The

The As our listeners know, we are a podcast about American presidential history, but we also love history in general.

And I really believe that when historians decades from now talk about

our time, inevitably they'll talk about Vladimir Putin and the enormous impact he's had. So that's

why we're focusing on him in this episode. And it's not hard to become fascinated by Russia.

There's that famous quote by Winston Churchill that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery

inside an enigma. And that's why we have Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at Syracuse

University. He's the author of the book, The Code of Putinism. Full disclosure, he was my

grad school professor at Syracuse, and I loved his class on Civil Milite Relations. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken. And I'm not just saying that because he was my professor and he's on the call right now. So welcome, Professor Taylor. Thanks for being here.

Happy to be here, Richard. Yes. So as a Siv-Mill professor, how did you get interested in

Russia in particular, and what led you to write this book? So my interest in Russia is fairly

longstanding. I started to get interested in what was then the Soviet Union during the

Reagan era and during the sort of rise of what has sometimes

been called the Second Cold War, the period after detente in the 1980s. And a professor of

mine suggested that I start studying Russian, as well as keeping up with the study of military

security affairs. And so that's where it all started. And so

over the years, I've worked both on security issues and Russia issues, but there's something about

Vladimir Putin that made me think I wanted to write an entire book about him. Sure. So you call the book,

the title the book is Code of Putin. Why did you give it that title?

So the title is actually a reference to a famous book written in the early 1950s about the Soviet system

under Lenin and Stalin called the Operational Code of Bolshevism. And so I stole

the word code and applied it to Putinism as a system. Hmm. So you used a quote that says the law

...