The Pull of Putin
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why do populist politicians across the West want warmer relations with Russia? Are they just Kremlin agents? Or are they tapping into a growing desire to find common cause with Moscow – and end East-West tension? Tim Whewell travels from Russia to America and across Europe to unravel the many different strands of pro-Moscow thinking, and offer a provocative analysis which challenges conventional thinking about the relationship between Russia and the West.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Moscow's Red Square and a special program here on the BBC World Service, the pull of Putin. |
| 0:15.0 | I'm Tim Hewell, and I first heard the bells of the Kremlin's Spaskey Tower, |
| 0:20.0 | echoing across the cobbles back in Soviet times 40 years ago. To me they still sound as they |
| 0:26.2 | did then, cold, harsh, slightly sinister. |
| 0:30.3 | Moscow's softened a lot since then. |
| 0:33.5 | Behind me, you can hear a fun fare, once that would have been unthinkable on this square. |
| 0:38.5 | Yet most people still remember that this was the centre of what US President Ronald Reagan once called the evil |
| 0:45.2 | empire. And under that former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, the Russian state has become in many eyes |
| 0:52.0 | pretty evil again. The air to the British |
| 0:54.6 | throne Prince Charles no less is reported to have compared Putin to Hitler. But |
| 0:59.8 | now the person who has just become the most powerful in the world is immune to all that talk. |
| 1:05.0 | If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset not a liability. |
| 1:11.0 | Because we have a horrible relationship. |
| 1:12.0 | In his openness to Russia, President Trump is threatening to turn American foreign |
| 1:16.3 | policy on its head. |
| 1:18.0 | And some European politicians now also want warmer relations with Moscow, certainly those on the far right, but others too in France, Italy, |
| 1:26.9 | Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. They can't all be Kremlin agents or dupes of Moscow propaganda. |
| 1:34.0 | So what for them is the pull of Putin? |
| 1:37.0 | In this program I'm going to listen to those who reject conventional wisdom about Russia |
| 1:42.0 | because they're not quite such a small |
| 1:44.1 | minority as they were and I'm starting for the sheer shock value just outside |
| 1:48.9 | Moscow on the wildest shores of Russophilia. |
... |
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