Departures Podcast with Joshua Yaffa

Is it better to fight an authoritarian government and lose, or work with that government and survive to fight another day? In this latest episode of Departures, Bob interviews Joshua Yaffa, Moscow Correspondent for the New Yorker and author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, about the mentalities of the people who brought Vladimir Putin to power, the internal moral compromises they make to keep him there, and what those compromises mean during a global pandemic.

Yaffa describes a pervasive wiliness among the people he met through his reporting in Russia, from TV producers to zookeepers to human rights activists: people who engage in “quiet games of soft rebellion, acknowledging power and being outwardly loyal to it, while at the same time trying to undermine it and eke out personal benefit from it.”

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