The Putin Interviews Read online

  ALSO BY OLIVER STONE

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  By Oliver Stone and David Talbot

  The Untold History of the United States

  By Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

  On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

  By Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali

  Scarface: The Movie Scriptbook

  By Oliver Stone

  A Child’s Night Dream: A Novel

  By Oliver Stone

  Copyright © 2017 by Oliver Stone

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Robert Scheer

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Hot Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-51073-342-8

  eISBN: 978-1-51073-343-5

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Printed in Canada

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  First Interview

  Trip 1—Day 1—July 2, 2015

  Trip 1—Day 2—July 3, 2015

  Trip 1—Day 2—July 3, 2015

  Trip 1—Day 3—July 4, 2015

  Trip 1—Day 3—July 4, 2015

  Second Interview

  Trip 2—Day 1—February 19, 2016

  Trip 2—Day 2—February 20, 2016

  Third Interview

  Trip 3—Day 1—May 9, 2016

  Trip 3—Day 2—May 10, 2016

  Trip 3—Day 3—May 11, 2016

  Trip 3—Day 3—May 11, 2016

  Fourth Interview

  Trip 4—Day 1—February 10, 2017

  End Notes

  Index

  PUBLISHER’S DISCLAIMER:

  The following is a transcript of a series of interviews conducted between Oliver Stone and Vladmir Putin, on four separate trips to Russia for a total of nine days between July 2, 2015 and February 10, 2017. Since Putin’s words were translated from Russian, we took the liberty of fixing grammar, unclear language, and various inconsistencies. And because the interviews took place over a two year period, we edited out some repetition. In all cases, we did the very best we could to ensure that the intent and meaning of what was said was accurately reflected in the transcript.

  Foreword

  Thirty years ago, as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, an assignment led me to the inner sanctum of the Politburo, that darkly mysterious and all-powerful center of the Soviet Union, as its leader Mikhail Gorbachev was initiating his ambitious drive for openness and change. His Perestroika, or restructuring of the Soviet government, would inevitably—if inadvertently—end the brutal Communist experiment to mold a brave new world of disparate ethnicities, cultures, and religions spanning one-sixth of the planet’s land mass.

  My interview was with propaganda chief Alexander Yakovlev, the Politburo’s most liberal member and a close Gorbachev ally, while down the hall I would later knock on the door of Gorbachev’s No. 2 man, Yegor Ligachev, depicted most often as the strongest opponent of Perestroika. I didn’t encounter the less-defined figure of Boris Yeltsin, who would become Russia’s first president when the Soviet Union collapsed four years later. Yeltsin would come to appoint former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, part of the reform faction, to join his administration, and on December 31, 1999, when Yeltsin resigned, he named Putin acting president. The following year, Putin would be elected to the office, soundly defeating the Communist Party candidate.

  In a historic and immensely important series of interviews filmmaker Oliver Stone has conducted with Putin, which is the subject of this book and a four-part Showtime documentary, Putin states he believed that with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War was over, and with it the endless threats of confrontation. But that was not to be.

  Although Putin discarded Communism as an ideology and indeed embraces the traditions of Russian Orthodox Christianity, he remains a fervent nationalist, determined that Russia be granted the respect he strongly believes it deserves. That means deference to its historic concerns over its borders and the treatment of Russian-speaking people who, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly found themselves thrust outside newly drawn borders, Ukraine being a prime example.

  In his discussion with Stone, Putin credits Gorbachev with recognizing that profound change was required in a failing Soviet system, but he faults him for his naïveté regarding the immense obstacles to that change at home and, more importantly, in the United States. Putin is dismissive of Gorbachev’s belief that reason would triumph, since both sides of the Cold War—each possessed of the capability to destroy all life on this planet—desired peace.

  The central query in the Stone-Putin interviews is how matters devolved to the current state of tension. Thus they are compelling as a key text for understanding this dangerous time. The intermittent conversations between July 2, 2015 and February 10, 2017 occurred during a period when relations between the world’s two most formidable military powers degenerated to a point of suspicion and hostility not witnessed since the end of the Cold War more than a quarter century ago. And as Stone reminds in several pointed exchanges, the tendency of power to corrupt rulers of any country in the name of a false patriotism should be of concern in any nation, Russia most definitely included.

  The discussion is respectful, and as Stone states at the conclusion, it gives Putin a chance “to state his side of the story;” but that is a story the film director-journalist questions energetically, considering the continuing controversy over Russia’s role in the world, ranging from its support of the Assad regime in Syria to charges of interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

  Stone knows much about futile wars and the lies told about them, having served two combat tours in Vietnam, a story he documented in his Academy Award-winning movie Platoon and the two others in his brilliant Vietnam trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth. He explored the subject convincingly in his 2012 ten-part revisionist history for Showtime, The Untold History of the United States, and its 750-page companion volume, which challenges the conventional US Cold War narrative that provides an essential backdrop for this current work.

  Putin is no less familiar with the subject, having come to power in Russia on the ashes of a Soviet Union that, despite surviving the immense horrors of the German invasion and fifty million dead, unraveled in the wake of a pointless invasion of Afghanistan. He leads a society that retains enormous military power but is far less successful in its peaceful economic achievements.

  These men share a conviction that militaristic hubris is fatal, and both express wariness of ideologies in their respective societies that historically supported imperial adventure. But this is not a conversation of equals, for Stone is very much the questioning artist eager to pursue contradiction and oddities of thought, while Putin makes amply clear that, as guarded as he appears, he is highly mindful of his position as the commander-in-chief of the world’s second most awesome military power, and that his words have consequences far beyond the requirements of interesting filmmaking. Still, there is clearly a mutual, if wary, respect between the two that makes for a candid glimpse into the minds of the powerful, both the ruler and the artist.

  For Stone, filmmaking provides a natural outlet for his scorn of the perceived wisdom of his nation’s foreign policy establishment. For Putin, the task is more complicated, being the leader of a nation in profound transition from Soviet Communist ideology to a new Russian national identity that attempts to bridge “a thousand years” of Russian history, spanning eras of the czars to the powerful oligarchs, the Russian version of our crony capitalists.

  Putin emerges here as the prophet of a wounded Russian nationalism that, while capable of posing a potent threat, should not be confused with the Communist ideology that preceded his rise to power, and which he clearly views with considerable distaste. That tension provides the leitmotif of this rare glimpse into the workings of Putin’s mind and, in a larger sense, of the quandary of Russia’s place in a much-changed world. The interview begins at a time when few expected the US victory of a populist rightwing candidate who trounced a dozen leaders of the GOP establishment in the primary and went on to defeat the anointed candidate of the Democratic party leadership. By the end of the transcript, less than a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, the lengthy interview comes to an end that is both illuminating and depressing.

  In that last session, Stone strenuously pushes Putin to complete the interview in a manner the intellectually aggressive documentarian believes will answer some unanswered questions. That includes controversial aspects of Putin’s eighteen years as head of the world’s largest nation, by land mass. Is Putin addicted to power? Does he see himself as the indispensable agent of Russian history? Has the largely unchallenged power he wields corrupted
his vision? This is not the first time these topics have been broached, but whereas Stone’s earlier probing seemed welcomed by Putin, there is now a weariness that, he makes clear, is borne not so much from assuming his ideas are unappealing to a Western audience, but rather that they simply will not be heard.

  Now facing his fourth American president, and ironically one he is widely accused of having helped elect (which he denies), Putin seems worn down by the effort to break through to any American leadership. He asserts that it, and more importantly the bureaucracy that informs it, inevitably views Russia not as a partner, a word he uses frequently to refer to the United States, albeit with a lacing of sarcasm, but as a convenient scapegoat for its own failures.

  At the third interview’s conclusion, Putin asks Stone if he has ever been beaten. Stone assures him, “Oh, yes many times,” to which Putin responds, referring to the projected release of the documentary: “Then it’s not going to be anything new, because you’re going to suffer for what you are about to do.”

  It is a painful but perhaps accurate prediction, given the current climate of widespread condemnation of yet unproven claims of Russian interference in the US election. Stone replies: “I know, but it’s worth it … to try to bring some more peace and consciousness to the world.”

  —Robert Scheer

  FIRST INTERVIEW

  Trip 1—Day 1—July 2, 2015

  ON PUTIN’S BACKGROUND

  OS: I think a lot of Western people don’t know much about you except for the news. We’d like to know about your background and where you came from. I know that you were born in October, 1952, after the war. That your mother was a factory worker and your father had been in the war. But I don’t know what he did after the war. And I know that you lived in a collective apartment with other families as you grew up.

  VP: My mother didn’t work at a factory. She was a worker, however, but she did different jobs. But I was an only child. They had lost two children before me. One during the Siege of Leningrad,1 during the war. And they didn’t want to give me up to an orphanage. And that’s why my mother was working as a warden—

  OS: Because she did not want to give you up?

  VP: Yes, that’s correct. And my father was working at a plant—a factory.

  OS: Doing what exactly?

  VP: He was an engineer. He graduated from college. He had a vocational education and he was working in a factory.

  OS: Steadily or was it stop-gap work? Did he work on a steady basis?

  VP: Yes. Yes. On a steady basis. I would say. And he’d been working for a very long time. And then he retired and he still worked until he was 70 or so.

  OS: He was wounded in the war, though?

  VP: Yes, he was. When the war started he was serving in a special unit. There were small intelligence groups which were sent to the area guard of the enemy to perform different actions. There were 20 people sent in such a group and only four survived.

  He told me of that and later, when I was president, I got the archives and I received a confirmation of what had happened. It’s quite curious. It was. And then he was sent to the armed forces to one of the most dangerous areas of the Leningrad front. It was called the Nevsky Pyatachok—the bridgehead. There were hostilities on the Ritneva River. The Soviet army managed to create a small bridgehead two by four kilometers.

  OS: Going on, your older brother died within a few days, I believe it was, or within a few months of your birth?

  VP: No, he died during the Siege of Leningrad. And he was less than three years old. And back then in order to save children, children were taken from their families to support them, to save their lives. But my brother got ill and he died. And our parents were not even informed where he was buried. Quite curious, just recently there were some interested people and they managed to find something in the archives. They used the surname, the father’s name, and the address from whence the child was taken. And they managed to find some documents about his death and about where he was buried and the orphanage where he was sent. And last year was the first time that I visited his burial place. It’s in Memorial Soundry in St. Petersburg.

  OS: Well, considering the casualties from World War II, I would imagine your father and mother were not broken by these tragedies. They must have looked to their third son as a new hope.

  VP: Well, indeed they were not broken. But the war ended in 1945, and I was born only in 1952. And that was a very difficult time for ordinary people who believed in the Soviet Union. And yet they decided to have another child.

  OS: And tell me … I hear you had a bit of … a bit of a juvenile delinquency problem. You were a bit of a wild child until, I heard, you studied Judo at the age of 12.

  VP: Yes, indeed. My parents tried to pay attention to my upbringing but still … I lived in freedom and I spent much time in the courtyard and the streets. And certainly I was not always as disciplined as some would have liked me to be. And since I started going into sport on a systemic basis, started to do Judo, this became a changing factor in my life for the better.

  OS: I also heard that your grandfather on your mother’s side was a chef at times for Lenin and for Stalin.

  VP: Yes, indeed. It happened. It’s a small world as it were. It’s true. Before the 1917 revolution he worked at a restaurant in Petrograd, in Leningrad. He was a chef, a cook. I don’t know how he got to work for someone of Lenin’s stature. But later, indeed, he worked in the countryside where Stalin lived and he worked for Stalin. He was a very simple man—a cook.

  OS: Did you hear him tell any stories?

  VP: No, he didn’t. He didn’t tell me anything, but to be honest, part of my childhood I spent in the Moscow Oblest. We lived in St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad back then. But in the summer we went for a few weeks to visit my grandfather—he was a retiree. But he still lived where he used to work. He lived in one of the State dachas. And my father told me how he went to his father when Stalin was still alive. And my grandfather showed him Stalin from afar. That’s the only thing I know.

  OS: We have something in common—my mother who’s French, her father—my grandfather—was a French soldier in World War I. He was a chef also in the trenches. And he told me many stories about World War I and how tough it was.

  VP: Yes, my mother told me also about the first World War, from what had been told to her by her father. He also participated in the first World War. One curious story from the human side. It was a war in trenches. And my grandfather got back and he told one story. He saw that one of the Austrian soldiers—I believe that was the Southern front—was aiming at him. But my grandfather was first, he shot first and the Austrian fell. And then my grandfather saw that the Austrian was still alive. But his disposition was like that—he was the only person there apart from the Austrian—and the Austrian was bleeding to death. He was going to die. And my grandfather just crawled to him. He took his first aid kit and bandaged his wounds. Quite curious. He told his relatives, “I wouldn’t have shot first if I hadn’t seen that he was aiming at me.” But whatever country you are from—we are all the same, we are all human beings and those people are also just ordinary people, just workers as we are.

  OS: The French war was as bloody as the Russian war. In World War I, one-half, 50 percent of the population of young men between 17 and about 35 were killed or wounded in that war.2

  VP: Yes, that’s true.

  OS: You graduated from high school and I believe you went directly to law school. That’s the Russian system?

  VP: Yes, that’s true. I graduated from high school, secondary school, in Leningrad and I directly entered Leningrad University and started to study law.

  OS: And graduated in 1975? That’s pretty good—as a lawyer and met your first wife there—I mean your last wife—your only wife.

  VP: That was later. That was after seven years.

  OS: And then you joined the KGB right away in 1975 in Leningrad.

  VP: Yes, as a matter of fact, there was this system of distribution of jobs in the Soviet higher education institutions. So when you graduated from a higher education institution, you were supposed to go where you were sent.