This week on 'Intelligence Matters,' host Michael Morell speaks with Andrew Weiss, a former White House Russia expert and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia.
MICHAEL MORELL: Andrew, welcome to Intelligence Matters. I am really excited about this conversation today. So it's great to have you.MICHAEL MORELL: Andrew, you've just published a very unique book titled. So congratulations. I'd like to start by asking you why you wrote the book. What art form you chose for the book, and why you chose that art form.
ANDREW WEISS: Thanks for saying that. I'm sure Brian will be really gratified to hear that. I was, like a lot of people, I'm not super nerdy about graphic novels, but the ones I've read all tend to look pretty literal. And when I was first connected to the editor of this book, who's a graphic novelist himself but runs an imprint at Macmillan, he gave me a bunch of books to read as a source of inspiration.
MICHAEL MORELL: I walked away from reading the book with a handful of themes about Putin. And let me ask you about each one of them. And for each one, if you could explain sort of how the theme plays out, where it came from in terms of Putin's background and his history and how it impacts his decision making today. And the first one that jumped out to me was that this is a highly emotional guy.
MICHAEL MORELL: The second theme, Andrew, that jumped out to me is that Putin is impulsive. And it sounds similar to being emotional, but it's but it's a bit different. Could you talk about that? ANDREW WEISS: Putin is nimble. And the way the Russian decision making system is set up, there aren't any checks and balances anymore. Those existed earlier on in his tenure. And you had people who had served with him in the KGB or who had been his lifelong associates who were in senior positions. And you had something that looked a lot more, not exactly like the Politburo, but at least created some semblance of checks and balances.
Second factor is the notion of a strong state and that when he took over as president in 2000, the Russian state had really atrophied. The Yeltsin years had been a period of great devolution of power. And what he's done over the course of the 20 years is re-centralized power in the Kremlin. And there's a word in Russian which means a believer in a strong state, and the interests of the state should trump everything.
MICHAEL MORELL: This seems very linked to what you just talked about in terms of the strength of the state, regime security. Is that the right way to think about it? MICHAEL MORELL: Another one that jumped out at me was the protesters outside the KGB villa in East Germany during the collapse of that country. And of course, Putin was inside.
The protests that broke out in Moscow in late 2011, though, which were spontaneous and showed the main beneficiaries of the Putin regime coming out on the streets and saying, we can't just be subjects. You need to treat us like citizens. At that moment, when the very first protests had occurred, Putin very opportunistically came out and claimed falsely that the State Department had orchestrated the whole thing and that anybody who was out on the streets was just in the employ of the evil U.
The other thing that we looked at was how there was something about the failure to protect strategic depth made Putin and the Russian leadership feel more vulnerable vis a vis the United States and Europe.
MICHAEL MORELL: How do you think about his staying power in Russia as a result of what he's done here?
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