Mikhail Zygar is a journalist, historian, and one of the leading figures in the Russian opposition over the past decade. He was the founding editor-in-chief of TV Rain, Russia’s leading independent news outlet. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Zygar was forced into exile and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army in 2024. He is the author of several books on Russian politics, history, and authoritarianism, including “All the Kremlin’s Men,” “The Empire Must Die,” and “War and Punishment.” Most recently, Zygar released “The Dark Side of the Earth,” providing a novel historical account of the Soviet Union’s final three decades.
You spent a lot of your childhood in the Soviet Union. How did that upbringing shape your worldview?
I would say that my childhood was much more influenced by the political process that was happening in the Soviet Union. I went to Moscow in the first grade. The political show that was unveiled became a huge part of my life because I was watching all those political debates. I was reading the new independent media of the Soviet Union. I probably didn’t understand everything, but that was like my Harry Potter––all the conflicts and adventures, all the really crazy investigations in the magazine called Ogoniek about the crimes of Stalin, and all the photos and revelations shaped me as a person. I was watching it like a TV show. I did not think of it as real life. It was really interesting—I loved the change. I remember I was 10 when the coup happened in 1991, and I had that interesting feeling of history happening. I was not worried. I was thrilled that it was happening.
Since then, has Russia seemed to chase the feeling of change while forgetting its substance, finding a strange pleasure in stagnation?
I would never talk about Russia in general. You, like all of our readers, know that it’s a simplification to talk about a nation in general—we cannot talk about America in general or Ukraine in general, every nation is very diverse and very complicated. Russia, especially, is a super polarized country and the generation gap is enormous. The Soviet generation––all those who were born, raised and shaped before me––are very different from my generation. Many, though not all, carry the Soviet values of cynicism and apathy. They knew that communism did not exist, that it would be in vain to believe in anything, and so, they saw life as a dead end.
That’s a primitive description, but that’s Putin’s generation. My generation is of a different type. We were too young to become Soviet citizens. We saw a gap between the collapsing Soviet Union and the new post-Soviet states created in the early 90s.
At the same time, I think my generation is also very cynical. When I was a kid, my classmates and I were told all these stories about Lenin and Communism, and it was always deadly serious. And then, overnight, our teachers came in saying: “Forget that bullshit about Lenin. It doesn’t exist. Communism doesn’t exist. You should all believe in God now.” That obvious lie made a lot of people from my generation very cynical and very skeptical in a very different way.
We are very different from all the post-Soviet generations too, and they are completely different from those who lived in the Soviet Union because they were raised online. I don’t think their values differ from those born after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s or later, they are just like anyone else, with complexity. Populism is effective anywhere in the world.
The old generation is cynical because, for them, there was no future and no hope. Your generation experienced a fracture. Are you worried that the continuity of Putin’s rule has led to a broad apathy and a sense of loss that reinforces his power?
Am I worried? That’s too mild. Yeah, I’m really worried. In Japan there is a concept of the cannibalism of generations. The generation that saw the war and witnessed the collapse of Imperial Japan and Hiroshima were trying so hard to prevent their sons and daughters from repeating their fate. They imposed their fears and their complexes onto the next generation. In a way, they cannibalized the next generation.
We actually know that that didn’t happen with Japanese society. The imperialist Japanese generation that was defeated during World War II did not take the next generations hostage and did not succeed in cannibalizing new generations. But, I’m afraid that’s exactly what has already happened—or at least is happening—in Russia. The Soviet zombie army is trying to eat the brains of the innocent young post-Soviet kids. They are trying to turn them into zombies.
You mention in the preface of War and Punishment that you hope the Russian people will soon be able to stamp out the myths that have infected them. How do you see that happening? Can you imagine Russia without an imperial myth of grandeur?
I believe that there is nothing eternal. There is no predetermination, there is no curse, and no nation is doomed to remain the same forever. Just yesterday, I heard a Yale professor comparing the future Third World War to the First World War. In his projection, the rising power of China is comparable to the rising power of Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. So, in that parallel, Russia is obviously Austro-Hungary because it’s a failing power—a failing empire that is on its deathbed.
Could we imagine, if we were talking in 1913, you asking me, “Can Austria not be an empire?” The Habsburgs’ long history was the identity of the Austrian nation. It was impossible to imagine Austria without its empire. We have such a long history of the Austrian empire as the Holy German Empire or Holy Roman Empire or German nation, as it was called. Everything changes. We’ve seen the collapse of so many empires. We don’t even remember many empires that existed for much longer than the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire existed for 300 years. That’s nothing in historical terms. So, do I believe that Russia can be different? 100 percent.
In Europe, 70 years ago, there were almost no democracies, and within 70 years, a lot of European countries changed. They changed how they treated their own citizens. For the last half-century, democracy was something cool and fashionable. Now, it’s not. After a period of time, it’s going to be cool and fashionable again. I wish it could be sooner rather than later. I definitely think that imperial myths are not something to stay. I see that as part of my mission, as a writer and historian. I know that Russia deserves, as any other country deserves, a more humane, humanist approach to its history because Russia’s history has always been historical propaganda written by the authorities or by the people in control who were serving the Emperors or leaders of the Communist Party.
So, we don’t have a history of Russian people. We have a history of Russian rulers. It’s a fake narrative. It’s a very interesting task to try to explore other dimensions of that history. I’m sure that Russian people would be better off if they knew something about their own predecessors, their own ancestors, not only about the Russian tsars.
But at the same time, there’s a difference between the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Austria today. Can Russia maintain its territoriality without an imperial narrative that purports its own dominion?
I don’t think that Russia really needs more territory. I think that Putin wants to stay in power forever, and he uses the concept of imperial greatness as the justification for his aggression. But it’s not about more land, it’s not about more territory. It is such an irony that during the last couple of decades, the imperial idea in Russia was minimally popular. Because, it’s like national pride. National pride is urgent when people are miserable, when they don’t have anything to be proud of, when they don’t have a successful job, a happy family, or any real, substantial success in their own life, so they need to be proud of something else. The best case scenario for national pride is a football team. The worst case scenario is a great imperial might and the pursuit of a great empire that can conquer your neighbor.
During the last decades, the Russian population has become more prosperous than ever. More people have started living normal lives, they have apartments and mortgages and cars, and they go to theaters and restaurants, and they travel abroad to Turkey or Thailand. People who enjoy their life don’t need any kind of imperial greatness because they’re fine with what they have. Only people who don’t have that, that have emptiness instead, need that painkiller. Actually, those people who are happy with their lives are the worst part of the population for the dictator, because they want a normal life, and they don’t want a dictatorship. So, by starting a war and trying to promote the imperial idea, Putin is trying to get rid of that normal perspective of normal people, and is trying to intoxicate them with the idea of imperial governance.
How do the Russian people, everyday, rationalize the continuation of the war with an awareness of what’s going on in Ukraine?
Let’s do a mental experiment. Let’s imagine that the internet exists in Nazi Germany. The citizens are capable of opening their laptops in the morning, going to different news websites, and checking how many Jews were exterminated yesterday in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or other concentration camps. Let’s imagine this information is available on a daily basis. How many Germans would use that opportunity, and how many of them would prefer to stay away and just pretend that nothing is happening?
Sometimes it’s really hard, psychologically, to live in the world when you know that terrible things are happening and you cannot do anything. It’s called “learned helplessness.” When you think that everything is in vain, you start to think that you shouldn’t even try to fight the system, because you’re going to be dead.
But, if you pretend and you just watch the news, you watch videos from the war, that’s sadomasochism, and a lot of people do that. I must stress that, according to all the statistics we have, more than 10% of the population of Russia, on a daily basis, consume the content from the internet or of Russian independent media from abroad, like Medusa or TV Rain. 10 to 15 million people do that, and it’s a terrible life. They torture themselves. They are not the biggest victims in this world, but their choice is to not pretend that nothing is happening. The choice of other people is to continue living, and that’s their moral decision.
As a war correspondent, I used to work in many war zones. I worked in Darfur when there was a genocide. I worked in the Middle East for years and years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war between Israel and Lebanon. I saw that outside those war zones, people were indifferent. Could I blame them for being so deaf? They had the opportunity to learn what was happening. They probably didn’t have the capacity to change anything, so they preferred not to. That’s human nature. People prefer to stay passive. That’s their choice, I guess. It seems to me that someone in Moscow who is pretending that nothing is happening will hopefully wake up in two or 10 years and feel remorse and consciousness. They will show up and help fight against dictatorship.
We know that in the history of humanity, a lot of people have changed. They used to be ardent followers of some inhumane, authoritarian ideology, and then something made them change their perception. They became different people. Gorbachev was an ardent communist who was very loyal. Then he started thinking that democracy would probably be better.
Speaking about Navalny, he had a long journey in his political evolution. We can watch it from beginning to end. He changed his position during that evolution. And it’s clear that at the end of his political career, at the end of his life, right after the invasion of Ukraine, he denounced all ambiguities and doubts. He was sure that Crimea is part of Ukraine. He denounced his own earlier uncertainties, and I think that’s important.
You wrote about Bin Laden very early. To you he was an empty signifier of a terrorist—his image as a global boogeyman gave him power. Russia projects power similarly, coming from their historical narrative. Could you talk about your experience studying bin Laden, and that connection with Russia?
It’s an interesting comparison. It’s about ideology and the power of popularity, the power of example. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine set a horrible precedent that changed the world, because he showed the world that it was possible. He did not become the most powerful man in the world, but he crossed the line, and he got away with it. He was one of the first to challenge the psychological boundaries that a lot of leaders in the world used to have. So in a way, the importance of bin Laden was close to that. He definitely didn’t have a real hierarchical system.
Al-Qaeda was not an army with a Commander-in-Chief; Al-Qaeda was much more of a decentralized network with a lot of people who share the same beliefs about what’s right and what’s wrong, and who’s the enemy and who’s to blame. In a way, bin Laden became that: a symbol that empowered so many people with his example and visibility, just like with Putin. Western media contributed a lot. Putin would have never become Dr. Evil, the mysterious villain from Hollywood blockbusters, without American media. He never dreamt of that career and that symbolical popularity. He never dreamt of becoming Che Guevara, and bin Laden didn’t either.
In my book All the Kremlin’s Men, I examined the way Putin’s perception of the world, in Russia and within his inner circle, was changing. A very significant turning point was 2007, the year when he was named the Person of the Year by Time Magazine. That iconic photo of him watching from above and looking like a Czar glorified Putin as the almighty strategist who is the mastermind of the anti-democratic world. It was created unwittingly by the Western media. He was not that brave, he was not so sure he was all that. I think the same happened with bin Laden, who, in reality, did much less than Putin and definitely much less than what is attributed to him.
A lot of people thought that the invasion of Ukraine was a point of no return for Putin. That it would be his 9/11. But that lasted for about a year. I remember the week that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him, which horrified the political and business elite in Moscow. They were sensing the Nuremberg Trial approaching them. That same week, Xi Jinping came to Moscow for a state visit, and that changed the picture. The fact that China’s leader came to Moscow the same week as the International Criminal Court issued the arrest warrant made it seem like maybe this was not that important. In 2023, after he killed Prigozhin everyone was sure that sanctions were going to destroy the Russian economy. In a year, it turned out that sanctions don’t work. Nobody stopped buying Russian oil and gas. It created this sense that he somehow always manages to get away with it. The moment he came to Alaska was the final comeback. Now, he’s no longer bin Laden.
In War and Myth you talk about a realization that nothing ends and that resistance never reaches a point of termination. Has anything in your thinking changed since you wrote that and can anything be done to prevent surrender from being the default choice?
I’m really surprised that you brought that up in our conversation, because that’s a very important idea for me and a very important feeling. We are culturally spoiled by movies, by literature, and by the concept of a happy ending, because we think that there is some progress, and in the end, it will all be better. We’re spoiled by the concept that there’s going to be an end. But in reality, there is no end. There might be an end for us as spectators, but the movie will continue. Only the spectators in the audience are going to die. No one is going to watch this movie till the end.
There is no happy ending in any political struggle. There could be some happy moments, but the next moment is either going to be much worse than the previous one, or maybe better. No political fight is over before you want it to be over. We have seen so many political shows that seem to be a triumph of democracy, and then, they turn out to be a catastrophe. The collapse of the Soviet Union happened because democracy was so needed by the population of the Soviet Union. From today’s point of view, the Soviet Union has never collapsed, because what we have now is the victory of the coup in 1991 as if it really won.
There is no other reason, no fight, except for your moral obligation. We are the only ones to decide and to measure how much moral obligation we should take on if we want to devote our lives to sacrifice, to struggle, or to any other fight. Recently, with my fellow Yale World Fellows, we discussed the concept of sacrifice, what it means, and what sacrifice is, and how different this word is in different languages. For example, the word comes from the Latin root sacra, which means sacred. So to make a sacrifice means to make something sacred, which is amazing. In Russian, this word is completely different. It means to make yourself a victim. You have made yourself a victim.
It’s almost like suicide.
It’s a suicide, absolutely. It’s an honorable suicide, but it’s still a suicide. There are definitely different perspectives, and no person should impose their agenda or their system of values upon other people. For Navalny, the only choice, the only reasonable choice, for him was sacrifice. He really wanted that. I have no doubt about that. He knew that was his only path, and he encouraged others not to do that; he encouraged others to live long enough to be able to fight when the situation is better. He encouraged others to get integrated, get educated, and to remain safe, sound, and prosperous. To be capable of continuing to do important, meaningful things once we can. There are no right values and wrong values. We have to choose our own. It’s to think about them before sacrificing ourselves for those values. I know a lot of people who changed their values significantly, and realized that what they considered to be their values were just habits of their parents and childish delusions. As long as you analyze what is important and what is less important, you can continue. It happens to everyone.