WTH is going on in Russia? Vladimir Kara- Murza on his arrest, the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny, and the growing anti-Putin movement inside Russia Episode #94 | March 17, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Vladimir Kara-Murza Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen. Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, , what the hell is going on now? Marc Thiessen: What the hell is going on is we have a podcast today that reminded me of why I got into foreign policy and why I had a passion for the battle for freedom. We just had a conversation with, and you're about to hear an interview, with Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is one of the courageous leaders of the Russian opposition. We spoke to him from Moscow and it's very fortuitous we were even able to get him because if we had scheduled this interview even a couple of days earlier, we would have been unable to have it because Vladimir Kara-Murza was in a prison cell. He was rounded up with all of the democratically elected opposition leaders from the local and municipal governments around the country who had gathered in Moscow to have a meeting. And the Putin regime rounded them up, arrested them, sent them to prisons, and is now going to prosecute them for collaborating with a hostile foreign organization, apparently the local governments of Russia are hostile foreign organizations. This guy is so courageous. He's been poisoned twice by the Putin regime and survived. And he is undaunted. He speaks out. He exercises the right of free speech, even when it comes at a huge political cost to him, to his family, to his friends. And this was just such an inspiring conversation. I'm so glad that he was able to join us today. Danielle Pletka: I couldn't agree with you more. And one of the things that you all will hear from him is just how the Putin government has stopped pretending. Marc Thiessen: Yeah. Danielle Pletka: This is one of those things, and you hear us talking about these tangentially when we had Jonathan Swan on to talk about Nord Stream and the Russians, hypocrisy 2 over helping Putin with one hand and sanctioning him with the other. This is something you hear in the context of the Trump administration. But what I think we failed to pay attention to as much because we spend so much time talking about ourselves, is what's happening in Russia. And the backsliding, the re- Sovietization of the Russian Federation is remarkable, notable, and particularly because it happens not just in foreign policy, not just in Syria, and not just in Libya, not just in trying to interfere in our elections, in European elections, and in invading Ukraine and Georgia, not just that, but that this is happening at home. And because we don't pay as much attention to that, Vladimir Putin has exploited what I can only call our ignorance and our indifference to crack down in ways on the Russian people that I think deserve a great deal more attention. Marc Thiessen: And it also shows how fragile his regime is. This is the myth of Putin as the strong man. I'm sorry, a strong man isn't afraid of a bunch of local mayors gathering in Moscow to talk about how to make the country better. Marc Thiessen: A strong man isn't afraid of Alexei Navalny coming home after recovering from a poisoning and speaking out against him. What is he afraid of? One of the things that Vladimir, and I don't want to spoil the interview, but one of the things Vladimir points out is that we have this myth that Putin is popular, right? That "Yeah, well, polls show that the Russian people really think the collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and that Putin is bringing back a strong Russia." For those of us who've studied tyrannical and totalitarian regimes, it's always the myth of the popularity of the regime, that there's a number of people who really like this power. They like the strength of the regime. And it's always a lie. They're always brittle on the inside. That's why they take these actions. Because if Vladimir Putin was so popular, then why doesn't he just have a fair election with Alexei Navalny and trounce him? What are you afraid of? Why do you have to put Alexei Navalny in jail? It's because you're afraid you'd lose. Because the truth is the Russian people do not support Vladimir Putin. They don't support repression. They want to live in freedom. They want to have the opportunity to build a better life for their family, have accountable government. And if Vladimir Putin went into a free election with Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara- Murza, or the dog catcher of Moscow, he would lose that election. Danielle Pletka: That's one of the stories Vladimir tells us. We're going to play the full interview, unedited for you. And the only thing we ask your forbearance on is that we had to do it over Skype, so the sound is not quite as perfect as you're used to from Marc's mellifluous voice. Vladimir Kara-Murza, for those few of you who don't know who he is, was a protege of the now dead, murdered Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov. He is the vice-chairman of Open Russia, which is an organization that was founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, someone who also spent 10 years in prison trying to oppose Vladimir Putin. He's the author of two documentaries, one called They Chose Freedom and another on Nemtsov himself that is just fantastic. He's a good friend to many of us here at AEI, and I was really happy when he agreed to join us despite everything that's going on in Moscow these days. Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org 3 Well, Vladimir, welcome to the podcast. Vladimir Kara-M...: Great to be on your podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Marc Thiessen: We're very excited that you're here because we almost missed you because you were arrested this weekend. Can you tell us what happened, and why we're so lucky to have you with us? Vladimir Kara-M...: Well, I have to say I've been in Russian politics for quite a while now, and I've seen many things as you know. But I have to say that what happened on Saturday was actually unprecedented, because an entire conference of elected municipal lawmakers from across Russia was detained by the police. The whole conference was detained. And so about 200 people were taken and driven around different police stations in Moscow. About 150 of them were elected municipal lawmakers. So, the idea was to try to gather a forum, a conference, of elected opposition legislators from all over the country. The municipal level is really the last level of politics in Russia where it's still possible to have some pluralism, some competition, some free debate, sometimes even more or less honest elections. And in fact, in the last couple of years, several hundreds of independent or opposition activists and local political leaders have been elected to these seats on municipal councils all across the country, from the Baltic to the Pacific, literally. And so, we thought it a good idea to try to coordinate this new sort of generation of rising pro-democracy political leaders. And the idea was to hold the first national conference, the first national forum, of these independent and opposition elected municipal legislators. Well, the authorities presumably thought this was also a good idea for us, so they made sure it didn't happen. But the way they did this was actually pretty surprising even for those of us who are seasoned in the Russian opposition. Usually, when the authorities try to sabotage our events, it would be something like a pipe suddenly burst in the hotel, or all the electricity would go off, or there would be a bomb scare. What happened this time was that they actually allowed the forum to start, and then about 20 minutes in, about 80 full-gear armed police officers marched into the room, and a police colonel took the microphone from the moderator. We were only just having our first session, but my spot was taken by this Moscow police colonel who announced to the entire room that everybody was being detained on the charge of assisting an undesirable, foreign organization. And I said this a few times, but I have no other way of describing this, I think Franz Kafka would have been ashamed of himself because his imagination would be nowhere near describing the situation we have in Russia under the Putin regime today, where you have elected municipal legislators, the people who have a democratic mandate from Russian voters detained by police because they're considered an undesirable foreign organization. By the way, just as an aside, today, there was an official delegation from Hezbollah here in Moscow at the invitation of the Russian foreign ministry. That's not an undesirable organization. That's okay. Hezbollah is fine, but elected municipal lawmakers from the Russian opposition, no, no, no. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org 4 So, we were all seized by police.