decade of the 19 seventies for the United States, I think it begins that decade in the state of political turmoil. Because of the Vietnam War, you go through Watergate and you have a phase of the Cold War where I think the Soviet Union was really very self confident. It felt itself to be advancing. But it’s not just the election of Reagan in 1980 that changes the dynamic. To a degree, he does bring a new styles to the U. S. Soviet relationship. But the fact that the U. S. Endured all of that and didn’t descend into tyranny or didn’t descend into anarchy is enormously important. And I’m sure, for the dissident movements from Poland, uh, to Czechoslovakia to Russia in the late seventies, early eighties, just the fact that the US could pull through these things that it didn’t fall apart in the midst of the Vietnam War was enormously inspiring. And perhaps there are similar rhythms at work in the U. S. Russian relationship relationship today. I think it’s a wonderful point, Michael and I think it’s the basis for your next article. I think it’s something you should and upon Zachary, do you find this persuasive? Do you and your young young cohort who are examining and looking out at the world today and all the difficulties United States faces? Do you see a sense of purpose with regard to Russia? I’m not a missionary purposes, Michaels made clear. But a commitment to doing some of the things we can to encourage democratic change in Russia is that something that motivates your generation? How do you think about this?

[0:31:02 Speaker 0] Well, I think it definitely does. I think democratic, democratic reforms worldwide or something that are very important to my generation. But I do think there is a failure of our education system. Twofold, first of all, to teach an accurate and accurate recount of of American foreign policy successes not to act as if all American foreign policy successes have come through force or through over handed actions. And I think I think at times it can seem like an easier way to teach American history. But I think it really does a disservice. And then again, I do think, as always, there is this American

[0:31:39 Speaker 1] caricature

[0:31:40 Speaker 0] of Russia and other societies like Iran mhm as as just completely autocratic and and doomed to be forever autocratic. And I think we need to highlight the the the democratic creativity and and and spirit in these countries, even in times when they are ruled by very autocratic regimes.

[0:32:01 Speaker 1] I think that’s very well, said Zachary and and Michael. Your work has done so much to, just as Zachary said, to to take the dull prose of what is a false caricature of autocracy and give us the poetry, Michael, of the complexity and the various different, courageous and creative elements of change in Russia and elsewhere in the way the United States can modestly, uh, tap into that in one form or another. It’s really it’s really been wonderful talking to Michael. Thank you for joining us today. It’s been a delight. Thank you, Jeremy and Zachary for your lovely questions and, uh, for raising the question of democracy in Russia at this hour of of drama in transition. And thank you, Zachary for for giving us a poem is always to get started a dialogue between Russia and the US, similar to the dialogue we need to have in broader terms and thank you most of all, uh, to our audience for joining us for this week of This is Democracy. This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at Harrison Lemke dot com. Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy. Yeah,

[0:33:30 Speaker 0] mhm