[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome you to the third and final installment of our special episodes, filmed in Munich, Germany, at the One Young World Conference, where I've met dozens of visionary leaders committed to civil society and securing the future of democracy.

And I'm honored to introduce our third and final guest today, Bill Browder.

He needs no introduction, but I will tell our viewers he is an impressive economic thinker, a devout champion of human rights and an author of bestselling books.

Bill, a pleasure to meet you today.

Thanks for having me.

Bill, let me ask you, as someone who invested in Russia, as it was entering Russia from Soviet Union, my sense from reading your work and knowing your story is that when you were investing in Russia, initially you saw the possibility of a different outcome then, a Putin dictatorship.

Yeah.

Did you see that possibility?

Absolutely.

I mean, I wouldn't have gone there and devoted my life to that country if I hadn't seen that possibility.

And so when I showed up in Russia, I went there with very romantic notions.

It comes from a very strange family history, my grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party, in my family rebellion, I became a capitalist.

And, after the Berlin Wall came down, I said I should become the biggest capitalist in Russia.

So I went out there, and at the time that I went out there, they had pretty much just broken the whole thing.

The Soviet Union was a, you know, big monolithic, monstrosity.

And, Boris Yeltsin, who was the president at the time, said, let's just break everything.

And, they broke everything.

And, in the process, so there was like, it was a clean sheet of paper, you can kind of imagine almost anything happening.

And it was, and the main terribleness of that moment was it was just so, so chaotic because, you know, anybody who was reliant on any institution for anything could no longer rely on the institutions for anything.

And so, you had this sort of everyone in society was scratching their heads trying to figure out how to survive in this new world.

But it gave you the sense that there was a chance it could go from sort of total chaos to some sort of normalcy, I wouldn't say, you know, I never thought it was going to go from, like, horrible, which was what it was like when I got there, to good.

But I thought maybe it could go from horrible to bad.

And, or I sometimes describe it, the Nigeria to Brazil transition and that's what I was betting on.

I wasn't betting on that Russia was going to become like Norway.

I just thought that Russia could become like Hungary or, you know, something like that.

So was there a start to genuine progress?

And if so, do you attribute the regression or the reversal of that progress to a singular event?

Either pre Putin or since Putin took power.

So, when I got there, it was very disgusting in the sense that, the oligarchs owned and ran the country.

There were 22 oligarchs who had stolen 40% of the country from Russia, and they lived in the most elaborately wealthy way, and everyone else lived in destitute poverty.

And so... And that was, that the status quo pre Yeltsin?

That was Yeltsin.

This is Yeltsin.

Pre Yeltsin, it was the Soviet Union.

Right.

So Yeltsin shows up and he says, we're going to free prices.

We're going to give away all state property.

It's going to just be a free for all.

And it wasn't good.

I mean, Yeltsin did a couple of good things.

He said, we're going to have democracy.

We're going to have free speech.

But he also said we're going to have oligarchs and total chaos.

And so anybody who showed up there, looked around and it was just you couldn't help but think, this is just awful.

So, you know, the nurses became prostitutes.

You know, nuclear physicists became taxi drivers.

Art museums were selling the paintings off the wall.

It was just the whole system, it was just horrible.

And so everybody who was watching this said, you know, somebody needs to bring some order to this place.

And so, Putin shows up and, he shows up and Yeltsin is just physically unable to carry on being president And Putin shows up and says to the people of Russia, I'm going to bring order.

I'm going to get rid of these oligarchs.

I'm going to bring order.

It's going to become a normal country.

It's going to be all normal.

And, when he first came to power, he wasn't the tyrant that he is right now.

He was operating in this democracy that make, created by Yeltsin, where there's lots of institutions and power was distributed here, there and everywhere.

And, so he had to kind of play the game.

And so for the first two, maybe even three years, he was a technocrat.

He wasn't a autocrat.

He was a technocrat.

And so if you made a list of, like, the, 15 most important economic reforms he was doing seven of them.

And, you know, he was sort of going along, as if he was, sort of just a normal guy.

And the main problem at the time was that these oligarchs were the ones who had control over many of the institutions that he thought the president should control.

And so what did he decide to do?

Well, sort of on the margin, he was sort of trying to whittle that down.

But one day he did a radical thing, which was he arrested the richest oligarch in Russia, a man named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the owner of an oil company called Yukos.

And in doing so, he broke the confidence that the oligarchs had in the system.

They all thought that money could buy everything, money could buy government, money could buy anything.

And all of a sudden, the richest guy in Russia couldn't buy his way out of jail.

And Putin sent him to jail for ten years.

And the other oligarchs were just, like, out of their mind with with worry and fear.

And they went to Putin, this was now the summer of 2004, and they said, Vladimir, what do we have to do so we don't sit in a cage?

And Putin said, it's real simple, 50%.

And if there was one moment that changed everything to where we are today, it was that moment because at that moment, the oligarchs understood that if they didn't give him 50%, they would go to jail, like, or Khodorkovsky or worse.

And you mean the Putin family?

-I mean 50% in state -Not for the state government.

-municipal funds, -No, no.

in his bank account.

He doesn't even have a family just for him.

It's not in his bank account, because you can't have a bank account with Vladimir Putin's name on it.

Right.

Right.

They control it, they're trustees.

-Surreptitiously funded.

-Yeah.

They're trustees for Vladimir Putin.

That was the moment that he became the richest man in the world.

He has a daughter, though, right?

He's got two daughters.

And like, like when one of them got married, he instructed an oligarch who was holding assets for him to, like, give the, son in law, a petrochemical company.

And then, it is a really funny story, actually.

Then the son in law, cheated on his daughter.

They got divorced, and he had to give back the petrochemical company.

But when there was the arrest of the tycoon, the corrupt oligarch, is it clear that his intention was to, in effect, blackmail or bribe these other oligarchs?

Did he have, that's all he had in mind.

For sure.

So, there was a technocratic, pretense.

But really, he intended all along in your mind, and you think that there's substantiation of this, that he intended all along for there to not only be a continuity of the Yeltsin approach, but to take it even further.

Right.

So, he he just wanted to become the biggest oligarch himself.

Was there someone who should have had a more purposeful, perspective on, on this diplomacy, on the US side, whether it's the CIA, the State Department or a president who could have acted to, avert or abort what we've seen was, is this downward trajectory ultimately resulting in full blown war and atrocity, not human rights violations, atrocities.

Was there a counter perspective, you know, I'm thinking about, the congressman from Texas, that Tom Hanks plays, and thinking of the risks, Charlie Wilson's... Charlie Wilson's War, right.

Well, so there was all sorts of people like that floating around, but so the problem that we had and, it wasn't just an American problem, but I'll describe the American problem.

And then I kind of extrapolate is that you have these people who become president of the United States of America.

It's a hard job to get, you really have to, like, clear a lot of hurdles.

It's a huge competition.

It's like a Hunger Games times a thousand.

And, when a person becomes the president, they have a pretty high opinion of themselves and with a high opinion of themselves.

They think, I just became president of the United States of America, and we have this troublesome country over there, Russia, that it's always causing problem.

My predecessors could never get it right.

But I am so ******* good.

I mean, I'm the president of the United States of America.

I'm going to go there and I'm going to talk to him, to Putin, because I'm so charming and persuasive, I persuaded the American people to elect me.

If I can persuade the American people to elect me, I can certainly persuade Vladimir Putin to behave himself.

And so they all go over there, and Vladimir Putin is just thinking, oh, this is just great.

And so, they show up and and he has a good meeting with them.

And he tells them and he knows exactly what they want to hear.

And, so the first one of these was George W Bush.

He goes there in Slovenia, they have a summit.

And he said, I looked Putin in the eyes and saw his soul.

And so that bought Putin like three months or six months of doing really nasty stuff before, George W Bush said, well, wait a second, we talked about some of that stuff and you're not doing what we talked about.

And then, you know, as time goes on, it gets more strident and more angry.

And then eventually the relationship breaks down.

And so all of a sudden, America's got a bad relationship with Russia.

Then Obama shows up, you know, he's like, you know, I'm like such a great guy.

[laughs] First African American president.

I mean, you know, this is just great.

And he says, that George W, Republicans, they don't know what they're doing.

I'm just such a great guy.

And he shows up and he says, I'm going to do a reset with Putin.

And Putin is laughing and thinking, okay, I've got that's buys me another three to six months.

And then after Obama, then Trump shows up, and it just goes on and on like this.

And so, we end up in this situation where there's so many times we could have.

And by the way, it's not just America, you know, you have, British prime ministers and German chancellors, and for everybody, it's easier to not have, conflict with Russia than it is to have a conflict.

And it is easier to sweep it under the carpet and appease Putin than to confront him.

And we live in a free Germany where I can say that you have said that most complicit, maybe Germany in the elevation of Putin, the empowerment of Putin to wage war in Ukraine.

You've said that.

Well, I mean, and Angela Merkel is a truly, complicit in this story.

Was she self-aware at all about what the result would be?

I don't know Angela Merkel, but what I can say is that, you know, Russia was doing a lot of bad stuff.

They, took over Georgia, Right.

illegally annexed Crimea and went into eastern Ukraine.

And in the midst of all this, she was making Germany more dependent on Russian gas.

And I mean, how can you do that?

And in fact, she agreed to a project, the Nord Stream 2 project.

The Nord Stream 2 project, is a project which is a pipeline, a gas pipeline designed to bypass Ukraine.

So the gas goes straight to Germany so that Russia can squeeze Ukraine.

I mean, and Germany not just agreed to it, invested in it.

And so, yes.

So, you know, the Germans were busy trying to get more cheap Russian gas.

The British were just loving all the professional services, every lawyer in, London was getting rich off of Russians suing each other and divorcing each other and doing deals with each other and and fighting off extradition from one another and so on and so forth.

And everybody had something they were trying to get, and everyone was saying, well, you know, all that Putin stuff, you know what, he's a bad guy, but there's a lot of bad guys in the world.

Let's just, you know, not rock the boat.

Someone that I interviewed in the last five years, Amy Knight, you know, I asked her, what's the end game?

And, you know, she was very clear that, any movement away from dictator for life, or president for life, puts him in a, vulnerable spot.

When I interviewed Amy, the events that transpired once the war was underway, hadn't happened.

Where, you know, a Lieutenant threatened to coup engaged in the beginning of a coup.

So that's the new information that we have, they killed Navalny, and there was an unsuccessful coup.

Those are the two new dynamics.

How do you look at those dynamics in terms of answering that question about an endgame for the Putin regime?

Well, so first and foremost, there is no exit strategy for Vladimir Putin.

There's no Putin presidential library he can retire to and do paintings or whatever a president does in a presidential library.

He understands that if he's no longer in power, he loses all the money that he stole from the people and from the oligarchs.

He goes to jail and somebody kills him.

That's his clear, that's the consequence of not being in power.

And he's a very scared little man.

He's very small, physically small.

And so he absolutely doesn't want to be killed.

He wants to keep his money, and therefore he has to stay in power.

I think he would be happy if he could retire.

I mean, he even tried to retire, if you remember Dmitry Medvedev, who became president briefly, and Putin was a prime minister, he thought he could maybe slowly, you know, withdraw, take his money and withdraw.

And they realize that like, nobody has the same type of ruthless sadism, that he has to keep it all going.

Certainly not Dmitry Medvedev.

And so... Was the idea that with his retirement in that environment, that he would have been putting himself in a position of vulnerability then, or is it just the idea that he thought that Medvedev could not govern with the same level of, like you said, sadism or whatever the word is?

Is it that he thought that he could be under attack then, or that he just felt that he was the better ruler?

No.

So, the way it worked was when Yeltsin put Putin in, he did so because Putin immediately pardoned him.

And then he knew that Putin would be around long enough to, like, honor the pardon.

Right.

And so, Putin put Medvedev in thinking, okay, if a pardon is necessary, he'll be there and everything will be fine.

But he looked at Medvedev and said, this guy is not going to last, like, you know, more than four years.

And if he doesn't, anything could happen.

And then somebody could come after me.

I see.

So, he understands that he's basically at risk.

And, he's a very risk averse guy.

And so he step back in, and he step back in with the full understanding that he was going to be having to stay in power for the rest of his life.

-It's not an easy thing to do.

-Right You know, it's not like Russia has been booming.

I mean, it's had a few boom times where oil prices were going up and the average life, you know, sort of life expectancy was going up.

The standard of living was going up and then has had, bust times where it all started going down.

And so he's been around for now 25 years and people are no better off now than they were 15 years ago.

They're better off than they were 25 years ago, but definitely not 15 years ago.

And, you know, people demand to be better off when when they have a leader.

And so, in order to stay in power, he's got to do two things.

The first thing is he can't have people ever being mad at him.

And so what do you do if you want people in your country to not be mad at you?

They have to be mad at somebody else.

And so who are they going to be mad at?

Well, he created a war.

This is straight out of Machiavelli 101 playbook.

Right.

You create a foreign enemy and start a war.

And that's what the war in Ukraine is.

And by the way, the war didn't start in February '22.

It started in 2014 when they took Crimea.

That's the first thing you do.

And the second thing you do is you turn the screws as tight as they can possibly be.

So everyone is scared to death of even uttering, you even call the war a war.

You go to jail for eight years.

That's his playbook.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the guy who was marching on Moscow.

And he wasn't going against Putin.

He was going against the Defense Minister Shoigu and the, in the head of the army, Gerasimov, because he was running, this guy, Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group.

I mean, he was very disgusting character, but, he was running a much more entrepreneurial, operation than the Russian army.

He was like, you know, and he was also really disgusted with the amount of casualties that was were going on.

But what was so unique and interesting about this Prigozhin situation is that when he decided to march, he first wasn't marching on Moscow.

He was marching just on Rostov, which is where the head of the general staff of the Defense Ministry is, and when he started marching, it wasn't like all of a sudden the world is outraged in Russia that this guy is like turning against Putin.

We love Putin.

We hate Prigozhin.

No, they were showing up with flowers, giving them to the soldiers, taking selfies, giving them candies.

And it became obvious to everybody watching, to Putin as well, that, people were kind of, impressed with this guy Prigozhin, the Russians were more importantly, there was nobody had any loyalty to anybody, they just wanted to see who was going to be the winner and who's going to be the loser.

So they could figure out who to report to and who to declare their loyalty to.

And that was a very, very upsetting thing for Putin because, you know, all this myth that he's got 88% approval ratings is complete nonsense.

What he's got is, a total iron fist that people are scared of.

But the moment that somebody else shows up who's more scary or people's anger becomes greater than their fear, then all of a sudden, things aren't so good for him.

Do I think that's going to happen?

Do I think that there's going to be a, revolution in Russia?

I don't think so.

I think that he's pretty good at keeping a lid on this thing.

But, there's like a 10, 15% chance that, you know, something could happen.

So, we're thinking of what the, there's no exit strategy, but there will be an endgame at some point, whether it's his death, by natural causes or something else.

I mean, what do you think will transpire, at that point, assuming he lives, you know, as president until he's not?

Well, it all depends on how.

So I think he's going to be in place until the end of his natural life.

Yeah.

So there's two ways, his natural life can end.

It can end with a natural death, you know, stroke, heart attack, cancer, or it can end violently.

If it ends with a stroke, heart attack or cancer, what happens then?

Well, there's a lot of people, about a thousand people who have enrich themselves beyond anyone's most elaborate, imaginations of wealth, who will all be then worried about if somebody comes in who's not part of the group, like Yevgeny Prigozhin before he was killed.

They're gonna want to get rich themselves.

And where are they, how are they going to get rich?

They're going to come to the current rich people and say 50% or 100% or whatever it is.

And so if you're a member of the establishment, the establishment is the oligarchs, and then the law enforcement people, the head of law enforcement, the head of the army, all these guys are going to get together in the Kremlin in the same way as the people conclave meet, and they're going to iron it out among themselves, who can keep the status quo going so no one comes for our money.

And so that is the natural death next step of Vladimir Putin.

Now, will they get somebody as ruthless and sadistic as him?

I don't know, they're going to look for somebody who can hold it all together, who they kind of trust to not go after their money.

But even then, it's kind of a, hard thing to predict.

And I would say with 85% probability, that's where Russia goes next.

But there's a 15% chance that some version, some Russian version of the Tunisian fruit seller who set himself on fire, which was the launching, which is what precipitated the Arab Spring, that you've got so much money concentrated in so few hands, and so many people living in poverty that it just explodes.

And if you have a, uncontrolled violent transfer of power, anything could happen.

From the American perspective, when President Trump ran the first time, he said Russia, will you find Secretary Clinton's emails?

And it always surprised me that at the end of the day, with the Mueller investigation, there was nothing that, you know, the most incriminating thing was what Trump's own words were.

But there wasn't... people were expecting some kind of forensic analysis that showed funds getting transferred from Russian sources to, Donald Trump's family.

And we do know that during the 2016 campaign, there was cyber espionage and there were, Russian affiliated entities programing on social platforms, buying ads on Facebook, and so we know that.

But with the Mueller investigation, to my mind, as an objective viewer, it came up totally empty on the question of the Emoluments Clause basically.

Right?

The idea of the wrongdoing, that, would have made Trump, govern according to Russian interests rather than American interests.

Whether it's with his apartments, his buildings, you know, that kind of criminal activity or it was never really presented.

And does that just mean it doesn't exist?

Or did Bob Mueller not do his job?

I mean, it's really an open question to me.

Well, it's interesting.

So when I do a lot of public speaking, I've written a couple books, I go out and talk to large audiences.

And I often times at least around that time, I would, I sometimes in a large group, I would ask the audience, how many people have actually read the Mueller report?

And I can be talking to an audience of a thousand people and like seven hands will go up.

I've actually read the Mueller report every single page, and it's not so, un-incriminating as a, it's not a nothing burger.

You have a whole number of incidents of people from the Trump campaign who are trying to connect with Russians.

And then you also have a whole bunch of people from Russia, from the Russian government and Russian government affiliated entities trying to connect with the Trump campaign.

And what you don't have is the intersection where they actually connect.

But I mean, from reading it, is a very disturbing.

It was, it was but to put it in a different perspective as we close here, you know, it's almost the way that Trump was found guilty of inflating his real estate holdings, in New York when the crime against democracy that is pretty obvious was when he called the secretary of State of Georgia and pressured him to count more votes in his favor.

You know, and, of course, the related events of January 6th which he was never held to account for.

And I think of the same thing with respect to Mueller.

It was very detailed about those interactions.

But when it came to, and even if he had asserted there was a, money laundering empire and Trump's whole real estate holdings were basically built up on Russian money, but that wasn't what was conveyed.

In fact, I think Mueller said at some point that he wasn't privy to that or he wasn't pursuing Trump as an individual.

Which is all to say that the United States Supreme Court and where we started said, oh emoluments, we don't care about that.

I mean, it's written in the Constitution.

And so maybe people just would not have cared regardless.

But I think the substance that Mueller went after didn't match the rhetoric of this person is the Manchurian candidate governing according to Russian interests instead of American interests.

Am I wrong?

Well, so let's put the Mueller thing to one side.

Yeah.

What's happened since Trump came back in his second term?

He has, cut off, American financial military aid to Ukraine.

He has attacked the victim, Zelenskyy, in the White House.

He's rolled out the red carpet for Putin.

And he's done so for reasons that we don't know.

But what we do, we don't have to know the reasons.

What we know now is that he's not on the side.

He's not on the side of Ukraine.

He's on the side of Putin, and he refuses to provide, you know, certain types of military aid that that's supposed to be provided.

Right.

And absolutely.

And that's premised so far on a faulty notion that he was going to end or help end the wars.

And that hasn't happened.

I mean, just... But, that doesn't end.

You don't end an end a war by withdrawing aid to the victim.

And so I'm watching this whole thing, and I'm saying it doesn't really matter to me why he's doing it.

What he's doing is serving the interests of Vladimir Putin and not serving the interest of the victim, a democratic country, the neighboring country, Ukraine, that's been invaded.

And that's really terrifying for me, and it's terrifying for Ukraine, and it's terrifying for Europe, because, it doesn't matter why he's doing it, he's just doing it.

That's true.

Mr.

Browder, thank you for your time.

Thank you for speaking the truth.

Thank you.

[music] Please visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind.

Download the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

And check us out on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from Vital Projects Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, and Draper Foundation.