Season 1 Ep. 3 - What Made Russians Skeptics about Democratic Capitalism?

New Frontiers Will Pyle Transcript
Hosted by Mark Williams

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern.  Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by economist Will Pyle, to explore how the tumultuous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union helped shape Russians’ attitudes toward capitalism and democracy in the Putin era.

Mark Williams  
Will Pyle is the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College. Much of his research is focused on the evolution of markets and markets supporting institutions, particularly in post socialist countries, and especially in Russia. Today, I’ll be talking with Will about one of his most recent projects. It’s an article he published in the journal, Post Soviet Affairs, that, interestingly enough, examines Russians’ political attitudes and their preferences, as much as it does their economic attitudes and preferences. The article is titled, “Russia’s Impressionable Years: Life Experience during the Exit from Communism and Putin Era Beliefs.” Will Pyle, welcome to New Frontiers.

Will Pyle 
Thank you, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here.

Mark Williams  
Well, why don’t we dive right into it? As an economist, what initially got you interested in researching Russia? How did this happen and what aspects of Russia’s economy have you studied the most?

Will Pyle 
Well, my interest in Russia came actually before my interest in   economics and it goes all the way back to two years of Russian language courses I took at my public high school in Seattle back in   in the 80s. I had a great teacher, a Russian emigree, who, along with teaching us Russian, got us interested in the country’s culture and history. I went on to major in history in college and I took several courses on Russia and eventually wrote a senior thesis on a topic in 19th century Russian intellectual history. I actually only took one economics class as an undergrad and found it found it really boring honestly. After college, I went on to work at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, and I was there in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the countries of Eastern Europe threw off communism and held democratic elections. It was a really exciting time.  I took a great class on the economic transition from communism to capitalism. My professor convinced me that I might want to go on and get a PhD in economics to better understand the whole process of abandoning one economic system for another. So as a graduate student, I got into a decent PhD program and eventually wrote my dissertation on credit markets and the banking system in Russia in the 1990s.  And then my research and the Russian economy, or on the Russian economy, for at least the next 15 years after I left graduate school, was focused on Russian businesses, as you as you alluded to earlier, and how they navigated an economic environment in which the bedrock institutions of a modern market economy, like the rule of law, including the enforcement of private property rights, were weak or compromised.

Mark Williams 
Well, it sounds like a really fascinating journey that you had from an undergraduate to the professional status that you have right now. The research we’re talking about today, here, is about public opinion in Russia, but again, you’re an economist. And so how did you get interested in researching what you are calling in this article, political preferences of Russians? Is this a topic that you’ve been working on for some time?

Will Pyle 
My interest in doing research on public opinion is actually relatively recent. Five years ago, I taught a first-year seminar on the old Soviet economy and its collapse. One of the books that I assigned was an oral history by a Belarusian journalist, a woman by the name of Svetlana Alexievich. And the book of hers that I assigned for my first-year seminar is called Second-hand Time, and it’s about how the demise of communism was experienced in Russia by very average people. And what her oral histories highlight is a real nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s achievements, and a deep sense of loss at its collapse. It was that book, perhaps more than anything else that I read or heard about, that got me thinking carefully about how Russians form their worldviews, about the factors that shape their beliefs, about the way societies should be ordered. And I, I couldn’t help thinking that the really wrenching and disorienting experience of transitioning away from one socio-economic system, communism, to another entirely different socio-economic system, market-based capitalism, like Russia went through in the early 1990s, would leave a lasting impact. And so as a researcher, as an economist, I started cataloging the available public opinion survey data that would allow me to connect Russians life experiences, in the 1990s to their worldviews into the 21st century, that is to understand Russia today, to understand how Russians collectively view the world we have to spend more time understanding the 1990s. And my sense is that certainly economists and to a lesser extent, political scientists, have forgotten the 1990s. And one of the reasons I think, is that there’s just not that much good data from that decade. In the early 1990s especially, the Russian government just didn’t have the capacity to collect the sorts of market-generated data that governments and other industrialized societies routinely collect for many, many economic variables. Decent government data doesn’t begin until just before the turn of the 21st century.

Mark Williams
From what I’m hearing, you see the 1990s as a critical period where one needs to understand what’s going on in Russia, at that point, in order to better understand what one sees coming out of Russia today. On that basis, let me be a bit provocative and ask you this sort of devil’s advocate question. Honestly, why should someone even care about public opinion in Russia today? Why should someone care about what Russians think about their country? How it ought to be run? After all, Russia is an autocracy. Political freedoms are limited and circumscribed dissent is suppressed. Aren’t the opinions of Russians really unrelated to how their country is actually governed and what Vladimir Putin decides to do?

Will Pyle  
Well, that’s a great question and you are indeed being provocative there in asking it. There’s a Middlebury alum, Tim Frye, and he’s now a professor of political science at Columbia University. And he’s one of our country’s leading interpreters of contemporary Russian politics. Anyway, he’s just published a book about Putin called Weak Strongman. And one of the points he makes, Putin wants to be feared, yes. But since repression is costly, and not always effective, he also wants to be loved. And being popular by being responsive and sensitive to public opinion, makes it less likely that he’ll face challenges to his rule. There’s another recent book by political scientists Sam Green and Graham Robertson that makes a very much related point. They argue that Putin’s rule is it’s not forced on an oppressed and unwilling public, but is in some sense co-constructed with society. Putin has been, in effect, lifted up above the normal push and pull of politics by 10s of millions of Russians. 

Mark Williams
Again, that’s a fascinating response. Let’s dive into the heart of your article. And let’s start with the title. What are Russia’s impressionable years? What does that phrase actually mean for listeners who aren’t acquainted with it?

Will Pyle   
There’s a hypothesis from social psychology, that one’s life experiences in young adulthood, basically late teens until the mid 20s, leave a more lasting impact than if they’d occurred at another stage in life. This is often referred to as the impressionable years hypothesis. And not too long ago, two economists put the hypothesis to the test by looking into whether living through an economic downturn when you were 18 to 25, whether that affected your worldview later in life. So they looked at a lot of survey data from the United States going back to the middle of the 20th century, and what they found was that if you were you were living in a part of the United States that was going through tough economic times when you were in your impressionable years, you are more likely to hold progressive economic views later in life than somebody your own age that hadn’t experienced that same sort of economic downturn during their impressionable years.  Now, the impressionable years that I’m talking about in my article, that are part of the title of the article, are a bit different.  I’m using that phrase to refer to what I hypothesize is a stage of history in which all Russians regardless of age, were prone to form enduring memories and beliefs based on their own individual life experiences. I home in particular on the period from 1989 to 1994. And so that’s the idea. So I’m cribbing a term and using it in a slightly different way than it’s used traditionally. I focus in on that period from 1989 to 1994, and it’s a period that that covers the last three years of the Soviet Union and the first three years of an independent Russia. It’s a period that’s bracketed on one side by the dissolution of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and the unraveling of the Soviet economy and on the other side by the privatization of a huge swath of Russia’s economic base. It’s a half decade in which Russian life expectancy collapsed in a way that’s almost unprecedented for a country not experiencing war, or widespread disease. It’s a period in which the old rules governing how society was organized were thrown out, and new ones were introduced. It’s a period as I write in the article, when so much was so new for so many. Russians at that time, were taking it all in learning lessons about how a market economy with private property functioned, how democracy and free elections functioned, and drawing conclusions, forming beliefs that had the potential to endure for a long time, perhaps their entire lives. That particular half-decade, from 89 to 94, had the potential, I hypothesize—and it’s just a hypothesis—I hypothesize left a deep and lasting impression on them.


Mark Williams
How do you go about showing that there’s actually a connection between what Russians experienced in life during those impressionable years you’re talking about which, which honestly is over a generation ago, and what they believe much more recently.

Will Pyle 
So I couldn’t have done it without access to a really wonderful data set. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development carried out a massive survey across Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in 2006. And they asked a whole bunch of questions of at least 1000 individuals per country. And one set of questions, had a retrospective or backward in time component to it. People were asked about life events, potential life events, and whether they’d occurred in 1989, 1990, 1991, each year all the way up until 2006. Which years for instance, they had been laid off from a job, which years they had experienced a severe decline in their household income, etc. Those are those sorts of questions.

Mark Williams  
Big life changing events, milestone events.

Will Pyle 
Exactly, exactly. People were asked also for a lot of information on their lives in 2006: their employment status, their income, how well they felt they were doing financially relative to other people in their country. So they basically collected a ton of personal information from this representative sample of at least 1000 people per country. The questions that I was most interested in had to do with their attitudes and beliefs, particularly whether they felt democracy was a good political system, whether an economy based on markets and private property was better than the alternatives, and whether they felt their government should do more to redistribute income and wealth. Now, these are their attitudes and beliefs circa 2006, well into the Putin years, which had begun in 1999. And I was particularly interested in investigating my impressionable years hypothesis, that a person’s life experiences and experiencing economic hardships between 1989 and 1994 influenced those beliefs and attitudes with respect to democracy, and a market economy, and the proper role of government in redistributing income in 2006 were different as a result. I’m thinking of Russians as being just incredibly sensitive to external stimuli in that period from 89 to 94, because everything was so new. And so they’re learning lessons about how this new world works. They’ve heard, and they’ve imagined what the world beyond the Berlin Wall was like prior to 1989.

Mark Williams 
The wonders of capitalism, and consumerism, and prosperity.

Will Pyle 
Exactly they had an exaggerated sense, I think, of the glories of life to the west. But they really had their antennas up in that period that half decade. And so that, because they were extra sensitive to their initial experiences, those initial lived experiences, I’m hypothesizing that those initial experiences did get embedded in a way that maybe later experiences with markets, private property, and even democracy didn’t get embedded in the same way.

Mark Williams
Well, one thing that stuck out to me in your article is that when you examine the attitudes and preferences that the Russians display, they’re quite skeptical, you claim, about economic inequality. And presumably, I assume that’s because since under Soviet communism, vast or routine economic inequality was rare, or at least it wasn’t acknowledged, officially. And this raised two questions in my mind: first, hasn’t economic inequality actually grown dramatically under Putin? And maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my impression. And second, if that’s true, then what does it tell us about how much Russians’ beliefs actually shaped the country’s trajectory under Putin?

Will Pyle
So that’s a great question. A really, really good question. I’m going to put a pin in it, if it’s okay with you, and come back to it.  And I’d like to finish the thought about how I actually use the survey data. 

Mark Williams
Okay, please do.

Will Pyle
To illustrate that the hypothesis, my hypothesis, actually held up.  And so, we economists, and a lot of political scientists these days, use statistical software.  We take it to the big data sets, and we can look at large data sets and perform exercises that effectively allow, in this case, me to compare Russians that are similar in all respects that I can observe in the data: same education, same household structure, same gender, age, similar economic circumstances in 2006. And then see if those who experienced economic hardship during the impressionable years, on average felt differently from those that didn’t experience economic hardship from those same impressionable years.  And that’s, in fact, what I find in the data.  Russians who suffered between 1989 and 1994, Russians who suffered, in particular because they lost their job or they suffered a severe decline in their income, they’re the ones that are particularly skeptical of democracy and market economics. And they’re particularly big believers in a more progressive redistributionist government in 2006.  So they have a very different orientation than Russians who didn’t have this same experience of suffering back in those impressionable years.  Now, interestingly, I didn’t find any relationship in the data between individuals experiencing a job loss or a decline in income after 1994 and their beliefs in 2006, there was only in that period between 1989 and 1994 where we see that strong relationship.  But to come back to your really good question about inequality and Russian sensitivity to inequality, it certainly comes out in the survey data from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that Russians are unusually kind of sensitive to questions of economic inequality. And they’re big believers relative to peoples in other countries that government should get involved in addressing inequality.

Mark Williams
What’s interesting to me about that is from a Western perspective, we hear a lot about the oligarchs who have commandeered the commanding heights of the Russian economy, perhaps via the privatization of portions of the old Soviet state-owned enterprises and so forth. And from a Western perspective, one hears a lot about the growth of inequality that seems to be quite dramatic. And so, which is why I was wondering about the impact that Russians’ concerns over inequality might actually have or not have on the direction that the Russian state is going under President Putin.

Will Pyle 
It’s a very natural question. Now economists, we have ways of formally measuring inequality. And those measures just took off really rapidly in the early 1990s. And if anything in the years since they’ve come down.

Mark Williams
Really, they’ve come down?

Will Pyle
They’ve come down. They’re still very high. In terms of the policy response to the inequality even in the present day, I think there are a couple points worth making. First of all, Putin recognizes that there’s a political payoff to knocking the rich off their pedestal. During his first term, all the way back in the early 2000s, he launched a frontal assault against one of the big oligarchs.  There was one particular oligarch, guy named Mikhail Kolakowski, who was the owner of the biggest private oil firm in Russia in the early 2000s. And Putin threw him in jail for 10 years, before sending him into exile, and that was incredibly popular. And Putin understood that that would be popular because of Russian sensitivity to question inequality.

Mark Williams
I see. So he could use some of this to his own political advantage in a very practical sense.

Will Pyle
Yes, very much so. And another point, in part because of the Russian public sensitivity to economic inequality, Putin and his inner circle have gone to great lengths in the present day to conceal just how wealthy they’ve become. You’re probably familiar with the name of Alexei Navalny, who’s been Russia’s leading opposition figure for at least a decade now. Just in the past year, he survived an assassination attempt.

Mark Williams
He was poisoned, wasn’t he?

Will Pyle
He was poisoned just before getting on a plane, and then he was nursed back to health in a German hospital. But being the courageous figure that he is he went right back to Russia, got right back in the game, and very soon after that was put in prison on trumped up charges. Anyways, Navalny’s popularity as an opposition figure grew out of his efforts to expose the corruption and ill-gotten wealth of Russia’s governing elites. Information about Russia’s inequality today is something that Putin very much wants to keep hidden.

Mark Williams 
That reminds me of something that’s been in the news of late, and that is the revelations about hidden wealth by powerful individuals and world leaders that have been revealed with respect to the Pandora Papers. Can you tell us anything about that, and how that might play into the sensitivity that Russians have about inequality within their country?

Will Pyle
So my understanding is, I’ve just read the news stories, and my understanding is that there are more Russian accounts that have been unearthed than accounts from any other single country.

Mark Williams
These are issues they would rather not see come to light.

Will Pyle
Exactly. Because of exactly what you asked about because of Russian sensitivity to questions of inequality, they really want to keep these sorts of matters under wraps.

Mark Williams 
When one reads your article that Russians are skeptical of inequality and draws a line, perhaps logically, that maybe that type of public opinion would lead to state policies that might seek to diminish inequality or address issues of inequality, what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not that the political leadership doesn’t understand the sensitivities that Russians display towards inequality, it is that they do understand them, and, A, either don’t want them to become too public and too much discusses, or B, at times might be able to use those sensitivities for political purposes and to their political advantage.

Will Pyle 
I think that’s right.


Mark Williams
Let’s think about what you’re addressing with respect to Russia but in a slightly different context. Didn’t a lot of other countries that are in Russia’s part of the world also go through some really similar tough times when communism collapsed after the Cold War ended? What do we see in those countries? What can you tell us about, you know, something about how Poles, or Ukrainians, or Georgians experienced those impressionable years? Was it similar with the Russians? And have the outcomes to your knowledge been similar or different?

Will Pyle
So it’s true. Almost all the other countries that you mentioned, all the other countries in the region experienced profound economic shocks in the wake of the collapse of communism. Some countries experienced even steeper declines in income in the early 1990s. And throughout Eastern Europe, hard times in the aftermath of economic liberalization were the norm, collapses in GDP, persistently high rates of unemployment; for all the former Soviet republics, but Russia really, those economic wounds were salved, at least in part by the excitement of democracy, by getting out from under the Soviet yoke, and achieving political independence. But for Russians, identification with the Soviet Union was always much stronger than it was for the peoples of the other post-Soviet states. So, the Soviet Union’s collapse was experienced by them much more as a psychological loss. In the survey data that I look at for the article, outside of Russia and those other countries from the former Soviet Union, I don’t see the same pattern connecting personal experiences with economic hardship in the early 1990s. And personal beliefs in the 2000s.

Mark Williams
Are you saying that the psychological dimension that you see in the Russian data isn’t mirrored in the data from some of the other countries?

Will Pyle  
So, I am speculating. I don’t really see the psychological dimension in the Russian data, I’m speculating that it’s there that the fact that I see that relationship in the Russian data, and I don’t see it in the data from these other post-Soviet countries, lines up with this hypothesis that I have, that there is this kind of this combination of economic and psychological factors that’s unique to Russians and is not shared elsewhere in the post-Soviet space.

Mark Williams
Do you think that that’s because Russians, seeing themselves as the sort of lodestone of the Soviet Union, had much more to lose than some of the other countries that were grafted into the Soviet Union, are satellites of the Soviet sphere of influence?

Will Pyle
The Soviet Union got started in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were the cradles of the revolution. Russians always occupied the most prominent political posts. Russians always identified more with the Soviet Union, than the peoples of the other republics. So, there was a real sense of identity tied to that.

Mark Williams
That larger political project.

Will Pyle
That larger political project, that larger political body the Russians felt that certainly the people in the Balts, certainly the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeris, they never felt. And a lot of those people had been part of independent countries before the Soviet Union was even formed. And so, they really kind of felt a sense of liberation when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Mark Williams 
Will, I’m curious about something in your, in your hypothesis, and in the findings that you are presenting in this paper? I’m really curious to know what role, and it’s not necessarily addressed in the paper which is why I’m asking now, what role do you think that time and speed might play in the process of forming worldviews? And by this I mean, do you think that it was simply the losses, the economic and the social losses that Russians experienced when the Soviet Union imploded, which played the leading role in forming their worldview, that you see during the Putin era? Or was it the rapidity of these changes that mattered more?

Will Pyle
I think the speed of the changes is critical here. Russians really had the rug pulled out from under them in the early 1990s. The Soviet world, in many ways, was a world of certainty and security. Incomes may not have been as high as the incomes that we have here in the industrialized West. But people were guaranteed a job, they were guaranteed basic health care, they were guaranteed a pension. In the early 1990s, all that was taken away, almost overnight, incredibly rapidly. There’s a Berkeley anthropologist, a guy by the name of Alexei Yurchak, who captured that sense of a wholly unexpected, an almost tectonic shift in Russians’ lives in a book he entitled, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

Mark Williams
It’s a great title. Well, given the magnitude of the changes that were wrought inside what had been the Soviet Union, given the way that those changes seem to have affected the development of worldviews and the preferences for politics and economics that citizens hold later on, would you expect to see similar results if you studied a different country that underwent a sort of similar loss? And here I’m thinking of, for example, suppose you studied the British say, pre and post the loss of empire, would you expect to see something similar develop in the mindset of British citizens. Would you expect to see similar dynamics, as you observed in Russia, in these other contexts?

Will Pyle  
That’s a fun question. Of course, with economists always wanting to know if there’s good data to answer that question. If there was good data to answer that question, I think that would be a natural extension.

Mark Williams
I’m asking you to speculate.

Will Pyle
So, I will speculate now and I’ll draw on somebody who’s smarter than me, Yegor Gaidar who served under Yeltsin as Russia’s prime minister in 1992 and was really the architect of the country’s rapid economic transition away from communism. Just before his death a little over a decade ago, he wrote a really, really smart book called Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. And in it, he writes how difficult it can be to the national consciousness to adapt to the loss of imperial status. He pointed out that when the decline is gradual, a process that extends over decades, this was arguably the case, for Britain.

Mark Williams
It certainly  was the case for  Britain.

Will Pyle
In the 20th century. The elites and the public realized that coming to terms with the hopelessness, the uselessness of trying to preserve the empire is futile. And in those cases, it’s much easier to handle imperial decline than a sudden collapse, like the Soviet Union experienced. A second thing Gaidar pointed out was that while his reading of history is that nostalgia for territorially integrated empires is always going to be stronger and longer lasting and deeper than the nostalgia for overseas empires. When the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, millions of ethnic Russians were cut off from Russia proper and they were residing in newly independent countries like Ukraine, in what used to be Russia’s territorially integrated empire. Now Putin drew on that, that sense of loss and frayed connections when he decided to annex Crimea back in 2014. Indeed, that was incredibly popular. And Putin’s popularity, I think, was no higher than it’s ever been over the past 20 years than immediately after.

Mark Williams
So, the loss of a landed empire is felt more acutely, more intensely than the loss of an overseas empire. That in turn will have effects on the development of a worldview.

Will Pyle   
One of the things that Gaidar expounds on in making that point is that he’s worried that Russia will suffer from the same sort of syndrome that Germany suffered from between the wars. After World War One and territories were, the borders separating states were redrawn. And some of the empires that existed prior to World War One were dissolved: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire were dissolved and state boundaries were redrawn. A lot of Germans got left in nation states outside of Germany, for instance, the Sudeten Germans who were in Czechoslovakia. And of course, Hitler used the fraying of those ethnic bonds across national borders to gin up nationalist sentiments and to get Germans fired up for his ambitions, his expansionist ambitions. And Gaidar, writing in 2007 in a way that was very prescient actually, thought that Putin might do something similar.

Mark Williams
To try and reacquire influence or even territory of what had been the Former Soviet Union.

Will Pyle  
Exactly. Not only did Russia invade Georgia in 2008, a year after Gaidar wrote those words, but using the pretext of Russians in Ukraine, he annexed Crimea and has supported surreptitiously this kind of frozen conflict in the Donbass in the years since.

Mark Williams  
This is really fascinating. Let me bring you back to how you approach the research in your in your article. As an economist, Will, as a scholar of Russia’s economy, its economic performance, its economic transition, how is research that’s based on honestly what we might call sort of non-standard economic tools, how is that useful? I guess what I’m really asking is, what does the approach that you’ve adopted in the article here help us understand about Russia’s economy or its trajectory that a more standard economic approach might not fully explain or illuminate?

Will Pyle 
So, I’m not sure that I’d say that there’s a more standard economic approach to the topic. Economics is a discipline that’s diverse in the questions that it asks and the methods that it uses. I do feel particularly good, particularly proud about the way that I reached out to research on Russia from other disciplines, sociology and anthropology, for example, oral histories, as well, those sources from outside my discipline were particularly influential in the way I formulated my hypothesis, that Russians were particularly impressionable during those years right around the Soviet collapse. To the extent that commentators talk about the Yeltsin years in the 1990s today, most treat the decade as a single contiguous whole. But what my investigation of the sociological and anthropological literature allowed me to see was that Russians experienced the early 1990s very differently than they did the mid to late 1990s, even though the economy in the latter half of the decade was even, if anything, in a worse state than it had been in the earlier part of the decade.

Mark Williams 
Interesting. Interesting. Well, what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing for this episode of New Frontiers was published back in January 2020. And you’ve been on sabbatical, I know, for the past year, so are you continuing to do research on this topic? What’s coming down the line?

Will Pyle 
Well, so with a colleague from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, I’m working on a new paper that also explores the general relationship between economic shocks and political preferences in Russia. We’re looking at presidential voting patterns between 1991 and 2000, a period that bridges the before and after of market liberalization and privatization. There’s another paper that I’m working on with a colleague at Indiana University, and we’re analyzing how Russians respond relative to the peoples of other countries that get at what we’re calling for now aggressively nationalistic points of view. We’re not terribly comfortable with that term yet. It has a kind of a negative connotation.

Mark Williams
It sounds foreboding.

Will Pyle
Yes, so we might rethink that. But for now, we’re calling it aggressive nationalism. And we’re looking at a quarter century worth of polling data from the 1990s up almost to the present day, focusing in on whether people agree that it’s best to support their country even when it’s wrong, or that their countries should pursue its interests, even if doing so leads to conflict with other countries. And what we’re finding with our data suggests that there’s a real appetite for expansion of military spending, supporting their country, even if it leads to military conflict, supporting their country, even if they know in their heart of hearts that it’s wrong, that that appetite, if anything, it’s stronger, prior to Putin getting on the scene.

Mark Williams
It’s much more endogenous than something that’s been induced by the leader.

Will Pyle
It’s more embedded in Russians. And I don’t want to get into the kind of essentialist argument that it’s always been in the Russian character to be more militarist and aggressive. I think the trigger, and it’s a natural trigger, and it’s not a kind of story, an essentialist sort of story, is that it’s the Russians’ experience that exit from communism in just a very particular way. It’s that combination of being the metropole of a former imperial empire, and experiencing the economic hardship. Those two things kind of mixing in together, gave rise to, it kind of created this brew of factors that gave rise to a more aggressively nationalistic population. In the West, I’m not sure we treated Russia with the respect that they deserved.

Mark Williams
Certainly not the respect that they felt they deserved.

Will Pyle
Certainly not the respect they felt they deserved in the 1990s. We took NATO right up to their right up to their doorstep.

Mark Williams
All the time expressing surprise that this might disquiet Russia. Yes.

Will Pyle
And I think it did. And I think that in many ways, and that was done in the 1990s by the Clinton administration. And I think there were good reasons, there were not necessarily all, there were good reasons for doing that. Can I say with certainty that Putin wouldn’t have made a move into Estonia, if Estonia wasn’t a member of NATO, like it is now? No, I can’t say that; maybe that would have occurred. But I think if we were a little bit more careful in the way that we treated Russia, and were a little bit more sensitive to their former status as a superpower, were a little bit less triumphalist in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end that that aggressive nationalist streak, or however you want to call it, may not have come to the fore as dramatically is it seems to have in the survey data that we’re observing.

Mark Williams
Will, your new project sounds fascinating. I can’t wait to read the article that comes from it. And thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.

Will Pyle 
Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.


NH
Professor Will Pyle lives in Middlebury with his wife and sons—the joys of his life. While Professor Pyle grew up in Seattle, Washington, he lived in various places throughout the world which included Japan where he went to kindergarten.  Professor Pyle has always loved music from eclectic to Americana and grew up playing the piano. He is very active in the community and has been a Meals on Wheels volunteer for over 12 years.  Around town, you can often see him bicycling or catch him at a soccer or ice hockey game.