When a Book is More Than a Book

Commemorating four decades since the publication of Hedrick Smith’s best-selling portrait of the Russian people

2016 is the fortieth anniversary of the release of Hedrick Smith’s pathbreaking book, The Russians. The first book to truly take readers behind the Iron Curtain and into the everyday lives of Russians, it soared to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and influenced a generation of Americans (and not only Americans) in their views on Russia. When Hedrick Smith came to Vermont in May to give a talk sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council, Russian Life Editor Paul Richardson sat down with him to talk about the book and its legacy.

Russian Life: Did you have any inkling when the book first came out that it was going to jump to the top of the bestseller list?

Hedrick Smith: Oh no. It was my first book, Christ. I didn’t even know if I could write a book. Seriously. I persuaded myself I could do it because I figured a book, a book was a hundred thousand words and I had written a bunch of New York Times Magazine pieces, which were typically 5,000 words, so I said I’ve got to write 20 pieces, right? That is not —

RL: That’s not how it works.

HS: My editor very quickly disabused me of that notion. He said, “No, a book is not a string of circus elephants holding each other’s tails. A book has to have an architecture, a structure of it’s own. So you’ve got to create that.” And he helped me. The one thing I did know, from the interest in the reporting that I’d done for the Times, was that there was this tremendous hunger on the part of Americans to understand Russians. And I was lucky because before I went, I was a Nieman Fellow [at Harvard] and Dick McAdoo, who was the head of Little Brown Publishing, came out to speak. And he knew I was going to Russia and he wanted me to sign a book contract right then. Which I was smart enough not to do. He said, “But you ought to write a book on why they behave like Russians. Sort of, what makes Russians tick?” I just stuck that in the back of my head.

And I knew that I wanted to write a book. I had started to write a couple of different books. When I was in Egypt, I started to write one and then I got involved in some major reporting projects for the Times in Washington. I wrote very long stories for the Times. On presidential decision-making, the Cuban Missile Crisis, other things like that. And the war in Vietnam. And so I was thinking about that. So I was geared towards thinking about a book. But, did I have any idea what would happen to me? No, of course not.

RL: Well there’s obviously something different about your book. Certainly there have been many people who have written many books about Russia before and after. Yet there is something different about your approach that set it apart.

HS: I think that it’s the humanity of the book. I really hated the system, but I really came to love the people. And I think that’s crucial. And I think people sense that without being kind of maudlin about it. I really got to know them, I spent time with them in their kitchens. I traveled the country. I finally really got away from the typical American correspondent of that era’s pattern of reporting. Which was basically to hover around the American embassy. And hover around Americans, if there were any American business people; there weren’t very many, but Americans who were there on official business. And go talk to the economics section and go talk to the political section and go talk to the cultural section. Maybe go to the Bolshoi ballet. But it was a very circumscribed notion of what the reporting was.

And I remember my colleague Ted Shabad, who was a long time Soviet cartographer and geographer... he knew Russia extremely well... He was a real Russian specialist. And of course I wasn’t. I had a fortunate Nieman year at Harvard to study the Russian language and learn some history, and I’d always been interested in the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists and Russian music. But I didn’t really know that much about Russia. Ted knew a lot. And I remember I was just constantly curious, constantly asking questions, constantly pushing, trying to get it. And Ted said “What are you trying to do, Rick? Eat Russia whole?” And I said, “Yes Ted, that’s what I’m trying to do. I want to understand the whole thing.”

So I think part of it was just driving curiosity. And then telling very human stories. My mother at the time was dying of cancer in America. So I had arranged to make cassettes. I would go into the toilet so hopefully the bugs couldn’t hear me, so the Soviet eavesdropping couldn’t hear me. And I would record long letters, but verbal letters, to my mother describing everything. And my father got them and he was blown away by them and got them transcribed. So those were wonderful notes for me. And then I also had, I had pads that were 4 by 6 but they weren’t cards, they were just thin sheets of paper. And I carried them all the time. And I sorted out topics. I began to see topics. And I had 10,000 of those when I got home.

I was just immersed in the reporting practically from the moment I got there. With the idea of writing a book, and with I think the kind of genuine curiosity that intelligent Americans had. What are Russians really like if we can get below the Communism? Or how much of it is Communism, how much of it is Russia and the Russians? How much is their culture and their history? And are they like us?

You know, you have to remember, when we finally get to the summit meetings, suddenly Russians think Americans are like them, Americans think Russians are like them. I mean there’s a naive sort of discovery there that goes on. We’re both big countries and we have this big space and we look at the world and we’re finally at the top – that’s where the word summit came from. We’re finally at the summit of global power, both of us. And we can understand each other because we have global interests. We have these huge nations that are a continent wide. We think big. We’re open. We’re friendly. And Russians actually are open and friendly. They weren’t during the Cold War, because a lot of them were afraid of foreigners. But when I traveled in Russia I found they were enormously curious about America. And I would make sure I told them immediately I was an American correspondent, because I didn’t want people taking risks of talking to a news person. It’s very different from talking to a tourist in terms of the political risk that Russians were taking. 

But, I just found that they were very open, and thank God I took Russian at Harvard and that I kept going. I had more time after Harvard, I took some tutorials after that. When I got done with my Nieman year, I got involved in the Pentagon Papers. So I had a few other things distracting me. But I kept the Russian going during that period. Even during the Pentagon Papers I went to Russian lessons like three times a week in New York City while Neil [Sheehan] and I were hold up in that hotel working on the Pentagon Papers. And I kept taking Russian all the time I was in Russia. I had tutors that were given to me by UPDK [a Foreign Ministry directorate that dealt with foreign diplomats].

RL: Did you think that was very unique then? I know when I was living there, you did not get the sense that too many correspondents were working very hard on building up their Russian. They relied on and leaned on their fixer, their translator, their driver.

HS: No. I think there were four or five of us that had Russian. And we served the whole community. We’d get dissident documents and we were the ones that would translate them for everybody. There was Eric de Mauny of the BBC, David Bonavia with the London Times, Bob Kaiser at the Washington Post, who had taken Russian at Columbia. And one or two others, and that’s all there were. No. I think that’s another part of it. I think that’s part of the curiosity. It was the understanding that there were so many things that you could hear. You could stand in line at a store. You heard what people were saying. I mean I couldn’t initially, I couldn’t pick it all up. A lot of it was quick conversation and jargon and stuff, but I began to learn that.

And then the longer I lived in Russia, apparently my clothes got seedier. And when I traveled in Siberia, I would travel outside of Moscow, I got taken for being from Karelia. My Russian must have sounded as though it was half-Finnish or what not. But I got taken for a Russian.

I got stories simply by knowing enough of the language that I could hear what was going on, and I would either get a tip or a part of a story or get into a conversation that would point me to something and I’d go to Literaturnaya Gazeta or whatever and I’d get the researcher and the fixer to help me find some stuff. And I’d put something together. And that happened to me many times.

So having the language was crucial and to me it was, if not insane, at least enormously short sighted of a major news organization to send somebody to a place as important as Russia without at least giving them some Russian.... but most of them didn’t. 

RL: I went back and I’ve been reviewing, looking at the book because it’s been years. I was reading your great interview with Solzhenitsyn and your impressions were spot on. Would you say he was one of the more interesting people of all those you interviewed? Or maybe there was somebody who just kind of sticks in your memory as the most interesting Russian you ever interviewed?

HS: Solzhenitsyn is just a stark figure. He was a tsar! He saw himself as the tsar, I mean. When Kaiser and I went for that first interview... Solzhenitsyn, being a Soviet man, had done what Soviet leaders do. He had written out the entire interview: “Questions and answers by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”

We spent an hour at least, maybe more, arguing with him about how we don’t do interviews that way. If you want to prepare your answers that’s fine, but you don’t do our questions. We ask our questions, you know?

“Well that’s not how Pravda does it,” [Solzhenitsyn said].

I said, “Well we’re not Pravda. We come from America.”

It was very funny. We finally worked it out where we would ask questions and he would start to answer verbally and then he’d say, go to page three on my thing or whatever. And that was all right. I mean after all those were his answers. If he wanted to read them aloud to us or hand them to us in writing, that was okay. But then he wanted a commitment that we’d print the whole thing. And it was 3-4,000 words, you know. It’s a half page of the paper, maybe more. Nobody had interviewed Solzhenitsyn, and so Solzhenitsyn was probably worth that, but I wasn’t in a position to commit The New York Times without ever talking to the foreign editor. The foreign editor didn’t even know I was interviewing Solzhenitsyn at that point. So I couldn’t do it. I think Kaiser committed that he would do it and that relaxed Solzhenitsyn, thank God. I can’t remember what they did. I think the Times in the end did print it all. But I didn’t know that. I couldn’t say that in advance. And Solzhenitsyn had an argument he wanted to make and he wanted it all out there, you know.

So, that’s what I mean by his being a tsar. And I remember just before he got arrested in ‘74 and I hadn’t been in touch with him for a long time. And he did not surface very often. I get this phone call:

«Говорит Александр Исаевич. Смит, Вы там? Приежай ко мне сразу!” [“This is Aleksandr Isayevich speaking. Smith, are you there? Come right away!”].

Just right away. Come. This is a command.

But at least the ко мне made it less military. But it was like, it was an order. I said, “Куда?” [“Where to?”], you know? 

RL: You can’t escape your environment, right?

HS: And well no, that was Solzhenitsyn. He was in an urgent situation. He knew he was – well he was more than a control freak. He perceived himself almost as royalty. Not even among the dissident movement, I don’t even think he regarded the rest of the movement as being all that much related to him. He was like this – he was like Everest. He stood alone.

And that time, it was fascinating, I had a whole bunch of correspondents who had asked me if I ever saw Solzhenitsyn to take them along with me. These are not people who had good Russian necessarily, except de Mauny, who lived across the hall from me. De Mauny had very good Russian. And I didn’t regard him as a competitor, because he was British and not American. And I made him agree that he wouldn’t run anything on the BBC until The New York Times had come out and so forth. So he agreed, it was not a problem. But we went and – my God, the KGB was staked out all around the apartment where Solzhenitsyn had told us to come. And it was the same apartment we’d been in before, but it was not an apartment he lived in, although they may have lived there some of the time, but somebody else had loaned them the apartment.

He was giving us a кусок – a little piece of the Gulag Archipelago, which had not been published. And the head of it I can still remember: “There is no law in the Soviet Union today.” So he was talking about the contemporary man, like holy s**t, they’re gonna love us for this. And de Mauny got him to read some. And he sat there at the table, this little plain wooden table in the sitting room, and his wife Natalia had her hands on his shoulders. And he was in an Oxford cloth I think, button-down shirt, an unusual shirt for a Russian to be wearing. And he started to read this in this deep, sonorous voice of his. And when he read it, it was like listening to Dylan Thomas read poetry. I mean it was moving. I mean he read it with a kind of deliberate pace. The way Soviet writers read.

RL: Poetic.

HS: They’re poetic. That’s right. And it was really very moving and I thought well, the guys who are listening, now they’ve got the whole thing on tape before we get out the door. I wonder if we’re going to get out the door and get back to the office. Or whether or not we’re going to get picked up on the way out. But that was Solzhenitsyn: dramatic, powerful, meaningful and commanding.

Andrei Sakharov was exactly the opposite. I believe Andrei Sakharov was the most Christ-like person I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was truly humble, which is not to say he wasn’t strong, because he was. But he was self-effacing. And he was so human and so caring about other people and so un-self-centered. I mean he knew when he went and stood outside somebody’s trial that he was the person to whom all of us reporters were going to go. He was the person on whom the KGB was going to focus their attention. He was the person around whom other Soviet dissidents would rally. He knew that. But he didn’t strut it in any way. He didn’t use it in any way to bring more attention and more aggrandizement on himself. He was truly humble. In the most fundamental sense of the word. And yet so ardently and firmly committed to the idea that Russia had to open up, the Soviet Union had to open up.

So those were certainly two of the most striking people. I also knew Yevgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak’s son, quite well. My wife and I used to go have dinner with [him and his wife]. We would go there and he looks quite a lot like his father. It was really interesting to be with him and his family. We’d get into interesting discussions that gave me an understanding of Soviet life.

For example, I remember at one point his son was, I don’t know, 14 or 15, and they had been careful with their kids. They didn’t want to put their kids under any pressure. They were careful not to expose the kids to their own dissenting life. But their kids get to be teenagers and you know, what do you tell your kids about what you believe and what you think is going on? And the kids are asking intelligent questions, and they can see the misfits between the propaganda and the reality. And just talking with them as parents. That was fascinating.

I knew Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova. You know, Lev had been in the camp, was in [Solzhenitsyn’s] First Circle, and knew Solzhenitsyn well. I saw them many, many times. Big, wonderful, lumbering – Again, a powerful, intellectual force. But wonderfully plain people. A bunch of friends like that.

I knew a guy named Zinovy Yuriev, and that was very risky for him. He was deputy editor of Krokodil. I had a close relationship with him and [his wife] Larissa. And when I went there to see them I had to do the business about jumping on the subway trains, and changing the trains, and turning around, making sure we were not being followed.

So there were many, and I was fortunate, and I just got more and more dealing with people like that, and they would pass me on to other people and of course to [Andrei] Voznesensky and [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko.* Many times I went to the apartment of Voznesensky and [his wife] Zoya. I knew them, went out to Peredelkino with them. So, there were a lot people, and I think it’s not so much who was the most commanding or most interesting, but it was an ability to put together a tapestry, and that’s really what I was interested in doing. I was only trying to understand the society – how it worked.

And the whole business of Solzhenitsyn living in [Alexander] Tvardovsky’s† home in Barvikha, at the dacha settlement west of Moscow. So the whole notion that this huge country with this huge military power and vast geography kind of all came together in those settlements west of Moscow. The military elite was out there, the scientific elite was out there, the academic elite was out there, the political elite was out there, the governmental elite was out there, the literary elite was out there. And they were all kind of, you know, almost cheek by jowl. And in the midst is the leading dissident – Solzhenitsyn – living at Tvardovsky’s home. If they’d ever wanted to get rid of him, they could have done it right then and there, and yet somehow with the elite there was still enough fear of the Stalinist craziness that kept some restraint.

Brezhnev would overdo it and crack down, and eventually they came together; they couldn’t stand Solzhenitsyn anymore, so they kicked him out. But I gotta tell you that when we walked out of that building with that кусок, that little piece from his big work, The Gulag Archipelago, I wasn’t sure if we were going to get arrested and then, the next morning when I translated this stuff and I sent a piece to the Times, I thought, you know, this is attacking the Soviet Union today. Article 57, you know?

RL: Did you have to go through the censors on that?

HS: No, no, back then you didn’t have to go through the censors, what they would do is they had teletype – they would interfere with the teletype, they would block the teletype and it would break down. And you’re trying to type Solzhenitsyn’s name and it would break down.

But I made a call ahead to tell the foreign editor what I had, and what I was going to try to do, so the paper was more sympathetic. The New York Times had a system then where you could dictate stories into a recording, and I used to do that as a correspondent around America, so I knew how to do that. I think I may have dictated some of the material. Anyway, we got it out. And then, of course he’s arrested the next morning. Eight guys come to get him from the KGB and I thought, “Oh, we are done. We’re the other part of the case.”

I went over – they gave us a call; his wife gave us a call so I went over there. She described the whole thing. I guess there were seven guys who broke in. That’s probably all in the book; I mean it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about that.

But I mean it was just a fantastic reporting experience, to live through that, because you know I was writing about people I knew – these were not just figures, which in fact Solzhenitsyn and well, which political people are. They’re political figures, right, leaders. These people were figures in that sense, but they were people I knew...

They shoved [Solzhenitsyn] out and sent him to Norway. So then I was there, actually, in their apartment one evening, when he called from Norway. So I waited – she said to wait – and I waited. She hangs up and I said, “How is he?”

“У него бодрый голос. Я думаю, что все в порядке.” [“His voice is cheerful. I think that everything is okay.”]

So, just an enormously vibrant reporting experience, just a continuous adventure. If you’re interested in being a reporter, what greater experience is there? I mean it’s just a constant discovery, and that’s what I couldn’t understand about some of my colleagues in the media there – not to be critical of them – but they were sitting on top of this tremendous story; because of detente it was opening up a path – there were all kinds of things we couldn’t do. I kept trying to go to Kazakhstan and they wouldn’t give me permission to go to Kazakhstan. I finally went into the Foreign Ministry and said, “Why can’t I go to Kazakhstan?” and he said “Well, people in Kazakhstan don’t like what you wrote about Armenia,” and I said “I was not aware The New York Times circulated in Kazakhstan? How did they find out about what I wrote about Armenia?”

So, there was a lot you couldn’t do. You could take the train to Murmansk, you could take the train from Moscow to Novosibirsk and onto Irkutsk, and then we flew up to Eskimo country, you know it’s such a huge country, and there are so many cultures and there’s so much to learn that, yeah it was a pain in the neck that you get tailed by the KGB, and that you did not get all the food that you would like to get, and what a nuisance it is when the car breaks down.

I remember I went to see Sakharov once, and I left my car parked on the Ring Road, because he had an apartment right on the Ring, and I came out and the tires had been slashed; he was unhappy about it. So I came in the next morning, I told Ivan, our driver, who was supplied by UPDK, and obviously reporting to the KGB, and I said “Your guys messed up my car, now you go fix it. It’s there, you go get it, you’ve got your key.”

I gotta pay for it, but you guys gotta fix it. I mean, there’s all kind of stuff like that. And then I had kids – I had 2 kids in Russian schools; that was fascinating but they were...

RL: Not in American schools? They were in Russian schools?

HS: Oh no, they were in Russian schools. And that was very interesting... The very first day we showed up with my older daughter, Laurie, who was in 6th or 7th grade, where the kids spoke a good deal more English, and they line up outside the school, these long lines, class by class.

And we’d gone by the school, my wife and I had gone by the school, and talked to the Assistant Head Master or whatever it was, so they would know she’d be coming, and they would be prepared for it. We asked what the routine was, and they told us about lining up and we had to walk her up there and, you know, we both wondered whether or not we were doing something crazy and unfair to her. There’s this line and we went to the right place and we saw a teacher who’d been identified to us and so forth, and she waved at us. Her name was Laurie; and we were about to let Laurie go. It almost brings tears to my eyes. This very sweet young Russian woman walked up to Laura and said “My name is Marina, what’s your name?” And they became very close friends.

So you had moments like that, and you have the moments with the Pasternak family, and you see Sakharov and you know a guy like Lev Kopelev and Voznesensky, and you come to know the Russians as people, as individuals, and they differentiate from each other by their personalities or by their interest. But as a people they are marvelously attractive; they are human. They care, they bleed, they get angry – they do all the things that we do, and in some ways more volubly than we do. And of course they drink a hell of a lot of vodka, but you know they’re just...

See, I think my experience of having that goes back to answer your question about what made my book work. I think those connections, that human relationship that I built with a bunch of Russians and that they were willing to share with me. I think that just affected the way I wrote the book. It was just all through the book; it was just woven into the tapestry of the book. And I think people sensed that. I think people sensed that it was genuine and I wasn’t trying to make the Russians – not into a Cold War enemy – but I was trying to paint a picture of why they behaved like Russians, what they were like. And I know I wrote some pretty tough stuff in that book, but I also wrote some very human stuff. Very varied people of different political outlook in America responded to it, and I think it was the authenticity and the humanity of it.

Bob Kaiser wrote a book at the same time, which was a very good book and it did well, and it should have done well. Yet I don’t think it did anywhere near as well [as The Russians]. It was this human quality that made the difference.

RL: Have you got any idea of how many copies have sold over 40 years?

HS: Oh, well over a million and a half. It sold over a million in paperback. Book of the Month Club told us they sold 260,000. There were more hardbacks on top of that.

RL: That’s a big impact.

HS: Last night there were two people who came up to me and told me they’d read the book and how much it meant to them. You know, this was a small group of people at the reception.

RL: Well you’ve obviously been a Russian watcher – you say you haven’t been there for 10-15 years, but you probably keep a close eye on things and you have plenty of opinions. Just as a reporter, if you were to be able to sit down across a table like this with Vladimir Putin, how would you approach him, what would you ask him? What do you think would be interesting to get at?

HS: Well, as I see Putin, he’s a pretty difficult guy to penetrate. I mean the question that’s in my mind – then the question is how do you ask the question that’s in your mind so that you actually begin to get the answer, as opposed to get an answer – you’re not looking for words, you’re looking for understanding. The question I would ask him is “Where do you really think you’re taking Russia now, by withdrawing into Russia?” I mean, I do understand that we pushed you in a corner by pushing NATO so far west. George Kennan said it pretty clearly when Clinton expanded and NATO began to take in Eastern Europe – this was the start of the new Cold War. We pushed him back. I do understand that, but he can’t possibly think that Russians as a people are going to thrive just exporting oil and natural gas, and you had a chance coming out of the Cold War to take some very top quality scientists, engineers, probably not very good business managers, but technologies and so forth and market them to the world – become globally competitive. And you’ve retreated, and that’s got to be a long-term step backwards for this nation. Why are you doing that? If it is just fear, then how do we overcome the fear? What do you need from us? And then what are you prepared to bargain in return?

I don’t believe he’d answer me, but that’s what I would like to know. And the other thing, there’s just internal repression, which is just awful to watch. Gorbachev opened up so much, and Yeltsin added quite a bit until he started mucking up. It’s just tragic; it’s just awful seeing the crushed expectations that people had as Putin gathered more and more of the power into the Kremlin, into himself. Took it away from provincial governments, controlled the media – just one thing after another, systematically. Crushing the oligarchs, well, I can somewhat understand that.

But inside I do want to know about that; I would want to ask about that. But I think the really important question to ask him is “Where the hell do you think you’re taking your country over the long-run; you as a leader? Because you’re going to be remembered, and are you going to be remembered as Putin the Black, or are you going to be remembered as Putin the guy who put a kibosh on the modernization of Russia? I mean you had a chance when you let Medvedev run the government. He was starting to run another way and he was going after corruption, he was going after a modernized economy; he wasn’t throwing Russian nationalism and Russian interests to the wolves. There was another path you could have taken, and it is within your own family, and it isn’t just Medvedev but there are others in his cabinet.”

When he first came in, there was a question in people’s minds whether or not the repressive side of the KGB was going to rise and be in control of Putin’s mind and his entourage, or whether or not the foreign intelligence side of the KGB, which is attuned to the world and understands “you gotta get modern,” whether or not that side of his brain and his experience would have sway. And I always figured it was going to be a battle between the two, but boy it sure became a lopsided battle. 

So I guess that’s the most fundamental question I’d ask. And then you’d get into Ukraine, you’d get into Syria, but Ukraine and Syria are geopolitical moves; it’s much more this shutdown of foreign NGOs, this rebuilding the mistrust of foreigners – I mean I don’t know why anybody with any capital would go there and put it at risk and try to form a mutual corporation with Russians and hire the smartest people in Russia to work with them and work on modern airplane technology, computer technology, whatever. There are a lot of really bright people there and it’s a shame for them, it’s a shame for us not to have the benefits of that. It’s just power hungry, fear-driven policy. I would have thought Putin was smart enough at least to know that he’s taken a fork in the road and he could have taken another fork. An interesting question to me would be to get him to talk about that other fork.

RL: So how do you think he’d answer? How do you think he would justify what he’s up to?

HS: Easy. We caused it – we didn’t leave him any alternative. He wanted to reach across, attach people to NATO, be observers, why do we keep pushing NATO to the east, why didn’t we use the Conference on European Security and Cooperation as the vehicle for a pan-European umbrella of cooperation and exchange. Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia; they’re 125 miles from St. Petersburg and you got your ships there and all that kind of stuff. You didn’t like it when Khrushchev wanted to put the missiles into Cuba – how do you think we feel about this? You can’t play that game with us. This is our Caribbean and it’s our sphere of influence. We have a Monroe Doctrine, too. It’s called The Near Frontier.

Yeah, I think they put the blame directly on us. That would be the frustrating thing, because there’s some legitimacy to that and what you really want to do with somebody like Putin or some Russian leader is to get beyond those statements, acknowledge some validity to those statements and then talk about how do we break that down? What do we need to do? Where can we collaborate? Where are the things that – ISIS is a good example. You’re scared stiff of the Chechens, you’ve got people leaving southern Russia, Chechnya, you’ve got people who are Muslim who are going and joining the Front, and ISIS.

And they’re going to come back? They’re going to come back? They’re going to cause trouble? Why do you send your friggin’ planes to Syria and bomb the people we’re backing instead of bombing ISIS? So I mean I think there are some ways of engaging, but I think he’s pretty much given up. I think he’s read Obama and figures he’s a wimp and he can push him around, or the opposite – that he’s not a wimp but he can’t make a deal with them. I think they clearly don’t get along as personalities.

And it looks like it’s going to be that way for quite a while. He’s not going away. If Hillary wins it will be really interesting to see how Putin deals with a woman. RL