Russian Rights Defender On Trial
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00:00 part of a team of former speechwriters for Russian President Vladimir Putin up until
00:07 2014, I believe. Thank you for being with us here on France 24.
00:11 Hello.
00:13 First of all, your reaction to that appearance by Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of Memorial
00:21 in a Russian court, and those cheers from his supporters this Thursday.
00:29 Well, people are still struggling. It's great. Definitely. I'm happy to hear this.
00:36 It's no longer news that repressions are heavy in Russia. In fact, it's no longer a metaphor to tell
00:48 that Russia is becoming a totalitarian society. No, it's actually now making this transformation
00:55 from a regular authoritarian state, which it used to be before the war started, into a
01:02 totalitarian society with elements of totalitarianism. It's not like 100 percent
01:09 Stalin type, but it's certainly movement in this direction. Now we can tell that the repressions
01:16 in Russia are done on the scale which we have not seen at least since 1953, the moment of Stalin's
01:26 death. Everything which was after Stalin under other communist leaders was lower and weaker
01:33 than what Putin is doing.
01:36 When was the tipping point?
01:41 Well, you know, it was a growing escalation since probably
01:45 2018, I would say, when the...
01:53 When Putin was reelected?
01:55 He was reelected and two months after his re-election, actually his ratings started
02:04 visibly falling down. It was his last time when he was really popular. And so the protest sentiment,
02:12 the protest mood started growing in the country, and Kremlin started becoming more and more
02:17 oppressive and started using this force and law enforcement more and more often instead of
02:28 propaganda. So actually, previously, the political tools were the main ones, while force was, you
02:38 know, just sometimes being switched on. But now it's vice versa. Propaganda is just, you know,
02:46 a kind of steam which is covering the battlefield. But actually, almost 100 percent of Russian
02:52 politics is done through law enforcement bodies like FSB, former KGB and others.
02:59 So let me ask you about this, Abbas Galanov, because there's a lot of pop psychology going on,
03:05 people guessing as to whether or not Vladimir Putin is crazy or whether or not he's a psychopath,
03:13 as his critics might argue. As somebody who frequented him for over years, was he somebody
03:21 who was sound of mind when he was running meetings or reviewing speeches?
03:26 He was absolutely sober back in those times. He was one of the, like, probably the most
03:35 rational person I've ever seen. I saw him many times, maybe hundreds of times, and
03:43 all the time he was absolutely, he could control himself well. He was extremely rational. He was,
03:48 you know, like a very non-emotional manager, this good managerial type. So back at those times,
03:56 you could never imagine that he would be doing those things which he is doing now. Actually,
04:01 he changed a lot. So you talked about 2018 as perhaps a tipping point. Was it that he went
04:10 off the rails or that he realized he needed a rally round the flag moment to keep Powell to power?
04:17 It's when he started growing. Well, that's the point when he started shifting the balance from
04:27 propaganda and campaigning, all these political tools towards this force, like putting,
04:36 like, previously critics could afford being critical, and Russian propaganda was trying to
04:42 outperform them, was arguing with them. After 2018, he started using more and more, like,
04:49 just putting people to prison, for example, ousting them out of the country, refusing to register
04:56 opposition politicians for elections, and so on and so on. So he started using this,
05:03 what we call in Russia, administrative resource. It's the official power of the state
05:09 to fulfill his political goals. So this change that you're describing, Abbas,
05:18 this predates COVID, because the standard narrative is that during COVID, Vladimir Putin
05:27 became more isolated, didn't listen to as many advisors, and that may have weighed on his
05:32 decision making in the run up to what he deems a special military operation in Ukraine.
05:37 It's everything is all right. Everything is right. But I'm trying to tell that it's not that before
05:44 COVID it was like one thing, and then after COVID, thanks to COVID, it changed. No,
05:49 COVID just added to what was happening already before. And COVID was actually the main problem
05:56 with COVID was that Putin failed to perform as efficiently as people expected him to perform,
06:03 and his ratings went down at that moment. And even more, like, they started falling down in 2018,
06:09 in 2020, 2021. This popular discontent was growing. So when we had presidential election,
06:17 sorry, Duma, it's our parliament elections, the last national elections in the country before the
06:23 war started, half a year before the war started, over three months of campaign, his approval rating
06:31 fell down, if I'm not mistaken, seven percentage points within three months. You understand,
06:38 it's the time of campaign when people should rally around him. So at that moment, probably he
06:43 understood that he can no longer rally people around him with the domestic agenda. It was no
06:49 longer working. He needed foreign policy. And it was the only issue where he could still garner
06:56 some kind of support, get back some of his supporters whom he was losing. That's why he
07:01 needed escalation with some foreign policy agenda. He needed escalation. Just a quick question,
07:08 because we're running short on time. You recently granted an interview to Radio Free Europe, where
07:13 you said that today his former president, his former prime minister, who briefly replaced him
07:22 as president, Dmitry Medvedev, seems completely discredited in the West with his bombastic
07:26 statements. You're saying he might be grooming him? Well, you mean as a successor? I can't rule
07:36 this out, but a few things indicate this now. Like half a year ago, he elevated Medvedev greatly. Half
07:43 a year ago, he really seemed to be on the rise again. At that moment, nobody could rule out
07:52 him coming back. But two months after this, in the middle of the spring, the process stopped,
07:59 and now Medvedev is no longer dealing with any serious issue, and Putin discarded him completely.
08:05 He's just writing his tweets on Twitter and nothing else. So you should understand,
08:10 Putin is becoming very erratic. He's turning quickly from one decision to the other. He's
08:14 canceling his previous decision and coming back to those old canceled ones and restarting them. So
08:20 it's always shifting. He's desperately looking for something, for some solution. He cannot find it.
08:27 Now he's absolutely unpredictable. So maybe in the future he'll bring back Medvedev,
08:35 and we will see this. But right now, at this particular moment, nothing indicates that it
08:40 can happen. Very briefly, one final question about Abbas Galimov. The palace intrigue that's playing
08:48 out in public with his defense minister, the head of the Wagner Group, is that just theater,
08:56 or is there really a problem? No, it's a serious problem. It's really the first...
09:03 You might... It's not a big exaggeration to tell that we're witnessing the first
09:07 stage of the new beginning Russian revolution, just like it was in 1917. The united front of
09:15 the elites around Putin there, it's collapsing, and it's actually the collapse of the institutions,
09:22 because keeping united front at war, this is the desperately needed thing. Even democracies cannot
09:28 afford democracy at war. And this is what is exactly happening in a non-democratic country.
09:36 So this is a real collapse of the system. Abbas Galimov, many thanks for speaking with us from
09:42 Tel Aviv. Thank you.