Earlier this month, when the bomb went off in the St. Petersburg subway station, killing 14 people, Anna Nemtsova was in a cafe in Moscow. She's a Russian reporter, currently a correspondent for The Daily Beast. The bombing was blamed on a suicide bomber, a 22-year-old from Kyrgyzstan. But in this cafe, Anna says, as soon as people saw the news on their phones-- Minutes after the attack took place in St. Petersburg people were still in shock and the first thing that came up to their mind was that the government was blowing up St. Petersburg metro. Nobody else but the government. That was a shocking conspiracy theory that they heard-- Right. So they have no evidence that that's true. Zero. Absolutely zero evidence. Yeah. And they say they're doing this to distract our attention from their opposition rallies. She's talking about the opposition rallies that were just a week before the bombing-- the largest in years-- in dozens of cities across the country. So people thought-- Now they're trying to distract our attention from the protests. The fact is, though, the 22-year-old suspect in the bombing really might have done it. Investigators have released a still of him entering the subway, taken from video surveillance footage. They said they have DNA evidence, too. But no evidence so far linking him to ISIS or any other radical group. And no group has claimed responsibility for the bombing. But even if the government did produce definitive evidence, Anna says, people would take it with a huge grain of salt, given the general level of misinformation disseminated by the government all the time. Russian state TV right now says, for example, Syrian President Assad has nothing to do with the chemical attacks in his country. And in the aftermath of the St. Petersburg bombing, all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories started circulating in Russia. On state TV, Anna saw a pro-Kremlin commentator named Alexander Prokhanov peddling a theory that was the exact opposite of what people in the cafe thought. That theory? This attack was plotted and performed by the same people who staged the anti-Putin protests in Moscow. So in other words, he blamed the Russian opposition. He accuses them of blowing up a train with people in St. Petersburg. The day of the bombing, 500 journalists happened to be in St. Petersburg for a conference with Vladimir Putin. And lots of people said the timing was intentional, that the bomber wanted so many journalists there to cover the event and help the government foment fear about terrorism and distract from the protesters. Or possibly the complete opposite. The bomber wanted all those reporters to embarrass the government with lots of coverage of the atrocity. A Moscow cab driver told Anna the fringiest conspiracy theory she heard-- that the cops did it. So the taxi driver was saying, uh-huh, the police blew up the train themselves to receive more money to fight terrorism in St. Petersburg and to receive epaulettes to be decorated. I have to say, I find that theory even more depressing than the thought that the government would set the-- It is extremely depressing. It is extremely depressing, and it is madness. It can drive you crazy. When you hear so many completely opposite theories and people jumping to conclusions without having any information, any evidence, the truth is dissolving. It's becoming more and more blurry. And it's not just Russians speculating about what happens in Russia. We speculate, too. Especially about Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, who's either, you know, a man battling suicide bombers, or possibly a man who gave orders to blow up 14 innocent people to take everybody's mind off some protest marches. There's a journalist named Keith Gessen, who was born in Russia and has written about it for years, who recently wrote, quote, "at no time in history have more people with less knowledge and greater outrage" speculated about Russia's president. Is he a political genius? Is he a man just trying to get rich? Is he a guy who wanted to be part of NATO and an ally to the West, who we spurned and now he's acting out of revenge? Today on our program, we try to understand a little bit more about who Putin is and how he operates. He's been in the news for months. And I'll be frank. There are still some basic things about him and about Russia I went into this show feeling like I really did not understand, including-- I don't know if you've heard this one-- did he come to power in 1999 by first killing off a few hundred innocent Russians? And do people think about that and talk about that in Russia today? That's going to be the first thing we take up. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us, comrades. Act One, Going in with a Bang. So have you heard this story? I just heard this for the first time recently. Long before this month's St. Petersburg bombing, there was another bombing that people speculated about. And in that one, there actually was some evidence that raised real questions. It happened right when Vladimir Putin was coming to power. This was back in 1999. Boris Yeltsin was president, running Russia. Putin was the prime minister. Not well-known, not well-liked, polling at 2% as a possible presidential candidate. And then-- Putin had only been prime minister for a month-- there was a series of bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere. 300 people died. Putin blamed it on Chechen rebels, invaded Chechnya, started the Second Chechen War, which he won. It was a popular war. Catapulted him into the presidency. When he took office, he had 53% of the vote. And even back then, when he took office in 2000, there was a question. Did he bomb those buildings himself to create the pretext for the war and his own rise to power? If he did, of course it calls the legitimacy of his presidency into question in a big way, murdering his own constituents-- exactly the kinds of Russians that he claims to be serving and protecting as president. One of our producers, Robyn Semien, talked to reporters who covered this and reviewed the evidence with them. Before we get to the more mysterious aspects of the bombings, a quick summary of what happened. The bombings came in fast succession. Four bombs in two weeks in random locations in Moscow and two other cities. Early September was the first one. A bomb in a truck went off right outside an apartment building, collapsing it. Over 60 people died. Days later, thousands of miles away, another bomb goes off on the ground floor of a nine story apartment building. Nine stories flattened, killing over 90 people. Within days, there was another one, and then a fourth. Buildings destroyed in the night while people were inside, sleeping. David Satter was in and out of the country at the time. He's been reporting on Russia since the '70s. It was an atmosphere of panic. The whole country was terrified. People began to fear that any apartment building could be blown up in the middle of the night and any family could be buried under the rubble. There are 30,000 apartment blocks in Moscow, and night patrols were organized in all of them to prevent terrorists from putting bombs in the basements. The government immediately blamed the bombings on Chechen guerrillas. Scott Anderson is another reporter who's written about the attacks. Chechens tend to be more darkly complected than your typical ethnic Russians, so anyone who was darkly complected on the streets of Moscow was subject to arrest or being beaten up. And so a lot of people from the Caucasus, they would just stay inside. They were afraid to go out in the streets. But this story that Chechens were behind the bombings was kind of fishy. For starters, it was three years after Chechnya and Russia had finished a war-- the First Chechen War. Chechnya basically won. They signed a peace treaty. Again, Scott. What motive did the Chechens have to start this bombing campaign against Russia when they pretty much had everything they wanted? There was no reason to fight the Russians at this point. Right. They'd won the war. That's right. They had won the war. So why commit acts of terror that were big enough to start another war? And just logistically, it would have been hard to pull off. Even in 1999, Russia was a very heavily policed state. And so certainly by after the second or third bombing, there were police checkpoints certainly all over Moscow-- all over major Russian cities. So the idea of these bombers moving around-- and these are kind of crude explosives. They're very heavy. 50-Kilo sacks of explosives you need to haul around, so you need a car. So you're going through checkpoints. And with the whole hysteria against Chechens, certainly anybody who was, again, darkly complected, going through a checkpoint was going to be thoroughly searched. Even some people in the government questioned the official account. David Satter was in Moscow right after the bombings. And a friend who had good connections told David there were people in the security services who suspected the FSB-- that's the modern version of the KGB, basically-- might be behind the bombings. So David asked to meet some of those guys in person. And they agreed. But this was such a dangerous idea, they wanted to make sure they weren't caught. So they had this very private conversation in a very public place-- in the center of Moscow. I don't want to give away too many details-- It's OK. --but it was in a store of some sort, in a building not far from the Bolshoi Theatre. And people coming and going, but we didn't give any indication what we were talking about. Just a couple of men standing there, talking about something. The agents didn't have proof, but some things just didn't add up. For example, the simple fact that the buildings were blown up with hexogen, which is a very, very powerful explosive that's used to top off artillery shells and is available only in one factory in Russia, which is tightly guarded by the FSB. It's also at military bases. But how would terrorists get hexogen at all, the agent said, let alone drive big quantities of it around Russia unchecked? When you heard this stuff, were you thinking these arguments were convincing, or were you also thinking... well? I wasn't completely convinced that this was a government provocation. But what convinced me was the bomb that did not go off, the fifth bomb. The fifth bomb in yet another city-- Ryazan. And this is where the story about the Chechens seems to really fall apart, and where the story gets truly strange. September 22, 1999, 2 and 1/2 weeks after the first apartment bomb. A couple of residents in a building in Ryazan noticed something weird. One guy, a bus driver who lived in the building, saw a car, a white sedan, parked outside the building. Maura Reynolds was a foreign correspondent for the LA Times back then, living in Moscow. She talked to the guy, who told her the license plates on the car didn't look right. They had a local city code on them for Ryazan-- the number 62. But, he told Maura, when he looked closer, he saw that the number-- It had been written on. It had been drawn on by hand. It didn't look like it was stamped into the metal license plate. Like with a Sharpie or something? Yeah. Like a magic marker on a piece of paper taped over the license plate. Oh. And that was immediately something that he thought, huh? So he calls the police. In the meantime, two men get out of the car. And start carrying heavy sacks of something into the building's basement. The people jump back in the car. They take off. That's Scott Anderson again. The local police show up. They went down into the basement and came running back up, saying, it's a bomb. It's a bomb. Ryazan is essentially sealed off within hours. Thousands and thousands of soldiers and police cordon off the city, and they begin this massive dragnet for these two men and a woman who was the car, also. Local FSB start combing through evidence. A detonator was found in the basement. Here's a TV news clip from then, from a documentary about the bombings called Disbelief. The reporter says, "the sacks were discovered by police." The sacks were taken to a lab that concluded the contents were hexogen, the same explosive used to blow up the other buildings-- the stuff that supposedly only the FSB and military had access to. One day after the bomb scare, prime minister Vladimir Putin, who, remember, has only been in the job for a month, launches the Second War against Chechnya over the bombings. He says, quote, "the question is closed once and for all. We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport. And forgive me, if we catch them in the crapper, then we'll rub them out in the crapper," unquote. Meanwhile, back in Ryazan, local police find the mysterious white sedan and the two suspects. They were not Chechen. They were Russian. Russian FSB agents with FSB IDs. The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, goes on TV and is like, there's a totally reasonable explanation for FSB agents to be caught doing this. The whole thing was a drill. This audio of that announcement is from a documentary about the bombings, called Blowing Up Russia. First of all, there wasn't an explosion, and an explosion wasn't prevented. But it wasn't good work. It was an exercise. He goes in front of the cameras. He makes this little statement. Again, Scott Anderson. He doesn't take questions. He walks away. It's just like, oh, yeah, that was just a military exercise. As for the hexogen, there was no hexogen, he says. There were no explosives. The white powder in the bags, he explains, was sugar. Maura Reynolds talked to people who lived in the apartment building in Ryazan back then. She says people were angry, and they thought their own government had tried to kill them. Though, of course, since this was Russia-- They wouldn't say it quite that way. What they would say over and over again was in the form of a question. Whose interests were served by this? Who had something to gain? It doesn't make sense, but who had something to gain? Would you ask them, who do you think? Yeah. And what would people say? Who else? The government. But let me say that some weren't willing to go to say that out loud. They would say, who had something to gain? And then there would be a pause and they would raise their eyebrows. And I would say, who do you think? And they'd say, who do you think? At the time, there was still something of a free press. People could speak out, and did. This is tape from a TV special on an independent channel, the NTV network, which has since been taken over by the state. The special is like a talk show, with a host, some FSB higher-ups, and people from the building, who are pretty mad. Again, this comes from the documentary Disbelief. He's saying, the people of Ryazan and many other towns just do not believe all these stories. I'm sitting here and just cannot believe the story the FSB is telling. I myself am a military officer. I was a senior officer for 28 years. I was in charge of countless exercises. What these generals are claiming about this so-called exercise, I just can't believe my ears. All of this unfolds very quickly. Putin becomes prime minister in August. The bombings are in September. The war starts in September, also. Putin is the public face of the war, and it's going well. This is when his popularity soars. And on New Year's Eve, at midnight, the president at the time, Boris Yeltsin, makes an announcement. Boris Yeltsin announces-- completes a shocking announcement that he's going to retire. He's going to resign the presidency, effective immediately. He names Vladimir Putin acting president. Putin's very first act, his very first presidential decree, is to stop all corruption investigations into Boris Yeltsin. These investigations had been going on. The elections are supposed to be in June. Instead, he moves them up to March, which gives opposition parties very little time to organize. And then he wins the presidency outright in March. So in this incredibly short period, about eight months, he goes from being a complete unknown to being the president of Russia. Maura Reynolds says when Ryazan happened, she saw it in local news reports, but it wasn't a huge story. The FSB may or may not have planted explosives. It wasn't clear what it meant. And it was quickly drowned out by the invasion and the war. Only in retrospect did it start to seem significant. And in retrospect, there were other pieces of evidence that started to seem important. I'll tell you one more. Right after one of the bombs went off in Moscow-- this was the third bomb-- the speaker of the Russian Parliament, a guy named Seleznyov, mentioned the bomb but got the city wrong. Mind you, he was in Moscow and the bomb was in Moscow. But he said the bomb went off in Volgodonsk. Here's Scott Anderson. So you could say, oh, well, somehow he said Volgodonsk instead of Moscow, except that three days later, an apartment building in Volgodonsk was blown up. Wow. Raising the question of how Seleznyov knew about the bombing three days ahead of time. The next thing that happens is-- After the bomb finally did go off in Volgodonsk, another member of parliament, a guy named Zhirinovsky, confronts the speaker about how suspicious this looks. He says, you told us on Monday that a building in Volgodonsk was blown up, three days before the explosion. Zhirinovsky calls the act monstrous and says he'll try to keep the speaker from being re-elected, but he's hard to hear because they keep cutting his microphone off. Someone calls Zhirinovsky a scumbag, and then a scoundrel who deserves to be shot. Finally, Zhirinovsky turns around, walks away, and gets hit in the back with a folder of papers. There was an official government investigation into the apartment bombings. Trials, convictions, all held in private, not open to the public or press. People were convicted. They were not FSB agents. They were not Chechens, either. There have been people outside the government who tried to look deeper into the bombings, but overall, that hasn't gone well. Most notably, an independent commission of human rights activists, politicians, and investigators. Again, Scott. The head of that commission was killed-- was murdered, shot to death in front of his house. Another member of the committee died under mysterious circumstances. Anna Politkovskaya, investigative journalist, one of Russia's leading investigative journalists, was murdered in her apartment building. She had written casting doubts on the apartment building bombings. And of course, Alexander Litvinenko came out publicly accusing the Putin regime of doing the apartment building bombings. He is poisoned with polonium in London in 2006 and dies. Radioactive poison. Polonium-210 slipped into his tea. A British investigation determined two FSB agents had killed Litvinenko, and that Putin had likely signed off on it. In his autobiography, which came out in 2000, Putin roundly denied any FSB involvement in the bombings, writing, quote, "What? Blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really utter nonsense. It's totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people," unquote. David Satter has been researching this since it happened and has written two books about it. He's convinced the story went like this. Before the bombings, even before Putin came to power, Boris Yeltsin and his administration were plagued with corruption investigations. He worried they could eventually point to him and his family, especially if some other party or someone unsympathetic to him became president. So he looked to appoint a prime minister who he could trust. He fired two other guys in just three months before landing on Putin. Then he and Putin together had the apartments blown up as the pretext to go to war, and, in the patriotic glow, to install Putin and quash the corruption investigations. Scott and Maura aren't so sure. For Maura, when it comes to the bombings, she gets that something was done by design and that it appears to be for political purposes. But as for who was behind the bombings exactly, she can't tell. If you ask me what I think, I have to say, to this day, I do not know. But this is what I would say. Right now, it doesn't matter. What do you mean? Because whether the government or people around Putin played a role or whether they didn't, the effect is the same. Either you believe what they said about the bombings, that there were terrorists out to kill ordinary Russians, in which case you are frightened and the world is a very scary place; or you believe that your government or someone connected to the government could be bloody-minded enough to kill 300 innocent civilians in their beds, in which case the world is a very scary place and you should be frightened. This is how it works in a police state. You should be frightened. And that's how the government exercises control. It's been nearly two decades since the bombings and I wanted to know what do people in Russia think about them? Putin is still their president. How big a deal are they? Are people walking around, wondering if their president came to power by killing hundreds of Russian citizens? So I interviewed four people who live in Moscow. None of them said they were big supporters of Putin. Three of the four had heard the rumor that he was behind the bombings. None of them believed it or wanted to believe it. "I can't know the truth, so I can't say," a 42-year-old screenwriter told me. A 22-year-old student I talked to said she didn't want to know if it was true. As for Ryazan, only one of the four, a telecommunications specialist, had heard anything about Ryazan, the sacks of sugar, any of that. He knew all the details, though. Read a book about it. And he believes Ryazan was an FSB drill. The one person who'd never heard the story that Putin might be behind the bombings was Yuliya, a 40-year-old lawyer. It's just not something that people discuss. The media doesn't say anything about it. The families don't talk to each other about this. And friends don't talk about this to each other. Does it just seem like old news? Yes, absolutely. So I ran through all the facts with her, all the evidence that Putin might be behind the bombings. She said she didn't care. Does it sound like a ridiculous theory, I asked. Yes, she said. Most likely. Some ridiculous theory. Robyn Semien. Act Two, Mr. Popular. So here in the United States, we're told that Vladimir Putin is incredibly popular in Russia, and the statistic you see sometimes in the press is that he has an 84% approval rating among Russians, which, of course, is insanely high. We think US presidents are doing great when they get to 55% or 60%. But that 84%, is that real? Is that just from some Russian state agency that is controlled by Putin? Well, we asked Charles Maynes to look into this for us. He's an American radio producer based in Moscow. Charles, is that number real? Well, it is real. These are real polls, where large numbers of real people really do answer questions. Russia has two big polling firms that are essentially state-sponsored and one that's independent. And all three of these get basically the same numbers. This month, Putin dropped by 2% to 82%. And American pollsters like Gallup and Pew, they also get the same results. In the 80s? Yeah, in the 80s. But are people just saying that they like Putin because they are scared to say anything else? Well, that's part of it, especially with older people. There was a poll done by this Levada Center-- this is the independent pollster in Russia-- saying that 26% of all respondents said they're afraid to share their views of the government with pollsters. So that probably inflates the number, but just how much isn't really clear. So if 82% isn't the right number, do we have any sense of what a more accurate measure of his popularity might be? Some pollsters say it's the so-called electoral rating. This is when you ask Russians who they'd actually vote for. Like The Levada Center has this poll they do where they say, if the presidential elections were held next Sunday, who would you vote for? And then only 55% say they'd vote for Putin. And that's, again, the independent pollsters. The state one has a figure that's a little higher-- 64%-- but that's hardly the 82%, 84% that we've seen. So what I get from this is, take the 82%, 84% approval rating with a grain of salt, but it is true that most people approve of him? Yeah. He's still really popular. OK. So to hear what that approval is all about and what people think of him, we asked you to talk to some people who like him, which you did. People across the country. And then you put together this story about one of them. This was someone I knew wouldn't exaggerate their feelings about the president because they were talking to a foreign reporter, someone I've known for decades. That's her talking here, Olga Sergeevna Dmitrieva. I lived with Olga Sergeevna and her two children back in the mid-'90s, when I was an exchange student in Moscow. It was a good five years before Putin arrived on the scene. Over the years, she took in several American exchange students. That's her telling me I was her favorite. And I tell her I always say I have a Russian mom. She says, I always say I have an American son, who I don't see as much as I like. We took the tram to her apartment building through the neighborhood I lived in with her family back in the '90s, and she started pointing out all these changes. A new playground, new stores. And just by the new museum, they're building a community pool. Now, none of this was here back when I lived with them. It's all part of the prosperity that's come to Moscow since Putin came to power. And it's why Olga Sergeevna and lots of people in her generation-- she's in her 60s-- it's why they love Putin. When I lived with Olga Sergeevna and her family, Boris Yeltsin was president and things in Russia were really, really tough. In fact, there's a poll for that. It says 68% of Russians think nothing good happened in Russia during the Yeltsin years. Nothing. Olga Sergeevna says life was hard back then. People didn't have enough money. Grocery stores were empty. And they only began to clear with the arrival of Vladimir Putin. It seems almost hard to remember now, but when Putin first arrived as prime minister in 1999, Russians had no idea who he was. He was this awkward public speaker back then. His suits were ill-fitting. The guy never smiled. Hardly, says Olga Sergeevna, the specimen she sees now. She told me Putin's appearance was predicted earlier, when mystics said one day a man named Volodya would save Russia. Volodya is short for Vladimir. Lots of the older generation will tell you stuff like this. Nobody thought that savior would be Putin. I mean, let's face it, she says. He's kind of short. No one believed he'd change Russia. That Russia would rise from its knees. But it did rise from its knees. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was seen as this buffoon, visibly drunk in meetings with world leaders. An embarrassment. Putin was younger. He didn't drink. The fact that he was a former KGB agent at least meant he was disciplined and educated. He spoke German, practiced judo. And he brought an end to the chaos of the Yeltsin years, during which the ruble had collapsed several times. The government was constantly reshuffled. And a few insiders, the so-called oligarchs, became billionaires while most everyone else lost their savings. But as soon as Putin took over, the economy boomed, mostly because of oil prices shooting up. And soon he exiled or arrested oligarchs who'd been running the country behind the scenes. A lot of people talk about how Putin saved Russia. If you compare 1994 and 2017, Olga Sergeevna says, the difference is night and day. In 1994, '95, we didn't celebrate holidays. Nobody was in a festive mood. The theaters were all closed because nobody went. Nobody had money. Under Putin, she says, she lives a comfortable life, has a job, can afford to travel, can go out to eat or to the theater. It's hard to overstate how important this is. During Putin's first decade in power, Russians had never lived better, particularly in the bigger cities. People like Olga Sergeevna became part of something that was happening for the first time ever in Russia-- the emergence of the middle class. Over time, this economic miracle turned Putin into sort of a folk hero. There's the side of him we know in America, the guy flying jets or riding horses shirtless. But in Russia, he's cultivated this image that he's frugal, lives modestly, works all the time. A political analyst told me Putin's seen as the only one who can fix anything or improve people's lives, the one who keeps corrupt bureaucrats in check. He's the good czar. For Olga Sergeevna, it wasn't just that Putin made the country better. It was that he could do no wrong. I love Putin. Why? Because he's smart, intelligent, cultured, athletic, she says. He's even a musician, plays and sings. I asked her if there's anything he can't do. Her response? He can't cook. But he doesn't need to. Finally, I said, come on. Isn't there anything you don't like about him? Anything at all? Nyet. Nyet. Nyet. Nyet! No! While we were talking, Olga Sergeevna brought me over to her computer, started scrolling through her Facebook page. She subscribes to a Putin feed just to see what he's up to. And her feed is filled with pictures of him. Putin snarling. Putin laughing. Doesn't he look like a benevolent lord, she says. I just want to point out here that Olga Sergeevna doesn't work for the government or Putin's United Russia party. She's an accountant. She has been for decades. With a daughter who lives in London and a son who works for an American tech company. One of the things Olga Sergeevna likes best is that Putin stands up to the West. And that's a big thing for Russians. As Putin likes to say, when they curse me in the West, it means I'm doing the right thing. When it comes to the bad things Americans hear about Putin-- that he's corrupt, that he's secretly one of the world's richest men, or that he's meddled in the American elections-- Olga Sergeevna says that's all lies perpetuated by Western journalists. People like me. A reminder that we have this ongoing joke, where she tells me to leave our Putin alone, and she says she means it. I ask her about the many opponents of Putin's who've ended up dead. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB whistleblower who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope. Who poisoned him, she asks. Some say it was Putin, I tell her. Oh, please. Everyone says it's Putin. The moment somebody sneezes or farts in Russia, Putin is to blame. I say, but what about the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov? He was killed. But she interrupts me and says-- Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. There was an investigation. Nemtsov died over a love triangle. She doesn't buy any of it. In fact, a lot of Olga Sergeevna's opinions are things you might hear on state TV. But I think with Olga Sergeevna, and the other people I talk to-- people who love Putin-- the moments I understand them best are when they talk about the past, everything they went through before Putin arrived. It's why sometimes I think the real reason people like Putin is not because they believe he'll keep moving Russia forward into the future. It's because they fear someone else-- anyone else-- might drive Russia back to the past. Charles Maynes in Moscow. Coming up, the Steve Bannon of the Kremlin, except he accomplishes all kinds of stuff and is not on the verge of losing his job. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Other Mr. President, stories of Vladimir Putin and those around him. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Maybe Pay a Little Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain. There's a quote that we heard while we were working on today's program from a writer named Peter Pomerantsev. He said that if the old Soviet Union was 75% violence, 25% propaganda, in today's Russia, those numbers are reversed. It's 25% violence and 75% propaganda. Propaganda was radically reinvented under Vladimir Putin, its tactics and its methods, by this one political operative. Sean Cole explains. The operative's name is Vladislav Surkov. He was Putin's deputy chief for more than a decade, starting in 1999. In Russia, he's what's referred to as a political technologist. But those are a dime a dozen. At the top of his powers, Surkov had a much more ominous, if unofficial, title. He was known as a grey cardinal. He doesn't look like a shadowy mastermind. He sort of resembles Rowan Atkinson, the actor who played Mr. Bean, except handsomer. And he actually doesn't manage propaganda at the Kremlin anymore. But the methods he invented to manipulate people and information, I've even heard them called artistic. See, in the Soviet era, the country was run by the Communist Party and the propagandists pumped out literally the party line and tried to suppress all other opposing messages. And then the Iron Curtain fell. A whole bunch of new political parties were created. And it was the messy early stages of a real democracy, with parties bickering and vying for power. And then, when Putin became president-- I'm obviously skipping over a lot here-- his right-hand man, Surkov, helped solidify the Kremlin's power by putting together this party called United Russia, which gained a majority in Parliament and backed Putin. And then, instead of tamping down the opposition like the old days, Surkov built a new system, where there was opposition, but he dictated what the opposition stood for. You do not allow political parties to create their own agendas. You just write these agendas for them. This is Vasily Gatov. He's been a very high-level player in Russian media for nearly 20 years. These days, he's a visiting fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication, Leadership, and Policy. We decide one of our parties is left party with some sort of communism. Another party, you're a socialist. And the third party is a deep conservative, kind of evangelicals. And the fourth party would be liberal radicals. And that's what Surkov actually constructed. And he created whole new political parties and wrote their agendas. For example, he created a party called Spravedlivaya Rossiya. Just Russia. Just Russia. Yeah. That was a political cadaver. Are you saying cadaver, like a corpse? Cadaver, like a cadaver. Like Frankenstein. Frankenstein, yeah. Got it. Created from some sort of pieces of socialists, labor, activists, more pro-government type of labor unions. He also decided that he cannot allow any grassroot activities which would not be vetted by the Kremlin, so he decided that he will create also youth movements and write an agenda for them. And he also tried to do the same thing with NGOs, like political NGOs or those that control elections' transparency or expose corruption-- writing agendas for every one of them in the Kremlin. It's like directing a movie, in a way. Absolutely. I would even provide you with a very funny hypothesis. In 2001, I think, Russia has been invaded by reality shows, things like Survivor, Big Brother. And he was amazed how scripting can improve even those likely spontaneous interactions between people. And I know that he was very good friends with all the producers of these reality shows, actually. And actually, I think he was once even present at the filming of the Russian version of Survivor. No way. Yeah. And he's like, if they can do that on TV, sort of fake reality in TV, maybe we can fake reality in reality? In a way, yeah. By 2003-- so about four years into Surkov's tenure as grey cardinal-- Vasily says Surkov had built up a whole cadre of deputies that would carry out his agenda with these different parties and other groups. I asked Vasily for an example of how all this worked, and he told me what everybody told me when I asked for specifics. He said, it's not like I was in the room with him. I don't know exactly what he said to whom, nor when. He did tell me about this one case that he heard about from someone who worked with Surkov. In 2004, Vladimir Putin decided that governors shouldn't be elected anymore. They should be appointed by him. It's a long story, but at first, every other political party besides Putin's was against the idea. Genuinely against it. But then Surkov manipulated them over to his side. It helped that he controlled their funding and the number of seats they got in the Duma. And then the parties went through this whole drawn-out public drama, which had all the trappings of democracy. The bill was submitted. There were arguments for and against it. Protests around the country. People announced they've changed their minds. There were several votes. And finally, after three months, it passes. All of this, Vasily says, was scripted by Surkov's people. The name you hear for all these techniques is managed democracy. Surkov uses the phrase sovereign democracy. I suggested to one person I talked to that managed democracy sounds like a contradiction in terms. He said, exactly. It just means there's no democracy. I don't want to overstate Surkov's power, nor his malevolence. Apparently, he was much more carrot than stick in his approach in explaining why, no, you really want to align yourself with the Kremlin. Here's what's to be gained. And he didn't try to do this with everybody. He maintained, under this managed or sovereign democracy, a certain level of dissent. Some actual opposition. Actual opposition, both in society and press, and even enjoyed this dissent because it was developing natural leaders like Navalny. That's Alexei Navalny. You may have heard of him. He's a high-profile activist, organized the anti-corruption protests in Russia a few weeks ago. He is considered to be the only real opponent to Putin, except he can't run against Putin because Putin's people had him arrested, and you can't run for president in Russia if you have a criminal record. To be honest, Navalny emerged within these sandboxes of allowed freedom that Surkov created, and it was important for him because it was making his camouflage of autocracy much better-looking. The more you hear about Surkov the man, the more it makes you understand how his whole Truman Show theatrical directing of society developed. He has all of these opposing factions inside of him, too, all working in an unlikely but perfect concert together. Back in the early '90s, he was a PR guy, designing ads for the richest oligarch in Russia. At that point, Surkov said he wanted to be like, quote, "the hero in Pretty Woman." He meant the Richard Gere character. But he's also a huge fan of the anti-bureaucracy, gay, Buddhist, beat poet, Allen Ginsberg. This is Surkov reciting Ginsberg's poem "Sunflower Sutra" from memory. And you there standing before me in this sunset, and all your glory in your form. A perfect beauty of a sunflower. You might be able to tell that Surkov studied theater, but he got kicked out of the Moscow Institute of Culture after a fistfight. Reportedly. He's written lyrics for a Russian band called Agata Kristi. And so you marry PR and art and performance, plus his time at Russia's main state TV network, Channel One, managed democracy was just the natural culmination. He was kind of entertaining himself. Again, Vasily Gatov. It was really funny for him to make these things happen, to achieve certain results, and creative building of reality. Again, as I said, it's a very much Big Brother type of scripting. He means the reality show Big Brother. You need to create a conflict, and this conflict will create the conflict, and then we just roll it out and people will vote, and that would be fun. Besides which, he could totally get away with it because not only was he good at it, but in Surkov's time as grey cardinal, not very many people were paying attention. At this moment, people were absolutely uninterested in politics because Russia had a national economy growth of about 9% a year. The ruble was taking strength. Credit was extremely cheap. The country was booming. It's easy to build autocracy when a country's booming because nobody cares about politics. Right. And I think Surkov was enjoying this moment because he was not only kind of a shadow cardinal, but he actually was openly cardinaling the situation. That is, after a certain point, he wouldn't take very many pains to hide what he was doing, which I can imagine the feeling. Here he is carrying off all of these feats of manipulation in secret. You'd think he'd want a little credit. On this point, there was a moment when Surkov seemed to be showing his cards a little bit, deliberately. It's a story that Peter Pomerantsev likes to tell. He's the journalist that Ira quoted earlier. Peter used to work in reality TV in Russia, and he's written a lot about Surkov. This liberal blogger-- liberal photo blogger, yeah; the very, very popular blog-- took some photos of the office. Of Surkov's office? Yeah, yeah. He was there to photograph an official meeting, but he said on his blog that he was much more interested in what was in the office. And that's where you have the phones on his desk with the names of all the opposition political parties. Like literally, there's a whole mess of phones. And on one of them in particular, next to the numbers, there's a bank of buttons labeled "Mironov," "Zhirinovsky," "Zyuganov," all heads of parties. And you have the photo of Tupac Shakur next to like Machiavelli or something. Yes, Tupac Shakur the rapper. It's actually next to a picture of Barack Obama. And at the time, everyone was like, oh my god, wow, we got to see inside Surkov's office. And then many years later, when everybody realized that Surkov had been funding this liberal blogger, everyone's like, oh my god, he leaked that. He wanted us to feel his power. And he wanted to create an atmosphere where you can never really tell what's true anymore, so everything is suspect. That was absolutely intentional. Surkov himself has come just shy of saying it openly. He talks about it in his book. This is another shape Surkov is reported to have shifted into. He wrote a novel under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky. He won't admit it's really him, but Surkov's wife is named Natalya Dubovitskaya, so everyone's like, nutty coincidence. The book's called Almost Zero, or Close to Zero. It's about a PR guy who grew up in the sticks, like Surkov did, moved to Moscow to hang out with bohemian artists, like Surkov did, and is now embroiled in the seedy murderous underworld of illegal book publishing and distribution. Oh, and it's got an English subtitle-- "gangsta fiction." In any case, Peter says there are these really telling passages in which the hero realizes, oh, wait. Everything's made up. Language, politics, every ideology-- everything's fake. I can see through it all. It's an epic kind of cynicism. It's not cynicism as in like, oh, I don't believe in anything, but almost like, oh my god, I've burst through the shallow shells of morality and ideology and belief. It's like I'm seeing behind the Matrix kind of a thing. Yeah, very much. The Matrix was a super popular film in Russia. I bet. Which makes sense, if you think about Russian history, or this generation like Surkov or like Putin. They've lived through communism. They've lived through the mafia state. They've lived through fake democracy, through religious national socialism, or an empire building, which they have now, and it's all the same people. And they've gone through so many different modes of being in the last 30 years, and such blistering progression, that they're kind of left with the feeling that everything is a masquerade. So when Surkov says everything is controlled in a construct, what he's actually saying is not a confession. It's a piece of psychological propaganda to say, so there's no point struggling for anything. Don't even try to do any of your silly protest movements. So in a way you're killing-- if you tell people that everything is a conspiracy, it doesn't lead people to revolt. It leads people to go-- Give up. --well, then I might as well give up. Yes. But again, we might be over-interpreting here. But it's a book, so we're allowed to. Like I said before, Surkov is no longer the grand manager of propaganda in Russia. He was sidelined in 2011 after a dispute with Putin. A dis-Putin. But he's still a personal adviser to the president, and he was also an organizer of Russia's takeover of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine in 2014. His involvement in that annexation got him sanctioned by the West, meaning he's not allowed to travel to the US or Europe anymore. And he can't have assets in the West, either. Surkov was unfazed. "The only things that interest me in the US," he said, "are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don't need a visa to access their work," which, you know, good comeback. And he has a point about Allen Ginsberg. God, I love Allen Ginsberg. "America, you don't really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh--" Sean Cole is one the producers of our show. Act Four, A Matter of Principle. So the anti-government protests last month in Russia were surprising for a few reasons. Their size, the fact that they happened in cities all across the country. These were the first big demonstrations in years in Russia. And there were tons of young people. That was new. Lots of those young people were there because they've been watching these videos online that had been created by the charismatic opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who's the one who called for the protests, which were about government corruption, also the subject of his recent video documentary. And then, after the protests were done last month, teenagers started posting their own videos to the internet of their teachers lecturing them about the protests, with kids arguing back. You were called in for a lecture by your principal, you think that very idea of your principal lecturing you on the subject of protest is either unjust or absurd or funny or whatever, and so you film it and post it, just like I think a lot of 16-, 17-year-olds might be tempted to do anywhere. Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker magazine in Moscow, and he wrote about one of these videos that was filmed in the provincial town of Bryansk, 200 miles from Moscow. Apparently, there was a student there who tried to enlist other kids to go to the protests, which led to their principal and homeroom teacher to talk to them. Which they filmed. It's obvious that it was filmed surreptitiously. You see a lot of the desk in front of you and half-cut-off shots of the school principal in front of a chalkboard. OK, and I should say that most of it's just completely black. You see nothing, and you hear sound. And then occasionally the camera bops up. She's essentially saying, with a tone in her voice that suggests "you naive, juvenile, somewhat immature in the ways of the world" students, are interested in this guy Navalny. What does he really stand for? What is he really offering or suggesting other than just getting rid of the country's leaders? The principal says, guys, I can see that you're looking at this problem one-sidedly, and that you lack range in your political view. You see Navalny. You watch his video. And boom, you believe it all. When you wrote about this recording in The New Yorker, you described her tone as hectoring and frustrated. I would say that that's really the most interesting or striking thing about the whole video to me. To me, it sounds like Kira Petrovna, the principal, is experiencing something between confusion, exasperation, anger. I think she's really at a loss. She doesn't understand them, maybe, in the same way that, I don't know, five years ago, seven years ago there was something more shared between her and her students. At one point, she starts defending Vladimir Putin, saying, you can't blame him for the bad economy. That's because of the sanctions that the European Union and the United States imposed on Russia. And she says, on the world stage and foreign policy, he's doing a great job, which the students challenge. The student is asking the principal, OK, so what is our foreign policy? America is against us. Europe is against us. And the principal says, OK, well, why is that? What's the reason? And the student, without thinking, says, well, that's because of Crimea. We took it. And the principal, responding with some surprise or indignation says, so was that bad? Because in most of Russia, it's seen as like a patriotic thing to have taken Crimea. Yeah. The annexation of Crimea is incredibly popular. It's widely perceived to have been a good thing, basically. And then the homeroom teacher jumps in and argues with the kids over Crimea. The teacher says, did we really take Crimea? Didn't they vote and choose to become part of Russia? The kids correctly point out, yes, Russia did take Crimea, and the sanctions were the result. Soon the conversation turns to the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Russia officially denies that its soldiers are there, but all kinds of evidence has come out proving that this is untrue. And the principal is essentially trying to blame the crisis in Ukraine on America. Let me read exactly what she says because it's so aggressive. She says, kid, you haven't read anything about this and you don't know a thing. You've got some very superficial knowledge here. What started this whole conflict? Maybe it was because America stuck its nose in. And then they start to argue. Right. And the student asks, somewhat mockingly of the principal, did you see American troops in Ukraine? And the principal says, did you see Russian troops in Ukraine? And this is this moment where the student reveals this like basic, elementary, non-ideological, factual knowledge, and the student just says, yes. Da. There are videos going around. And then comes, really, maybe my favorite line. You have no idea. And that, to me, gets to the key point of this whole dialogue, which is the kids just have access to this information and just a worldview that they've gotten on the internet themselves-- information that's not on state TV. And that alone seems kind of somewhat destabilizing or uncomfortable for the principal. The kids don't watch TV the way older Russians do. The principal tells them, OK, you don't remember how bad it was here before Putin. The country was in chaos. People had to carry guns and knives. And this is when I was in college. When she says this, and when she parrots talking points that you might hear on Russian state TV, she seems totally sincere. As an American watching this, it's one of the things that's actually most interesting about this video. You think that these government talking points on Crimea or Ukraine or whatever, you wonder if authorities are just mouthing these points and they don't actually believe them. When you hear the principal, she seems totally emotional when she runs through these talking points. But those talking points are, in a way, emotional, couched in the language of patriotism and appeal to history. Russia as a great power. Russia as this besieged fortress surrounded by enemies who wish it harm. And the students just seem less receptive to those messages. At one point, the kids openly laugh at the country's ruling political party, President Putin's party, United Russia. We're against United Russia, the kid's saying. The student asks everybody to raise their hands who is against United Russia. And then you get the sense-- this part is dark in the video. You get the sense that lots of hands are going up. This is one of the things that's interesting to me about this because I feel like we read about how the Russian government sort of floods the zone in their own country with all kinds of misinformation and disinformation to make people feel that Putin is doing a great job. And here it seems like you have a bunch of kids who just seem utterly immune to it. Yeah. And that, I think, must freak out the political advisors and political technologists, as they're called here in Russia, in the Kremlin who just seem to have lost the country's youth. They just don't seem to be able to come up with the kind of messages and rhetoric that, for an older generation, worked so easily and naturally, and it flowed with so little resistance. Joshua Yaffa of The New Yorker magazine, in Moscow. Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar. Our staff includes Elise Bergerson, Elna Baker, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Karen Duffin, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Miki Meek, Robyn Semien, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Research help today from Michelle Harris and Benjamin Phelan. Music help from Damien Graef. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Obviously, like so many public figures, people ask him all the time, did he ever meet with Russian officials during the presidential transition? Nyet. Nyet. Nyet. Nyet! No! I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.