Hey, is that really Putin?
Description
Chris Alexander, whose Substack I recommend with the highest enthusiasm, joined the Canadian foreign service in 1991. He spent six years at the Canadian embassy in Moscow: He was the deputy head of mission during the first three years of Putin’s presidency. He’s also the former Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, a former Parliamentary Secretary for National Defense, a former Canadian Conservative MP, and the former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan and Deputy Head of UNAMA.
You’ll remember him from our conversation about what went wrong in Afghanistan:
For those of you who prefer audio-only, here’s a podcast version:
This was another blockbuster conversation. I’ve annotated the transcript below with links, comments, and examples.
Claire: Hi, this is Claire Berlinski, and you’re listening to the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. And we have with us, again, Chris Alexander, former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan—but much, much more. Chris, among other things, you spent much time when you were in the foreign service studying Russia. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background there?
Chris: Sure. Thanks for the chance to chat again, Claire. First, I went to university—I studied history and political science. I had learned some languages, but actually, in university, I never studied Russia directly. I really didn’t want to take international relations, because even then, I thought a lot of what was being taught was dogmatic and not very interesting. And this was end of the Cold War period and then edging into End of History time—the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so forth, when you and I were together [at Balliol College], but my experience of Russia, my learning about Russia, my knowledge of Russia is that of a practitioner.
I was there starting in 1993, learned Russian in the Canadian Foreign Service before going. Worked on the desk literally weeks after I joined the Department of External Affairs. There was the coup, attempted coup, against Gorbachev. People needed to watch CNN all night and stay in touch with our embassy for updates to ministers and so forth. That was the kind of thing I was doing from day one. So my life as a diplomat was totally swamped with Russia, post-Soviet dynamics, transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, and then from Soviet institutions to Russian institutions through that difficult period that gets forgotten in 1993, when Yeltsin shot up the White House.
I saw a lot of that firsthand. And because I had learned Russian, I was talking to everyone in that period of 10 or 15 years when Russians would talk to us frankly, because they weren’t afraid of the KGB, which was gone, or Putin and his repressive machinery of government, which hadn’t yet been put in place.
So it was a really interesting time. A time of insight, a time of building new relationships with Russians, a time of hope. But to be honest, I never had that much hope for what was happening in Russia in the 1990s. Moscow was a city awash in organized crime. Privatization had been done in the dirtiest of ways across the country—“Sale of the Century,” Chrystia Freeland’s book has that hard- hitting title.
Standards of living were in free fall for Russians. And so this democratic moment, when they actually had the chance to vote, to choose different candidates, was associated with economic disaster in the minds of Russians—which as we now know set the stage for Putin, and set the stage for Russians actually to like his strong man, anti-democratic approach right from the beginning.
There was hope, but it was false hope in the 90s. But there was a drama playing out that has come to affect us all, because even if we didn’t believe in the end of history, a lot of people believed Russia was out of a central role in history, actually, in the 90s. And they weren’t.
I just looked at this photo of Putin with his KGB buddies, in 1999, I think, when he’s Prime Minister, about to become president—acting president. Just a couple of months after all the apartment buildings had blown up in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, with their involvement, I would say. And they’re looking pleased as punch. On the march. They’re gonna get Russia back to where they needed it to be. And they didn’t go to war in Georgia or Ukraine for another 10, 14 years.
But even then, they were plotting to build influence in our countries that would help them influence decision-making in European capitals and in Washington, and if they could, pull the rug out from under democracy in our countries, which they’re now trying to do. So they were out of history. They didn’t have a lot of formal, obvious influence in those years. But they never stopped having these grand ambitions, which are the Putin version of Marxism. They really think that if they engage in enough subversion, disinformation, enough political corruption, that the whole house of cards of US society, the US Constitution, will come crashing down. And similarly in France, Germany, the UK. And in the late 90s, early 2000s, you and I would’ve laughed at that idea. Now, we’re actually involved in trying to defend our institutions against an attack that has proven to be much more formidable than we ever imagined it could be.
Claire: Yeah. I’d like to talk about—first, I want to talk about why you put “Putin” in quotation marks. Let’s just start with that. Whenever I cross-post one of your posts, my readers must be wondering, “Why does he always put Putin in quotation marks?”
Chris: This is a hard issue to share with anyone because it’s a judgment that I’ve come to—I’m certainly not alone: Many Russians have come to this judgment. Many other Russia watchers have come to this conclusion. But it stems from my personal experience with Putin. In Canada, I think I’m one of the only people who actually spent quite a lot of time with Putin, speaking Russian to Putin, in person, both before he became Prime Minister and then as President.
Claire: How many hours in total do you think you spent with him?
Chris: I would say a couple of days. Like, in the same rooms, in the same talks. The longest time I ever spent with him was at the Kananaskis G8 Summit, 2002, just after 9/11, in Alberta—where the G7 just met again, but obviously without Putin, thankfully, replaced by Zelensky, in that case.
And he was not involved in all the meetings because it was the G8, but there were still G7 meetings of leaders on financial and other issues in which Russia was not included. So he had downtime, hours of it, in fact, and he didn’t really want to talk to his own people, which was amazing.
I think his real friends are that old crew from St. Petersburg, the KGB officers he came up with that have stayed with him. But they weren’t on that trip. This was the Foreign Ministry types, the G7 Sherpa types, G8 Sherpa types. He wasn’t interested in them. So we walked around in the forest in Kananaskis, literally for hours, talking about nothing in particular. I think he thought he was recruiting me; I was obviously squeezing him for everything I could. But he asked about, “Where are we on the map of Alberta? Where are the Indians, Chris?” he said, meaning First Nations. And I had to get a map and show him these things.
Claire: So it was just the two of you? No translator?
Chris: No, I was speaking Russian to him.
Claire: Yeah. So just the two of you.
Chris: Just the two of us. There were security people around. We weren’t alone, but we had long, meandering discussions about lots of things. And he sounded to me pretty dumb. Like he was asking very simple questions.
Obviously, he’s not dumb. People later said to me, “Oh, he’s playing that way, Chris. That’s a KGB thing that they do.” I think the truth is somewhere in between. But suffice to say, from that occasion, from seeing him in talks and translating for our prime minister, Jean Chrétien, on a couple of occasions, doing this big Team Canada visit to Russia, where we played a hockey game, reenacting the 1972 Summit Series—which kind of influenced Putin to want to learn to play hockey, which he later did. We bonded in a way that few other international players did. Canada was there a lot. A few of us, as diplomats, were there a lot.
We got to know each other in those early years. So I had a strong sense of his physical presence
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