Hey, everybody. My guest today is Watimer Goldstein, who is Professor at Brown University.

Professor Goldstein grew up in Moscow. He had a master's degree from the Moscow Institute of

Management. He got a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and a PhD in the Slavic language

and literature from Yale University. Professor Goldstein has taught at Oberlin College at Yale

University and at Brown where he teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses

that explore Western and Russian literary traditions. He has written numerous books and articles

on 19th and early 20th century Russian authors including Pushkin, Ogol Tolstoy,

S. F. S. E. Chekhov and others. And he regularly appears or publishes on popular news sites

including Al Jazeera Nation, Forbes, etc. I wanted to have Professor Goldstein on this show

because he's been an outspoken, I would say I guess, critic of the propaganda barrage and the

censorship of information about the Ukraine Russian conflict. And I've shared your

misgivings just about that aspect of it without taking any position because I'm not really an expert

on Ukraine or on Putin. But I feel a deja vu that I have from 2001 to 2003 during the

Olaf to the Iraq War. And it became impermissible to express any kind of ambiguity about whether or

not we should be going to or was a who had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks in 2001

who had nothing to do in 1911. And who was not a sponsor? I'm one of the rare countries in the

Middle East that were not actively sponsoring external terrorism. And yet it seemed that a lot

of our oil somehow got put it underneath his country and the neighboring country of Kuwait

in a great act of mischief and that a lot of the propaganda was directed towards creating a

justifying a war that certain sectors of our society wanted. And there was really no debate on that.

Is that how you feel about what's happening here? Yeah, absolutely. I felt that even before in the

late 90s when there was again something similar vis-à-vis a dismantling Yugoslavia and then

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