SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE ⟩ "Putin Knows He Missed His Big Opportunity in 2014"

And when you write a book like this, you have to approach it with some sort of humility as well, because you have to sort of understand that you know so little even about people that we live with in our lives that you've got to have some humility about distant worlds, the similarities, but also the vast differences.

When you look at the value system and cultural world of, say, the Romans, it's so different. It's so weird compared to what we are, very Christianized, you know, mental geography. And even when I was writing about Stalin and his court, I had to remind myself that, though they were only 70 or 100 years ago, they existed in a completely different mental world.

And of course, if you're writing about people inside different movements, you know Hezbollah or Islamic State, one has to imagine completely different mindsets, as Putin said to Joe Biden famously: «we may look like you, but we're not like you». So, these are the lessons, I think, brought up by your very good question. Thank you.

Interviewer: In the preface of «The World...», you write about how you read Arnold Toynbee as a child. Eighty years ago, he was a world-famous historian who put forward a bold theory about how civilisations rise and fall. Few remember him today, but almost everyone has heard of Francis Fukuyama and his 'end of history'. Recently, even Russian President Vladimir Putin felt it necessary to call Fukuyama 'short-sighted'. What do you think of theories of history?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think the best history is written without ideologies and without the interference of the present. And you know, that's one of the great dangers. There are various dangers writing history.

One is trying to be a prophet. Historians, as a rule, are very bad at this. It always leads to terrible humiliation, not naming names among my colleagues, but another sort of huge trap is the opposite, teleology. You know, where you know what's going to happen.

So, anyone who fails, you predict their failure from the beginning. And anyone who succeeds, you see that. You see their success from the beginning as well. While, as Kissinger said, most of these successes are unexpected and unplanned and a surprise to everybody. So, those are dangerous.

But then the greatest danger is not the past or the future, but the present – writing history according to the values and pressures and orthodoxies of the present, because the orthodoxies of the present are just as crazy.

When people look back at now and look at all the things that we're obsessed with on the right and the left, progressive and conservative, it will be like looking back at the iconoclastic debate in Byzantium. It will seem utterly ridiculous. Much of it already does seem ridiculous.

Yet we're also living in a period when historians are both essential and important. It's always true historians were, like when I was given Toynbee. I don't want to go into too much about Toynbee, but as a child, I was just dazzled by his kind of breadth of vision.

As an adult, I think he was either idiosyncratic or wrong about everything, and I think many of his values were just preposterous, but that's another thing. The point was that at that time, you're right, he was regarded as kind of the great world historian.

People weren't writing world history then. World history has now become sort of industries. It's literally a book of world history coming out every week from somebody who's using the coinage or the history of the wheel to tell world history. So, there's lots of different ways to do it.

But as for Putin and Fukuyama, Fukuyama, I think, is very good, by the way, and his end of history essays, I think, stands well. He was just unfortunate that he used that expression because he didn't need to. But he liked it, and this is often the danger for historians and all political commentators.

It's just the shock value of this spectacular drama, when actually, if he hadn't put that title, it would be regarded as a very prophetic, clever essay. So, shame that he chose the title, but I very much doubt that Putin has read that essay. But the Putin example is important, because history is very important.

I've always argued that in secular societies without religion they're adrift, looking for moral structures and sources of legitimacy and authenticity, and both of these things make history terribly important, as something, as a moral force to deploy, and that makes history even more important.

History is also very dangerous to write. It's always been dangerous in the Soviet Union, in China, in Iran, in many places, but it's also become much more dangerous in the West too – more dangerous to be a writer, to be a public writer too.

But it's more important because social media has brought it to millions of new people but also undermined the rules and norms that we use to judge history and to police history, if you like.

I don't mean police in terms of politics. What I mean is to judge sources and judge how history is written. It's reliability, I guess it's authority. And so, your question just draws attention to the fact that it's now more important than ever.

Interviewer: For most of its history, mankind has considered slavery completely normal. My ancestors were freed from serfdom a little over 200 years ago and then had to buy their land back from their former masters – I have seen my great-great-great-grandfather’s payment receipts. After the declaration of independence, the Republic of Estonia was pressured by the international community to compensate the estate owners. You also write about how the abolition of slavery went hand in hand with compensations to slave owners. What does this tell us?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: It simply tells us that these emancipations were made in a world where it was still a conception of ownership over humans, which is now unthinkable, unconscionable and unbearable. But you're absolutely right.

The interesting thing about studying the slavery is how it was part of every society on Earth in one way or another. Obviously, there were many different definitions of slavery and types of slavery. You could argue whether serfdom was full slavery, or a type of slavery linked to land or whatever.

But the point is, from the very first documents that exist in Sumer, in the ancient Fertile Crescent, right up to the sale of war slaves by Islamic State in our own lifetimes recently – slavery has been a part of human societies.

I think as soon as there was war, there was slavery, maybe even before, but as soon as there was organized war, there were organized captives. But that's just a guess, we don't really know.

But the point is that the Black Lives Matter movement was very valuable in that way, because it returned people to focus on Atlantic slavery, which had been neglected. But because it was all about America, it only concentrates on Atlantic slavery, as if that was the only slavery.

Of course, in the book, I go into all the slaveries which were exactly the same size, but no one in America is interested in them. There's no professor studying these things in American universities, because they're only interested in their own society, which is a very American feature.

But if you're really writing a real global history, and that's what I wanted this book to be, then I began to study East African slavery, Black Sea slavery, and African slavery within African societies, and the slaveries of different systems in eastern Asia, including China.

So, slavery is very much part of this. And serfdom, of course, and the historian needs to recognize this without sentimentality, that the Western slavery as many other flaws in Western society, were not unique to the Western world.

Interviewer: My home country Estonia is mentioned twice in your book: in connection with the Livonian War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that’s not bad for such a small country, and the context isn’t bad either: Ivan the Terrible failed to conquer what is now Estonia, and in the end, so did Stalin. I like to think of it as our revenge – had Stalin not annexed the Baltic states, the Soviet Union might have survived. Do you agree with this line of thinking?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, I like it (laughs). I like the concept. That's why I like the idea – I think that's right. I think it's ironic and fitting that Estonia played such a key role, and Lithuania and Georgia, in the fall of the Soviet Union. There is some justice and revenge.

I could have gone into much more detail in Estonian history. Because, as you know, I was here from the early 1990s several times, and I wrote a lot about the fall of the Soviet Union. And in this book, the historian, the author, has to make massive decisions all the time.

For example, writing about Southeast Asia in a book like this, you can't write the history of Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. You've got to decide on one. So, in that case, I chose Cambodia. Similarly, if you're talking about the Balkans, you can't write a history of Croatia, Serbia and Albania. So, I chose Albania. I had all these decisions all the time.

And the decision making was, was, of course, completely capricious, but partly what I knew most about already, and partly what interested me. What I wanted this book to be was something unusual.

Normally in most world histories, even though they claim to be world histories, they're all very much based from Western Europe looking and America looking out. And the other thing is, they're usually about big countries. Empires are falling.

So, I wanted this to be about small countries, not just a victor's history, as it were. So, there are whole sections on Hawaii, on Haiti, on Albania, on Georgia too. So that's the nature of the book I wanted it to be, but a lot of these decisions were difficult.

For example, I wanted to have a whole section on Madagascar, but in the end, you couldn't just do it in a short section, it was so complicated. Everything has to be done properly, if you can. So anyway, apologies to Estonia.

Interviewer: You write that after the Cold War, the Americans should have been more generous: offering Russia a Marshall Plan and coopting it into the European Union or even NATO. It is difficult for us in Estonia to understand this, because we remember how reluctantly Yeltsin pulled out the troops and how even Andrei Kozyrev, probably Russia's most pro-Western foreign minister ever, refused to call the destruction of our independence an occupation. Are we misunderstanding something?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: No.

It may well be that we mishandled Russia, or it may well be that nothing we could have done would have pleased Russia, because the same elite, former party people and former Cheka people remained in control, really, all the time, and that their program was always to restore the Imperium.

But I think it's always important to look at things and not just presume that one's own side has always got everything right. And also, to analyse what could have happened. That wasn't the book I was writing. But how would Russia have worked within the European Union? How would it have worked within NATO? Would it have immediately destroyed NATO from within?

Interviewer: Like with the League of Nations?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes. Would it have enabled Russia to feel that it was at the top table and its greatness was finally recognized. I just think one's got have some humility. And I think one mustn't always presume, whichever these kind of deep conflicts, that there's only one way of looking at it, and that's our way, and that we did everything right. I think that would be insane.

There's no doubt – I know, because I lived through it and knew some of these people – that there was a sense of incredible jubilation that we'd won the Cold War. And that even if we didn't proclaim «this is the end of history», we felt that. West liberal democracies had triumphed, and our value system and international law and our political sort of architecture had won.

As historians, we know that no one wins for long and that no victory is complete. Of the presidents of America at that time, Clinton was the most sophisticated in terms of studying world affairs. Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) was the most experienced. Bush 43 (George W. Bush) was neither. But the thing is, none of them knew what to do.

I was in the Soviet Union in 1991, and I was traveling around, and I was in contact with the embassies of both Britain and America and I was being debriefed by their intelligence people. And they were telling me that the Soviet Union was going to survive, even in 1991, and that it wasn't really going to fall apart, and that there'd be a new arrangement.

And I was saying to them, it no longer exists, and they had no intel on the ground, because all their intelligence people were in Moscow, and it was only a short period when that was happening.

It's quite striking to me, even as somebody in their early 20s, that there were times when I knew more than the intelligence services of the great powers. And that tells you a lot about, there wasn't real preparation for this, and probably there wasn't deep enough thought about how to handle it. That's all I was saying.

Interviewer: You also claim that if nuclear weapons didn’t exist, the ‘open world’ would have gone to war with Russia over Ukraine, just as it did in the Crimean War 171 years ago. Does this mean that if Ukraine had not given up nuclear weapons, there would have been no war?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: It's quite possible that that's the case.

To answer your question in parts, one is, we would have gone to war about Ukraine if it had been 1853, and we probably would have invaded Crimea again and, and that's exactly what I mean. This is basically exactly what happened in 1853, but Russia now has nuclear weapons and Ukraine doesn't.

Second part, if Ukraine had kept nuclear weapons, Russia would certainly not have invaded. So, was that a huge mistake to give them up? I don't know.

We don't have to invent a history of Ukraine to recognize that Ukraine is now a nation. But in 1991 it was a pretty flimsy construct and I'm just not sure that that in 1991, 1992 the Ukrainian state structure, could have maintained nuclear weapons. That was certainly the thinking, not just among the West, but among the Ukrainian leaders too.

So again, hard to second guess that.

I'm also convinced that if Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014, they would have got the whole country, and nothing would have been done about it except a few sanctions, and there would have been no Ukrainian army and not enough Ukrainian national consciousness to really resist it.

And I'm just guessing this, but I think that during COVID, when Putin was sitting at home in his mansion, this occurred to him strongly and he realized that there'd been an opportunity there.

Interviewer: The family that emerges from the pages of your last book has spent thousands of years killing each other – just to secure the power of a single person. Reading all this, you feel a deep respect for democracy – it truly must be a brilliant invention, allowing power to change hands without endless bloodshed. And yet, mankind does not seem to grasp the significance of this invention. Nobody wants to give up electricity and start burning candles, yet people are constantly willing to abandon democracy. Why do you think is that?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Democracy versus autocracy, open versus closed, these systems exist all for one reason, which is to provide security to people.

And that's why in some manner or other, we formed societies, and why we looked to what we sought, people to rule us and systems to rule us, systems of governance, and all of them, are a search for some sort of security, continuity, consistency and predictability in a totally dangerous and unpredictable world.

So, they have, and the reason why they've existed is because they work to some extent. And so, the truth is that they both have qualities. The big challenge is to try and get a balance between the two that works, that provides the advantages of one and mitigates the disadvantages.

The great thing about autocracies is that they are predictable. They have continuity. They have consistency. The rulers have experience, and they also provide a delicious appetite of glory abroad.

But the disadvantage is the rulers become lunatics. The glory abroad leads to global adventures that lead to wars that kill and destroy societies. They become isolated, and you can't get rid of them. They become rigid.

But then the great thing about democracies is, as you said, you can change them, and you can say what you like to people anywhere, and these are wonderful things. You can leave, you can stay, you can live how you wish.

But there are huge disadvantages too, and we're seeing some of them now. They're enormously inconsistent. There's no forward planning. Everything is short term. Every three years, you start campaigning for a new leadership.

So, there's very little time to govern, and the governance you get is completely unplanned and ad hoc. The people you get are totally inexperienced. Many times, they've never run anything at all except public relations marketing campaigns. And when they arrive, the decision making is inconsistent.

We're seeing it with Trump, but not just with Trump. Look at the Starmer government. You'd expect them to be well prepared and to be confident, because they have a huge majority. And to be responsible, because that's what they've told us.

Actually, they're completely inconsistent, and they're destroying confidence almost as much as Trump in different way. So, this is one reason democracies are problematic.

Another is, that they suffer from group think and orthodoxies that are exacerbated by social media. And they are very manipulable by tiny cadres of activists. And the type of people who win election, who reached the top in this system seem to be the sort of people who the system needs to root to govern. So that's why democracies are now under pressure.

Interviewer: In Estonia, we recently marked the 100th anniversary of the historic Cultural Autonomy of National Minorities Act, under which the Estonian Germans and Estonian Jews established their own cultural self-governments. At the time, this was unprecedented in Europe. In May 2007 Shimon Perez visited Estonia to open a synagogue in Tallinn. There has never been any anti-Semitism in independent Estonia – it has been brought here by either Soviet or Nazi occupations. But now we too have seen 'from the river to the sea' slogans. Where does this anti-Semitism come from?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: You're describing something that's happening across the western world.

Antisemitism has always been present in European and West Asian societies, and it always reflects some flaw, some divergence within those societies. And because the Jews were always a minority living amongst foreign cultures but refusing totally to assimilate.

Of course, they're always vulnerable and of course, that led to cultural tropes that survived throughout Christian society.

I mean, starting in Byzantine times with the first antisemitic legislation, which was brought by the early Constantine the great and the early Christian emperors to reflect the views that the Jews had rejected and possibly killed Christ.

And so, the tropes that we're now seeing activated are very ancient, and they're very deep within our societies. Also, one has to realize there are aspects of this that aren't to do with antisemitism.

As a historian, you can see that our relationship with the Holy Land is a special one, and it's very ironic that these progressives who are campaigning against Israel are really reflecting the deep crusading, colonialist and imperialist strain that is, that is in their unconscious. They'd be very shocked to learn that they were acting out this.

Because of the nature of the Bible, the Crusades and Christian links to the Holy Land Western mind does have a feeling of moral propriety over the Holy Land, and always has, and at times this worked in favour of an Israeli state. Now it's most certainly acting against the Israeli state, but it's the same thing. So historically, that's partly what we're seeing here.

But there are other aspects. The way that Israel is judged in a way that no other state is judged, the lack of balance in the coverage, and so on and so forth. Many of these do reflect a dormant antisemitism and it always changes.

In the Middle Ages, it was about religion. In the 20th century, it was about race and ideology. In the late 20th century, it was a leftist analysis, it was regarded as a capitalist, imperialist outlier. And now in an era when we're obsessed with identity and race and decolonization, it is seen to represent all those things.

Of course, there is a difference between criticizing Israel, where there's much to criticize, and I criticize it a lot, by the way, and being antisemitic. We have to confront the fact that it doesn't mean you're antisemitic if you criticize Israel, but it does mean you're antisemitic, if you claim that Israel should not even exist.

And I guess that's one of the lines that we're constantly seeing. We're also constantly seeing tropes that really do the blood libel, the inversion of the Holocaust, that undoubtedly are antisemitic. One also has to remember that 50% of the world's Jews live in Israel and it is nonetheless hard to separate the two.

But I would say, there's an enormous amount to criticize in the way that Israel has conducted this war, for example, but much of that criticism makes no attempt to confront the way that Hamas has fought this war and deliberately sacrificed its own people.

I just want the war to be over as soon as possible.

Interviewer: In January this year, before Trump took office, you gave an interview to Kathimerini, that can be considered as Postimees in Greece. And of course, it is impossible for me not to say that our paper is 60 years older (laughs). But here’s my question: you predicted that Trump will be tougher on Putin than he appears. Much has happened since then – do you still think we should expect that?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: I said two things. I said that Trump would be much tougher on Putin and Trump will be much harder on Netanyahu.

The first certainly hasn't happened yet. If anything, he seems curiously, I would say at best becalmed and at worst, beguiled by Putin.

And I think that Trump has always had a sort of fascination for Putin. I think it's because he's always had a bit of a boy crush on Putin, who's the sort of tougher boy, like the tough boy at school. I think that's part of it.

So, I still think that Trump will end up being tougher on Putin, if only from hurt feelings that Putin has failed to become the friend that he expected him to be.

And as for the other prediction, I think that's already started, that Netanyahu will find that Trump is much tougher to deal with than Biden ever was.

Interviewer: In the final pages of «The World», you write that the open world has never been richer or more secure than it is today, yet what you call ‘comfort democracies’ have started to consume themselves, much like medieval Constantinople. And yet, I have a feeling that you are not entirely pessimistic about the future of our family. Am I right?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: I am, by nature, an optimist and, and I do think that there are deep fissures and flaws that we really face, and we do need for democracies to work. We do need leaders and parties that have the courage to overthrow the orthodoxies of liberalism, if you like, of neoliberalism, on migration, on defense, on climate change and there are other things, and not to be intimidated.

There are other huge issues too, that they need to face up to. I mean, fertility, the population. The population is about to face a sort of massive decline in all of Europe and America and South America, and also Asia. The only places that the population is going to boom are in Sub Saharan Africa.

That is going to cause a massive crisis. And our politicians are already very frightened to say these things, because they're afraid of being accused of being racist or climate deniers. So, the key to democracies is for leaders to either become braver and more honest, or we will elect Trumpian figures. I don't know what the word populist means, really.

This in itself doesn't necessarily mean we are going to face more democratic disasters. After all, the whole point of democracies is to give voters choice and to elect governors that can make changes that the people want. So, this whole sort of fear of populism doesn't worry so much in itself.

Obviously, the worry comes if the populists then go on to set up dictatorships, then we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. But otherwise, this could be democracies working in their own way. So that's one thing I'm optimistic about.

And another thing is, I think that just as we have an endless ability to self-mutilate and self-sabotage, we also have great abilities to negotiate, to use our ingenuity to find solutions to things. So yes, I'm not as desperate as many people are.

Interviewer: You have said that social media has its charms, but it is also a ‘cesspit of lies and loathing’, and when lies are corrected, the response is often: ‘I aint reading all that!’ Do you see a danger here that with a generation used to watch short video clips on TikTok, this battle is already lost?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: You might be right. Which also brings me back to another weird effect, which is the fertility question again, because one of the reasons why people aren't coupling is because they're happy at home with their phones.

There are a lot of benefits to have a phone at home, because you only read opinions that you like. You can only see things you want to see. You can buy anything without leaving your bed. You don't have to meet people. You can watch pornography. So, there are huge benefits for it.

And to take your question the wide, one of the big challenges, as I say in the conclusion, is we haven't yet learned how to manage this technology in lots of different senses, in terms of politics, in terms of culture, in terms of history and the search for balanced, knowledgeable history, but also in personal relationships and how our families work.

This needs to be a mixture of family education and state intervention and legislation. But we're not there yet, and these things take a long time.

With the robber barons in America, for example, it took about 60 years for America to legislate against trusts and to bring in rules that are legislated about medicines, for example, and drinks and licensing, and all these things that we regard as essential. And it may take us a while to do this.

And of course, initially, our Democratic leaders are very frightened of these despots of data, as I call them in a sort of joke time. But the point is that they're very afraid of these people. They're also very afraid of the activists who are very inspired by the spark wheel of social media hysterias.

But as I said, the leaders of liberal democracies have got to get a grip on these issues or they'll be swept away by revolutionary democratic leaders and ultimately, possibly by dictatorships. That's the biggest danger that we face now, really.