Feb 25, 2022

Putin's Grievance Speech

...and, fuck this war.

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Appears in this episode

Yasha Levine
Evgenia Kovda
A podcast by Evgenia Kovda and Yasha Levine.

Putin shocked and surprised pretty much everyone in Russia by launching a regime change war on Ukraine. Two days before that, he went on Russian TV and gave a menacing grievance speech — in which he attacked America but also went after the Bolsheviks, blaming the disintegration of the Soviet Union and today’s crisis in Ukraine squarely on Lenin.

Evgenia and I discuss his speech and talk about how it fits into the mushy national identity that Putin’s elite has been trying to cobble together for Russia.

—Yasha Levine


A couple of notes.

Here is the English transcript of Putin’s grievance speech that I was able to scrape off the Kremlin.ru website, which is offline as we post this ep — a victim of an ongoing cyberwar? And here’s a dubbed video version of the speech, courtesy of C-SPAN. I haven’t been able to find a full translated version of the second, shorter address that he gave right before the invasion, but there is an auto-translate closed captions option for those that are interested in the video here.


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