N!

s Desk

Tucker Carlson
Promised an
Unedited Putin.
The Result Was
Boring
In an interview that lasted more than two
hours, the Russian President aired well-trod
grievances and gave a lecture full of spurious
history meant to justify his war in Ukraine.
By Masha Gessen
February 9, 2024
 In a photo released by Russian state media,
Tucker Carlson interviews the Russian
President, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, on
Tuesday. Photograph by Gavriil Grigorov /
Sputnik / Reuters

n February 6th, Tucker Carlson spent more than two hours

O interviewing Vladimir Putin. The interview later aired, in a
version dubbed by what would appear to be Kremlin-provided
translators, on Carlson’s Web site, one of Russia’s main state television
channels, and the Kremlin Web site.

What Tucker Carlson Saw When He

Interviewed Vladimir Putin
More than anything else, Carlson seemed surprised: by the fact that
he got to interview Putin in the Kremlin and even !lm himself
sharing some post-interview impressions in a room full of lacquer and
gold leaf; by what Putin said during the interview; and by the man
himself. Putin used the interview to deliver a lengthy lecture on the
history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and its aftermath,
meant to convince viewers that Ukraine never had a right to exist.
When he was done with the lecture, he segued into a litany of
grievances against the West, where several generations of Presidents,
Prime Ministers, and Secretaries of State have, according to Putin, let
him down or ghosted him. After the interview, an incredulous
Carlson held up a gray cardboard folder with a little rope tie: Putin
had given him copies of documents to back up his historical claims.
Carlson hadn’t opened it yet. “I thought he was !libustering,” he said,
still apparently reeling from the history lesson. “But I concluded after
watching all this, no, that was the predicate to his answer: the history
of the area and the formation of this country and the connection to
Ukraine is part of the basis for his Ukraine policy.”

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The content of Putin’s conversation with Carlson was barely

distinguishable from the content of Putin’s rare speeches and so-called
press conferences and hotlines—annual hours-long, highly
orchestrated television productions. Putin’s obsession with history is
genuine, as is his belief in a narrative that justi!es, indeed makes
inevitable, Russia’s war against Ukraine. That Carlson was surprised
suggests that he either didn’t watch Putin’s earlier appearances in
preparation for the interview, or that, despite copious evidence to the
contrary, he imagined that Putin the man would match Putin the role:
a dictator whose opponents get killed and jailed and who invades
neighboring countries ought to be larger than life, terrifying in person,
and certainly not boring.

Carlson emerged from the interview shaking his head. “Russia is not
an expansionist power,” he said. “You’d have to be an idiot to think
that.” Actually, you might look at the evidence—the invasion and de-
facto control over about a !fth of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of
Crimea in 2014, the continued occupation of about a !fth of Ukraine
and the ongoing offensive there—to conclude that Russia is an
expansionist power. During the interview, Putin gave every indication
that he thinks of former imperial possessions as still rightfully
Russia’s. That would include not only former Soviet republics but also
Finland and Poland. “The professional liars in Washington . . . are
trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take
the Sudetenland, or something,” Carlson continued. “Not analogous
in any way!” In fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever
before, channelled Hitler during the interview. This is what a tyrant
looks like: small, and full of tedious resentments.

What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed

by Tucker Carlson
Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a
couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all
this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin !rst
became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin
has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became
increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in
2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that
Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical
trivia about Calrson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation
tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had
unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many
to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of
Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between
Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders,
and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal
from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin
claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a
speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would
also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the
well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed
during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.

Most important from Putin’s point of view, Carlson seemed to share

two of his basic assumptions: that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war
with the United States and that any negotiations will take place
between the Kremlin and the White House, presumably without
involving Kyiv. Carlson even nudged Putin to call President Biden
and say “Let’s work this out.” To which Putin responded that the
message Russia wishes to convey to the U.S. is “Stop supplying
weapons. It will be over within a few weeks.”

What Russian Television Viewers Saw

Putin has reprised his history lecture many times. It seems likely that
most Russians who watched the entire interview did so out of
professional obligation—their job, as propagandists or political
appointees, is to amplify and affirm the leader’s message. Ordinary
Russians probably watched only outtakes and commentary. What they
saw was that something momentous had happened: one of the most
popular journalists in America came to interview Putin and looked
like a deer in headlights. Channel One stressed both Carlson’s
popularity and Americans’ evident interest in what Putin had to say.
Carlson’s promotional video in advance of the interview itself had
been watched more than a hundred million times! Russians see
Carlson, not unreasonably, as a representative of a future Trump
Administration, a preview of the coming America in which the
liberals who support Ukraine are !nally displaced.

What Tucker Carlson’s Viewers Saw

It’s hard to imagine an American viewer who would make it past the
!rst ten minutes of Putin’s monotonous history lecture. (In the
interview, Putin called it one of his “dialogues,” betraying either his
ignorance or his idea of what constitutes a dialogue; the Kremlin
translated “dialogues” as “my long speeches.”) The translator or
translators generally cleaned up Putin’s prose, smoothing out passages
that, in Russian, made no sense. For example, responding to Carlson’s
question about a possible invasion of Poland, Putin said, in Russian,
“Because we don’t have any interests in Poland nor in Lithuania—
nowhere. What do we need it for? We just don’t have any interests.
Only threats.” The translator rendered it as, “Because we have no
interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that?
We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering.”
In another exchange, the translator took liberties to make Carlson
appear more digni!ed. When Carlson asked Putin about his obsession
with !ghting Nazism eighty years after Hitler’s death, the President
said, in Russian, “Your question seems subtle but is very disgusting.”
In English, though, Putin appeared to be praising Carlson’s question
as “subtle” while Carlson himself, according to the transcript, called
the question “quite pesky”— the words were actually spoken by
Putin’s translator. However obscure the subject of Putin’s discursive
exercise was, the genre probably looked recognizable to Americans.
This was a conversation between an older man who has read a history
book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is
trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college. Except one
of these guys reaches millions of viewers and the other has nuclear
weapons.
What I Saw
I can’t get one passage out of my mind. In the history-lecture portion
of the interview, when Putin got to 1939, he said, “Poland coöperated
with Germany, but then it refused to comply with Hitler’s
demands. . . . By not ceding the Danzig Corridor to Hitler, Poles
forced him, they overplayed their hand and they forced Hitler to start
the Second World War by attacking Poland.” (This is my translation.)
The idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator by forcing
the hand of the aggressor is central to all of Putin’s explanations for
Russia’s war in Ukraine. To my knowledge, though, this was the !rst
time he described Hitler’s aggression in the same terms.

Putin has reproduced Hitler’s rhetoric before. Ten years ago,

announcing the annexation of Crimea, he seemed to borrow from
Hitler’s speech on the annexation of Sudetenland. At the time, I
assumed that the language had come from a speechwriter who knew
what they were doing while Putin may not have. But the way Putin
described the beginning of the Second World War in his interview
with Carlson suggests that, although he keeps accusing Ukraine of
fostering Nazism, in his mind he might see himself as Hitler, but
perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United
States and create an alliance with its presumed future President.

It’s telling, too, that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both
allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler’s aggression. As he has
done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to
Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his
conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared. ♦
New Yorker Favorites
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Shouts & Murmurs: “I’m Not

an Asshole. I’m an Introvert”

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Masha Gessen, a
staff writer, is a
distinguished
professor at the
Craig Newmark
Graduate School of
 Journalism at the
City University of
New York.

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