#29 The History of Putin's Russia w/ Arch Getty
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The relationship between the United States and Russia was hotly debated in the 2016 election, and will likely be one of the most important issues in US foreign policy for years to come. To help us better understand how this relationship looks from the Russian perspective, we spoke with Dr. Arch Getty, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. Arch explains where Vladimir Putin fits within the greater history of Russian leaders, as well as the ways that history and geography have shaped Russians' understanding of their place in the world. He also shares his own story of living in Moscow in the last year of the Soviet Union, and the changes he's seen since he first visited Russia in the late 1970s.
Dr. J. Arch Getty is a Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA whose work focuses on the Stalin period of Russian history. Arch is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Russian State Humanities University (Moscow), and has been Senior Fellow of the Harriman Institute (Columbia University), and the Davis Center (Harvard University.) His most recent book, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition, was published by Yale University Press in 2013.
A special thanks to Roscoe and Lucy Strickland for the generous donation that supported Dr. Getty's visit to Middle Tennessee State University, and to the Department of History at MTSU for arranging this interview.
Links and more info on this and other episodes can be found at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on the road to now. |
| 0:21.4 | All states are evil in some way on the world scene. That's how you survive. You know, people are talking today about how we have a new Cold War. There's a new Cold War going on. Everybody says, well, it's not exactly so. Well, one scholar has said that they're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They're paranoid. They're testy. |
| 0:22.6 | They overreact. |
| 0:25.4 | Be that as it may, they are not our equals. |
| 0:26.8 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:29.5 | And I've been Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:34.0 | Well, Ben, we had an election last week in the United States of America. |
| 0:36.8 | Yeah, I recall hearing about that distinctly. Lots of, lots of surprised people, |
| 0:40.3 | lots of people who aren't so surprised about the outcome. Yeah, yeah, people are little tense right now, |
| 0:48.2 | and I'd say our country's kind of divided on this, and it's a really sensitive issue for a lot of people. |
| 0:55.8 | So rather than jump in and kind of like do a post-mortem of the 2016 cycle now, |
| 1:03.3 | you know, you and I and Ian have spoken, and we're going to wait a little while. |
| 1:07.4 | To touch this topic, we wanted to be a little bit in the rear view mirror, and we want |
| 1:12.9 | people to be able to process this in a way that they can respond to all that happened rather |
| 1:20.8 | than viscerally react to it. Right. And I'm the same way, you know, in my classes that I teach, you know, it's interesting |
| 1:28.5 | because I teach a class, you know, U.S. history, 1877 of the present. And I told them now, |
| 1:33.9 | it's interesting because 1877, the election of the previous year, so controversial, Rutherford |
| 1:39.6 | B. Hayes versus Samuel Tilden, it's a case where, in fact, Rutherford B. Hayes wins in the |
| 1:45.6 | electoral college, but loses the popular vote. And there may have been some fan dangling in some states to work that out, but I tell him now, you know, the class begins with that and ends with that. But more than anything, I told him when I walked into the classroom on Wednesday, I said, we can talk about this election but not today |
| 2:00.5 | I want you guys to |
| 2:02.6 | to not as you said I don't want you to when I walked into the classroom on Wednesday, I said, we can talk about this election, but not today. |
| 2:06.6 | I want you guys to not, as you said, I don't want you to react. I want you to respond to each other and treat each other graciously. And, you know, right now when people are, you know, worked up, |
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