“So I’ve created a counter-myth to the official one—is that so bad?” – Oliver Stone on JFK, 1991
“We’ll improvise,” Oliver Stone tells Vladimir Putin at the outset of his latest film, directing the Russian president to his seat at a circular table. “No rules about this.” The Russian President takes his seat, smiles, and affirms that directive with an affable gesture and a simple English “yes.” Thus begins The Putin Interviews, a four-hour documentary series filmed between 2015 and 2017, that purports to offer a rare, honest, and intimate look into what makes the Russian leader tick.
Of course, anyone familiar with either Oliver Stone or Vladimir Putin will understand that there are rules about this. Stone has made his career with films that traffic in conspiracy theories and cast a skeptical eye on American claims to exceptionalism and moral authority. Vladimir Putin, perpetual critic of Western hypocrisy, is both a consistent mouthpiece for those views and a compelling prism through which to explore them. Interviewer and subject here reinforce each other’s priors; Stone may not know a word of Russian, but for much of The Putin Interviews he and Putin are effectively speaking the same language.
Like Stone’s other forays into documentary filmmaking, The Putin Interviews is best understood not as journalism but as advocacy. In this case, Stone is advocating for Putin—or at least his idea of him. Stone’s Putin is a strong and successful (if reluctant) leader, a principled defender of Russian interests, a rational actor, a staunch enemy of Western imperialism.
Above all, Stone’s Putin is misunderstood: the victim of a Western political and media establishment that has unfairly “insulted and abused” him, as the director put it to Stephen Colbert. Given Stone’s fawning treatment of Putin, some critics have argued that he has effectively launched the Russian president’s re-election campaign. But The Putin Interviews more closely resembles a kind of re-education campaign, with Stone showing the unwashed Western masses the error of their ways.
Needless to say, Stone’s four-hour hagiography is full of convenient omissions and credulous assumptions. It offers a few tantalizing glimpses of Putin’s daily life, a few telling insights into his thinking, and a few memorably off-color jokes. In many ways, though, The Putin Interviews tells us less about its ostensible subject than it does about his admirers. It’s a self-portrait of Stone as much as a direct one of Putin—but the picture it paints is hardly flattering.
The basic rules that Stone follows in The Putin Interviews are all established within the first episode. First, there is the tendency to cede the floor to Putin, allowing the Russian leader to spin his own version of events with minimal pushback or follow-up. That begins innocently enough, as Putin describes his journey from a hardscrabble Leningrad childhood to the seat of power in Moscow. It’s a sympathetic account, allowing Putin to speak with unfeigned sympathy about the social “catastrophe” visited upon the Russian people in the 1990s, while positioning himself as the reluctant leader who assumed the heavy burden of leading the country. It’s also a convenient version of events, which allows Putin to claim maximum credit for turning Russia around while distancing himself from Yeltsin and the chaos of the 1990s. Stone seems curiously disinterested in pressing Putin for details about other formative events, whether his famous stand against anti-KGB rioters in Dresden or less flattering episodes like his mismanagement of a “resources-for-food” scheme during his time in Leningrad government. Instead, Stone sets the tone early on by allowing Putin to pick and choose whatever elements of his narrative he prefers to emphasize.
The second rule Stone follows is quite simple: give Putin credit. “You’re credited with many fine things,” he prompts Putin early on, before listing a litany of accomplishments (Russia’s rising GDP, falling poverty rates, and so on) selected to demonstrate his positive track record. Stone is not wrong to mention these economic achievements; they are as much a part of Putin’s legacy as anything else, and constitute a key source of his support. But Stone offers them up so that Putin can nod in affirmation, and then pile on with other dubious achievements. Putin credits himself with establishing the rule of law in Russia, for instance, and bringing oligarchs to heel by “[differentiating] money from power”—a real howler for anyone familiar with the kleptocratic underpinnings of the Russian state.
As a third rule, Stone acknowledges criticisms of Russia when he must—but always so that Putin can excuse or deflect them. When he asks Putin to set the record straight about Russia’s restrictions on gay rights, privacy, and media freedom, Stone accepts Putin’s explanations at face value, and then goes even further to carry water for him. At one point, for instance, Putin claims that he has liberalized the party registration process so that the Russian electorate actually has too many options, and that opposition figures have simply failed to offer a meaningful alternative. Stone then cuts to clownish footage of pocket opposition figures like Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as if to prove Putin’s point: Russia’s democracy is fair and free, but only United Russia has a serious agenda.
Indeed, Stone always appears determined to make Putin appear the most reasonable man in the room. He therefore tends to ask leading, loaded questions that stake out a maximalist position and allow Putin to claim a sensible middle ground. When Putin initially declines an invitation to speculate about American grand strategy, for instance, Stone offers his own take:
Stone: Well, I can state it for you and you can argue with me. I could say I think, or many people think the U.S. strategy right now is to destroy the Russian economy, bring it back to 1990s levels, and change the leadership of Russia, make a new ally out of Russia for the United States and basically dominate Russia as it once did and perhaps they feel they did not go far enough and take your nuclear arsenal away from Russia.
Putin: This train of thought and policy is quite possible. If that is the case, then I believe this is an erroneous policy […] such a view of relations with Russia is not oriented towards the future. People who believe like that, they do not see 25 to 50 years to the future. And if they had a look, then they would probably go about building relations with Russia in a different frame.
The point of these exchanges is always to make Putin appear the rational actor, responding to an aggressive and unreasonable West. And that is linked with the most fundamental rule guiding The Putin Interviews: whenever possible, blame the United States. The documentary sometimes does this explicitly, with Stone and Putin predictably blaming NATO expansion or U.S.-backed foreign coups for the current strain in relations. But the film’s most insidious accusations are its implicit ones. When Putin alleges that the CIA supported Chechen terrorists to destabilize Russia, for instance, Stone cuts to somber footage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the 2004 Beslan school siege, with title cards listing the casualty counts for each attack. Stone does not elaborate on either event, nor does he directly state that the U.S. is to blame for those deaths—but the editing makes his insinuation clear enough.
It is moments like these that show Stone at his most conspiratorial, suggesting that the true aim of The Putin Interviews is less to understand Russia than to lob a tired leftist critique at the United States. Stone’s conspiracy-mongering is always selective; he shows no curiosity about conspiracies that could cast Putin in a bad light (like those mysterious 1999 apartment bombings, for instance), but whenever there is a chance to imply covert and nefarious wrongdoing by Washington, he takes the bait.
In the past, Stone has justified his films’ dubious historical assertions as representing a “counter-myth” to official U.S. narratives, which he subjects to extreme scrutiny. But that often leaves Stone in the position of accepting foreign governments’ narratives at face value.
For all of Stone’s ideological blinders, The Putin Interviews is not without its insights. Even in this carefully curated portrait, Putin betrays some revelatory tensions in his worldview. He decries NATO as a sovereignty-sucking monstrosity (“NATO has no allies, it has only vassals”) even as he complains that the U.S. establishment would never allow Russia to join. He asserts the principle of national sovereignty as the basic foundation of international relations, while conceding that some countries are more sovereign than others (“There are just a handful of countries who can really wield their sovereignty.”) He wrestles with how to talk about Edward Snowden, praising him as a courageous defector in one breath and calling him “foolhardy” for publicly leaking in the next. None of these contradictions in Putin’s thinking are new, but they do find a compelling expression in the film.
The film is also a showcase for Putin’s mordant wit. The Russian president sits stone-faced for much of the film (even when he watches Dr. Strangelove), but he displays flashes of humor where his personal charisma shines through. When asked about John McCain, perhaps the Senate’s leading Russia hawk, Putin likens him to Rome’s Cato the Elder, constantly declaring that Carthage must be destroyed. And he drily trolls the outgoing Obama administration, saying that Joe Biden’s receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom reminded him of the Soviet Politburo dolling out medals to each other. “I thought that was very funny, to be honest,” Putin says. “I understood that the administration had run out of time to take any serious decisions.”
Putin reserves no such mockery for Donald Trump. Predictably enough, Putin praises Trump’s political instincts and desire for better relations with Russia, while categorically denying Russian interference in the 2016 elections. But those strained denials, too, offer an offhand insight. Putin insists that he would never interfere in the U.S. elections, in part because American elections produce only cosmetic change anyway. “Bureaucracy is what rules the world,” he tells Stone; American presidents change but the policy does not. That rationalization for Russia’s noninterference is hardly convincing, but it does suggest that Putin expects no profound change out of Trump. Putin’s discussion of Trump suggests not a puppet master gloating over his success, but a man caught slightly off guard by Trump’s victory—the Kremlin never thought he would be allowed to win—and only mildly hopeful that he can overcome the bureaucratic obstacles to a reset.
Moments like these do shed a light on Putin’s thinking, which is Stone’s ostensible purpose and certainly a worthy goal. The United States does suffer from a lack of understanding about Putin, after all, and never more so than now. On the anti-Putin Left, we have a host of newly minted Russia “experts” proliferating on Twitter, casting their nets wherever they can for evidence that Donald Trump is a Putin puppet. On the anti-Putin Right, there is the usual assortment of hawks who are fond of declaring Putin a bully, a tyrant, a KGB thug: all accurate assertions, to some degree, but ones that tend to shut down the debate around Russia rather than illuminate it. And on both sides, there is a common and mistaken assumption that Washington faces a Putin problem, not a Russia problem: as if the continued disagreements between the United States and Russia are the personal province of one man, and will not outlast his time in office.
A film that complicated those narratives—a film that sought to understand the sources of Putin’s thinking, while still preserving a healthy skepticism about his self-serving narratives—would be a worthy enterprise. But Stone is not up to the task. And indeed, by not providing the all-important context, he leaves uninformed viewers with a completely distorted view of Russia’s authoritarian ruler.
A telling moment comes late in the final episode, as Stone excitedly visits a series of Communist monuments in Moscow: first the grave of Jack Reed, the prominent American Communist, and then the tomb of Lenin himself. At Reed’s grave, Stone explains that Reed was considered a hero by many for his idealistic devotion to pacifism and workers’ rights; at Lenin’s, he speaks in hushed and almost reverent tones. In both places, you get a sense of Stone’s personal investment in the old lost cause of Russia. He comes across as a fellow traveller who may believe that Putin—the leader of a kleptocratic capitalist state—is somehow the natural heir to that tradition.
To be fair, it is easy to imagine a Right-leaning admirer of Putin similarly clinging to illusions about Putin by embracing different elements of his persona: his public displays of pious Orthodoxy, for example, or his defense of “traditional values.” But the truth remains that Putin is not particularly committed to any positive ideology. He is a savvy opportunist and a smooth operative, a skilled political actor able to assume different guises for different foreign audiences, whether the far left or the populist right. But he is not a man of consistent principle, nor a leader to be much admired. Stone’s attempt to cast him as such tells us more about the projections of Putin’s admirers than the man himself.