Event Coverage Highlight

by Chad Bouchard

Two journalists who covered different eras of crisis in Russia said during an OPC program on May 1 that uncertainty and brinksmanship in U.S.-Russia relations have set the stage for potential disaster.

The program included Jill Dougherty, former CNN Moscow bureau chief and a current Russia expert for the network, whose memoir My Russia details more than five decades of work and study in Russia and covers the life of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She called Putin’s authoritarian rule unstable, and said he is “flirting” with nuclear disaster.

“You know, if you compare it to the old Soviet days, there were more people making decisions in the power structure than there are right now. It’s essentially Putin and his minions, close associates, many of whom come from the power ministries, security services and intelligence,” she said. “Putin is talking about nuclear weapons all the time. I still, hope – believe – that he does not want an all-out nuclear war. I do not think he’s crazy, but he is flirting with this. And when you get into flirting and threatening, things can happen.”

Marvin Kalb, former Moscow correspondent for CBS News, discussed his new book A Different Russia, the third in his trilogy of memoirs, which details his work in Russia from the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Kalb wrote about his experience covering Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and compares the differences between Khrushchev’s leadership with that of Vladimir Putin.

OPC Governor Beth Knobel, an associate professor at Fordham University who spent 14 years working as a journalist based in Russia, moderated.

Kalb said he sees a dangerous level of instability in leadership from both Trump and Putin, which has brought U.S.-Russia relations to an extremely dangerous point.

“There is something, in my judgment, profoundly wrong with our president. He says strange things, and that leads to uncertainty. And that is terribly dangerous – particularly when he’s working opposite a skillful former KGB person who is determined in his mind to recapture the glory of ‘Mother Russia,’” he said. “And that can only be done if you have Ukraine.”

Kalb said he’s also concerned about the lack of expertise on Russia within the Trump administration and the president’s most trusted advisors.

“Who are the people around President Trump who know anything beyond what they read in the newspaper about Russia? We are surrounded by people who may mean well but know very little about Russia,” he said. “Russia comes through one-dimensionally to people who do not understand that it is composed of many dimensions. And that is a scary thing for me. Mr. Witkoff might be the greatest real estate guy ever in New York, but that doesn’t make him the negotiator for Russia and the Ukraine war, for Iran.”

Dougherty agreed, saying Putin has studied Trump, and sees him as “simplistic” and ignorant of history.

“I think Putin looks at Trump as a person without a lot of historical knowledge about the world and what makes things important. Putin looks at history, and it’s very important. He says he reads history books. He justified Ukraine with an historical treatise that was gigantic and went back thousands of years. So, they’re fundamentally looking at the world in different ways. Trump is much more simplistic. Not to say that Putin is a an intellectual, but he’s a smart man. He really is a smart person. And so with his KGB training, I think he is doing everything to manipulate Trump.”

The two authors each discussed their unique sources and writing process for their memoirs.

Dougherty was able to use a series of letters she had written to an Irish friend while living in Russia 50 years ago, which he had kept and returned to her in 2020.

“It was a gold mine of very long descriptions about what we had gone through. And then I had some diaries and [broadcast] scripts for almost 10 years,” she said. “So in the book I get into a lot on Ukraine, a lot on the media, the Baltics, Georgia to a certain extent, and post-Soviet nostalgia, one of my favorite subjects.”

Kalb said this latest memoir, which is his 18th book, takes place from January 1961 until the fall of 1963, starting with President John F. Kennedy coming into office, the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, and then Kennedy and Khrushchev stumbling into the Cuban missile crisis.

“I think that people today do not quite grasp that a lot of people during the Cold War in the 1950s, 1960s, these dark days of the Cold War, did not know at that time whether the crises in Berlin or Cuba would lead to a nuclear war. And for a journalist, I can tell you flat out, it was an incredibly exciting story.”

Below are links to purchase the books.

A Different Russia: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course

My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin

Click the window below to watch a playlist of video clips from the program.