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NY Times Op-Ed, June 27 2017
How Putin Seduced Oliver Stone — and Trump
by Masha Gessen
Watching four hours of Oliver Stone interviewing President Vladimir
Putin of Russia is not a lesson in journalism. Mr. Stone is an inept
interviewer, and he does not get Mr. Putin to say anything the world
hasn’t heard from him before. Watching the interviews for entertainment
is a questionable proposition, too: The four-part series contains many
dull exchanges and even more filler, like footage of the two men
watching “Dr. Strangelove” together.
Still, “The Putin Interviews,” which were released this month by
Showtime, may be worth watching for the view they provide of a
particular kind of relationship.
Many Americans have been looking for an explanation for Mr. Trump’s
apparent adoration of Mr. Putin. How can a powerful, wealthy American
man hold affection for the tyrannical, corrupt leader of a hostile power?
Oddly, “The Putin Interviews” provide psychological and intellectual
answers to that question. For Mr. Stone appears to have the same sort of
breathless admiration for Mr. Putin as Mr. Trump does. In filming their
interaction, he has broadcast the conditions on which this kind of
admiration rests. Should you ever wish to experience affection for a
dictator, you too should make sure that these conditions are in place.
Condition No. 1: Ignorance. It helps that Mr. Stone seems to have only
the most vague, and largely inaccurate, ideas about Mr. Putin’s
biography and Russian history. Mr. Stone’s ignorance of his subject
allows him to listen uncritically as Mr. Putin lies.
In Episode 2, responding to a question about the state of democracy in
Russia, Mr. Putin claims that Russia has “hundreds of television
companies” that the state could not control if it tried. This is untrue
but goes unchallenged.
In Episode 3, Mr. Putin tells a long and winding story about the origins
of the war in Ukraine, culminating in the claim that the war began after
nationalist Ukrainian Special Forces kidnapped ethnic Russians from
eastern Ukraine. Mr. Stone appears to accept these fantastical claims.
Condition No. 2: A love of power and grandeur. Episode 2 is the story of
a courtship, of sorts. Mr. Putin shows Mr. Stone his horse stables
(intercut with stills of Mr. Putin riding). Then the two men watch a
movie together. Then Mr. Stone watches Mr. Putin play hockey and fawns,
praising Mr. Putin’s athletic prowess and vitality.
Then Mr. Stone brings up the thorny subject of L.G.B.T. rights, which
Mr. Putin takes as an opportunity to assert both his desirability and
his homophobia: He says that he would not enter a shower stall with a
gay man because he wouldn’t want to tempt him, and because he is a
master of judo. In other words, the hypothetical gay man would find Mr.
Putin irresistible, and Mr. Putin would have to beat him up. Both Mr.
Putin and Mr. Stone seem to find this scenario entertaining.
In Episode 3, Mr. Putin shows Mr. Stone his home in Sochi. Mr. Stone is
duly impressed. Then they go to the Kremlin. “This is a pretty big place
you’ve got here,” Mr. Stone enthuses. “Can you show me around?”
Mr. Putin obliges, taking Mr. Stone to an office where a monitor is
broadcasting — perhaps on a loop — Mr. Putin’s famous 2007 speech
denouncing NATO and the West, and to another office, where the Russian
president keeps a portrait of his father as a young sailor in Crimea. At
the conclusion of the episode, Mr. Stone recites to Mr. Putin the
Russian president’s own speech about the annexation of Crimea. Mr. Stone
seems to enjoy having Mr. Putin’s words in his mouth. Mr. Putin is
clearly pleased to hear his own speech, albeit in English.
Condition No. 3: Shared prejudice. Mr. Stone and Mr. Putin are both
terrified of Muslims. This shared view facilitates much of their
conversation. In Episode 1, Mr. Stone informed Mr. Putin that William J.
Casey, who led the C.I.A. in the 1980s, had a project “to excite the
Muslims in the Caucasus in Central Asia.” (Mr. Stone is apparently
unaware that the Caucasus and Central Asia are two different regions,
hundreds of miles apart.)
In Episode 2, Mr. Stone offers his sympathy to Mr. Putin: “You mentioned
earlier, the white, the ethnic Russian population is diminishing,” he
says, apparently believing that Russia was, consequently, in danger. But
Mr. Putin has good news: “Fortunately, we have reversed this situation.
For three years running, we have had population growth, including in
regions that are historically majority ethnic-Russian.” Mr. Putin
practically appears to be the savior of the white race.
Condition No. 4: An inability or an unwillingness to distinguish fact
from fiction. Throughout the interviews, Mr. Stone appears to ask Mr.
Putin prearranged questions, probably written by the Russian president’s
staff. Such scripted questions are standard fare for Mr. Putin’s annual
news conference with Russian journalists.
In Episode 1, for example, Mr. Stone, after fumbling through a set of
inaccurate biographical queries, suddenly asks Mr. Putin about
assassination attempts against him. There had been more plots against
Mr. Putin, says Mr. Stone, than against Fidel Castro. “There is a
legitimate five I’ve heard about,” he says confidently. This is
remarkable, because journalists who have covered Mr. Putin — including
me — have not heard of five, four or even one attempt to assassinate the
Russian president (though Russian law enforcement has claimed to have
foiled a plot or two). But Mr. Putin is not at all surprised at the
question and proceeds to answer it confidently.
It should not be surprising that Mr. Stone is willing to play the
Kremlin’s game. Throughout the “Interviews,” he uses footage from
feature films — World War II movies and even Mr. Stone’s own drama
“Snowden” — as though they were documentaries.
Condition No. 5: Moral neutrality. To exercise ignorance, racist
prejudice, a love of power and total disregard for factual accuracy, one
has to inhabit a world where everything can mean anything and nothing is
certain.
A quote from Episode 4 illustrates how this approach works: “Stalin was
a product of his time,” Mr. Putin says. “You can demonize him all you
want, or, on the other hand, talk about his contributions to victory
over Nazism. But the excessive demonization of Stalin is just one way to
attack the Soviet Union and Russia, to suggest that today’s Russia
carries the birthmarks of Stalinism. Everyone has one kind of birthmark
or another. So what?”
So what, that is, if Russia increasingly idolizes the man who killed
millions of Soviet citizens and confined tens of millions to
concentration camps? So nothing, apparently. “Your father, your mother,
admired him, right?” Mr. Stone says. “Of course,” Mr. Putin says.
Of course, Oliver Stone is not Donald Trump. But he shares with him a
certain way of seeing the world and being in the world — and the luxury
of persisting in this way of being, and even making a spectacle of it.
Masha Gessen is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “The Man
Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”
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