Russia

A Russian woman who visited East Germany in 1986 on a Soviet school trip described to me recently how their East German official hosts explained the Berlin wall as a necessary defence against the hordes of West Germans who wished to storm into East Germany to escape West German economic misery and join in East Germany's success. And she and her 13-year-old Soviet friends had at the time no reason to doubt this, never in their lives having been told anything different.

The arguments between the west and Russia over what to do in Syria resemble the old proverb of the two bald men arguing over a comb. In truth, neither side knows what to do. Both, however, respond to their lack of a plan in their traditional fashion: Russia, with stonewalling; the west, with empty rhetoric.

Peter Bergen discusses the Obama Administration's covert drone war in Yemen, White House information leaks, and the president's kill list. Evgeny Morozov explores the peaceful side of cyber warfare and the American cyber attacks on Iran. Elizabeth Weingarten Hosts.

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama declared, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” Sputnik was the satellite that the Soviets had launched into orbit 54 years earlier, setting off not only a space race (and a missile race to follow) but also a national panic over America’s primacy in the Cold War. Obama went on:

The meaning of Russian President Vladimir Putin's third term and updates on immigration policy and trends are topics for discussion in this week’s podcast.  Host Pamela Chan is joined by Schwartz Fellows Steve Levine and Tamar Jacoby.  

To learn more about today’s topics, check out:

Steve’s blog, The Oil and the Glory (http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/ ) and book, Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia (http://www.amazon.com/Putins-Labyrinth-Spies-Murder-Russia/dp/0812978412)

5:08 PM: Welceom [sic] to my life. Press has right to film me anywhere. But do they have a right to read my email and listen to my phone?

5:14 PM: When I asked these "reporters" how they knew my schedule, I got no answer. Heard the same silence when they met me after meeting w/[Anatoly] Chubais.

1:15 AM: Just watched NTV. I mispoke [sic] in bad Russian. Did not mean to say "wild country." Meant to say NTV actions "wild." I greatly respect Russia.

-- U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, on Twitter, March 29–30, 2012

Much fuss has been stirred over President Obama’s open-mic remark to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he’ll have more “space” and “flexibility” to negotiate the dispute over missile defense after he’s reelected.

Several Republicans have charged that his remark reflects a secret plan to “sell out” the U.S. missile-defense program and thus “capitulate” to the Russians (who, Mitt Romney seems to believe, are still “our No. 1 geopolitical foe”).

Viktor Bout made his first major foray into the weapons business in 1995, on a pleasant summer day in Bulgaria. A Russian entrepreneur who was then twenty-eight years old, he had flown to Sofia from Sharjah, the third largest city in the United Arab Emirates, where he had lived for the previous two years. Sharjah was a kind of postmodern caravansary—as Bout told me recently, it was a place with “practically no law.” Although he had arrived in the Emirates not knowing much about Arab culture, he had a cosmopolitan ability to adapt to new circumstances.

On a cold, grey Moscow winter day exactly 20 years ago, the red hammer and sickle Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin for the last time. The Soviet Union had died. The world's second most powerful state had crumbled under the weight of a bankrupt ideology, bankrupt finances and courageous self-determination movements across Eastern Europe. The Communist behemoth, once seen as the most dangerous foe of the western world, fell with a whimper.