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July 21, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
26:25
Media on Russia and Ukraine with Vladimir Golstein

Vladimir Golstein, professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University, discusses the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and how the media covers the war in this episode. Vladimir Golstein holds his M.S. in Computers from Moscow Institute of Management, his B.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University.

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Hey everybody, my guest today is Vladimir Goldstein, who is a professor at Brown University.
Professor Goldstein grew up in Moscow.
He got a master's degree from the Moscow Institute of Management.
He got a BA In philosophy from Columbia University and a PhD in the Slavic language and literature from Yale University, Professor Goldstein has taught at Oberlin College at Yale University and at Brown, where he teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses that explore Western and Russian literary traditions he has written.
Numerous books and articles on 19th and early 20th century Russian authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and others.
And he regularly appears or publishes on popular news sites, including Al Jazeera, Nation, Forbes, etc.
I wanted to have Professor Goldstein on this show because he's been an outspoken I would say, I guess, critic of the propaganda barrage and the censorship of information about the Ukraine Russian conflict.
And I've shared your misgivings just about that aspect of it without taking any position because I'm not really an expert on Ukraine or on Putin.
But I feel a deja vu that I, from 2001 to 2003, during the roll-up to the Iraq War, when it became impermissible To express any kind of ambiguity about whether or not we should be going to war with Saddam Hussein,
who had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks in 2001, who had nothing to do with 9-11, and who was not a sponsor of one of the rare countries in the Middle East that were not actively sponsoring external terrorism.
And yet, it seemed that a lot of our oil, somehow, God put it underneath his country and the neighboring country of Kuwait in a great act of mischief, and that a lot of the propaganda was directed towards creating, justifying a war that certain sectors of our society wanted.
And there was really no debate on that.
Is that how you feel about what's happening here?
Yeah, absolutely.
I felt it even before in the late 90s when there was again something similar vis-a-vis dismantling Yugoslavia and, you know, the bombing campaign of Serbia.
These are all complicated issues, complicated countries, you know, Yugoslavia, all these republics, all this complicated history, all sort of, you know, kind of mixed loyalties.
However, out of the blue, it was decided that Serbs are bad and we have to sort of organize NATO campaign.
And it was before 58 days, Belgrade was bombed and Serbia was bombed.
And, you know, again, alternative voices.
You know, I remember I was at Yale then, and once in a while, somebody will try to say something.
Somebody will try to organize something.
But mostly, I remember I was not very happy with what was going on.
I sent articles or papers, letters here and there.
It was silence.
Just one thing, you know, bad guys, good guys, we're always on the side of good guys.
Americans like the story that there is a bad Goliath, Serbia, good Davids, and we always support Davids.
The same thing was like some kind of, you know, freedom fighters in all this kind of, you know, Middle Eastern countries.
We have to support them.
Who are these freedom fighters?
We don't know.
We supported these in Afghanistan versus the Soviet Union.
Turned out one of those guys who had been Laden, who sort of then turned against us.
The same thing with Ukraine.
It's a very complicated story.
I kind of know some of it.
I know history.
I know people.
I've been there.
But it's a complicated story.
What I resent the most is the simplification.
Bad guys, good guys.
We're on the side of good guys.
Russia, Putin are bad.
Ukrainians are good.
We do all know from our own experience, nothing is that black and white.
And yet this black and white narrative is imposed upon us.
And I find it very disturbing.
So that's why I sort of, you know, I wrote an article.
I was giving interviews.
I was on TV shows just to say that things are much more complicated.
And I think we as the United States, working into this very complicated situation, making commitments, which are very frequently anti-US interests.
They're just getting us more and more involved.
Maybe some people in some people's interests, maybe military-industrial complex interests, they are selling more weapons.
But is it in a good interest in the long run?
Do we really, as a country, United States need to sort of always have Russia as an adversary?
I'm not sure.
What do you think Putin's intentions were in the Ukraine?
Well, you know, this is returning to this complex situation.
Ukraine is, if you want to sort of, you know, your audience have to understand it.
It's not a unified country.
It's like a quilt.
You know, it's like on some level, just imagine the United States.
We have here people from all over the world, you know, including a few natives who are left.
We have people from, you know, Latin America.
And out of the blue, if somebody in the United States would say, no, we're only Anglos.
No, we're only, you know, Mexicans.
It's going to be disturbing.
So there in Ukraine, there are a fair amount of Russian speakers, ethnic Russians, primarily located in the East, people who kind of feel loyalty to sort of old Soviet Union, to Russia, to Russian language.
They grew up with language.
I remember I was traveling through Crimea, through Odessa.
They were complaining that why are they forcing us to speak Ukrainian, where Russians want to speak Russian.
So this population in Ukraine have their relatives, friends, they came from Russia.
So Putin has tremendous pressure to support and protect these people.
As any politician, he has to do something.
Had he been just washing his hands out of this sizable minority, big group of people in Ukraine who are just being ostracized, second-rated, mistreated, there will be real agitation against him in Russia.
He probably could have lost his position.
So he basically, as any politician, feels obliged to respond.
So there's his pressure.
Somehow, you know, he feels that these people in the East, you know, Russian speakers, ethnic Russians, are mistreated.
And since 2014, they've been mistreated in a sort of very, very big way.
Bombarded, shelled, misplaced, about one million people.
We now talk about...
Refugees, which produced about 5 million people.
But from 2014 till now, there was about 1 million people in so-called Donbass, this area in eastern Ukraine, which were misplaced.
Some of them went to Ukraine, some of them went to Russia.
And these people are agitating.
These people actually, some of them have their Russian passport.
So they are putting the pressure on the government to do something about it.
So he was like not dragging his feet, dragging his feet.
Eventually he felt that there was a need to do something.
So one thing I really want to say...
Let me interrupt you for a second.
Since 2014, would you say that the coup that happened was a change and transition in government that happened in 2014?
A lot of people believe, and there's strong evidence, that that was a CIA-driven coup that occurred in the Ukraine.
Let me just get a quick impression of that.
Is that your assessment as well?
I mean, it was definitely a coup.
I really don't know the details.
There are various theories.
Some people say that those who were, like, shooting, they were provocateurs, they were organized.
But the fact is, it was a legal coup, because legally elected president, Yanukovych, was immediately kicked out, and some kind of a government, you know, very rapidly was patched in, and this government, which was patched in, was organized by Victoria Newland, who was, at that moment, very big shot in the State Department, American ambassador in Ukraine, and there's a recording of them talking and saying, once we sort of got rid of Yanukovych, we'll put these people sort of in place.
Okay, at that moment...
Okay, and so let me then interrupt you again.
So you have Victoria Nuland, who is a very solid member of what we call the neocons.
And she is, following the coup, a very pro-Western government It is erected in the Ukraine, and that triggers what I would say is a kind of a civil war in Donbass,
where the ethnic Russians immediately feel that one of the first acts of the new government is to attack the Russian language and go from a double-language country to a single-language country.
And take a number of other very public steps that were anti-Russian.
The Russians in Dumbass have peaceful protests.
And it's the beginning of what essentially is a civil war in which 14,000 ethnic Russians are killed.
And correct me if I'm wrong.
And Putin says the reason that he went into Ukraine Was to stop a genocide against the ethnic Russians.
Is that correct?
I wouldn't call it genocide, but it's like for, I agree with you, there was like, that's estimation, 40,000 people killed, shelled, displaced, about 1 million displaced.
So this was just a real mistreatment, and, you know, not genocide, but definitely some kind of, you know, racist attitude toward Russians.
Language is banned, and so on.
And what I should be stressed, and this is like I'm referring to Western studies, I've got a presentation by some professor from Colombia, that up until 2014, people in Donbass actually wanted to be part of Ukraine.
After this coup, when Yanukovych, who comes from Donbass, from this area, is overthrown, we have different pro-Western government, but this government not only pro-Western in terms of the West, United States, and France, it's pro-Western like it supports Western Ukraine against Eastern Ukraine, against Donbass.
It starts sort of banning the language, starts mistreating them.
They think that Donbass is still very much in Russian hands, and they turn against them.
And immediately, if you follow the public polling in Donbass, their mood goes kind of east, if you wish.
They used to want to be part of Ukraine.
Now they are declared second raiders.
They declare separatists.
They declare Russian terrorists.
They are being violated.
Then people in Odessa are being violated and killed and destroyed and burned.
Again, first, by the way, if you listen to Ukrainians, when they burn people, they say, they're all Russian separatists.
Turn out.
Each of them lived in Odessa.
They just wanted to protest peacefully.
They were burned down.
So the mood of the Donbas goes absolutely opposite direction.
And they say, we don't want to be part of you.
We don't want to be part of this kind of new conglomeration where we declared second rate.
And they began protest first peacefully, then violently.
At that moment, Putin feels that he needs to kind of support them.
He supports them with arms.
He supports it this way.
The war continued.
So eventually he said, I have to be much more proactive than I used to be.
So that's kind of his reasoning.
What are you seeing now?
Do you have any feeling about where this is going?
The consensus in the present in this country is that Putin is losing this war.
No, that's absolutely sort of based what, again, what troubles me a great deal.
You know, every time I turn on NPR, listen to BBC, they basically ask questions from people in Kiev, from people in Lviv, which are very frequently removed from the actual battlefield, and they just play their interpretation.
They're spinning.
So, you know, Ukrainians are spinning, then BBC has additional spinning, and they keep on saying that, you know, yeah, Rush, what we know for sure, It's a long campaign.
Russians probably expected to move quickly and Ukraine will collapse.
It did.
So it's a long-lasting war.
Russians are definitely losing a fair amount of people for the simple reason they don't want to actually have a scorched earth policy.
They're trying.
They still think that Eastern Ukraine should be kind of theirs voluntarily.
So they don't want to...
They turn people against them.
They don't want to indiscriminately bomb.
So they subject their soldiers to, like, door-to-door fighting.
As a result, a lot of Russian soldiers are dying, are being killed, besides Ukrainians being killed, too.
But what we see is that Russia is advancing.
And once they advance, the local population, those who survived all this, they still remember how poorly they were treated by Ukrainian government.
By Ukrainian propaganda.
By Ukrainian soldiers.
Some of them belong to these very nasty organizations.
Alternationalists, Azov, who are mistreating them, shooting them, raping them, doing all of this.
So I think Donbass is not going back.
Either they will be independent or Russia will just integrate them into Russia.
So that's one thing.
And Russia definitely is not going to give back Mariupol because this area of the south, eastern Ukraine, will connect Russia to Crimea.
Because for a while there was Crimea, it was Russian, then Russia on the other side.
Between them was the territory of Ukraine.
Now Russians have grabbed it.
People, local population there, mostly are pro-Russian.
And I think Russians are not going to back.
I'm not sure they have enough energy, strength, desire to go where they are not liked, like in Kiev.
So I don't think they're going to go to Kyiv.
I don't think they have enough strength to capture Kharkov, which is in the middle.
Half of the population are pro-Russian, half are pro-Ukrainian.
But they definitely will try to move as far as possible to the Black Sea, including Odessa and Nikolai.
I think that's where they will stop.
Maybe they would use this Black Sea access as a bargaining chip to put an end to that, but they're not backing off from Donbass, Lugansk, this area, and they're not backing off from this corridor between Russia and Crimea.
I think it's for all intents and purposes it's going to stay Russian.
When people try to tell this part of the story on the American news media, it's called fakeness, and it is fact-checked, and it is debunked.
What is your reaction to that?
Basically, we see people, you know, there is an endless amount of interviews.
I have friends all over the country, and they report to me.
Some actually were so much traumatized by war, by bombardment, they say, we just don't care Under whom we live, under Ukraine, under Russia.
We just want bombing to stop.
But many people are more or less happy.
Finally, these eight years of shelling and bombing, which people in Donbass experience, will be over.
So I think that's the reality.
And if you look at the map slowly, including even those who kind of begrudgingly don't want to agree with it, They look at the map, and the Russians are making advancements.
Mariupol was a central city on Azov Sea, which gave access to Ukraine, to all these trade routes, and so on.
Now it's Russia.
Now nobody denies it.
So I think people shouldn't dismiss unpleasant facts as fake news.
It's not in anybody's interest.
This is a gruesome, brutal war.
It should have been avoided had Ukrainian leaders, American leaders, Russian leaders sat down, said, No NATO in Ukraine, and Donbass can be autonomous.
We would have saved so much money, so much lives, just only because Americans couldn't enter any compromise and wanted to present Putin as some kind of Hitler of today.
Because of that, how much lives, property, and things are destroyed and will be destroyed?
We're witnessing now total explosion of inflation.
Economists predict very, very serious downturn in general economy without Russian oil, Russian gas.
You know, this is a total mess only because diplomacy somehow was sent sort of down the drain.
What do you think, in terms of the stability of the region and the relationships with China, What is this war doing to those important considerations?
China is very important here, because I think ultimately, if you ask, like you refer to neocons here on Washington, they They have pretty good intelligence.
They know that Russia, strong as it is, rich as it is, it's probably not a match to the United States, at least not economically.
Maybe they're a match in terms of amount of nuclear warheads, but that's about it.
While China is totally different to the ballgame.
China is a powerhouse, and basically Neocon's target is somehow The ability to reign in China.
So Russia is just a stepping stone.
And China, of course, knows it.
They're watching it, and it's their interest that Russia will be there, because psychologically and even militarily, Russia will be some kind of a buffer between China and the United States.
So China will do all it can to keep Russia afloat, to work as a kind of guarantor of peace and negotiator.
I'm sure they would support Russia economically, They will support Ukraine economically because they want to be like the top dog in this area and use all their kind of connections, economic connections and so on, as a sort of bulwark against the United States.
Because people talk about Ukraine being a proxy war between Russia and the United States, but I think it's also a proxy war ultimately between the United States and China.
So China is very important there because they kind of felt that if Russia falls, collapses with this war, China will be next.
What do you think about the reports that Putin is very sick and maybe dying?
I would say there was some extra activity on the part of Putin before this military operation, this war started.
He was trying to talk to all European leaders.
Lavrov was flying all over.
Somehow I wonder what provoked this agitation, whether he felt that his health is not good, And, you know, we know, look at sort of Soviet Union history, once Brezhnev and others began to die, then the whole country collapsed.
Then, you know, Gorbachev was pushed out.
So each new successor starts from the position of weakness.
So I suspect Putin, if he sensed that A, he's aging, B, his health is not good, he probably wanted to negotiate the best possible way to provide stability in the region.
So I wouldn't discount the fact that he was thinking about his own mortality, if you wish, and wanted to And this festering wound, because for eight years, this was a festering wound.
What we witness here in the United States in terms of propaganda, watching Ukraine being, you know, bombarded by Russia, Russians for eight years were watching this news about Donbas, day in, day out.
Shelling, shelling.
So he had to solve it somehow.
So he tried to do that, whether it was connected with his actual health or just ideas that sooner or later he has to retire.
A new person might be a little bit weak.
So at least he now, Putin, has good control of military, of KGB, of media.
So he has to make sure that this is a stable region.
So that's, I think, what provokes him into action at that moment.
And how is his popularity in Russia?
You know, that's another kind of naive idea of the West.
If we impose sanctions on Russian people, so if Russians cannot travel, if Russians cannot draw dollars from their accounts and pay for some goods from Amazon, they will turn against Putin.
This actually shows unbelievable ignorance about human psychology in general and Russian psychology in particular.
When he started it, his popularity was in the area of 65%.
Now it's like pushing 80%.
Because Russians, every Russian, and I read, I have a lot of friends in Russia who were not sympathetic to the war, to this kind of violence, to bloodshed.
But now they say, oh, we now realize that Putin might have a point.
West is actually against us.
West is against us as Russians, not against Putin, against us.
So if West is against us, We better get together around our leader and push back.
That's the result.
So Russians feel kind of under pressure.
Many, many of them now, every poll say that about 80% or he gets support.
So of course, you know, there isn't any normal country.
People have the right to think differently.
There are some people who are very well vested in the West.
Academics, artists who travel, and now they cannot travel.
So they can be vocal and express their anger.
That's fine.
But a lot of people whom I talk to, we're behind it.
We're behind it.
Enough of Radio West bullying us.
We should be aware, you know, that, let's say, we talk about United States, country of immigrants.
People come here with American dream.
You can make it.
Russia has a different dream.
Russian dream is, you know what Russian dream is?
Every now and then, Westerners invade us, and we have to push them back.
That's what happened under Poland in the 16th century, Swedes in 17th century, French in 18th century, Germans in 20th century.
Every time, we push them back.
So they're not going to bully us as much.
Now, if America wants to bully us, we're going to push them back.
So that's a Russian kind of mentality.
And if the West wants to provoke this Russian anger at the West, that's what they're getting.
Have you suffered censorship or retribution for speaking out about these issues?
Your question about now?
Yeah.
I don't experience censorship.
It was interesting, like, you know, when the whole 2014, for example, war started, I was approached by Al Jazeera to write my kind of different take.
But then at a certain moment, I suspect Al Jazeera got a phone call.
And no more articles.
I'm sending them one article.
No, no, we're not interested.
No, no, no, we're interested.
So, okay, it's not working.
I sort of publish once in a while in alternative publications.
I give interviews to Chinese CGTNs, you know, their major station.
I give interviews to RT. Whoever asks me, I will be able to publish and write.
But at that time, I think, like, thanks, but no thanks.
How about CNN or Fox?
Oh, forget it.
I don't know.
They probably have their own sort of, you know, vision.
And I try to, again, there was like some website called Alternet.
They published several of my articles.
Then again, as hard as I try to send more, No, thank you.
Thank you.
So, for some reason, there is some kind of a pressure to present a unified view.
And if you don't argue it, if you try to sort of widen the horizon, if you try to humanize somebody whom we try to demonize, this is a no-go.
How about at the faculty lounge at Brown University?
I mean, what I have to give a credit to Brown, and I'm really sort of happy about it, whatever.
Once in a while, I remember I gave an interview to England, I think, as they have Channel 4.
It's kind of more or less like CNN. And I, after Zelenskyy addressed Parliament, they asked me and I said, this is propaganda.
The same unanimity of English Parliament was in 1914 before they embarked on the most idiotic, self-destructive First World War.
So unanimity of the Parliament doesn't tell me anything.
It's just destructive.
So right away, I would get emails addressed to me and to Brown University administration.
Just, how dare you tolerate this obnoxious person?
He is channeling Kremlin.
He is channeling Putin.
And I actually, one person I try to answer, and then I get a note from the dean, don't get engaged.
We support freedom of speech.
Don't argue.
This is your opinion.
So that's fine.
They're not giving me a voice, but they're not trying to harass the press or anything.
But even the faculty, we have several people in our department.
Some people think like me.
Some people think, no, no, no, Vladimir, you're absolutely wrong.
There's one clear victim and one clear aggressor.
And your attempt to complicate the story is not correct.
But in a way, Remain, you know, kind of friendly.
So I don't think, thank God, you know, I don't feel that much sort of pressure from the faculty.
But I imagine I'm also lucky to have tenure and so on, because, you know, otherwise it'd be much more complicated.
Vladimir Goldstein, thank you very, very much for joining us and educating us about this important issue.
All right.
Thank you, Bob.
I enjoyed it, and I hope the audience would like it, too.
I mean, they will.
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