— Sergei Viktorovich, you're certainly not a man our citizens need any introduction to. But I know how to surprise you — with your Sinhalese. Go ahead, say hello in Sinhalese.
— (Speaks in Sinhalese.)
— Let's start with the West. It's simply lost its mind. Nobody intends to follow any of the old agreements that worked for decades. Of course, it's all being torn down. We know this, we feel it. In this situation, do we have something to offer the world as an alternative?
— First, we need to defend our legitimate interests. To offer the world something, we have to win. The world is watching, with enormous attention — some, with bated breath — to see how this war ends, the one forced on us by the West, in response to which the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, announced the start of the special military operation. It's not that this planet is surrounded by unscrupulous people — that's just life. Everyone wants to understand, to paraphrase Sergei Bodrov's famous line from the film Brother 2, "where does the strength lie, brother?" and "what is strength, brother?"
You're absolutely right that they're not even trying to hide, disguise, or dress anything up anymore. At first, they openly declared that Russia had to be dealt a "strategic defeat." Then, watching the situation along the line of contact — the front, essentially — they backed away from that rhetoric.
Now, with Volodymyr Zelensky constantly retreating in Donbass and along other stretches of the front, having moved from desperation to openly terrorist activity, and with them seeing that many of his long-range weapons are hitting their targets, they've started spinning this phase as a "turning point" — the idea that "Ukrainian character can still defeat Russia," which, supposedly, is the "aggressor" that, having taken Ukraine, wanted to conquer all of Europe. The slogan of inflicting a "strategic defeat" on Russia has resurfaced. So has the slogan of "decolonizing" Russia, which, once again, quite openly means the "dismemberment" of our country. It's a revival of the hopes the West also entertained back when the USSR was collapsing, watching separatist movements spring up in the Far East, in the Urals, not to mention the Caucasus. They cherished the hope that all of this would fall apart now and that they'd be able to pick it up piece by piece. In my view, they'd even started working out who would get what.
— We came within a step of that. We even had "Ural francs" in circulation from the "Urals Republic."
— Yes. It was all right on the edge.
The fact that Boris Yeltsin found the courage to hand over power ahead of schedule, and that he handed it to the one person who, at that moment, was able to hold Russia together — that's the kind of historical turn that suggests Russia really is "marked" by God. When things get truly desperate, we get help from above.
Now they're talking about "strategic defeat" again, actively backing the Russians who've relocated abroad and are setting up various anti-Russian groups in Europe, raising funds to keep up some kind of "underground struggle" to break up the Russian Federation. They no longer hide any of this at all.
Our main television channels show everything the West is scheming. I think it's important for everyone to see this, to understand that the situation is no joke. The President of Russia doesn't hide it either. The entire "civilized" world — as it calls itself — has turned against us.
— Before 2007, before Putin's Munich speech, they used to "love us, arms wide open." At least now everything is more honest.
— They thought they had us "in their pocket."
When Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, he was completely open to an equal strategic partnership with the West. The fact that our former allies — the Anglo-Saxons, specifically — are now fighting us through Ukraine with varying degrees of ferocity (London more so, the US somewhat less), pumping it full of the most modern weaponry and announcing that they'll build new, lethal, high-tech missile-defense systems specifically for Ukraine — nothing like that had ever happened before.
We began the special military operation at a time when our society was calm, comfortable, and, on the whole, satisfied with its standard of living. And the fact that this, too, didn't suit the West is a fact. They didn't want society to be calm — they wanted to stir it up against the authorities, and they were preparing provocations. They can't compete honestly. They're afraid of honest competition in everything. Hence the sanctions — an attempt to hold on to a position that is slipping away for good, after five hundred years of Western dominance.
So, once again, on the state of our society: this matters to me both as a citizen and as foreign minister, someone who carries out the foreign policy of the President of Russia — a policy that has to reflect the public mood. Of course, they want to "stir up" unrest here. Putin mentioned this recently. We're making progress along the front every day — not as fast as we'd like, but while sparing our people. They're making up for their failures along that same line of contact by trying to use terrorist attacks to undermine the way of life people are used to. Drone attacks are already being felt in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and in Russia's border regions and territories people are bearing the full weight of martial-law conditions. Honestly, I'm very proud that our people are taking this the right way — the way history, and the people who defeated Nazism, taught us to. All the more so since we're now fighting the direct followers and descendants of those same Nazis — the same lineup, essentially. German Chancellor Merz is openly saying they'll once again be the leading power in Europe. If you're going to be that candid about it, you'd better be ready for what follows.
— (Speaks in Sinhalese.)
— Let's start with the West. It's simply lost its mind. Nobody intends to follow any of the old agreements that worked for decades. Of course, it's all being torn down. We know this, we feel it. In this situation, do we have something to offer the world as an alternative?
— First, we need to defend our legitimate interests. To offer the world something, we have to win. The world is watching, with enormous attention — some, with bated breath — to see how this war ends, the one forced on us by the West, in response to which the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, announced the start of the special military operation. It's not that this planet is surrounded by unscrupulous people — that's just life. Everyone wants to understand, to paraphrase Sergei Bodrov's famous line from the film Brother 2, "where does the strength lie, brother?" and "what is strength, brother?"
You're absolutely right that they're not even trying to hide, disguise, or dress anything up anymore. At first, they openly declared that Russia had to be dealt a "strategic defeat." Then, watching the situation along the line of contact — the front, essentially — they backed away from that rhetoric.
Now, with Volodymyr Zelensky constantly retreating in Donbass and along other stretches of the front, having moved from desperation to openly terrorist activity, and with them seeing that many of his long-range weapons are hitting their targets, they've started spinning this phase as a "turning point" — the idea that "Ukrainian character can still defeat Russia," which, supposedly, is the "aggressor" that, having taken Ukraine, wanted to conquer all of Europe. The slogan of inflicting a "strategic defeat" on Russia has resurfaced. So has the slogan of "decolonizing" Russia, which, once again, quite openly means the "dismemberment" of our country. It's a revival of the hopes the West also entertained back when the USSR was collapsing, watching separatist movements spring up in the Far East, in the Urals, not to mention the Caucasus. They cherished the hope that all of this would fall apart now and that they'd be able to pick it up piece by piece. In my view, they'd even started working out who would get what.
— We came within a step of that. We even had "Ural francs" in circulation from the "Urals Republic."
— Yes. It was all right on the edge.
The fact that Boris Yeltsin found the courage to hand over power ahead of schedule, and that he handed it to the one person who, at that moment, was able to hold Russia together — that's the kind of historical turn that suggests Russia really is "marked" by God. When things get truly desperate, we get help from above.
Now they're talking about "strategic defeat" again, actively backing the Russians who've relocated abroad and are setting up various anti-Russian groups in Europe, raising funds to keep up some kind of "underground struggle" to break up the Russian Federation. They no longer hide any of this at all.
Our main television channels show everything the West is scheming. I think it's important for everyone to see this, to understand that the situation is no joke. The President of Russia doesn't hide it either. The entire "civilized" world — as it calls itself — has turned against us.
— Before 2007, before Putin's Munich speech, they used to "love us, arms wide open." At least now everything is more honest.
— They thought they had us "in their pocket."
When Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, he was completely open to an equal strategic partnership with the West. The fact that our former allies — the Anglo-Saxons, specifically — are now fighting us through Ukraine with varying degrees of ferocity (London more so, the US somewhat less), pumping it full of the most modern weaponry and announcing that they'll build new, lethal, high-tech missile-defense systems specifically for Ukraine — nothing like that had ever happened before.
We began the special military operation at a time when our society was calm, comfortable, and, on the whole, satisfied with its standard of living. And the fact that this, too, didn't suit the West is a fact. They didn't want society to be calm — they wanted to stir it up against the authorities, and they were preparing provocations. They can't compete honestly. They're afraid of honest competition in everything. Hence the sanctions — an attempt to hold on to a position that is slipping away for good, after five hundred years of Western dominance.
So, once again, on the state of our society: this matters to me both as a citizen and as foreign minister, someone who carries out the foreign policy of the President of Russia — a policy that has to reflect the public mood. Of course, they want to "stir up" unrest here. Putin mentioned this recently. We're making progress along the front every day — not as fast as we'd like, but while sparing our people. They're making up for their failures along that same line of contact by trying to use terrorist attacks to undermine the way of life people are used to. Drone attacks are already being felt in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and in Russia's border regions and territories people are bearing the full weight of martial-law conditions. Honestly, I'm very proud that our people are taking this the right way — the way history, and the people who defeated Nazism, taught us to. All the more so since we're now fighting the direct followers and descendants of those same Nazis — the same lineup, essentially. German Chancellor Merz is openly saying they'll once again be the leading power in Europe. If you're going to be that candid about it, you'd better be ready for what follows.
On the Russian National Character
— You said that before we can offer the world an alternative world order, we need to secure our national interests, and that winning is a precondition for that. What are our national interests on the international stage?
— They lie in being an independent power, an independent civilization. In having our borders reliably secured. In no one even thinking of trying to tell us how to run our own affairs inside Russia. And in every people of the Russian Federation continuing to enjoy their constitutionally guaranteed rights — to education, and to preserving their culture, traditions, and religious beliefs.
As such a power, Russia will be interested in cooperating on equal terms with other major centers now taking shape — China and India. These major players will, of course, join us in standing up for fairness, in the hope that the West, and Europe in particular, will also eventually come to its senses and be ready to integrate honestly, as an equal, into new systems of relations. It isn't ready for that yet. The US isn't remotely ready either.
And while that wait drags on, new centers of power are building their own network structures. One of them is BRICS, which is drawing in the leading economies of the global majority, and which settles issues quite differently from how it's done in, say, NATO, where America gives the orders and everyone else tries obsequiously to please the hegemon in one way or another. And it's certainly not like the EU, where the Brussels bureaucracy has usurped the powers of national governments.
In BRICS, in the SCO, in the EAEU, in the CIS, in the CSTO — no one can point to a single instance of Russia, China (speaking of the SCO and BRICS), or anyone else simply demanding something. It's always frank, mutually respectful negotiations aimed at compromise.
— 35,000 sanctions. Probably an all-time record, for any state in the history of humanity. How do we manage to hold out? What is it thanks to?
— First and foremost, of course, thanks to our ancestors, who built a country like this — the richest, the largest country in the world, with access to seas and oceans, which lets us develop trade and secure our safety, including through the Navy. And, without question, thanks to industrialization, which actually began back under the Russian Empire — people talk about this a lot these days. The railways that tied the whole country together were laid down then, along with much of the foundation of the steel industry. Then came industrialization under the Soviet Union, when, in an extraordinarily short time — over roughly a decade, the fifteen years before the Great Patriotic War — colossal achievements were made. And that did a great deal to prevent catastrophe.
But our chief national trait, I think, is something the West simply doesn't have. In our civilization, there is respect for those who built it — who built the cities, who defeated the enemy.
We also had times like those of Alexander Gorchakov, who, after our defeat in the Crimean War — for reasons there's no point going into now — said, "Russia is not sulking, Russia is gathering itself." We don't need to sulk now either. Sulking, wasting your nerves — that's the worst thing you can do. What's needed is focus. Healthy anger, on the other hand, is entirely appropriate. Not sulking — but a healthy kind of anger.
That anger includes the need to speed up on every front, including the technological breakthrough people talk about so much these days — and to decide, in a determined way, that we simply must get this done. To get angry at yourself: I want to achieve all of this faster. And we need that same healthy anger on the external front. Don't fall into hysterics of any kind — just draw a simple conclusion for yourself: trust, but verify. Whether to trust — we'll see about that later; first, verify. And, above all, hold your line.
Right now, our Turkish neighbors are again saying they're ready to help out on Ukraine, while at the same time signing on to NATO documents that say the territorial integrity of the Kyiv regime has to be restored. There are other proposals too: the current US administration keeps saying that once they've "dealt with" Iran, they'll get back to helping us again. We have our army and navy, and now also the Aerospace Forces — which have actually been around for quite a while — along with our unmanned-systems troops.
And we have our people too. Some say: let's just "sort it out" somehow, leave things as they are — freeze along the line of contact and figure out a compromise later. First of all, we have a sense of historical continuity, of our own historical identity, and of national — multinational — pride.
The West is telling us now that it will think about when to resume talks with us, but that these talks would have Europe, America, Zelensky, and Russian President Vladimir Putin all at the same table. And before that, in their view, a truce, a ceasefire, has to be declared. After that, the Westerners would bring in multinational forces led by France and Britain, and only then, supposedly, sit down to talk. What does that amount to? An ultimatum. Freeze along the line of contact, and the Nazi regime survives. They won't recognize any of the territories where referendums were held.
But there's something unique about our people's character — think, for instance, of that famous Mayakovsky line from his poem "Broadway," about the Soviets having a pride all their own. It wasn't that the Soviets suddenly invented that pride — Russians had always had it. That pride remains.
The Mayakovsky line is not reproduced in translation for copyright reasons.
— They lie in being an independent power, an independent civilization. In having our borders reliably secured. In no one even thinking of trying to tell us how to run our own affairs inside Russia. And in every people of the Russian Federation continuing to enjoy their constitutionally guaranteed rights — to education, and to preserving their culture, traditions, and religious beliefs.
As such a power, Russia will be interested in cooperating on equal terms with other major centers now taking shape — China and India. These major players will, of course, join us in standing up for fairness, in the hope that the West, and Europe in particular, will also eventually come to its senses and be ready to integrate honestly, as an equal, into new systems of relations. It isn't ready for that yet. The US isn't remotely ready either.
And while that wait drags on, new centers of power are building their own network structures. One of them is BRICS, which is drawing in the leading economies of the global majority, and which settles issues quite differently from how it's done in, say, NATO, where America gives the orders and everyone else tries obsequiously to please the hegemon in one way or another. And it's certainly not like the EU, where the Brussels bureaucracy has usurped the powers of national governments.
In BRICS, in the SCO, in the EAEU, in the CIS, in the CSTO — no one can point to a single instance of Russia, China (speaking of the SCO and BRICS), or anyone else simply demanding something. It's always frank, mutually respectful negotiations aimed at compromise.
— 35,000 sanctions. Probably an all-time record, for any state in the history of humanity. How do we manage to hold out? What is it thanks to?
— First and foremost, of course, thanks to our ancestors, who built a country like this — the richest, the largest country in the world, with access to seas and oceans, which lets us develop trade and secure our safety, including through the Navy. And, without question, thanks to industrialization, which actually began back under the Russian Empire — people talk about this a lot these days. The railways that tied the whole country together were laid down then, along with much of the foundation of the steel industry. Then came industrialization under the Soviet Union, when, in an extraordinarily short time — over roughly a decade, the fifteen years before the Great Patriotic War — colossal achievements were made. And that did a great deal to prevent catastrophe.
But our chief national trait, I think, is something the West simply doesn't have. In our civilization, there is respect for those who built it — who built the cities, who defeated the enemy.
We also had times like those of Alexander Gorchakov, who, after our defeat in the Crimean War — for reasons there's no point going into now — said, "Russia is not sulking, Russia is gathering itself." We don't need to sulk now either. Sulking, wasting your nerves — that's the worst thing you can do. What's needed is focus. Healthy anger, on the other hand, is entirely appropriate. Not sulking — but a healthy kind of anger.
That anger includes the need to speed up on every front, including the technological breakthrough people talk about so much these days — and to decide, in a determined way, that we simply must get this done. To get angry at yourself: I want to achieve all of this faster. And we need that same healthy anger on the external front. Don't fall into hysterics of any kind — just draw a simple conclusion for yourself: trust, but verify. Whether to trust — we'll see about that later; first, verify. And, above all, hold your line.
Right now, our Turkish neighbors are again saying they're ready to help out on Ukraine, while at the same time signing on to NATO documents that say the territorial integrity of the Kyiv regime has to be restored. There are other proposals too: the current US administration keeps saying that once they've "dealt with" Iran, they'll get back to helping us again. We have our army and navy, and now also the Aerospace Forces — which have actually been around for quite a while — along with our unmanned-systems troops.
And we have our people too. Some say: let's just "sort it out" somehow, leave things as they are — freeze along the line of contact and figure out a compromise later. First of all, we have a sense of historical continuity, of our own historical identity, and of national — multinational — pride.
The West is telling us now that it will think about when to resume talks with us, but that these talks would have Europe, America, Zelensky, and Russian President Vladimir Putin all at the same table. And before that, in their view, a truce, a ceasefire, has to be declared. After that, the Westerners would bring in multinational forces led by France and Britain, and only then, supposedly, sit down to talk. What does that amount to? An ultimatum. Freeze along the line of contact, and the Nazi regime survives. They won't recognize any of the territories where referendums were held.
But there's something unique about our people's character — think, for instance, of that famous Mayakovsky line from his poem "Broadway," about the Soviets having a pride all their own. It wasn't that the Soviets suddenly invented that pride — Russians had always had it. That pride remains.
The Mayakovsky line is not reproduced in translation for copyright reasons.
On Childhood, Family, and Hobbies
— What were you like as a kid in the yard? You were just talking about healthy anger. Did you throw punches, or did you switch on diplomacy? There's a well-known principle: "If a fight is inevitable, strike first." We all know whose principle that is. What was yours?
— I actually grew up in a village, in effect — in the town of Noginsk, formerly Bogorodsk. I'm working actively these days with the Moscow Region, with my friend Governor Andrei Vorobyov, on restoring the name Bogorodsk. Some individual place names there have already been changed, but the town itself is still called Noginsk for now. And the part of it where I lived was a real village — to the left of the railway station was the town, and to the right, two rows of wooden village houses, with all the usual village amenities. And, I won't hide it, as boys, whenever a train came in, we'd run over to wherever a freight train had stopped and see what was in the cars. If there were watermelons, we'd get up to a bit of mischief.
— We know a great deal about you. But we've never asked about your grandparents. Who were they? Whose genes, whose abilities and talents, run in your blood?
— My mother and father divorced when I was just a few months old. They'd both graduated from the Institute of Foreign Trade, which is now part of MGIMO. That's actually why my mother pushed for me to try to get into MGIMO — and did so with some success. After their job assignments, my parents went to work at our customs post in Brest.
As fate had it, I ended up living with my mother alone after that. My grandmother was in Noginsk — she was the head nurse there. My grandfather was the head of the Noginsk railway station. Throughout the war, he was responsible for sending trains off to the front. Two of his brothers fought at the front, and both came back.
My grandfather died young, still a relatively young man — he was 67. My grandmother lived longer; she later moved to be with us in Moscow. I loved them both very much. They were genuinely my friends. They'd cover for me whenever they sensed I'd done something my mother wouldn't approve of — the way these things usually go.
Your roots play an invisible role. You don't sit around thinking about how many generations came before you. That's not the point. The point is that you're now living on their behalf. Just as we're now fighting on behalf of those who defeated the Germans, and all of Europe alongside them.
— You do rafting, is that right? Do you still do it?
— It must have been around 1984–1985 when our group decided to start vacationing "the wild way." One of our friends — a year ahead of me at MGIMO — was from Ufa. He invited me and another friend of ours to come to Ufa for a week that summer, to spend some time on the river, do some fishing. We went out to the river — there are lakes there too. We took out a little boat, went for a ride, fished on the Belaya River. It barely flows at all — flat, calm water. We decided to go again the next year and put together a team of five. We picked the Biya River, in the Altai this time — it flows out of Lake Teletskoye. But before we went, we found out that several rivers feed into Lake Teletskoye, including the very turbulent Chulyshman.
We started working out the options and eventually settled on a plan. We went twenty kilometers up a very difficult river from Lake Teletskoye. We got dumped out into the lake — by some miracle, all of us stayed on the rafts and none of us capsized. A boat towed us across Lake Teletskoye, and then we rafted down the Biya. After that we made our first trip to the Katun River, and we covered it from one end to the other.
First the middle stretch, where the Rafting World Cup is held — rapids around class 4 to 4.5, with some class-5 elements. One time we rafted all the way from Mount Belukha itself. A fascinating route: for the first day you have to stay on the plateau, where everything barely moves. Then the river suddenly drops away, and on that stretch there are five fantastically tough rapids. The adrenaline hits you instantly.
— Did you ever capsize?
— My raft never did. We had two rafts — my colleagues flipped a couple of times, but we always got them out. We spent nearly 20 years on the Katun — meaning summers, not winters. We have a lot of friends there. It's a fantastic part of the country.
— So in the evening you pull ashore, haul out the raft, light a fire, pitch a tent. And then out comes the guitar and the singing?
— Guitar and singing, yes.
— About how many songs do you play on guitar? You've probably never counted.
— I'm very fond of Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava.
— You play and sing both?
— Yes.
— Will we ever get to hear it? We really should.
— I'll take you up on whatever resources you have in our media space. No fee required, if anyone's actually interested. I accept the offer.
— Interesting. We'd really love to hear it. We're interested in everything, because journalists love not just watching you but eavesdropping too — especially when you think the microphone's off. If you'd trademarked that famous phrase of yours — the one with the word "morons" and one other word — you'd probably be a rich man by now. Practically all my colleagues wore that T-shirt, and so did I. It sold in the thousands. Is that just your character? Or does it just come out depending on the situation?
— It just comes out. We're all only human.
— But your colleagues say you never allow yourself words like that at work.
— Liars. I'll remember that. That's a hypocritical claim, of course. When something suddenly doesn't just upset you but someone unexpectedly does something wrong, a hot word or two can slip out. As for the trademark, I've never given it any thought.
By the way, after Alaska, where I showed up in a sweater with "USSR" on it, people were calling my aides to thank me — saying they'd be happy to knit sweaters like that for my friends.
You understand, when something draws people in like that... There are plenty of examples of it now. It never really went away. Some particular wave of nostalgia for the USSR has taken hold. The Soviet Union is, in a way, everything we started out from. People don't just want a comfortable, well-fed life. It's a sense of belonging to what your ancestors did under the harshest conditions — building this country up, pulling it out of poverty, creating conditions for hundreds of languages to coexist.
And when people put those sweaters on, they feel that... even those who never lived in the Soviet Union heard about it from their parents, their grandparents. So it seems to me, as Putin has put it, that anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart, and anyone who wants to bring it back has no head. As for the heart, all of that lives on. And as for the head — thank God, in Russia's current situation, there is a head on our shoulders, and it's a level one.
— I actually grew up in a village, in effect — in the town of Noginsk, formerly Bogorodsk. I'm working actively these days with the Moscow Region, with my friend Governor Andrei Vorobyov, on restoring the name Bogorodsk. Some individual place names there have already been changed, but the town itself is still called Noginsk for now. And the part of it where I lived was a real village — to the left of the railway station was the town, and to the right, two rows of wooden village houses, with all the usual village amenities. And, I won't hide it, as boys, whenever a train came in, we'd run over to wherever a freight train had stopped and see what was in the cars. If there were watermelons, we'd get up to a bit of mischief.
— We know a great deal about you. But we've never asked about your grandparents. Who were they? Whose genes, whose abilities and talents, run in your blood?
— My mother and father divorced when I was just a few months old. They'd both graduated from the Institute of Foreign Trade, which is now part of MGIMO. That's actually why my mother pushed for me to try to get into MGIMO — and did so with some success. After their job assignments, my parents went to work at our customs post in Brest.
As fate had it, I ended up living with my mother alone after that. My grandmother was in Noginsk — she was the head nurse there. My grandfather was the head of the Noginsk railway station. Throughout the war, he was responsible for sending trains off to the front. Two of his brothers fought at the front, and both came back.
My grandfather died young, still a relatively young man — he was 67. My grandmother lived longer; she later moved to be with us in Moscow. I loved them both very much. They were genuinely my friends. They'd cover for me whenever they sensed I'd done something my mother wouldn't approve of — the way these things usually go.
Your roots play an invisible role. You don't sit around thinking about how many generations came before you. That's not the point. The point is that you're now living on their behalf. Just as we're now fighting on behalf of those who defeated the Germans, and all of Europe alongside them.
— You do rafting, is that right? Do you still do it?
— It must have been around 1984–1985 when our group decided to start vacationing "the wild way." One of our friends — a year ahead of me at MGIMO — was from Ufa. He invited me and another friend of ours to come to Ufa for a week that summer, to spend some time on the river, do some fishing. We went out to the river — there are lakes there too. We took out a little boat, went for a ride, fished on the Belaya River. It barely flows at all — flat, calm water. We decided to go again the next year and put together a team of five. We picked the Biya River, in the Altai this time — it flows out of Lake Teletskoye. But before we went, we found out that several rivers feed into Lake Teletskoye, including the very turbulent Chulyshman.
We started working out the options and eventually settled on a plan. We went twenty kilometers up a very difficult river from Lake Teletskoye. We got dumped out into the lake — by some miracle, all of us stayed on the rafts and none of us capsized. A boat towed us across Lake Teletskoye, and then we rafted down the Biya. After that we made our first trip to the Katun River, and we covered it from one end to the other.
First the middle stretch, where the Rafting World Cup is held — rapids around class 4 to 4.5, with some class-5 elements. One time we rafted all the way from Mount Belukha itself. A fascinating route: for the first day you have to stay on the plateau, where everything barely moves. Then the river suddenly drops away, and on that stretch there are five fantastically tough rapids. The adrenaline hits you instantly.
— Did you ever capsize?
— My raft never did. We had two rafts — my colleagues flipped a couple of times, but we always got them out. We spent nearly 20 years on the Katun — meaning summers, not winters. We have a lot of friends there. It's a fantastic part of the country.
— So in the evening you pull ashore, haul out the raft, light a fire, pitch a tent. And then out comes the guitar and the singing?
— Guitar and singing, yes.
— About how many songs do you play on guitar? You've probably never counted.
— I'm very fond of Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava.
— You play and sing both?
— Yes.
— Will we ever get to hear it? We really should.
— I'll take you up on whatever resources you have in our media space. No fee required, if anyone's actually interested. I accept the offer.
— Interesting. We'd really love to hear it. We're interested in everything, because journalists love not just watching you but eavesdropping too — especially when you think the microphone's off. If you'd trademarked that famous phrase of yours — the one with the word "morons" and one other word — you'd probably be a rich man by now. Practically all my colleagues wore that T-shirt, and so did I. It sold in the thousands. Is that just your character? Or does it just come out depending on the situation?
— It just comes out. We're all only human.
— But your colleagues say you never allow yourself words like that at work.
— Liars. I'll remember that. That's a hypocritical claim, of course. When something suddenly doesn't just upset you but someone unexpectedly does something wrong, a hot word or two can slip out. As for the trademark, I've never given it any thought.
By the way, after Alaska, where I showed up in a sweater with "USSR" on it, people were calling my aides to thank me — saying they'd be happy to knit sweaters like that for my friends.
You understand, when something draws people in like that... There are plenty of examples of it now. It never really went away. Some particular wave of nostalgia for the USSR has taken hold. The Soviet Union is, in a way, everything we started out from. People don't just want a comfortable, well-fed life. It's a sense of belonging to what your ancestors did under the harshest conditions — building this country up, pulling it out of poverty, creating conditions for hundreds of languages to coexist.
And when people put those sweaters on, they feel that... even those who never lived in the Soviet Union heard about it from their parents, their grandparents. So it seems to me, as Putin has put it, that anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart, and anyone who wants to bring it back has no head. As for the heart, all of that lives on. And as for the head — thank God, in Russia's current situation, there is a head on our shoulders, and it's a level one.
On What Matters Most
— You've already mentioned that our country, our Motherland, is kissed by God, kept by God. Are you a believer yourself?
— I am. My grandmother had me baptized in secret, without my mother knowing — my mother was a Communist. She herself got baptized much later, already well into adulthood, after the Soviet Union fell apart.
My grandmother took me to be baptized in Noginsk. The church still stands there, on the bank of the Moscow River — God willing, it's still active. I still have the little cross they put on me back then. It was a good time.
— Has anything ever happened in your life that can only be explained by a miracle, by God?
— I suppose it has. There are some stories I'd rather not revisit.
It happened once. We were rafting down the Katun. We stopped, got some horses, and rode up into the mountains — I'd done equestrian sport back in college, so I had some skills, unlike some of the others. Suddenly the horses bolted while we were riding back down. On one side, a mountain; on the other, a genuinely serious drop. One of my friends' horse took off with him — he very nearly ran into me. Somehow, by some miracle, we managed to stop.
If we're talking about political dramas, I suppose it would be during the 1991 putsch. This brings me back to where we started. At the time, they thought: fine, Russia is docile, obedient, but it just needs to keep following whatever we set out for it. When it turned out Russia wasn't so obedient after all, that it had a pride of its own — and this started showing well before the Munich speech you mentioned, when Putin laid everything out with total, brutal honesty, in the middle of a discussion that was, on the whole, steeped in hypocrisy. There were moments before that too, but we didn't lose hope that the West would come to its senses, that all this was just some temporary lapse it needed to overcome.
Take the Baltic states. When I first took the ministerial post in 2004, they started drawing the Baltic states into another round of NATO expansion. The President of Russia asked them why they were doing this, given what we'd agreed. We were told, essentially, that you understand — after their time as part of the Soviet Union, these countries still feel they were occupied, held under duress, and that fear still lingers, so if we take them into NATO and the EU, they'll calm down.
Well, and did they calm down? Now they're the main "warheads" being pointed at us, given how "hot-tempered" they know these Estonian fellows to be. Lithuania and Latvia have now announced they're lifting the ban on deploying nuclear weapons on their territory.
So we can only rely on ourselves, as our president has stressed many times. What is happening now has heavy consequences. But I want to say once more: we are finishing the work of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who destroyed Nazism — while our former allies saved that same Nazism. The fate of the Wehrmacht generals who found a home and shelter in the West is well known. And now — something no one ever imagined could happen — Nazism is reviving openly. No one is even hiding it anymore. So we have no other option, if we want to remain our Russian civilization.
— One last question. What do you put into the words "Motherland," "Russia," "life"? What matters most to you?
— Russia is life, and life is Russia.
— I am. My grandmother had me baptized in secret, without my mother knowing — my mother was a Communist. She herself got baptized much later, already well into adulthood, after the Soviet Union fell apart.
My grandmother took me to be baptized in Noginsk. The church still stands there, on the bank of the Moscow River — God willing, it's still active. I still have the little cross they put on me back then. It was a good time.
— Has anything ever happened in your life that can only be explained by a miracle, by God?
— I suppose it has. There are some stories I'd rather not revisit.
It happened once. We were rafting down the Katun. We stopped, got some horses, and rode up into the mountains — I'd done equestrian sport back in college, so I had some skills, unlike some of the others. Suddenly the horses bolted while we were riding back down. On one side, a mountain; on the other, a genuinely serious drop. One of my friends' horse took off with him — he very nearly ran into me. Somehow, by some miracle, we managed to stop.
If we're talking about political dramas, I suppose it would be during the 1991 putsch. This brings me back to where we started. At the time, they thought: fine, Russia is docile, obedient, but it just needs to keep following whatever we set out for it. When it turned out Russia wasn't so obedient after all, that it had a pride of its own — and this started showing well before the Munich speech you mentioned, when Putin laid everything out with total, brutal honesty, in the middle of a discussion that was, on the whole, steeped in hypocrisy. There were moments before that too, but we didn't lose hope that the West would come to its senses, that all this was just some temporary lapse it needed to overcome.
Take the Baltic states. When I first took the ministerial post in 2004, they started drawing the Baltic states into another round of NATO expansion. The President of Russia asked them why they were doing this, given what we'd agreed. We were told, essentially, that you understand — after their time as part of the Soviet Union, these countries still feel they were occupied, held under duress, and that fear still lingers, so if we take them into NATO and the EU, they'll calm down.
Well, and did they calm down? Now they're the main "warheads" being pointed at us, given how "hot-tempered" they know these Estonian fellows to be. Lithuania and Latvia have now announced they're lifting the ban on deploying nuclear weapons on their territory.
So we can only rely on ourselves, as our president has stressed many times. What is happening now has heavy consequences. But I want to say once more: we are finishing the work of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who destroyed Nazism — while our former allies saved that same Nazism. The fate of the Wehrmacht generals who found a home and shelter in the West is well known. And now — something no one ever imagined could happen — Nazism is reviving openly. No one is even hiding it anymore. So we have no other option, if we want to remain our Russian civilization.
— One last question. What do you put into the words "Motherland," "Russia," "life"? What matters most to you?
— Russia is life, and life is Russia.