Who Is Vladimir Putin?

Who Is?

iHeartRadio + NowThis

News, Politics

4.1 • 803 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. And yet, much of his story remains a mystery. Born in St. Petersburg, when it was still known as Leningrad, Putin’s childhood unfolded on the streets of a city recovering from a devastating, years-long siege during World War II. Today, Putin is the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin, and could be in charge until 2036. On this episode of Who Is?, Sean Morrow dives deep into Putin’s past, and talks to some of the Russians who are fighting back against Putinism, and for freedom and democracy in Russia.

Catherine Belton previously served as the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times. She’s currently a special correspondent at Reuters, and is the author of “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West”
Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of many books, including “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” and most recently, “Surviving Autocracy”
Michael McFaul, who has taught at Stanford since 1995. McFaul served for five years in the Obama Administration, which included several years as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation. His most recent book is “From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia”
Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founder of feminist collective Pussy Riot

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Vladimir Putin is not someone you can dig up a lot of stuff on.
0:03.3	You have to go on what he gives you.
0:06.6	And I actually find it in some ways more important and more informative
0:11.7	to analyze what people tell you about themselves
0:15.2	than to try to find out what they don't tell you.
0:17.5	That's Masha Gessen,
0:19.2	the journalist, LGBTQ plus activist, and Russian dissident who has covered
0:24.6	and written about Russian president Vladimir Putin for decades. Putin is often referred to as
0:31.3	all-powerful, a masterful villain who's the guy behind all of the doors. In 2017, he became the longest serving leader of Russia since Joseph Stalin, and Putin could be in charge of Russia for the next few decades.
0:46.9	It's kind of unbelievable that we don't really know the story of one of the most powerful people in the world.
0:57.6	So, who is Vladimir Putin?
1:13.2	I'm Sean Morrow, and this is Who Is? The podcast from Now This, where we examine power by looking at the stories of people who have it. Like Masha Gesson said, not much is known about Putin's past
1:19.4	besides what he himself has told us. So let's start with the place he was born. He was born in
1:26.3	1952 in Leningrad.
1:30.3	And it's really important and really hard to imagine what Lennongrad was like in
1:37.3	1952. So we're seven years out from the end of World War II.
1:41.3	And what happened in Leningrad during World War II is probably still one of the most significant
1:49.0	and difficult to sort of imagine traumatic events of a century that was rich in shocking traumatic events.
2:00.0	During the war, Leningrad, now St. Petersburg,
2:03.6	underwent a level of suffering that's difficult to even comprehend.
2:07.6	The city was under siege for 900 days,
2:12.6	and more than a million people died mostly of starvation, combined with the extreme cold of that winter.
	...

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