Lunch in Moscow with Viktor Sumsky

Posted 2010-07-29 by Metta Spencer | Comments (0) Add comment

This is the transcript of a conversation I had in Moscow in 2008 with Viktor Sumsky and my assistant, Ignat Kalinin. I think it reflects the attitudes that prevailed during those months before Obama was elected. It is available at the web site for my forthcoming book, The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy. See the web site of the book, which will eventually include hundreds of interviews and photographs: http://russianpeaceanddemocracy.com.

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Viktor Sumsky: Well let me put this way, I think we should be more conscious about climate change but so far, I think we have no prospect of getting even close to the level of emissions which we had in 1990. And I don’t think we will get there because if Russian industry will be renovated and modernized, it will be operating on the basis of very different technologies from the ones which were applied back then.

Metta Spencer: Yeah? Which technologies are you thinking of?

SUMSKY: Well, energy saving.

SPENCER: Oh, they will?

SUMSKY: Of course. I have no doubts about it. Let’s say you would certainly not detect a public awareness and concern about global warming but there is some concern related to it in the government. And I think the kind of concern which they have is things like energy-saving materials, being more apprehensive about how we use our natural wealth, being apprehensive about not wasting it the way it was frequently wasted before.

SPENCER: I noticed yesterday I got the Moscow Times and there was an article about people talk…, I think Medvedev said something about doing energy conservation kinds of measures.

SUMSKY: Both Putin and Medvedev are now speaking more and more about it. I mean two or three years ago it was not yet a big issue but now it seems to be….

SPENCER: Growing?

SUMSKY: Yeah

SPENCER: It’s not in the public. I was at Greenpeace yesterday and they don’t have it on their agenda and I interviewed Sergei Kapitsa and he pooh-poohed it basically.

SUMSKY: You know, I can give you at least one possible reason why. The Russian academic community is, I mean the really smart people, are somehow sceptical about the whole concept of global warming. They say that basically there are no valid empirical data to support the idea that this is what is taking place in such a way that there will be no reversal and it will be a one way road. There are even some people who are seriously saying that in the geological history of the earth, periods of global coldening were always much more prolonged and manifest than periods of global warming. And there is a, well, there is some kind of possibility that where we’re actually headed is not the global warming. It may persist for a while longer, but then global cold will overtake it. You have to be a real geologist and a geological historian to make these judgements. I’m just saying this in a very primitive way to indicate why some of the academics are not alarmists. But I read these articles more than once, not in the academic publications but in the Russian media so there is a school of thought which is based on this.

SPENCER: Well there are two things…

SUMSKY: Sorry, whereas practical politicians have to proceed from the fact that, you know, every year we now have a flood in Germany and in Czechia, or in Turkey or many other places which used to be without floods, that ice in Arctic and in Antarctica is melting, and they now go to Greenland to have these conference on what to do when Arctic conditions will permit drilling for oil and other nice things like this.

SPENCER: Have you seen the Al Gore movie?

SUMSKY: I haven’t seen his movie but I’ve read about his book and about his movie, well, and I know that he has associated himself politically and intellectually with this cause.

SPENCER: Well, he has graph in there that shows the ice ages and the warming ages and so on going back, and we’re already way beyond the point where, I think it’s six hundred thousand years, the CO₂ is way above that and climbing fast. The worst is that there’re thousands of square miles of frozen methane including in Siberia….

SUMSKY: Siberia especially

SPENCER: Yes. And when it melts, it’s eight times more dangerous, eight times worse than CO₂ as greenhouse gas. And when it melts it warms the place up and that melts more of it and so there is a, you know, a critical mass kind of effect and that’s the most alarming thing of all. Because if you pass a certain threshold and things happen like the ocean currents — the ice melts, dumps fresh water into the Atlantic… It happened once in Canada, it was a big melt that dumped the frozen ice, and when that happens the…. What’s that belt of water that goes through the Atlantic and keeps Europe warm?

SUMSKY: Gulf Stream

SPENCER: Gulf stream. And it makes a loop. The warm part travels this way and then the other way around. Anyway, when that cold fresh water comes in, it can disrupt that whole flow of ocean current. There is a point at which it’s irreversible. And those guys, there were two thousand scientists that produced that IPCC report. And none of their journal articles show any disagreement about it. So I take it lot more seriously than Kapitsa did or even Greenpeace. I’ve been working on that as much as anything else the last two years. I organized a forum at U f T for specialists — a public forum that lasted all day. Several hundred people came. And I’ve been publishing articles about it too. So I know there are books coming out all the time and Kapitsa referred me to one by some guy named Lawson which I have to check out. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me really question…

SUMSKY: The Gore position. Well, I have heard about the danger of permafrost
releasing all these gases into the atmosphere and this is a serious subject obviously but on the other hand, I think the people who should be really brought into this discussion, if you want to have at least a semblance of practical implications, are Indians and Chinese. They are the really big powers who contribute to this whole process

SPENCER: Everybody is aware, especially with China, cause China is coming up so fast, putting in coal burning plants.

So how are things at the IMEMO? Have you changed your role there or is your job pretty much what it was?

SUMSKY: No, it’s the same. But the problem is that you see we have managed to
survive and the nineties were a very tough time but then gradually it… No, well, our management had done a lot to secure for us at least some degree of payment which would keep the people going. And I think in the nineties and early in this decade, we were a little better off in that sense than some other academic institutions. And in a purely material sense, things have improved in the last three or four years and they will continue to improve. So the salary is no longer as meagre as it used to be. So in practical terms it means that if you want to just concentrate on your academic exploits and stop working elsewhere for someone else doing other jobs, you can do it. The problem is that now that this situation is really different from what is was twenty or twenty-five years ago and the demands of the younger generation when they finish, when they graduate from the university and they start their adult life, are very different from the previous ones.

SPENCER: How so?

SUMSKY: They want to get everything at once just like that and they think it’s possible. From that point of view, what we may offer them is still not enough to support the young family to be able to go to the nightclub on a Friday night and so on. So the implication is very simple, we have very little fresh blood. On the other hand, you know people who are interested in this kind of research they were never very numerous. In this generation, there should be also young people who want to do it for the sake of doing it. So our task is to try to identify them, to see them, to draw them in and we are not yet doing it very well

SPENCER: I keep hearing things from the other perspective. For example, Ignat has a Master’s from Moscow State University in History. He doesn’t think it’s possible to have an academic job. He’s going to go into business. He has no talent for it but, [laugh], whatever. He’s a very smart kid; he could do well.

SUMSKY: Also you know, the more I see these kids – and I see them because I teach over there at the Moscow State University, you know I ….

SPENCER: Is it, you are pointing as if it’s near. Is it?

SUMSKY: Yes, it’s across the square.

SPENCER: I see, so it’s not up on the hill?

SUMSKY: It has several campuses. There is the major campus up on the hill but it has its historical premise which is right across Kremlin – two big buildings where the School of Journalism and the School of African Studies and I think Geology are located so that’s where I teach. Of course, inevitably, I compare these kids to the young people of my generation when I was a student myself and I have to tell you that Marxism was a great intellectually disciplining force. You had a framework into which you could structure the world and see it, not the chaotic mess but as something which has a degree of order in it and a sense of direction and all that. And, these kids, they are typically post-modernist creatures. You know, everything is equalling everything. No hierarchies, no degrees of importance which differ one phenomenon from the other. And when you are dealing with people like this, you realize that it’s so terribly difficult for them to remember anything. Because when you want to memorize something and you already have a framework, you are putting certain dates and certain facts into these cells and they’re forming a picture. And here, you know, the one date is all fumbled up in the other and one group of one information is mixed with the other – it’s just a porridge, an intellectual porridge

SPENCER: [laugh] That’s fascinating. You know, I never heard anybody say that before.

SUMSKY: Yes. And I’m not sure that this is just a Russian phenomenon, judging by my experience in the American university.

SPENCER: Yeah? Is that, that’s the kind of thing you found there in Seattle?

SUMSKY: Sort of.

SPENCER: I never thought about that.

SUMSKY: I would not like to be over-generalising. As you know, there are all sorts of people. Some of them are really very talented and, of course along with the ones which talk more or less like I described, I came across some very smart young people. They’re always there but if you ask me how big is that proportion in the overall number of students, not very high.

SPENCER: Well, is it that they are accepting a larger number of students now so that…?

SUMSKY: No

SPENCER: It’s not? Cause that’s what you would expect if you just enlarge the student population.

SUMSKY: No, no.

SPENCER: I haven’t been teaching now for six years maybe. I retired eleven years ago but I kept on teaching one course for free. It was a course on negotiation and non-violence and it’s a small course which students liked so I kept on doing it. But, then I couldn’t do it anymore. I had both of my hips replaced so I have mobility problems. I didn’t want to go back and start up again. Glad I did it then but I had my turn, you know. But, you know, I still do Peace magazine.

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: And I published a book two years ago. Nobody read it [laugh]

SUMSKY: What was it about?

SPENCER: It was actually about vicarious emotion and as applied to drama in particular and the way our lives are full of both imaginary and real emotions and concerns. I talked about television but what happened was that the publisher thought that he would get a lot more mileage if we put television in the title. It was terrible idea cause people who read books don’t watch television and don’t read books about television.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: [laugh] And people who watch television have no interest in reading books about it. He insisted and I wish to God I‘d held out and said no cause people immediately think of it as a book about television and it’s a book about philosophy and social psychology and tons of other stuff [laugh]. It’s not anything that I had done before. It’s not like any of my work on peace except in so far as I think that, and I do believe this, that we have to think about how to change culture, and I think the best conceivable way to really change culture is through really excellent television series – long running serials. Dramas where you watch the same people for years because viewers form real relationships with these imaginary characters and I love would to see… For example, I know Alexander Likhotal, he’s the head of Green Cross International, and…

SUMSKY: Does he work here with Gorbachev?

SPENCER: He is based in Geneva. The Green Cross office is there and I went to one of their conferences in Bologna about five years ago and proposed to him that what they really need is fewer conferences and more public outreach in terms of making people more aware of environmental concerns and so on, and that the ideal thing would be, say, a TV series about a Green Cross team in the Middle East after a war handling the things that they have to handle, for example, in Iraq or someplace, some imaginary war. And then Gorbachev could make guest appearances and stir up interest. And they loved the idea so we’ve been working toward it but Likhotal doesn’t know anything about the business of television. And we talked about it now and then but it, I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s very hard to get connections with the people who would actually be in a position to do something like that. There’s a fellow named Jeffrey Skoll who made five billion dollars as the founding president of EBay. You know EBay?

SUMSKY: No

SPENCER: EBay is an online auction. You can take anything you want to sell, take a picture of it, and put it on their website and then they have people bid on it. And at certain time the bidding stops and you sell the item. So he made five billion dollars and then he decided he wanted to do something to save the world. So he went to Hollywood and he asked them why don’t you make pictures, movies about social issues? And they said because we would lose money. And he said supposed I guarantee you won’t lose money? OK. So he’s been in the movie production business as one of the producers. And, as a matter of fact, it’s not only that he would back them and, you know, fill in any holes in financially but all his movies are successful. So the first year, he made something called Murderball which is about wheelchair athletes; something called North Country which is about sexual harassment -the woman goes to court, she’s a coal miner or something, and she wins this case against these men who were bugging her; Good Night and Good Luck which is about Edward R. Murrow and the way he defeated Joseph McCarthy – the power of the media in other words; Syriana which was about the oil greed in Washington and the Middle East. The second year, all of them win Nobel, I mean were Academy Award nominees. The second year, I forgotten what, he’s, he public…, he did Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which actually won an Academy Award and won a Nobel Prize for Gore. He’s funding Bruce Blair who’s one of the nuclear experts in the US to do a movie about nuclear weapons and the dangers thereof. He has a thing in progress, or maybe it’s not making progress, I don’t know, about the Christmas truce of World War I. You know when the soldiers…

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: …refused to fight? That’s our thing. Oh, he’s…, one recent one was something called Charlie Wilson’s War which was very interesting for a Russian I would think. It’s a true story about a congressman, Charlie Wilson, who was on the, I guess, House Ways and Means Committee. So he could allocate money to anything he wanted and nobody held him accountable. And so they started this was when the Russians were in Afghanistan. And he paid for these stinger missiles that shot down the Russian helicopters. And, of course, the end is he’s won the war in Afghanistan but then his buddy comes up to him and says, you know, something like: be careful what you wish for [laugh]. Now these Talibans are flooding into the country [laugh]. So that’s the kind of thing that, I would think, if we could get to Jeffrey Skoll, he’d might be interested in doing something, you know, a series about a Green Cross team. But the one thing that frightens a television or movie producer more than anything else is to have somebody send them a story. And they actually hire people to open all their mail to make sure that nothing gets through because it’s happened many times that a story will get through, they will reject it and then later on they write something that’s similar and they get sued for plagiarism. So they’re extremely careful…

SUMSKY: So they’re very closed?

SPENCER: Very closed. You cannot get through. I cannot get through to Jeffrey Skoll.

SPENCER: So you can now convince Ignat that he ought to be an academic.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

IGNAT KALININ: It’s too hard to be an academic.

SPENCER: He wants to teach history to high school kids. That would be OK but he says you can’t make a living doing it. So let’s go back to the discussion of non-violence. It takes me back to a time when I was in Dubrovnik in 1983 with a whole program on non-violence. It was put on by UNESCO for three weeks I think, every day all day long. There were more resource people than students. Gene Sharp was there and Narayan Desai, whose father was Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, so he’d been brought up in Gandhi’s ashram from the time he was a week old. And then there were several people from Martin Luther King’s movement. And the real controversy was about whether non-violence is a spiritual process. And obviously to Desai and the Gandhians it is and to Sharp it definitely was not. It’s a method you can use, and people do it for good reasons and bad reasons. Sometimes they do it just because they couldn’t get their hands on any guns so that’s the only thing left for them to do.

I KALININ: Violent non-violence.

SUMSKY: [laugh] I agree. You know what was the first publication by Gene Sharp which I encountered? And it told me a whole lot about the man and his mindset. I found it in the IMEMO library. It was his plan which was designed for NATO. He had done it on the orders of NATO. It was a plan for non-violent defence of Western Europe in case of Soviet intervention.

SPENCER: Really?

SUMSKY: Can you imagine that? It was written I think before…, what was the name of that book he wrote about Gandhi?

SPENCER: I don’t remember.

SUMSKY: He had the volume on Gandhi then he had this three volume edition on the politics of non-violent action. Now his name is quite well known here — known in a very negative sense.

SPENCER: Really.

SUMSKY: Very. You know I also have to tell you quite frankly that I was a little surprised by your interview with Robert Helvey in Peace Magazine. Well, the very fact that this guy is employed by Albert Einstein Institution tells you a lot.

SPENCER: No he’s not employed there, but he’s with them. Well he’s not with them anymore but that’s another story. It doesn’t bear on what you’re saying.

SUMSKY: Do you know the name of Edward Lansdale?

SPENCER: No

SUMSKY: Oh you should because Robert Helvey is the modern day Edward Lansdale. I have a whole story on Lansdale in my book. Technically he was not a CIA man but he was more than that because he was employed in a special inner unit of the CIA which was handling things like support of insurgencies, oppositional forces, you know all sort of these kinds of things. He was sent to the Philippines in the early 1950’s to stop the Hook rebellion and to install another government because the present day Filipino government was considered not capable of stopping the communists overtaking.

SPENCER: But he was using violence. It’s not a non-violent thing.

SUMSKY: The problem is that his whole idea was what can we do non-militarily to stop the insurgency. And it was like, you know, his whole idea was approximately like this: ‘We are confronting a revolutionary war. You have to oppose it with another kind of revolution’. He started to cultivate all sorts of intellectuals asking them to provide ideas about peaceful social reform in the Philippines. It was non-violence in that sense. Confront an armed rebellion with peaceful reforms in order to rob the population support from the insurgents to the government and leave them baseless. He was very smart.

SPENCER: Leave them baseless?

SUMSKY: Baseless. Deprive them of the mass base.

SPENCER: OK, you’ve got to fill that in because I’m not sure I understand.

SUMSKY: No, no. But I’m practically saying that he’s a kind of creative military thinker like Lansdale who is, in the final analysis, promoting the geo-political interests of his country. Because that’s the way I see Helvey. I think he’s…

SPENCER: I don’t think so.

SUMSKY: …he is an untypical product but a very interesting product of the American intelligence community. That’s what he is.

SPENCER: But his technique, theoretically, could be applied by any movement. I don’t know how far he would go in training people that he wouldn’t agree with. But I know that Gene Sharp would certainly not train a Hitler, let’s say. He would say, “I would rather have you use non-violent methods than round up Jews and kill them. So you can go look in my books. I’m not going to train you but the material is there, so have a look.”

SUMSKY: No, the problem with that kind of approach for me, if you look at the Gandhian perspective, Gandhi wasn’t, whether you look at how he behaved or what he wrote, he was not a dogmatist of non-violence in the sense that he always was bringing this message in that what is important is what happens after non-violence. Suppose your program worked, what are you going to do? Do you have a plan to restructure the society? To construct it in such a way that violence will not be there anymore? And of course, his greatest message was that the worst variety of violence is poverty. And it’s central for him. And it’s the base of his populism. That’s why he went to the poor and try to make himself poor — to sympathize with them.

SPENCER: Okay.

SUMSKY: I do not see this message in Sharp’s strategizing at all.

SPENCER: No. You’re right.

SUMSKY: It’s not there.

SPENCER: It’s not about spiritual things whatsoever.

SUMSKY: It’s about one simple thing: ‘you don’t like this government, would you like to know how to take it away?’ That’s it [laugh].

SPENCER: But that could be a very good thing to know. I would like very much to make sure that everybody had a pretty good grasp of what one might do because it’s an alternative to violence. That’s all he claims for it. In fact, he makes a joke about how some Quaker in the audience once got very huffy with him and said: “Well look, all you’re doing is taking the violence out of war/” [laugh] To him the joke was that, well of course — what else would you want to do? That’s perfect. If we could take the violence out of war, that’s all we need to do.

SUMSKY: Have you ever heard of Edward Luttwack? Have you read the piece which is called Give War a Chance?

SPENCER: No

SUMSKY: You may want to read it. He wrote a small pocket book which is actually an instruction how to make a coup. Sharp teaches us how to depose a government in a non-violent way. This guy is teaching the Machiavellian things. But [laugh] he also knows his subject very well.

SPENCER: Yeah, Luttwack’s a very smart man. I know that much about him but I don’t know that article.

SUMSKY: It was written in 1999 at a time when the first wave of non-violent revolutions was already done and there was a period when there was an impression that not everything can be solved by negotiations, by compromises, by peacemaking, that there are ineradicable conflicts which have to be played out to the bottom.

SPENCER: Whose views are you referring to?

SUMSKY: Luttwack. Luttwack.

SPENCER: You make it sound like there are other people were thinking that way. It sounds like Frantz Fanon.

SUMSKY: But it kind of rang a bell at the time the article was published.

SPENCER: Yeah, OK. Who is this Filipino guy Garcia?

SUMSKY: Ed Garcia. Yes

SPENCER: Ed Garcia. I interviewed him for the magazine once.

SUMSKY: I read it. Do you realize that I remain the free subscriber of your magazine for four…, [laugh], how many years now?

I KALININ: Fifteen, as well as we are.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: Do you ever read it, Ignat?

I KALININ: Yes, sometimes.

SPENCER: OK, good [laugh]

SUMSKY: I do read it.

SPENCER: Well, Garcia said, something like, “Non-violent resistance is only good for getting rid of a dictator. It doesn’t tell you anything about what kind of a democracy you can create afterwards.”

SUMSKY: That’s what he told me [laugh]

SPENCER: Yes, well that’s right. It doesn’t help you. You got to have something else beyond that. Still, it sure can be a handy thing if you are planning a violent revolution cause it gives you an alternative.

SUMSKY: Well, the problem is that paradoxically, a non-violent revolution is really an oxymoron. And I think I can tell you why. When we think about accomplished revolutions, about the ones which really achieved something in the big sense, these are the revolutions which helped certain societies, basically the western societies, quickly jump from traditional, feudal society into the modern age – make a breakthrough. It is inevitably achieved by violent means.

SPENCER: Well, any big change can count as a revolution, but if so, you’d count the Industrial Revolution as a revolution.

I KALININ: It was violent as well.

SUMSKY: That’s one point. The other point is that to make it happen, you had to have the Charles the first deposed and taken away and then the possibilities for the revolution would arise. The British revolution of the 17th century was the political phase of it. The Industrial Revolution was the necessary social supplement. So these are different types of revolution. But one turned out to be a very important prerequisite for the other. Here in all these Third World countries, they still confront this very painful issue of how to make a transition from traditionalism to modernity. And to cross this borderline, you do have to have what is sometimes called the radical vanguard, the revolutionary vanguard – some kind of very strong, determined, fanatic force which will be just fixed on the program of making this breakthrough. After it happens, by the way, there will be a kind of drawback and then some kind of middle ground will be found where the society itself, you know, will decide what is actually in its own capability. I mean the radicals want to go too far, then the conservatives would like to pull back even deeper into traditionalism than it was before. But eventually, there will be some middle ground but which would already be located beyond the border between traditionalism and modern, already in that other realm. I’m by the way describing to you the way Marxism presents the revolutionary mechanism. That’s how it works, and the fact that we no longer see real revolutions taking place, there are lots of explanations for that. But one of them, if we take the particular case of the recent color revolutions, you know, you’re applying non-violent means and by doing it you make much more peaceful, more comfortable, you really take away the unpleasant aspects of the whole exercise there. But along with this, you take way the whole capability of making a breakthrough. And as a result of it, what do you see in Ukraine? Do you think the Ukraine elites as a result of the color revolution have changed? Is there a really new ruling group representing the people? No. All of them are the old Kuchma people.

SPENCER: OK, and are you really arguing that if it had been violent you’d have a much better crowd now?

SUMSKY: No, I’m not saying this because the issue of revolution is not just the issue of violence or non-violence. It’s the issue, again we get back to Gandhi, it’s the issue of the revolutionary project. If it’s there. thre is a chance that something will happen. If it’s not there — it may be violent, it may be non-violent — it will not work.

I KALININ: Metta, I told you about a small group of people working here gathering information, then sending the information back to the US and then creating some kind of plan for each country.

SPENCER: When was this? You need to tell it again. Tell him too.

I KALININ: OK, it’s just pretty much the same what you’re saying — that the Orange Revolution itself, the export of democracy itself as a process, means nothing because it’s only one single process and it looks very destructive, at least from our point of view here.

SPENCER: It looks destructive?

I KALININ: Yes

SPENCER: Well, to my mind, it prevents something more violent.

I KALININ: No, and because I’m not saying that violence is an option. No, in no way…

SUMSKY: And I’m not a friend of violence too.

I KALININ: Yeah. But what I told you about, for example, Iraq, you should have studied that there are Sunnis and Shiites there before interfering, and you shouldn’t….

SPENCER: I should have? [laugh]

SUMSKY: [laugh]

I KALININ: [laugh] No, no, not you

SPENCER: Condoleezza and I should have. All right.

I KALININ: Condoleezza and you, OK, Metta. But it’s pretty much the same. OK,

Condoleezza used tanks in Basra and Baghdad but she used the Orange Revolution in Tbilisi and maybe, just probably, things went worse there and Saakashvili is a pretty violent guy, and you know this. He’s really power monger, yes. And they should have studied that the Ukraine is split before they started the Orange Revolution. What I’m telling you is that Gene Sharp’s idea of non-violent resistance of Orange Revolutions based on these ideas is just one small part in how you do the transition. But where you go then?

SPENCER: I have said the same thing. You’re not telling me something different. Isn’t that what I was just telling Victor?

I KALININ: I don’t know. I’m trying here to explain why people don’t like idea of Orange Revolution here because…

SPENCER: Because you lost something.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: That’s obvious. Same reason you don’t like the Kosovo thing – because you lost something.

I KALININ: What I lost?

SUMSKY: No, no, it’s not just that.

I KALININ: Well, what?

SPENCER: Yeah, people here lost, so obviously they’re not going to like it. I’m not surprised at that.

SUMSKY: It’s not that.

I KALININ: It’s not because of that, Metta. No, it’s because we have a lot of, you know, we can see that it is only destroyed because there is nothing to…

SPENCER: But there was a lot there to be destroyed.

I KALININ: You are speaking very violent thing. Let’s destroy everything…

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: I would say that getting rid of authoritarian rulers, getting rid of Kuchma and Milosevic, that’s a pretty good thing to do. I would love to see that —

I KALININ: But then what? It’s…

SPENCER: I agree: then what? The Orange Revolution is only a part of the process.

I KALININ: That’s why people don’t like Orange revolutions.

SPENCER: Well it’s not an argument against an Orange Revolution. It’s an argument saying that if that’s all you’re going to do, you’re not going to get anywhere.

SUMSKY: You know the problem is, and I think you said a lot as you commented that we lost — that the issue of the Orange Revolution for, I’m not referring personally to you, but I’m referring to people in the West. Let’s say to Condoleezza, if you wish, who manipulates these things and who designed them, that the last thing on their mind is what happens to Ukraine or what happens to Georgia. The first thing on their mind is what happens to the geo-political interests of the West and of the US, of course.

SPENCER: Yeah, but you cannot run a nonviolent revolution from Washington. You can help them but the source of the revolution has to be the people themselves…

SUMSKY: I agree. I agree.

SPENCER: So it’s not an American revolution.

SUMSKY: It is an American revolution with the application of local sources.

SPENCER: OK, now wait a minute. What Condoleezza did was an American invasion. That’s unquestionable. What I think could have been done instead was nonviolent. There were expatriate Iraqis living in the Netherlands (I can’t think of the leader’s name) who were prepared to do a non-violent revolution in Iraq. And they were not given any hearing whatever. No discussion about the possibility. Now I would have said at that point, yes, help these guys because your choice is helping them or else invading. That’s what you’re going to do. To do it that way, you need to realize that when you’re finished with that, when they’ve succeeded (which would take three or four years at least because it would have to be built up and helped and I don’t know whether the opposition against Saddam was strong enough for them to have won) but you certainly couldn’t have won if the Iraqi people didn’t want to get rid of him because it is based on that. And if you do that, you must realize that the country is fragmented in every possible way and you’re going to have nothing but trouble after you do this. So to prepare, you’ve got to bring together the people — the Iraqi National Congress and a bunch of other people — and work out what kind of government you want before you even begin this process. If you don’t, you’re going to have trouble. Now I’ve been working with Burmese in Canada trying to help them give support to the democratic opposition movement in Burma. But they understand very well that they’re in exactly the same situation as the Iraqis. That is to say, there are seventeen ethnic groups in Burma that have been at war for hundreds or thousands of years and they haven’t worked it out. So, I had a meeting in my apartment building, I took over the party room, for representatives of each of these ethnic groups to come and to start talking about what kind of government they’re going to have and what kind of issues they were going to have to work out. So that has to be done in advance so that you have the issues worked out enough so that a democratic organization can be formed to govern that everybody will respect. And if that’s not done before you start your opposition movement, you’re in for trouble. That much is clear to me. So it is part of the democratic process. But it sounds like you’re saying, “Just wait and let violence happen and then it will swing back and there’ll be something else and history will take care of things so don’t think about it.”

SUMSKY: Well let me get back to my last statement about the geo-political interests behind all these things. Take Condoleezza’s statement of 2005 when she presented to the world the list of six outposts of tyranny: Byelorussia, Cuba, Iraq, or it was Iran, sorry, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar. All these countries were presented to the world as direct threats to American national interests and points of immediate concern — which is absolutely insane if you analyze the strategic capabilities of any of them including…

SPENCER: I agree.

SUMSKY: Of course…

SPENCER: I agree, but they are certainly threats to their own people and that’s why I want to help them.

SUMSKY: So, just a second. But if you go to the semantics of the word outpost, well it’s like this, this is an outpost and this is a stronghold. An outpost is something standing in front of the stronghold to protect it. So, here you have to figure out what are the strongholds of tyranny which the United States wants to hit by hitting the outposts. And of course, behind Byelorussia you have Russia. And the big question for all us here is ‘Is it a stronghold of tyranny?’ And I say a big no to that; this is rubbish. This is the worst kind of cold war thinking and the worst kind of demonizing somebody whom you are uncomfortable with. When you are looking for a stronghold behind Myanmar, of course it’s China. Same story. I mean you may be mindful about the troubles of people in Myanmar and these other places but not the people who are forming the overall plan. And in that sense, you know, when you are trying to join this global struggle for democracy, you are working, you think that you are working for these people. In the final analysis, you will be working for someone else.

SPENCER: I am working for these people cause I know some of those people. I know their families, I know their situation…

SUMSKY: I realize this and I’m not putting any specific blame on you. But I am saying that, you know, there is this great word “objectively” in Marxism. Irrespective of your own beliefs, your own personal good intentions, you will be used by someone else. That’s it. And what the United States is doing vis-à-vis Myanmar, for me it’s just one huge scandal. I mean, even, just take a look at this latest attempt to have a color revolution in Myanmar in last September and October. You have all these demonstrations in Yangon, and in the Bay of Bengal. Quite accidentally, there is the joint naval exercise of the United States, Australia, Japan, and India. What’s the purpose of that? What are the signals? What do they want to say? And as far as…

SPENCER: It’s not the US running the Myanmar movement.

SUMSKY: It’s just the National Endowment for Democracy, which is, from my point of view, a government organization with the big letter G. It has nothing to do with NGO’s. It is funded by the American government and this is the strategic arm of the United States. That’s what it is.

SPENCER: Well, I’m sorry but I don’t agree that the monks’ revolution in Burma — it was not a prepared thing; they didn’t have enough training. I don’t know whether they had enough resources but I would do anything to help those people because those are people who are actually… You can’t imagine the kinds of things that the government does to them!

SUMSKY: I can. I talk to the Burmese and I talk to the émigré Burmese and I know that this is not a great situation. I know. But my next question is what will happen when this present government will be deposed and when…

SPENCER: My answer is there are meetings of people in Canada going on among these different tribal groups and political organizations trying to work out in advance the kinds of problems that they will face. I don’t know whether they’ll succeed or not. It’s a very difficult thing but that has to be done before you try to bring in a change in Myanmar, I don’t like the word Myanmar – Burma.

SUMSKY: Burma

SPENCER: I wouldn’t know what was worth doing in this world if I didn’t say that was. Of all the things that I can imagine doing with my life and my resources, the most important thing would be to help people free themselves.

SUMSKY: As an academic, can you think about any historical situation which is worse than Myanmar? If we go into things like, for instance, numbers of victims of the ruling clique, things like this, is Myanmar the worst case in world history?

I KALININ: No

SPENCER: I wouldn’t think so but I don’t have a ranking in my head of what is the worst thing that ever happened in the world. It is certainly… Myanmar is not in the top ten.

SUMSKY: No. It’s not in the top hundred. If we start observing the numbers of political detainees…

SPENCER: In the conditions of the world today, it is as bad a place to live as you can imagine. There is no place worse.

I KALININ: North Korea is.

SUMSKY: Well…

SPENCER: That’s really arguable. I wouldn’t be able to say that it is or not.

SUMSKY: But, you know, let me tell you this, I think it is more serious than just the multi-ethnicity of Burma. We know that it is also a part of the golden triangle, in terms of drugs production and all that. I think if the world touches it in the wrong way and allows it to collapse, we will have another Afghanistan and another Kosovo in terms of how huge outpouring of this stuff. Does the world need more heroin or narcotics?

SPENCER: I hope not.

SUMSKY: I also hope not and let’s think about that too. Well not to speak of the fact of course that, you know, you look at a map of Asia. You look at Burma and what you see to the west of it is India, what you see to the east of it is China, what you see to the south is South-East Asia. In a strategic sense, I mean, the Americans want to have bases everywhere in the world in the crucial spots of the world like Central Asia. From Central Asia you hit Russia, you hit India, you hit China, you hit anybody you may want to hit. From Burma, if you get it, you hit China, if you want you press India, if you want you press South-East Asia, whomever. Not to speak of the fact of course that it’s another huge asset. I just want to tell you once again that when the American administration is heating this issue up, it has no humanitarian considerations at all — like it never had before when it was…

SPENCER: Well, I do.

SUMSKY: OK, let’s put it this way, if I were you, and I think I’m not also oblivious to humanitarian issues, but if I want to act, I would probably think about: ‘OK if I do this, what may be the eventual results considering that someone else wants to use the situation for its own purposes and wants to play on it?’. And I think what is especially worse about this whole thing is that the American administration and people in it manipulate the best feelings of the people like you when they build up these cases…

SPENCER: That is really insulting!

SUMSKY: Their manipulation?

SPENCER: To learn that I am manipulated by the American government.

SUMSKY: No I…

SPENCER: That is really insulting.

SUMSKY: I am not saying that you are manipu… I…

SPENCER: Well you said it!

SUMSKY: No, I said something else. I said that the American government wants to manipulate people like you. That’s what I said. I did not say that you are manipulated. I say that they want to manipulate you.

SPENCER: Well, I believe that I want to help people get freedom wherever I can and I do realize that after independence comes, after dictators are ousted, there is a lot yet to be solved and that that is only one step of the process. And I do think I am mindful of the other factors that have to come into play and should come into play before one starts a non-violent revolution. But I would never be able to live with myself if I simply stayed under a dictatorship and didn’t fight it .

SUMSKY: OK, but just for the sake of it can you give me an example of one non-violent Revolution, let’s say since 1986 in the Philippines, which has led to something decent? Useful?

SPENCER: Since 1986?

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: Well, there’s 1989. I think that came after 1986 didn’t it?

SUMSKY: In Eastern Europe.

SPENCER: All around the world but, yes, in Eastern Europe. I think the people in Poland, the people in Czechoslovakia, the people in Hungary…

SUMSKY: Do you count the Baltics in this process?

SPENCER: Well, that’s a good question. I don’t actually like secession so I don’t like to count the Baltics.

SUMSKY: As a Canadian [laugh]

SPENCER: As a Canadian, but it’s not because I’m Canadian, it’s because I wrote a book about the effects of secession.

SUMSKY: I know.

SPENCER: And the outcome of most secessions have been catastrophic but more recently they haven’t been, so certainly I would assume that the Baltics count.

SUMSKY: Let me tell you this, I have family in Lithuania. I go there once in a while and, and when you come there in, after three or four years interval, you see improvements. The roads are better, more restoration in the old section of the city, the tourist spots look very nice and, you know, all of that. It’s undistinguishable from any regular West European city. But if you take into account that the population of Lithuania, for instance, is 3.5 million people and then you are told that in the first year when free emigration was introduced between the Baltic States and the rest of the European Union countries, half a million people from Lithuania left the country to work and to reside permanently in the west European countries, precisely in England, in Ireland, and in some other places, you know you might have all sorts of thoughts. One of them is like this. For instance, we in Russia are so much preoccupied with the fact that we are in a terrible demographic position. Our demographic crisis is measured by the fact that the population now is smaller than it was in 1990. In 1990, it was around 150 million. Now we stand approximately ten million smaller and it may go down to, by the middle of the century, to something like 130 million. So that’s demographic catastrophe by Russians’ measurements. What are the demographic prospects of a country like Lithuania, which is deprived in one year by a sixth of its population, of the most vibrant, young, enterprising and so on and so forth who will never come back, who’ll stay there? I mean what these things mean for the future of this nation? On the surface it looks like it’s an integration into Europe, so great, we will have the same standard of living as the Western Europe has but the really dramatic thing is that in the process they may not notice the fact of their disappearance as a nation. They will be so enchanted by the receptivity of Europe that they will…

SPENCER: But what would you have them do? What would you have done to them? What is your solution?

SUMSKY: I am not saying…

SPENCER: I mean is this an argument against their being democratic?

SUMSKY: No, I…

SPENCER: Well what is it?

SUMSKY: I am just saying that every strong desire to have freedom and to be democratic has a sociological price and the price may be sometimes so heavy that’s…

SPENCER: Well if you want to look at it statistically, there’re a lot of people who do
research on the causes and consequences of democracy, looking at the economic development relationships and so on. I won’t try to go into that part but I would refer you to this article by Peter Ackerman and somebody else at Freedom House where they looked at all of the data that Freedom House has collected over its thirty-three year history and compared countries. There are sixty-seven cases of countries that became democratic, at least for a while, during that period of time. So the main thing they looked at was whether or not these countries had their democracy given to them from above by the ruling elites or through a democratic grassroots movement, civic action. And forty-eight percent of those sixty-seven cases had involved civic action, grassroots movements, if you want to call them colour revolutions, you can.

SUMSKY: Let’s call them civic movements.

SPENCER: All right. And when you look at them five years later, the ones that did it through civic movements are very much larger (and I don’t remember the numbers) much higher percentage of them were still democracies five or more years later. So the question is how you become democratic. And, in general, while it’s certainly true that you can find cases such as Ukraine and Serbia where – and probably Georgia – where it doesn’t look like things are going terribly well there in terms of democracy, if you look at all the cases, the figures show that you’d be a lot better off having a grassroots indigenous movement than having somebody like Gorbachev come and give freedom to a country that didn’t particularly want it. Because you don’t have it anymore.

SUMSKY: I disagree.

SPENCER: You think you have democracy here?

SUMSKY: I profoundly disagree. I’m not saying that we have democracy. No. But I would not go as far as to say that we’ve lost all our freedom. By far we have not.

SPENCER: Most people don’t call it a totalitarian state. They just call it an
authoritarian state…

SUMSKY: Which is not true too. And if you want to call this an authoritarian state then I will give you an argument in favour of America becoming an authoritarian state. And I think it will be very difficult to disprove.

SPENCER: OK

SUMSKY: But I’m not going to say this. I want to say something else, that the distinctions Freedom House is making between democracy giving from above and democracy coming from below is a distinction between democracy and non-democracy because I think that the second case — granting democracy from without — something else. And I would approach this whole issue from a somewhat different angle. Democracy pre-supposes freedom of choice. Let people be what they want to be in practical terms. If they need it, they will get it. If they don’t need it right now, leave them alone. Leave them alone and let them get to the point where they’ll want to have it. And because enforcement of democracy and imposition of democracy is the worst type of authoritarianism.

SPENCER: I would certainly agree. I don’t use violence to impose democracy on anybody.

SUMSKY: What about Yugoslavia? How do you like the non-violent campaign which was preceded by the bombing campaign of 1999? I was in the United States at the time and I saw it all on TV. You know, I really had a change of heart about so many things in the world after I saw it.

SPENCER: All right.

SUMSKY: You said you were insulted by a remark that people like you may
be manipulated by the American politicians. You should only imagine how I was insulted by the mood in the America which I sensed in1999 and by the mood in Western Europe about the whole Yugoslavian case, by the appearances of this. We find NATO British spokesmen who are saying about some degree of “collateral damage” being done during the bombardment! It was just…

SPENCER: Do you think I supported that bombing?

SUMSKY: I’m not saying this but you have to agree that the Serbian revolution is the direct continuation of that proj…

SPENCER: Absolutely opposite. The people who did it, the Otpor people, had started organizing before that and they are the biggest opponents to the American bombings because it stopped them in the tracks. It turned the whole population inside out to support Milosevic. They couldn’t make any headway whatever in trying to oppose him at that point and that’s what you do when you start a war — people line up behind the leader. So that is the worst thing that could have been done and Otpor couldn’t do anything for six to eight months after the bombing stopped. Then they could begin to actually carry out their movement. And they were the most opposed to the bombing. In no way did they want anything like that to happen nor did anybody I know who was concerned about trying to help them get their independence.

SUMSKY: OK, let’s register this. But let me tell you another thing. Is Milosevic the greatest of all the world tyrants imaginable? I mean what they had in Yugoslavia in the late 1990’s was a full blown civil war in which every side was committing the things which were all heaped on Milosevic alone.

SPENCER: I agree. I agree.

SUMSKY: So do you have an explanation for the fact that this particular part of Yugoslavia, Serbia, and this particular leader were demonized and were presented as the biggest evil of them all?

SPENCER: He did some pretty bad things. However, I was not in favor of breaking up Yugoslavia, any part of it, and…

SUMSKY: But someone else was.

SPENCER: I spoke to Cyrus Vance, who represented the US in that group of foreign ministers that was trying to decide what to do about recognizing the break-up of…, I think the Bosnia situation, it may have been Croatia as well, but I believe by then it was Bosnia. And he says it was Genscher. He said, “I argued with my friend Genscher and he was completely wrong. He wanted, to recognize these break-up countries, and I completely opposed that and I wanted all the country together.” He was right. Cyrus Vance was right and if he had…

SUMSKY: But he was overtaken by Holbrooke I think.

SPENCER: What?

SUMSKY: He was overtaken by Holbrooke I think.

SPENCER: No, because Holbrooke came along considerably afterward. Because Holbrook was into the Kosovo thing.

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: So I mean Holbrooke came, the Dayton Accord was after they’d already had the siege of Sarajevo. That’s what, three years difference?

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: So Cyrus Vance — and he represent the US officially — was trying to prevent the break-up of Yugoslavia.

SUMSKY: No, but the fact is that whatever he tried to do and whatever the American political line was at that time, very soon after that the major scapegoat of the whole situation became Milosevic and Serbia.

SPENCER: And he was from the beginning, he was the major scapegoat.

SUMSKY: Well the problem is that the guy who has some capacity and … Well, what is Serbia? Serbia is the axis around which this whole state was built. This is the core of Yugoslavia. If you attack Serbia, by implication you attack Yugoslavia.

SPENCER: Well if Serbia attacks the rest of the provinces and the peoples living therein, there are some problems. And those people have their own reasons which I didn’t support for wanting independence, wanting separation. I don’t believe in separation. But I can see what they were offended by. Serbs were not — you know, around East Slavonia and so on, the Serbs were really doing a lot of damage.

SUMSKY: I think everybody was doing lots of damage there. That’s civil war.

SPENCER: Yeah, but….

SUMSKY: Every country is guilty…

SPENCER: I agree. But, you know, I don’t know what your argument is…

SUMSKY: My argument is very simple that…

SPENCER: That the US broke up Yugoslavia?

SUMSKY: Yes in the…

SPENCER: Well they were trying to stop it. I mean that they were negotiating…

SUMSKY: In 1999?

SPENCER: Dates I can’t remember, I’m sorry.

SUMSKY: 1999 is the time when they started the bombing.

SPENCER: Oh, no that’s about Kosovo later. I’m talking about much earlier before the siege of Sarajevo, much earlier when Vance and…

SUMSKY: No but I am now focusing now on that phase when the NATO operation was underway.

SPENCER: But those are totally different wars.

I KALININ: OK

SPENCER: But I mean don’t mush them together.

SUMSKY: OK. The logic of the.. I’m just stating…

SPENCER: This was Clinton’s war in Kosovo.

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: The break-up of Yugoslavia was done a decade before, practically. It went on …, I’m no good at dates, I’m sorry.

SUMSKY: Yes, OK, but…

SPENCER: But I do know…

I KALININ: 1991, 1993 in Serbia.

SPENCER: …that the effort was being made by Cyrus Vance in the name of the US to hold the country together and it was Genscher…

SUMSKY: This I know.

SPENCER: who demanded they recognize these break-away states — which was a very bad idea, I agree. So it’s not the US who was doing it in that case. If you want to argue US supporting Kosovo and the war, the bombing of Belgrade in that period then that’s a different case. It was well after the Dayton Accords. That was several years later.

SUMSKY: Yes. I can switch it once again in a different direction. Why do you think that we lost in Kosovo? And why do you think that we lost in Ukraine and Georgia?

I KALININ: Why do you think we were fighting there?

SUMSKY: [laugh]

I KALININ: [laugh] I…

SUMSKY: What makes you think so?

SPENCER: I don’t think you were fighting there. I think what you were doing was
identifying very strongly with the Serbs and that in no sense did you lose except that emotionally if you identify with the people who did lose, then in that sense you lost but you didn’t actually lose anything. That’s…, you just identified with the Serbs and…

SUMSKY: Yes, and I think that even if we start speaking politically, yes, they lost, we supported them, we lost too. I do not think this is the final word in this whole story and I think the Balkans’ story will be as long as the Middle-Eastern one. And I think there will be many change of fortunes there and I think that whether you like it nor not, the West has made a terrible contribution to its own history by what it had done in the Balkans in the 1990’s.

SPENCER: OK, if you talk about Kosovo I would agree with you. I think the US action in Kosovo I disagree with strongly. I don’t think I could say that the US was responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia, apart from Kosovo and, you know, Montenegro.

SUMSKY: But you know what?

SPENCER: What?

SUMSKY: Had the US really wished, they certainly had a way to say to Genscher well, not exactly “shut up” but stay where you are, [laugh], and let them stay where they are.

I KALININ: I think it’s OK that they split up. I am in favour of this because I don’t understand how can you make people who are cutting each other in centuries, make them live in one house, one country.

SPENCER: But they’re all mixed up. It’s not like you can draw a line and everybody
inside here…

SUMSKY: The problem is the Serbs, they are all around the place.

SPENCER: There are minorities everywhere.

SUMSKY: Yes.

I KALININ: OK, there are minorities but still Croatia is populated by Croatian people and Serbia is…

SPENCER: My cleaning lady is a Serb from Croatia who had to leave.

SUMSKY: There’re enclaves in each of these…

I KALININ: Yeah I understand this but still you couldn’t have made them live together under Tito who had said…

SUMSKY: They lived together since the First World War I period until the end of the last century.

SPENCER: Many of them intermarry. Two of my closest friends are a young couple who came from Sarajevo. She’s Muslim and he’s a Serb and there was no trouble beforehand. Now they can’t go home and introduce their families to each other because they won’t speak.

I KALININ: I can say there was a five-year period where there was a lot of trouble, you know, from starting 1940 ending 1945 when they were cutting each other in a very serious way, you know, and Croatia… You can’t even imagine!

SPENCER: Absolutely

I KALININ: It’s not even written in the books.

SPENCER: But it wasn’t one region versus another. They’re all mixed up. They always have been all mixed up.

SUMSKY: Then the problem is how do you split a country like that?

SPENCER: I don’t want to split a country like that. I want to teach people to get along with each other better.

I KALININ: Those people won’t.

SUMSKY: Did anything work there that other people wanted them to do?

SPENCER: No, I guess the best time was Tito’s time. Looks to me like that’s when they came closest to getting along.

SUMSKY: Sure, but you know, in the final analysis, I’m afraid that there are situations in history and in… [laugh] where outsiders have to say with utmost humility that we do not know how to solve this and if anybody knows, these people must know. Let them try to do something themselves.

SPENCER: I am pretty much agreeing that people have to solve their own problems.

SUMSKY: I think that’s the basic of democracy.

SPENCER: Well, it is. You can help people who are oppressed though. I think if you really find that some people are being really oppressed, there is an obligation, I feel, to do what you can for them.

I KALININ: The Russians are oppressed in Baltic States, for example, right now.

SPENCER: OK

I KALININ: In a not very hard way but they are oppressed.

SPENCER: I agree.

I KALININ: Baltic States considered, they actually hated Russians all their history, yes, for bad things that Russian did to them, I agree. But they never learned how to live with each other. Russians in Baltic States, they don’t want to learn Baltic languages and their history and become, you know…

SUMSKY: The story, it also differs from one country to the other. It’s much more normal in Lithuania. It’s more tense in Latvia, and it’s bad in Estonia.

I KALININ: Yeah, it is. But still there’s like almost thirty percent minority of Russians.

SUMSKY: Even more.

I KALININ: Even more, yes. And they’re still denied citizenship because they don’t want to learn the language…

SUMSKY: And you know, whereas the same people in the European community who may be hypersensitive to the situation in Myanmar or China like the present day foreign minister of France, you know the former head of Medecins…, Doctors Without Borders…

SPENCER: Yeah, Bernard Kouchner.

SUMSKY: Yeah, Kouchner. He’s hypersensitive to these issues. I never heard him speak about the Russians in the Baltics. Never. This is not an issue.

SPENCER: But what does that mean to you?

SUMSKY: To me, it means that these are the people who are practicing double
standards and in some cases they will have a passion for the injustices done to somebody. In other cases, they will be blind and deaf.

SPENCER: OK, I agree that everybody is somewhat inclined to do some selective perception and that is a real bad thing to do. It’s really hard, it’s really important to try not to be selective in siding with one group than another.

SUMSKY: You know Metta…

SPENCER: And in a way though, I really have to say that the really important criterion is how much people are oppressed. If they’re seriously oppressed, I feel an obligation to do something for them, if I can, to help them. Now they still have to get their own freedom. Nobody can do that for them.

SUMSKY: I think our mistake is that we are sometimes sliding into the personalized aspect. When I say these things, I’m not making a reprimand to you. Although I want to hear your opinion as a representative of Western society, I’m not blaming you for the double standards of Kouchner. I want to know what you think about this.

SPENCER: Well, I probably am closer to being like Kouchner than like you in that I share his being appalled by what happens in Burma. I am terribly offended by what goes on in Burma and because it’s so severe that I feel an obligation to do what I can for them. And I, maybe there’s, you know, we’ve got people of our own in Canada who are also disadvantaged and I suppose I do what I can for them too but probably not as passionately because I’m not, I don’t know that many people in Canada who are beaten and jailed and tortured and so on.

SUMSKY: My knowledge about the situation in Canada is very meagre; I’m not even speaking about it. And I presume from what I hear that it’s normal. So, no question about that but… And of course, I think better than many people from your country or the US, you know, that there was a lot of goodwill as far as the West is concerned in Russia and in the Soviet Union in the late 80’s and in the early 90’s. People were, you know, just looking at it as a shining example of what should happen here. I do not think it’s here anymore….

SPENCER: I did never did hold up the US system as a shining example.

SUMSKY: Well, some of us of course had a personal exposure to the West and it was not bad. The problem however is that we have a little better exposure to things like Western policies vis-à-vis Russia and things like, well, Baltics is just one example. I studied English since I was eight years old and the Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel, and Dylan are in my blood veins. I mean, we had several courses of English and American Literature in high school taught in English. We read Shakespeare in the original when we were kids and so on. I mean my generation of Soviets had all sorts of affinities and personal affection to the West. I don’t have it anymore.

SPENCER: I can see that

SUMSKY: I’m sorry to say it but this is the way it is. And it comes from practical experience and from seeing how… I’m sorry to say that probably some of this gets into my perception of not just Western governments but Western societies. But I want to be frank even about this, I had gone through a thorough study of American foreign policy and things like CIA and so on in the last fifteen years… Jesus. I mean every time they want to say something nasty about Putin, they remember that he was a former KGB employee, but CIA was doing things which I, [laugh] do not know how to describe.

SPENCER: Yes, I am as opposed to George W. Bush as anybody on this planet. There’s nobody who’ve…

SUMSKY: But was Clinton really better?

SPENCER: No, not a whole lot.

SUMSKY: Was Bush’s father really better? Was Reagan really better?

SPENCER: Not quite as bad, no. I think there has been a… You said fifteen years, that’s a good cutting point. Clinton wasn’t so great either but definitely George W. Bush is worse than any of them. So there’s nobody.

SUMSKY: Bush has brought it to some kind of extreme but you know if you start to look at what Clinton was doing and what Bush is doing, one is just the continuation of the other although both Democrats and Republicans will disagree. They are…

SPENCER: OK

SUMSKY: It’s a continuum.

SPENCER: I wouldn’t disagree with that. I agree. I mean, I guess I agree. There’s some differences and some similarities but I absolutely have been appalled by most of the US foreign policy for practically a generation. That’s why I’m so hopeful about Obama. I think he’s really going to be a change.

SUMSKY: You know when I read in the papers that he is consulted by Brzezinski [laugh] who is the famous well-wisher as far as Russia’s concerned… [laugh]

SPENCER: I thought that too, and I heard Brzezinski being interviewed on Charlie Rose and my jaw dropped. I don’t know what happened to the man. He sounds pretty different these days.

I KALININ: Brzezinski?

SPENCER: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean I…

I KALININ: What did he say different?

SPENCER: Well he was always a big, you know, anti-communist leader and he sounds very liberal now…

SUMSKY: Well he sounds very liberal in the sense that he opposes Bush and that’s —

SPENCER: He opposes Bush’s foreign policy and certainly sounds much more… I don’t know whether Obama’s gonna consult him but I know that he’s…

SUMSKY: The problem is, I think, that Brzezinski thinks that from the point of view of American national interests, Bush’s foreign policy is suicidal and he wants to change that. He wants to start defending American national interests in a saner way.

SPENCER: It may be as national interests or it may simply be ethical principles. I’m not quite sure. From my standpoint, it’s mostly ethical principles. I’ve tried to live my life the way it ought to be lived and…

SUMSKY: We’re not talking about you. We are talking about Brzezinski and…

SPENCER: We are and I would not impute to him what his motivation is, whether he’s interested in American supremacy or what is good for America. I don’t know that.

SUMSKY: Let me tell you something about him. He is the great architect of involving the Soviet Union in all sorts of regional conflicts in the late seventies and early eighties in order to bleed it…

SPENCER: Could’ve been.

SUMSKY: …of all sorts of resources. Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and all these places are very much the work of Brzezinski and…

SPENCER: And Kissinger.

SUMSKY: …and I do not think this is a great humanitarian ___________.

SPENCER: Well I quite agree. I quite agree.

SUMSKY: So that gives me a lot to judge his morals.

SPENCER: Yes. The only thing that I feel hopeful about I guess is this. I think the US has done more harm in the world in the last fifteen, twenty years than Russia. But what I sense in the US now is that they’re ashamed and that’s why Obama is going to be elected. People are really ashamed of what has happened. And I don’t think that I see that many people here who are ashamed of what has happened in Russia and it’s to my mind pretty horrible.

SUMSKY: Well, let me explain to you how I feel about what has happened in Russia in the last fifteen years. I think we were on the brink of a complete national catastrophe.

SPENCER: When?

SUMSKY: In 1999 and it was very much the work of Yeltsin and his clique. This is the the period of Russian history of which I am terribly ashamed. I am ashamed of the fact that we had somebody like Yeltsin rule this country. I am ashamed of the fact that the man who started as a populist or whatever became in the end the patron of the worst oligarchic group to emerge anywhere in the post-colonist world. And, well not to speak of Chechnya of course, that goes to him too. And in 1999, the big question was: will we ever grow at least a little from the brink of this abyss? Will we be able to move a little away from it? I think we got out of the pit. What has happened in the last eight years, I am proud of. And I do not think that it’s a retreat for Russian democracy. It’s getting back to normalcy and normalcy is a pre-requisite for having in, I believe, not a distant future a decent democracy. The country was completely rigged by Yeltsin and his associates. And to me it is amazing that it was able not just to get back to its senses but I think we’re getting back to a decent life now. And I also realize that there are no miracles in the sense that, you know, from where we have been we can all of a sudden get into a realm where everything is perfect and bright. It is far from being bright and Putin himself says that he has just arrested the process of degradation here. Just that. But even that is a mammoth achievement and instead of being given credit for doing a tremendous job, all sort of shit is poured on him. Well, let’s call it by its real name, what is conducted against him and by implication against the rest of Russia is an information war. That’s what it is. I read the world press every day. Thanks god we have internet now. What I read there is such a striking contrast to which I experience here that I have no words for it. And you have to conclude that people who are writing it are either complete uncompetents or very sly operators. That’s how I see it.

SPENCER: Ignat’s mother held a ceremony, I don’t know when, in which she organized some people in a public place and read out the names of the journalists, it was an incomplete list of journalists, and a paragraph or so about the lives — who had been murdered for their journalism. And the reading took two hours. I’m sorry, that’s a terrible state of affairs.

SUMSKY: I agree that this is very bad but I am reading Russian newspapers everyday and I can tell you this, I am a graduate, by the way, of the journalism department of the institute where I studied. I never worked as a journalist and thanks god I will never do. Let me put it this way, well, a dead journalist is a dead journalist and he is a legitimate part of a list like this, but it’s important to scrutinize each particular case. I think there are lots of people who died for a cause here, no question about that but there may be some people too who died for involving and selling themselves in things in which a journalist should never involve himself. Lots of people used to sell their pen in Russia for participation in domestic information wars. That’s also an unhappy part of our landscape and this is still the story. Well, I try to do some investigative work and I know how difficult it is to find a really revealing story and to explore it to the limit. And here you’ll come against types who’re producing a piece of investigative full page work once in a week. It means that somebody is supplying them with it and it means that somebody is paying them to do this job. And they do not lift a finger to do this investigation. They just put it on the news page under their name and that’s called journalism.

SPENCER: So they should be killed.

SUMSKY: No, that’s not what I say. But I say that they are provoking somebody into doing these types of things. And they are doing it for money.

SPENCER: I’ve been also interviewing people who are concerned about democracy here and who’ve been telling me pretty unpleasant things about how the regime is trying to keep them from organizing and functioning as civil society organizations. And that the main thing seems to be things like paperwork. They try to bureaucratise the requirements to the extent that they can’t function.

SUMSKY: Again, let’s put it this way. I think that you have to be specific about cases. Let’s quickly jump back to Burma and to this latest issue about not letting NGO’s into the country to help the victims of the natural disaster. Why do you think they are doing it?

SPENCER: Well, do you think there’s any good reason? What kind of rationale would make it morally acceptable to stop them?

SUMSKY: Yes, I expected you to say that. But for me, what is important here is not to say whether they are morally justified to do it but to try to figure out why they do it at all. Because on the surface it does look as completely unjustifiable morally. But I think they are doing it because they already had the lasting experience of the National Endowment for Democracy, of the Albert Einstein Institution and other energetic NGOs who did try to play their part in the destabilization of that regime. They do not want to repeat it. And, you know, the problem is that all around the world NGO’s these days are compromised because if you start to scrutinize their financial affairs, you will find out that they are NGO’s only as far as their own government is concerned. As far as foreign participation and governments are concerned, they are not non-governmental. They are operating for another government. So, I just want to say that there may be absolutely legitimate cases when, from the point of view of civil society representatives, when they are deprived by the bureaucracy of what they should not be deprived of but there may be cases where their links are too suspicious to let them operate.

SPENCER: So if they’re linked in any way to anybody outside the country, that’s suspicious to you?

SUMSKY: Judging by the way the situation in the world evolves, yes.

SPENCER: And because they might be supporting activists who want democracy.

SUMSKY: Listen when I was telling these things fifteen years ago and I was interested in things like the financial sources of various international movements and organizations, my question was which particular ones are funded by the American government, the CIA, the State Department, and so on. That’s how I formulated it. And what I had in front of me was a book by William Blum. Have you read this guy?

SPENCER: William Blum? No.

SUMSKY: You should. He is the greatest authority on… Well, he had written several books that speak about the story of CIA global involvements. And he has a diagram which shows…

SPENCER: How do you spell his last name? I haven’t heard of him.

SUMSKY: B-L-U-M, Blum. For instance, there is a diagram which shows how the American governmental funds allocated through various proxy organizations to places like Congress for International Freedom or the international, or some kind of international student awaking movement. By the time the money gets there, nobody knows that it came from the American government but it essentially came from there. So my question was which particular ones are funded in that way? Now my question is, which particular ones are not funded in that way? Because since this whole new wave of American democratizing of the world started, all these efforts acquired much greater proportions. And the money which had poured into NGO movements elsewhere in the world accounted by tens of millions, if not, hundreds of millions. So from my point of view, it may sound a little, well it may sound pretty tough but if they do have foreign sources of support it’s the reason to investigate it.

SPENCER: I see. Well I think that the question is what they do with the money and not where they get it. We have an equivalent, I suppose you could say, to NED in Canada. It’s called Rights and Democracy and it receives money from parliament and it’s an arm’s length organization. In other words, Parliament doesn’t tell it where to spend its money. And the first president was Ed Broadbent who had previously been the leader of the New Democratic Party, and I talked to him a few months ago. A matter a fact, in the current issue of the magazine, we have an interview with him, or not an interview, he gave a speech and let me have it and I printed the speech. But I talked to him at length and I asked, what are the criteria for the kinds of movements that they would fund? And he said the only criterion we have, it’s if they’re in a country that’s already a dictatorship or an authoritarian country, and there’re a democratic opposition movement working to get democracy, the only limiting condition is if they pledge non-violence. If they promise to be non-violent, we’ll fund them, otherwise no. I know the head of National Endowment for Democracy — matter of fact, I’ve called him since I’ve been here — and they have a document which I didn’t know existed until he forwarded it to me about what international law says about the rights of NGO’s. I didn’t know it had been formulated, but there is not just one source for international law. It’s about three or four different international bodies that have made what they consider rules about what’s appropriate and so on. And it’s a much more extensive and specified set of rules than I had realized. The document not only provides the rules and lists what is the right of an NGO but they also analyze particular cases where there is an infringement on those rights. It’s a paper about twenty pages long so…

SUMSKY: Good for them if they really operate on these instructions.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

I KALININ: I think probably yes they do.

SPENCER: I have no evidence. I assume they do. I know NED a little bit but, you know, I don’t know them all. I can’t possibly make a judgement about what they’re doing. One thing that I told Carl Gershman, who’s the head, is that the thing I would be worried about is if they funded any kind of political parties and that’s…

SUMSKY: Of course they do

SPENCER: No they don’t. They don’t ever fund political…

SUMSKY: No

SPENCER: …parties. The problem is, and Ignat was one of the first to point it out, that the boundaries between parties and movements is a shifting thing. For example, in PORA in Ukraine, it was a movement and then it became a political party. Well that kind of fuzzy boundary means that there’s lot of room for infringement there but they’re very scrupulous about it. I asked Gershman, and he said no, of course they would never fund a political party cause that’s interfering with the outcome of the election.

SUMSKY: But of course, you know, anybody who has any idea about what happened in Ukraine knows that PORA, from the very start, was a thoroughly politicized organization.

SPENCER: Certainly it was a movement. Well in fact…

SUMSKY: Well, it was a movement…

SPENCER: …it wasn’t just one organization. There apparently…

SUMSKY: I want to stress that it was political [laugh]

SPENCER: Sure it was political. It was not however a political party until apparently after…

SUMSKY: Why?

SPENCER: I’ve interviewed several people from it who are members of it…

SUMSKY: You know who was the head of NED before Gershman? His name was Weinstein. He’d given an interesting interview where he said quite openly that we are doing now openly what the CIA used to do secretly twenty-five years ago [laugh]. That’s what he said. You know let me tell you this, had anybody ever tried to do, vis-à-vis the United States and their civil organizations, what the Americans are doing against the civil organizations of other countries, Americans would have immediately labelled it subversion. Immediately.

SPENCER: Well that’s a very good question. I’ve had that conversation with a lot of people. But it seems to me if you’re going to have the rights of civil society organizations spelled out, what they’re allowed to do, then it’s got to be the same in the US as it would be in Russia or any place else, Burma or anywhere. That the rule, the rights of civil society organizations should be exactly the same and defended wherever they exist.

SUMSKY: Sure, they should be.

I KALININ: Sorry, I just want to make an example that it already happened before when communists trade unions and communists party of USA was funded by USSR and they were denied to have that kind of income and then there was the witch hunt of, in the 50’s…

SPENCER: The what?

I KALININ: The witch hunt, McCarthyism.

SPENCER: OK

I KALININ: Yes, so it actually… What we are here saying is that it already happened once before.

SPENCER: And you know what I was doing during McCarthyism? I was doing what I’m doing now. I was working on committees opposing McCarthyism.

I KALININ: Great

SPENCER: Because it was an infringement on democracy.

SUMSKY: Why do you think that we are attacking you? [laugh]

SPENCER: But I mean you seem to assume that I’ve got to argue why it’s all right for the US to do such things.

SUMSKY: Not at all

SPENCER: Of course it’s not all right.

I KALININ: It’s how you feel — as if we’re attacking you and not…

SUMSKY: No

I KALININ: …the US. No, it’s in no way so.

SUMSKY: Well that’s the last thing I’d like to do [laugh].

SPENCER: All right, absolutely. Number one thing is I absolutely do not have any respect for George W. Bush or most of his predecessors. I don’t even know how far back I would go to could think of somebody.

SUMSKY: Is that Roosevelt? [laugh]

SPENCER: I am thinking of Roosevelt [laugh]

I KALININ: JFK?

SPENCER: Not even there. Not even there.

SUMSKY: Well JFK was good looking and was very energetic but as far as his politics are concerned I’m afraid no.

SPENCER: Some things about Carter I admired.

SUMSKY: Well JFK was good in one sense. He talked to Martin Luther King and he did have a genuine wish to deal with the civil rights programs of the South. But he had a different record with Castro and Vietnam [laugh].

SPENCER: Yes, exactly.

I KALININ: I just wanted to say that I’m a graduate from history faculty of Moscow State University and some time I was studying there at the Department of Americanism, of American History. And then there was a head of this department, who was the head of it for forty years, I think. He’s very old now but he’s still giving his lectures and so he explained how the whole thing started to work. For example, starting from seventeen points of Woodrow Wilson, he explained each of those seventeen…

SUMSKY: Fourteen points…

I KALININ: …fourteen sorry. For the course, he explained each of those points because they all look very democratic. And they actually do promote the idea of equality of nations and peace and so on and so on. But each of these points he took for us and asked how do USA profit from each one of those. For example, the policy of free trade, of open doors, as they were saying at that time — that there are no restrictions on trade world-wide, you know, that you can trade with any kind of country. What did that mean? That USA didn’t have any colonies at that except for Philippines and…

SUMSKY: And they wanted to have access to everybody else.

I KALININ: Yeah, they wanted to have access to markets which were controlled, for example in Africa and Asia, which were controlled by France and England by the end of the war. I don’t remember all the explanations. I just remember this one starting from fourteen points so [asks a question in Russian]…

SUMSKY: Ambivalence

I KALININ: Ambivalence, yes. For one thing, it looks really idealistic for ideals in democracy, so you can’t just deny the profit that USA gets from promoting such a policy. It’s not that I really say that the USA actually is the empire of evil and that they are looking for any opportunity to put down on the knees all our other countries. It’s not. But it’s just peculiar, I think, how it usually happens. It’s what Viktor said, you can’t ignore that Burma is a strategic point. You can’t ignore that Central Asia is a strategic point. You can’t ignore that Kosovo is a strategic point. Actually, that’s what they want. I probably, I wouldn’t say that Condoleezza Rice actually is doing this for world dominance or something. But it’s just peculiar, you know, how…

SUMSKY: [laugh]

I KALININ: …it always goes together.

SPENCER: I guess one can do that with just about anybody. You can take whatever position people take and find how it’s really serving their own interest. And then what? I mean how does that answer the question whether it’s a good policy or bad policy? I don’t see that it does. You still have to find other ways of determining whether, say, free trade is a good thing or not. I don’t know whether I believe in free trade or not.

I KALININ: It’s not good or not.

SUMSKY: It’s great for a developed country. It’s very bad for a developing country.

SPENCER: That’s too simple.

I KALININ: It’s not about…, but it’s just…

SPENCER: No, I would say that most economists would not agree with that. Now I’m not an economist and I can’t argue it but I have read Stiglitz and he would not go that far. He would say there have got to be changes in how it works but he would not say it’s bad for…

SUMSKY: Stiglitz is the former World Bank chief economist [laugh]. Well what do you expect from him exactly?

SPENCER: That’s a kind of reduction to ad hominem arguments. Well it’s a Marxist argument about whose interests are what. To decide whether something is a good policy or not, you don’t look at whether it’s a good policy. You look at what the interests are of the people who are promoting that policy.

SUMSKY: Sure, I think that’s what we are doing [laugh]

SPENCER: That’s exactly what I’m saying you are doing.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: And I don’t think that’s the way to answer the question. The real question is things like what are the effects of globalization? Where is it good? Where is it bad? How do you make it work, et cetera? Those are totally different questions. Otherwise we’re just into, you know, “your mother wears army boots” kinds of accusations. You know, irrelevant, ad hominem arguments about why people’s motivations are impure and therefore we shouldn’t have anything to do with them. I think we have to get beyond the thing of attributing bad motives to people and start looking for what are real, genuine policy implications of different polic…

SUMSKY: But I think this is exactly what I’m doing. I’m not attributing to Americans anything they have not done. I’m speaking about things which have happened. So, I think I’m dealing with the facts. I’m not speculating that they are making these evil designs. I’m saying they are there, they have done this, they have done that.

SPENCER: But I have agreed with you on most of the things that you said. I don’t like most of the policies that you don’t like. And I don’t think it matters a hoot what their motives are. It’s that these are not good policies for other reasons. So just looking for the motivations of the actors is not helpful.

SUMSKY: I think that if you want to analyze the problem comprehensively, you have to have everything in mind including motivations, of course. I mean you…, [laugh], even out of sheer curiosity where you have to answer the question ‘why they want to make what they want to make?’ Why? What is it that that drives them?

SPENCER: OK there are lots of motivations, there’re lots of rationales, there’re lots of justifications for particular policies.

SUMSKY: Justifications and motivations are different things. You know, like…

SPENCER: Yeah, but if we look at any one policy and we ask why would somebody maybe want to do this? OK, maybe they have ulterior motives; they’re going to line own their pockets or something . That kind of reasoning, just comes up a hell of a lot here. I find Marxists and ex-Marxists think that way.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: What are their motivations? But there’re other things that one might take into account. One might want to do this because the consequences of this…, there are many different possible consequences and this looks like one of those beautiful consequences so let’s encourage that. That’s the way I think one has to deal with political questions —instead of just calling your enemy a fraudulent liar or something, look at — well is it a good idea or not?

SUMSKY: Well, that may be my shortcoming but I have some problems with abstract ideas. I always try to, and you know abstract discussions about what’s good and what’s bad, I try to put it in a particular social and political set up and see how it plays in this particular configuration. That’s how I approach this thing because well, I mean you know this wonderful proverb about good intentions being the pavement on the road to hell. So, in order to avoid that.

SPENCER: But I don’t know. I think we’re going in circles here.

SUMSKY: Well, then sorry [laugh] we have to stop and change the subject [laugh] if we have reached this point.

SPENCER: Well maybe you don’t think we have. I don’t know. I think… I don’t know that this particular angle on the debate is going to get us very far but…

I KALININ: Maybe I’m interfering in that but what I was trying to say that I would accept and support Orange Revolution if it brings about something else but revolution only. If it has…

SPENCER: [laugh] OK, what were you saying? Go on.

I KALININ: I was saying that I would accept and support, not any kind of Orange Revolution but an Orange Revolution that would have some idea behind it. You know, what they are now, what powers that are now behind the Orange Revolution ideas and other Russian parties and so on, they say that we should just destroy it, the whole thing. And when they’re asked what you’re going to next, you’re being communist-nationalists from one side and market liberals from the other side. What are you going to do next? Have a civil war or what? They have no kind of answer. So I want to hear something before I support any kind of Orange Revolution.

SPENCER: Very wise. I quite agree. You want to find out what they’re up to. Yes.

SUMSKY: [laugh]

I KALININ: They don’t know.

SPENCER: You’re right. They probably don’t.

I KALININ: Each of them…

SUMSKY: Lots of people left them many opportunities and they never say [laugh]

I KALININ: Probably they don’t have enough support.

SPENCER: Anyway, there’s no point in even trying a colour revolution here now.

SUMSKY: Oh, the problem is that these people defeated themselves in the Yeltsin times by what they did in the government. You mentioned feeling a sense of shame. Had I been one of them, I would have been terribly ashamed of the result they achieved. They never express that. They are very defensive. They continue to say until today that “we’ve done the only possible thing that could be done.”

SPENCER: Well, I’m not [laugh] defending Yeltsin either by a long shot. I never had any use for the guy even at the outset. Maybe I haven’t any business having an opinion on this subject but I never liked him. So you think things are fine now?

SUMSKY: I didn’t say that [laugh]. I say that they are improving. But I think the situation is still pretty tough and it’s tough for many individuals. For many social strata, we still have plenty of poor people. Ecology, of which you are taking care, is far from ideal, rather on the opposite. The economy is still very heavily balanced towards extraction of minerals and oil and gas. The intention to create an innovation economy — high tech — is still only an intention although things have started to move. I think that the military machinery, If we want to be sure that we are not intimidated by anybody, this has to be improved too. Not in a silly way of, you know, pouring all the money into production of obsolete weaponry or something like that but by being able to confront anybody who wants to confront us and making them sure that they will not overcome.

SPENCER: OK

SUMSKY: And certainly not for any kind of silly foreign adventures. This is also a problem. And I think lots of problems confronting young people like Ignat, I mean to support the family, a young family, these days you have to be billionaire, a millionaire. You really need lots of money. I do not know if you paid any attention to the shops. You said you’ve seen them.

SPENCER: I haven’t bought a single thing.

SUMSKY: You know, the prices are approximately the level as Europe. They are very closely now approximating the European level but the salaries are not.

SPENCER: Yeah. I don’t understand how it’s possible.

SUMSKY: So the housing market is very tough. I do not know how ordinary people solve this problem these days. They obviously have very little opportunity unless they are lucky to get a big state subsidy, which some of them get. I think the situation in the countryside is pretty tough in the sense that, you know, in the Soviet era peasantry was pretty much neglected and it is still not in the forefront of… Although recently, you know, especially with this global food crisis, there is a greater realisation here how agriculture is important. So they are getting now some money and some privileges but still far from what they really need. So I mean the list of these problems is very long and I, as you may notice, I have not mention anything related to civil society and democracy. I think that so far we’ve failed to develop a real party system.

SPENCER: OK. How so?

SUMSKY: The only party, which deserves a name so far, is the Communist Party. This is a disciplined ideologically oriented, dedicated force which I cannot say about the other organizations represented in the government. And I think…

SPENCER: United Russia too?

SUMSKY: United Russia still has a long way to go, although they try. [side talk in Russian]

SPENCER: Oh this paper is what you brought for me.

SUMSKY: Well it represents different stages of my approach to my subject. This was written in the time of my starry-eyed period and this is as romantic as I got as far as non-violence is concerned. This is a piece on Rizal and how his worldview evolved in the conditions of Spanish colonialism.

SPENCER: And this is for me? I can take this?

SUMSKY: Yes, yes, of course. If you know anybody you reads Russian in Canada and who can make you a review of this, I can give you this.

SPENCER: Why don’t you get somebody here to review it and send it?

I KALININ: Metta, if you need a review, I can do this.

SPENCER: Well fine. The only problem is you can’t sell any books there but it would be nice for us to have the review anyway.

SUMSKY: Okay. And this is a brief paper which I’ve done for one of the European conferences on the Philippines and which is, you know, like the philosophy behind the book. I touch upon the Burma situation in terms of the argument about what’s wrong in the treatment of Burma today.

SPENCER: OK

SUMSKY: And this was published this spring in the magazine which is called Global Asia. Their editorial board is in Hong Kong. The publication’s in Korea.

SPENCER: This is a two volume book. You realize what you’re volunteering for, Ignat?

I KALININ: Well, if you don’t need the review in a month…

SPENCER: No specific time, as long as you don’t sit on it forever. Thank you. I don’t even know Rizal.

SUMSKY: Oh, you may want to read him [laugh]. He has spoken these things let’s say, how many years, twenty years or so before Gandhi. Not as explicitly as Gandhi but in the form of a novel. You know the problem is that one of the key messages of this article is that Rizal was all through his period of his intellectual development, he was torn between reform and revolution. And he was very much for reform because it was peaceful and he was against revolution because it was violent. But in the process, he was understanding more and more that Spaniards do not want to reform the Philippines and the implication of their policy is that revolution would be inevitable and he tried to figure out how exactly it will come along and what can be done in order to make it more humane. That was the primary reason why.

SPENCER: This refers to the “centennial of his martyrdom.”

SUMSKY: He was shot by the firing squad in 1896 because he was convicted baselessly by the Spanish military court as the instigator of the Filipino revolution. He was its inspiration in the sense that the novels that he had written provoked a lot of ferment and drove many thinking people in the direction of doing something. But he, personally, was against that kind of action, against a rebellion. So that was his drama.

SPENCER: Tell me what you’re going to do next or what you’re doing now.

SUMSKY: I am investigating the 1965 coup in Indonesia and I think I’m pretty close to saying some unorthodox things about it. Do you know anything about it?

SPENCER: Only that a hell of a lot of people got killed.

SUMSKY: How many do you think?

SPENCER: Millions.

SUMSKY: Well the unofficial estimate coming from officials, for instance like the head of KOPKAMTIB which was the secret service of Suharto, is from half a million to one million people. And I’m afraid it’s conservative. The head of the paratroopers, General Sarwo Edhie, who was in the forefront of this killing campaign, said three million, which may be a bit too high but you have to bear in mind that it happened in the course of six months. And I heard these stories about the American Consul in Surabaya walking out of his office to the pit. You know, they until today they do not have real, how do you call it… [side talk in Russian]

I KALININ: Sewer

SUMSKY: Yeah, real sewers. They had just channels adjacent to houses and they were filled with dead bodies which he was moving somewhere not to let them stay. Anyway, it was really scary. And what really irritates Indonesians today, that until today there are many mysteries about this affair and there are basically four theories about who was the primary force behind this coup. The official Suharto government theory is that it was all about the communist’s involvement, which is not true .

SPENCER: No?

SUMSKY: In the sense that a little handful of people — we’re really talking about the number of people that can be counted by the fingers one hand, including Aidit, the chairman of the communist party of Indonesia — were marginally involved or somehow involved in the preparation of this but certainly not the key forces. The second theory which was developed by two very highly qualified American experts from Cornell University, the so-called Cornell theory, is that it all basically goes down to a group of middle-level officers from the Diponegoro Division in Central Java and that’s who later served in higher capacities in the presidential guard, that they did it. And there is also some reason too, some justification, but I do not think, these days anybody… It was a huge hit in its times because it confronted the official Indonesian government theory in some kind of documented way but it is also not a full story. The third line is that it was Sukarno and he had done it in order to pre-empt the military coup against him. The fourth theory is that Suharto himself, the major beneficiary of the whole coup, was the force, was the major force behind the scenes and knew then something about it in advanced and sort of used it for his own purpose. These four theories were already there by the end of the 70’s. Now twenty-five years or so passed and very little progress has been made although lots of interesting bits of information have been accumulated in the process but no overall convincing synthetic picture of the whole story. You know the intriguing fact is that if you read really closely all these description, you will discover there are certain areas where they’re not self-contradictory. There is a possibility to cook something which will incorporate elements of each of these theories but, strangely, it doesn’t happen although lots of people in Indonesia and everywhere are working on this. You only have to go on the web to figure out how much stuff is there in all languages. I came across one previously classified piece of research by a Soviet Indonesian who is now dead who has several tremendous insights which help you to see the whole situation in a totally different light, especially in the context of the newly accumulated facts. Well I’ve already done one presentation about it in the Institute to a small circle of really knowledgeable people and the reaction was very positive so I will want to continue along this line.

SPENCER: Excellent. Is that going to be a book or an article?

SUMSKY: I will see. I would like to make it a book because it’s too rich in material and… Well, it sounds like ancient history probably to people like Ignat but… You know the problem is that really productive historical research, as I see it, can be done not on what’s happening today but on what happened forty or fifty years ago because all sorts of archival stuff becomes available to you. For instance, I am now working in the Russian foreign policy archives. They have declassified something interesting stuff

SPENCER: As of what dates? What’s the most recent stuff that they are releasing?

SUMSKY: What I am interested in 1965, some of it is declassified. So you have already a set of hypotheses which were prepared by intelligent predecessors. You are really very well equipped to do research about these periods. For instance, so much stuff is now written on the history of the Cold War which is really revealing. It’s not the hottest stuff but new material is available. Living memories are still there, we all still remember how it was and that’s why it really produces some very nice pieces of research.

SPENCER: Tomorrow, I’m going to interview Petrovsky.

SUMSKY: Oh, I envy you. He’s an interesting guy to talk to.

SPENCER: I like him very much. I interviewed him at the UN in his office when he was under Secretary-General for disarmament. So I look forward to that.

SUMSKY: Sure

SPENCER: I’ve really interviewed some very wonderful sources here. I had an afternoon with Yavlinsky.

SUMSKY: Oh [laugh]

I KALININ: Sergei Kapitsa.

SPENCER: Kapitsa, yes. That wasn’t so enlightening. And Sergei…

SUMSKY: Kovalev, Kovalev, yeah.

SPENCER: And Ludmila Alekseeva.

I KALININ: Alekseeva is actually in favour of “leave it be and we’ll have a democracy in fifteen years with no need for interference.”

SUMSKY: I would say that Alekseeva of all the people who are around the civil rights and the NGO circuit looks very sane to me and very balanced.

SPENCER: She’s very optimistic. I don’t know how, whether to call that sane and balanced or not… [laugh] She’s very optimistic, at least in her own framework. I mean she believes things will happen in fifteen years, I personally wouldn’t consider that optimism but OK.

SUMSKY: I think they will happen quicker [laugh]

SPENCER: Really?

SUMSKY: Yes

SPENCER: What will happen?

SUMSKY: And they’re already happening.

SPENCER: What do you expect to have happen?

SUMSKY: Well, unless there will not be some really unhappy destabilizations and interruptions. In other words, if things continue to develop in their evolutionary vein and if the government is not overtaken by some group with the outlook and perceptions which are drastically different from this present one. That’s what I call evolution – a step by step development in the direction of being more modern, more civilized and all that. I would not give the exact numbers but I think it will happen quicker than fifteen years.

SPENCER: She pins all her hope on civil society. In fact, maybe everybody I’ve — I wouldn’t be able to say that without thinking about it — but practically everybody I know says that the route to democracy very much involves civil society organizations.

SUMSKY: What amazes me actually is the degree of outspokenness in our society and the number of people who want to speak and who are absolutely not afraid to speak. You know what you do not have here and what you have in every authoritarian situation is fear. This is completely absent from the present Russian scene. And also I give our people and…

SPENCER: We met with a guy named Dzhibladze yesterday who’s the head of some sort of democratic organization and I think Ignat agreed with everything he was saying in terms of how you support democracy. He by the way is far from a supporter of Putin and yet Ignat would say that he could not join any of those groups, that he’s afraid he’d get killed or at least he would never have any future and his career would be ruined.

SUMSKY: You mean if he works with them?

SPENCER: With any NGO that’s critical of the government in any way.

SUMSKY: You know the problem is that it’s a pity you do not read Russian. I would have given you a couple of publications which are freely available in any [kiosk?], for instance, Nezavisimaja Gazeta, the independent newspaper. I appreciate it as an independent voice but recently I almost force myself to read it because what they present on their pages is… You know, there is not a single positive article on any daily sixteen-pages issue. Each of them is turning the subject in such a way as to make it critical of the government in sometimes in a rather aggressive way. And it does look to me as a distortion of reality although they do touch upon some really sensitive and important issues. No question about that. The problem is that you go to any newsstand and it’s there. You’ve heard of the New Times Magazine? Well, it used to be pretty popular in the late Soviet days. It’s no longer that way now but there’re people who are trying to restore it to its former popularity. It’s fiercely oppositionalist and it’s also available in any newsstands. In other words, well, you read the governmental Russian newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, which is supposed to present an official point of view. All of its columnists are critical of the government, which is quite unusual. If you want to make a daily list of criticisms which are made of the government in the newspapers, it will produce a separate newspaper.

SPENCER: OK, but Julia, his mother…

SUMSKY: She’s still working for the MK?

SPENCER: She’s still working for Moskovsky Komsomolets.

SUMSKY: Yes.

SPENCER: And there’s a lot that she can’t publish and she says it destroys her every time one of her columns gets rejected for political reasons. She feels it very bitterly.

SUMSKY: I realize that and, but I think, quite frankly, that this is part of the journalistic work in every country. I think that when you want to touch some really sensitive issue, and I think that’s what she wants to do, you will not be able to do it every day. I think she does publish some stuff.

SPENCER: Well OK. I would agree that there, that no press is completely unbiased but sometimes… For example, I write letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail. I almost never get published.

SUMSKY: Whereas in your system, a letter to the editor is a must for publication. I mean this is exactly why this thing is there.

SPENCER: Well, they publish stupid things, you know, joking kinds of things or trashy, irrelevant comments but there’ve been times when I have written…. For example, take the thing about, you mentioned, the bombing of Belgrade and Kosovo and the non-violent movement against Milosevic. There was a column that conflated those and said that the bombing of Serbia had actually brought about the downfall of Milosevic, omitting any distinction between these two movements and two policies. And I got dates and wrote a letter saying that the bombing of Belgrade stopped on such and such a date, at which time the non-violent movement then was able to begin to revive because they’ve been stopped completely by the bombing.

SUMSKY: And they did not publish it.

SPENCER: Absolutely not. It’s a factual error with dates. And now, this, I don’t say the government’s doing this, hell no. It’s not even the editor of the newspaper who’s doing that. It’s because there’s somebody not too smart who’s running that page, I guess, and who doesn’t care about the fact that when there is a factual error that needs to be corrected, the newspaper has an obligation to run that, I think. So you get biases in the Western press and nobody could show that better than Chomsky. I remember one time — was it during the Vietnam War ?— he wrote a book called Manufacturing Consent with Ed Herman, I think his name is. Anyway he got how many column inches of coverage on this and, I don’t know, the something else, different things about the bombing of this or that. And it was on strips of paper rolled up like toilet paper and he started them both unrolling so you could see down the hall and you could still hear when this one stops and that goes a hell of a lot farther down the hall, showing how much… Oh it was the peace movement, you know, the opposition, I guess, to the Iraq war or something like that — showing how they systematically overlook peace activism and put all kind of other stuff in there. So, he’s the most vociferous commentator on…

SUMSKY: Everything [laugh]

SPENCER: …you know, the conspiracy of the US government to suppress knowledge. And he can make a pretty good case. But he isn’t saying that US sets out a directive and says you must censor this. No. He says it’s mostly self-censorship.

SUMSKY: That’s exactly what we’re talking about here too.

SPENCER: I’m going through a self-censorship issue right this minute. Being away from Toronto, I turned over everything to my assistant, who’s a very able guy. He was the editor of Peace News in London for eight years so he can run a magazine as well as I can. And he has certain fixed ideas which I basically share but one of my friends, Graeme MacQueen — I don’t think Ken knows him, but he’s a religious studies professor and peace studies professor at McMaster University who just retired a while back. And Graeme said somebody challenged him to look at the primary sources on the conspiracy of 9/11 theory which says that the US government was behind it. Well I think that’s idiotic. Ken thinks that’s idiotic. Like right off the top, I’m not interested because I don’t believe it. But, you know, I think I have some kind of obligation. Anyway, one of our friends wrote us and said why don’t you write a profile in the next issue about Graeme MacQueen and let him explain why he now believes this, since he didn’t believe it before. And, okay, well I thank God I’m not there. I don’t want to have to deal with this.

SUMSKY: I want to refer you to one book.

SPENCER: Yes, OK.

SUMSKY: This is a paper I’d done for a conference on 9/11 in China of all places.

SPENCER: Really. Oh, OK. Where’re you going to publish this?

SUMSKY: They’re publishing it in China. Let me show the reference. This is one book which never got to publication in the US but was published in Canada.

SPENCER: And what was that?

SUMSKY: I will tell you. And you should see it. This guy is a former L.A. cop who used to track trade in drugs on the streets of Los Angeles. His name is Ruppert.

SPENCER: Yeah, I’ve heard of him.
SUMSKY: …the streets of Los Angeles. His name is Ruppert.

SPENCER: Yes, Michael Ruppert.

SUMSKY: The name of the book is Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire, the End of the Age of Oil.

SPENCER: Right

SUMSKY: He has written a book as thick as this and 9/11 is just one of its subjects but he tells incredible stories and in the course of his professional work, he had gone from dealing with these issues at the level of the street to dealing with them at a level of the world. And I think he’s one of the most talented contemporary political analysts worldwide.

SPENCER: He dropped out and went to live in the forest or something.

SUMSKY: At least he dropped out of the police department because [laugh] he could not stand it anymore.

SPENCER: Yeah, OK.

SUMSKY: Oh, by the way, if you’re interested in this paper I can give it to you. It may sound a little radical to you but…

SPENCER: Thank you. Well do you believe in that conspiracy theory?

SUMSKY: I think if we look at history we will encounter lots of conspiracies. Various people want to influence the course of events in all sorts of ways. As you say, I am in self-censorship right now. As we talk, somebody in the world conspires somewhere so I’m not saying that — You know, what’s bad about conspiracy theories is that some of them tend to be very reductionist. In other words, they try to reduce it to a single point from which everything is regulated.

SPENCER: There are definitely things that I know about 9/11 that cannot be explained in the usual conventional way. But, boy, I’m resistant to… The whole story is absolutely overwhelming if under the theories that Ruppert and, there are some other people. Another guy — “The New Pearl Harbour” is the title of his book, and…

SUMSKY: It’s also mentioned in the reference section

SPENCER: OK. Well anyway, some of these conspiracies would require three or four thousand people to be involved in order to pull it off. And I can’t believe that you could do a thing like that and not have somebody show evidence. Anyway, so my assistant does not want to run this story. And he’s asking me what to do and I say “ you’re the boss while I’m gone. You can make the decision” — but I know it’s one of those cases where there’s self-censorship. If we don’t do it, it’s because he and I both think it’s just a little too crazy to be credible.

SUMSKY: Well it may be a little too much at the level of your magazine because either way you have an audience and you know more or less whom you are talking about. You’re not talking to the whole country like…

SPENCER: That’s true

SUMSKY: …the Globe and Mail and they have to take care about, you know, their subscription and all that.

SPENCER: Yeah, I organize, about once a month, a dinner in a restaurant, mostly for Science For Peace members but for other people too — either with a speaker or a book reviewer. This has been going on for years. Actually, most of the past seven months I was doing it for us to investigate the climate change issue and then start a campaign, which is a petition campaign to parliament, asking them for a carbon tax. So having done that I’ll probably turn to something else pretty soon. But one of the things that we did, we had somebody talk about the “New Pearl Harbour” book. And, I would say, the group, which then had about twenty people to that dinner, was split about evenly between people who believed it and people who didn’t. So there are people who consider it a very reasonable to thing accept. What I know is not right, and this is what I’m doing, is: I don’t believe it because I don’t believe it because I don’t believe it!

SUMSKY: [laugh]

SPENCER: And I have not personally looked at that evidence and my friend Graeme has, so in a way we ought to give him space to talk about it.

SUMSKY: No, the problem, as far as 9/11 is concerned in this particular case of conspiracy theory is concerned, it’s a little too straightforward to attribute it to American administration as such. But you have to realize since the Reagan times, well actually since the times of the Church Commission investigation of the CIA, something very peculiar happened in the United States in a sense that they have a kind of shadow intelligence community behind the regular intelligence community. During that period when CIA was severely criticized, lots of people retired, privatized their national security knowledge, their intelligence techniques, started to run all sorts of consultancy firms and so on. And Reagan administration helped them a lot in the sense that in order to absolve itself from accusations that they are manipulating certain regional conflicts through governmental bodies, they allocated these tasks to these privatized intelligence units and they grew. Now people like — well, names are not important here but they are also on the list- retired generals, retired colonels, lots of specialists and all kinds of dirty tricks and wars were there — and it became a real force. And a really sinister player in politics on which the government sometimes rely, for all sorts of dirty jobs. So I think, speaking very generally and, and without any precise knowledge of this 9/11 case, if we talk about government involvement, we are talking about the involvement of this group of people in the first place and probably of someone who is connected to them in the government. I do not think it goes straight to Bush or it goes straight to Rumsfeld or whoever was in his immediate circle but I think that this kind of relationship is hypothetically possible.

SPENCER: OK, I guess we’ll ever know. But somehow I’ve got to unpack it enough to at least open the discussion in the magazine.

SUMSKY: But you know what, The New Pearl Harbour is a really interesting book. Have you seen it?

SPENCER: Yeah, I read it.

SUMSKY: You’ve read it? OK, but read Ruppert too. It’s really worth it.

SPENCER: I’ve read some of it. His is not just one book. There are several…

SUMSKY: No, as a matter of fact, in this big book, there are several smaller books. It’s like a collection of all sorts of research which he had done, but some of it is strictly about 9/11.

SPENCER: Right, OK. You ready to go?

SUMSKY: It was a long afternoon [laugh]

SPENCER: [laugh] Well, it’s a challenging afternoon. I think it’s more disagreement than agreement and that’s not common for us, at least in the past.

SUMSKY: But that’s pluralism, that’s democracy [laugh]

SPENCER: Certainly [laugh]

The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, by Metta Spencer, published by Lexington Books