June 10, 2021 • 48 mins
In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the frontlines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
things go. A corridor of the mind stalked with evidence,
packed with proof. I've got this one box in here
was stuff from my childhood, old report cards, softball team photographs,
(00:39):
girl Scout badges. In this Russia in Review magazine I
made out of magic markers and construction paper in nineteen
seventy nine, when I was twelve in seventh grade for
social studies. It's got an article on the space race,
A little history that starts with Sputnik. There's a story
about Samovars, a little biography. Joseph Stalin, a Russian dictator,
(01:05):
was a man who instilled terror in people his early life.
Made been the cause of this, plus fake ads, Apski Coolska,
the communist at Kola. I made up one article called
on tour in Moscow, where I meet people on the
street and I say things like hello miss Where American
reporters would you mind a short interview? I loved imagining
(01:26):
myself as a foreign correspondent. All expenses were paid. I
was all packed in money from my trip to Russia.
What I didn't know when I was twelve was at
the same time as I was imagining flying to Moscow
to interview Russians about communism. A guy named Valentine Zorin,
the Walter Cronkite of the Soviet Union, was flying to
(01:47):
the United States from Moscow to interview Americans about capitalism
for Soviet television. So step back across the passage of
time to follow in the footsteps of a Soviet reporter
by historian of sorts. Valentin Zarin, known as the Walter
(02:16):
Cronkite of the Soviet Union, is filming a documentary on
the United States. In nineteen seventy eight, Valentin Zorin went
to southern California. He went to Disneyland. A local public
TV station sent a reporter out to Anaheim to cover
his visit. The sinister gentleman in the Navy blue jacket
might have bought his way into Disneyland, as thousands of
(02:37):
Russians have, but Valentin zorn wanted to bring a film crew.
The Soviet newsman had been forbidden to film Universal Studios
and the Hollywood Sign and he said the influence of
right wing conservative forces in Los Angeles were beginning to
hedge him in. Zorin had been complaining about conservatives who'd
been decrying his visit, but at Disneyland, Zorn said he
(02:59):
didn't want to talk politics. Mister Zen, are you still
sensing the right wing and conservative influences you spoke of
a day or two ago. I think that Disneyland not
good place for such discussion. Right, Welcome to the last archive.
(03:21):
The show about how we know what we know and
why it seems lately is if we don't know anything
at all. I'm Joe Lapoor. This season, I'm trying to
trace the history of doubt. I've been arguing that the
rise and spread of new kinds of doubt over the
course of the twentieth century was accelerated by changing technologies
of communication, beginning with the radio, by the increasing sophistication
(03:44):
and complexity of scientific research, and most of all, by
the lies told in wartime, the First World War, the
Second World War, and the Cold War. This episode, I
wanted to think about something a little different, not lies exactly,
but mutual misunderstanding, misperception and misinformation. This episode sewing doubt
(04:05):
as foreign policy. Look right at the top here, let
me put a few cards on the table. Here's a
really good reason to look at Soviet propaganda. It's a
lot like Trump propaganda, the stuff Donald Trump said, the
whole of his campaign, the whole of his administration, the
whole of his post presidency. In Soviet propaganda, as in
(04:29):
Trump's America, nothing is what it seems. All the news
is fake and there are conspiracies everywhere. This has been
happening for a long time. In twenty sixteen, right after
the US election, a certain sort of Russian misinformation operation
made headlines and brought reporters to a nondescript building in
Saint Petersburg. What's allegedly happening here the manufacture of fake news.
(04:53):
This is a so called troll factory. Troll factories are
only the latest weapons in a very very old propaganda war.
But that's why I want to take a close look
at the ideological weapons valentin's or In helped build and
the hazardous waste left behind. But I've got to confess
I had never heard of him until Julia Barton, the
(05:15):
last Archives brilliant editor, told me about him. I'm just
a big USSR nerd and I was doing a bunch
of research, and as one does, I ran across some
of Zorin's stuff while doing that, and it just fell
into this rabbit hole of Zorin. Julia found a bunch
of Zorn's documentaries on routube that's Russian YouTube, and watched
(05:36):
his work over and over. It's so well made, and
a lot of Soviet TVs not that watchable, and this
is very Differentia. Julia showed me one of his films,
a little number called America Autumn nineteen seventy one. When
(06:01):
this film opens, Zorin is sitting on a rock in
the woods. He's holding a small book in his hands,
maybe a book of poetry. He's looking directly into the camera. Yeah. Boys,
what's on the mind of Americans as they find themselves
near the end of the year nineteen seventy one? What's
(06:24):
on the minds of Americans? We will try to answer
this question by visiting bureaucrats in DC on the streets
of New York. Like, the footage is just so fun.
It has this kind of mix of you know, James
Bond and David Attenborough in which we are the monkeys,
(06:45):
you know what I mean. Yeah, not a normal position
for Americans to feel themselves in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And
they love that about it. That there's also kind of
I was thinking about you know, nineteen sixty eight and
Planet of the Apes and sort of like looking on
a kind of fallen version of what America is through
the eyes of some different people. Yeah, Julia got interested
(07:08):
in Russia as a kid at the same age as
I did. In eighth grade, I did a paper about
the Russians and how the Russians were people, and I
was just like, I get it now, I understand this
country that we're not supposed to understand. You know, it's weird,
this thing. Julia and I share Americans, our age share
(07:29):
as if it's a generational marker. But unlike me, Julia
got hooked, studied Russian, traveled to the Soviet Union, and
then later when she was older, she got obsessed with Zorin.
The americanist who studied us. Valentine Jorn was born in
nineteen twenty five, joined the Communist Party when he was
a student in Moscow. He got the best education, but
(07:52):
mixed in with mass and history was a steady diet
of Soviet conspiracy propaganda. Like in nineteen forty five, when
after FDR died, one of Zorn's professors claimed to prove
beyond a doubt that Roosevelt had been poisoned on orders
of Harry as Truman. Okay, so that's bonkers, but it
tells you about the education Zorn got, and it says
(08:13):
a lot that he believed this. Apparently all his life.
In Zorn's America, nothing was what had seemed. All the
news was fake, and there were conspiracies everywhere. In the
nineteen fifties, Zorn trained to become a diplomat, but his
mother was Jewish and the Soviets didn't trust Jews to
serve as diplomats, so instead he became a radio commentator
(08:34):
and continued his studies, earning a doctorate in history, Doctor Zorn,
Professor Zorn. In nineteen sixty three, a few days after
Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John F. Kennedy, Zorn
says he made his way to Dallas to investigate. He
began a quest to unmask America. He worked as a
reporter or documentary filmmaker and a television news commentator for years.
(08:58):
He hosted a show that was the Russian version of
Meet the Press. He was everywhere. He loved this joke.
I turned on the radio, Zorn turned on the TV.
Also's am I needed to turn on the iron but thought, Betra,
I don't really get that joke, but I still love it.
The point is he really was everywhere. He was the
(09:18):
Soviet Union's best known americanist and quite a serious journalist.
His take on the world was so persuasive that it
became the take on America. And he also got to
go to places that a lot of americanists in the
Soviet Union never even got to go to America. M Yeah,
(09:39):
and then he's also you know, this kind of sexy,
devonair guy with a cigarette holder and his quoft hair
and right cool croppy glasses, like, you know, he's very
alluring and so like the combination of like the physically
alluring sort of intellectual, which is an unusual let me
(09:59):
just say it's an unusual mix. Yeah, and he's funny.
He's funny. Yeah, but then he's also reductive, right, but
which is also appealing. Right, But I am we will
sit in the powerful Senate chambers and sit with the unemployed.
We'll see things through the eyes of wolf Street trade
there and the eyes of the protesters against war and poverty.
(10:23):
That's America Fall of nineteen seventy one. There's a rule
about propaganda. It's going to have some basis. In fact,
the whole point of Soviet anti American propaganda at just
this moment was to unmask the myth of American greatness.
As the historian Dina Feinberg has pointed out, Zorin made
(10:44):
most of his documentaries about America during Day tat warming
period in US Soviet relations, during Americans were trying to
understand Soviets, and Soviets were trying to understand Americans on
the theory that mutual understanding was the only way the
Cold War could end. There are all sorts of Russianists
in the United States and all sorts of Americanists in
(11:04):
the Soviet Union, everyone calling for understanding, including American President
Jimmy Carter. Each of us has only one nation. We
both share the same world. Believing that Americans and Soviets
share the same world. That was Day Tante. Zorin, like
(11:27):
all Soviet journalists, followed directives from the State. His film
America Autumn nineteen seventy one came out at the very
beginning of Day Tante, so it's a softer take on
the United States. But if you go back just one
year to nineteen seventy just before Day tante. You see
a very different Zorin, more adversarial, more die capitalist pigs.
(11:50):
I want to understand this transition better. The problem is
I don't speak a word of Russian. So I called
it my Harvard colleague, Sir he Pokey, a professor of
Ukrainian history. He's the author of a terrific new book,
Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Surrey
and I we'd taught history classes together, but I'd actually
never known much about his own history. He was born
(12:12):
in Russia and grew up in Ukraine. I was fascinated
to see that you were born in the year of
spot Nick. Yeah, I am a Spotney generation yesterday sister
child here. So and you said you grew up watching
Zorin as a kid, well as a teenager. Certainly my
father was watching him, and actually I watched him as well.
(12:37):
And again that was the window on them on the American,
on the United States. For a generation of Soviets, Zorn's
films were pretty much their only window on the United States.
Sir Hay born in nineteen fifty seven had watched Zorin
on TV as a teenager, but he had not seen
any of those films since, so we watched them together,
(12:58):
starting with an early series called Masters Without Masks. It
was a lot more over the top than Sir Hay remembered.
It begins with a pretty hair raising video montage of
scenes from all over the US, set over blaring James
Bond music, Americans as decadent capitalists with really nice cars
and exciting clothes. Yeah, it's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. Oh my gosh.
(13:28):
So it's nineteen seventy, he's just starting and it's just
the deepest Cold War and the most I don't know,
I almost don't believe my eyes. So we're looking at
it is such an like a massively captivating assembly of stereotypes.
Like it's just like sex and money and it's a mess.
(13:50):
They're crazy over there. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely absolutely, and
and of course it's runsome money. It's controlled by money,
and it's it's it's awful, it's decadent, Sarah. They'll explain
to me. The the Zorn expose is look one way,
but people in the Soviet Union south differently. You go
(14:11):
for something that actually you want to see it, okay,
And there are people dancing right Okay, this is interesting.
This is school, okay, and there is Cassine. Ah, well,
we don't have casina. It would be interesting to see
what does care You know, like it's an indictment of
this excess, but it's also like, ooh, yes, yes, yes,
(14:33):
I would like to see that. That's Sarah and I
both ended up being historians. Kind of knocks me out.
The parallelism and also the inversion. Teenage sarahy in Ukraine
watching Zorin and becoming fascinated by the United States. Me
in the United States making my magazine about Russia. I
had magic markers. The USSR had television. Ask Julia Barton
(14:58):
how Soviet TV worked. Keep in mind, the Soviet Union
is the biggest country in the world by far. It
has eleven time zones, and like, what can link all
those people together? It's television. So everything that gets made
something special like this is broadcast to millions of people
over and over and over again. And the thing that
(15:20):
Soviets are the most curious about and really want to
see is news from abroad, much more so than Americans
ever have been. Americans and Soviets we were looking at
one another, peering through holes in the iron curtain. Zorn
was looking through that curtain too, but he wasn't exactly
(15:42):
looking for the truth about the United States. Destant was
a nice idea, but there was still a war on
and even though his films appeared softer now, Zorn was
looking for evidence of America's corruption, It's inner evil, evidence
of its darkest secrets. Cold War Soviet propagandists wanted to
(16:12):
unmask America. One way they did that was to focus
on the brutality of Jim Crow. That led to an
American response. In nineteen fifty two, the US Attorney General
argued for an end segregation on the ground that did
a crippled American foreign policy. He wrote, racial discrimination furnishes
(16:34):
grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts,
even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our
devotion to the democratic faith. Exposing American hypocrisy worked really
well for Soviets, depicting the US as the land of
the free, but really the home of the oppressed. But
there's also, you know, the belief that communism is at
(16:57):
this vanguard of social change, and so they're looking for
signs that this vanguard is advancing in places like the
United States. It's about um, you know, capitalism falling apart,
falling on its own sword. Usually Alabama, which you know,
WILLISAO one in American Autumn. Zorn goes to an office
(17:23):
building to visit the National Socialist White People's Party, American
neo Nazis. Soren's smoking a cigarette, He's super casual. He
rings the doorbell and then amazingly, these Nazis let the
Soviet film crew inside party of our party. Who can
(17:44):
be summed up two words, white target. We believe that city.
Zarren's argument in this film is that there's a direct
connection between neo Nazis and the US government, a direct
connection between neo Nazis and the two major American political parties.
(18:05):
Soren's documentary takes us from the offices of the White
People's Play to a rally for George Wallace, the segregationist
one time governor of Alabama who ran for president in
nineteen sixty eight and again in nineteen seventy two. I
had my friends are he walked me through this point
in film. Okay, so basically he goes, he interviews this
(18:26):
white supremacist and then he says that in Washington, they
told us, okay, how many of those crazies are out there?
And he says, well, there is a lot of them.
Wallace is one of their leaders, and he got ten
million goals, said the last elections. So the connection between
(18:46):
between white supremacists and mainstream American politics. After going to
the George Wallace rally, he's off to Alabama's cotton fields
and shanties with poor black families. Soran says, it's one
of the centers of American racism. Stems at agenas of Shiprison.
(19:08):
If you pressing a cross burning footage of a cross
burning in the clan. He was very proud of taking
an interview from from I don't know the leader or
one of the leaders of Kuklux Klan. Yeah, I think
it's Robert Shelton, okay, right, because he said that that
(19:28):
footage was actually bought by a lot of TV companies
all over the world, and he was the one who
got it. The footage was such a scoop that Zorn
sold it to foreign broadcasters to get it out in
front of even more of yours. In this incredible scene,
Zorn sits down with an Imperial Wizard of the KKK
(19:50):
in a little fancy parlor with a framed picture of
Hitler on the wall behind them. You don't often get
to meet a grand wizard, Zorn says in voice over.
And yet here we are talking with mister Shelton. Can
you tell me? Can you tell me about basically the
(20:11):
organization advocates Christianity. Here in the Imperial Wizard's parlor, Zorin
found what he was looking for, the evil secret, the
ugly face behind the mask of American democracy, white supremacy.
(20:33):
But actually Zorin wasn't all that interested in social issues
or in how politics worked in the United States. He
was interested in stories that reduced power struggles to moral struggles,
struggles between good and evil. For his biggest story, Zorn
needed a different supervillain, not a clansman, but a capitalist.
(20:53):
A capitalist too, Zorin would claim, had conspired to kill Kennedy.
Valentine Zorin, one of their respected as far as the
Soviet goes mouthpieces of the Kremlin, is trying to counter
charges on Moscow Radio that President Kennedy was a victim
of a leftist fanatic. That's CBS newsman Walter Cronkite. After
(21:17):
the Kennedy assassination, Cronkite's reporting on Valentine Zorn's claim that
Kennedy could not have been killed in Dallas by Lee
Harvey Oswald acting alone or God forbid, on orders from Moscow.
He has said, those who know how the security of
President Kennedy is organized know that it is not possible
for a fanatic to commit such an assassination. Valentine Zorin says,
(21:41):
and this terribly inflammatory statement by one of the king
fins of Soviet propaganda in Moscow. He went on to say, quote,
it is not accidental that it took place in the
Southern States, which are well known as a stronghold of
racist and other fascist scum. Lee Harvey Oswald looked to
(22:02):
be a leftist fanatic. He'd taught himself Russian and in
nineteen fifty nine had traveled to the Soviet Union. But
Zorn claimed that Kennedy had been killed not by a
loane leftist but by a conservative conspiracy, a capitalist conspiracy.
We repeat, in case anybody could mistake the import of
these words, that this is Soviet propaganda broadcast by Moscow
(22:26):
radio commentator Valentine Zorn. This was Soviet propaganda, sure, but
of course a whole lot of Americans also suspected that
Oswald hadn't acted alone. Even after the government published its
official report, American conspiracy theorists poured over the evidence, especially
footage of the assassination. At the same time, agencies like
(22:46):
the KGB only added fuel to that fire. Zorn meant
to go further than spreading rumors he would conduct an investigation.
He went to search for the answers to Kennedy's assassination
in the place where it happened, Dallas, Texas, and there
Zorn got obsessed with a Texas oil tycoon named H. L. Hunt.
Zorin talks a lot about Hunt in a film called
(23:09):
called The Puzzles of Dallas. H L. Hunt's mansion fronts
a lake in Dallas, and as it turns out, our
editor Julia Barton, grew up just a few blocks away
in the less glamorous back end of the neighborhood. Julie
and I watched The Puzzles of Dallas together. I was
a kid there, and a lot of the shots are
like kid angle shots, like they're in the back of
(23:31):
a car that's just like endlessly driving. They even drive
past the freeway exit that we always got off at
on I thirty, you know, to go home. So I
was like when I saw that sign, I was like,
that's my exit, you know, like get off, go to
my house. Julie didn't know about hl Hunt when she
was a kid, but later on she too got fascinated.
(23:51):
You know. Hunt was a gambler. He won his oil
rights through through a poker game. He was awesome Jeeves Bond, Yes,
and he was coming. And he was an ardent, outspoken
anti communist who at his own you know, propaganda outfit,
(24:12):
which he financed through a money losing grocery operation HLH Foods.
And he lived in a in a mansion that looked
like a plantation, and he raised the flag every morning
with his wife. And it's just like a he had
a naked cat. Hl Hunt is basically a Bond villain
(24:34):
or better doctor Evil. He wasn't just an oil tycoon.
He was an American propagandist. He was really the anti
zorin mister Hunt. It's often been said that that you
have what is called a conspiratorial view of history. In
other words, if you see reds under every couch and
(24:58):
cover and where they're not really there, do you think
you're over alarmed about the way things are going. However
alarmed I am. I don't think I'm alarmed enough. I'm
playing the United States. The Communist Party today is a
weak read. Indeed, I don't think that Jedger Hoover would
agree with your conclusion. Hunt financed his own radio show, Lifeline.
(25:21):
He's very proto Rush Limbaugh, where his announcers spouted anti communism.
If the vast majority of Americans suddenly were to cease
believing in the individual dignity of man, we would all
begin looking to the government for everything, and freedom would
be lost to a paternalistic statism. Hunt's radio show attack
(25:43):
not only statism and communism, but also socialism and well
just plain taxation, whether we like it or not. This
is an extreme time in the history of our nation.
In the communist schedule, the time is now, the target
is you. Ah Hunt was the anti Zorin he had
(26:03):
that radio show, wrote a column called Hunt for Truth,
and he had a publishing outfit called Facts Forum. But
Zorn did Hunt one better. He peddled a conspiracy theory
in which Hunt and the Texas Oil Block, led by
Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Remember Johnson was also from Texas,
had wanted Kennedy dead and had gone so far as
(26:23):
to arrange for Kennedy to be killed because Kennedy was
about to regulate the oil industry. Kennedy. Because of Zorn,
Hunt was possibly better known in the USSR then in
the United States. I hadn't known much about him, but
(26:45):
Hunt still seemed weirdly familiar to me from an old movie.
Sure this is because everything reminds me of an old movie,
but apparently everything reminded Zorn of an old movie too.
Soviet propaganda is laced through with plots straight out of Hollywood,
and so are most modern conspiracies, including those about fake
pandemics and stolen elections. Every conspiracy theory feels like a
(27:09):
remake of an old movie, because for something to work
as a conspiracy, it has to work as a story. Specifically,
hl Hunt reminded me of a character from one of
my favorite Cold War thrillers, Billion Dollar Brain, from nineteen
sixty seven. If you haven't seen it, one easy way
(27:33):
to picture it is to know that it inspired the
Austin Powers movies. It's that campy. My love for Billion
Dollar Brain has nothing to do with Valentine Zorn and
a whole lot to do with Michael Caine, who plays
a sort of lazy, half asked spy working his way
into the center of a vast conspiracy run by a
wealthy oil tycoon who lives in Texas. He's named General Midwinter. Boy.
(27:56):
I tell you and I know the Texas is the
only truly hopes a man this world. General Midwinter is
hl Hunt. This isn't just me in my overdeveloped sense
of coincidence. The writer act based the character on Hunt.
Hunt Ran the Facts form. The fictional Midwinter runs a
propaganda outfit called Facts for Freedom. Midwinter also is prone
(28:19):
to see conspiracies everywhere, maybe because he's up to some
pretty conspiratorial hijienks himself. I'm leaving a flusha a world
of shape for freedom. You don't understand the kind of
love I have for this great country of ours. Love
not built that way, my way anymore. I love my
count baby. I might dreamy to make the thing I
love strong. Do you understand me? Yes? Strong? Strong, strong strong.
(28:46):
It's all here in Billion Dollar Brain, produced by the
same man who made the James Bond films, films that
Zorn constantly ripped off for his own documentaries. I'm always
struck by how in the late sixties and early seventies
and everything from spy thrillers to Soviet propaganda, everyone has
an ulterior motive and shady supervillains hold the fate of
the world in their hands. Midwinter Hunt, Julie and I
(29:10):
were both amazed by this Cold War central casting. But
there's something about Hunt that must have lent itself to
I guess you know the kind of the comic book
character treatment, right, because he was I mean, just as
you say listing off. He lived in a house that
was designed after Mount Vernon, so it was a southern plantation,
(29:32):
like the guy is a parody of a certain sort
of American magnet with the ten gallon hat and the
anti communist brochures. Yeah, and Soviet TV. I mean they
loved all these guys, Howard Hughes, you know, all of
these any any eccentric capitalists who's over the top is
(29:54):
I mean, they're just built for the caricature that worked
really well with Soviet propaganda. Midwinter was fun. He was
a fantastic supervillain. When Billion Dollar Brain came out, though
critics accused it of being anti American because by indicting
Midwinter for being an oil tycoon like Hunt, it played
(30:14):
right into Soviet propaganda. Especially Zorin's His specialty was state monopoly.
So there was this kind of Leninist worldview that the
United States was not controlled or did not work according
to the structures that it claimed to work. It didn't.
It didn't matter about the separation of powers, it didn't
matter about institutions like Congress and the White House and
(30:38):
the courts. That the real power centers in America were
state monopolies were control of resources. So you had the
steel monopoly groups, you had the oil monopoly groups, this
kind of thing under this sort of like rubric of
how things work in the United States, democratic elections are
(31:00):
a joke and we're just all chumps. So in American
politics today there are lots of conspiracy theorists on the
left and especially on the right. All of them require
a lot of cynicism about America, exactly the kind of
cynicism Soviet propagandists loved, and Russian propagandists still love. Zorin.
(31:25):
Though he didn't have to choose between left and right
conspiracy theorists, he just advanced both of them, Samuel, even
the abolition colleges run Dallas Kant sam Beasts. In the
(31:45):
film The Puzzles of Dallas, Zorin talks a lot about
how big everything is, biggest airport in the world and
best rodeo, and then he talks about how awful everything is,
the biggest crimes, the highest rate of suicide. Meanwhile, there
are puppet masters like hl Hunt lurking in their mansions.
But all the films in Zorin's nineteen seventies series work
this way. You see incredible footage of these big cities,
(32:08):
while Zorin rates explaining that capitalism brings all sorts of
glitz and goods to the rich and unbearable misery to
the poor. Julia, though, found it strangely moving watching our
hometown Dallas. But there's this other element to it, which
is true that he's a guest, and he's a stranger
in a strange land, and he's trying to explain it,
(32:29):
and it's impenetrable in some ways, you know, And I
just felt like, you know, that's actually true of a
lot of us. That we often in America especially, we
move around a lot, We go to places where we've
never been before. We think we know a thing, it's familiar,
and there's like McDonald's and like gas stations, and then
we start talking to people we feel foreign and that
(32:52):
this feeling of being an uncomfortable guest is kind of
everywhere now. Zorn's film about where I grew up in
the nineteen seventies, it's called Boston contrasts it with dazzling footage,
bird's eye footage, a flyover tour of the city, the Harbor,
(33:14):
the Financial District, the Charles River, Beacon Hill, Stero drive,
all over music ripped off from Paul McCartney's band Wings.
This too, is just more James Bond because that song
was the theme song for Live and Let Die. I
had a similar response to watching the Boston Contrast film,
(33:37):
a lot of which were shot in seventy four, which
are the Boston bussing riots, right when white families in
Boston were you blocking buses that were bringing black children
to their neighborhoods. It's brutal, horrible moment in the history
of Boston. But then there's also all this footage of
the tea party ship, because nineteen seventy three was the
(33:58):
two hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and this
goofy ship was brought over across the Atlantic and became
a museum. Julie and I had the same unsettling reaction
to watching Zorn visiting the America of our nineteen seventies childhoods.
It was weirdly comforting, even when he was pointing out horrible,
(34:20):
uncomfortable truths like the deep and violent racism of Boston.
I came to think that his weird appeal to us
was because he was a foreign reporter, a stranger in
a strange land, instead of the way I sometimes felt
in Trump's America, a stranger in my own country. When
(34:52):
I pointed in Moscow, I was not a word that
I was expected. There was a many procession of two
black automobiles awaiting my arrival. Two dark haired men in
black three piece suits appeared from the cards and walked
towards me. That's twelve year old me or a young
friend of mine, pretending to be reading an investigative report
called Communism in Russia that I made up for my
(35:15):
seventh grade social studies project in nineteen seventy nine. I,
realizing they are Russian police, picked up my Loga janned
with a deep sigh, started off to meet them. With
insincere grins upon their slightly aged faces. They explained in
slightly broken English that they would guide me during my day.
My report ends with me leaving Moscow disappointed. I considering
(35:39):
the remains of my trip Triviual. It was the same
over and over. I loved it. Everyone told me it
sounded like some of them were brainwashed, but some of
them were sincere. A few years after I wrote that,
the Soviet Union began to open up under the new
Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and after Gorbachev began to hold
(35:59):
talks with the US President Ronald Reagan, Americans and Soviets
began to look at one another a little differently. In
nineteen eighty eight, Valentine Zorin interviewed President yi Are in
the White House in Washington. This was just before Reagan's
(36:20):
first visit to the USSR. I'm looking forward to seeing
your country and well as much as possible with the
meetings that will be going on. The next year, the
Berlin Wall fell, and then in nineteen ninety one, the
Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. I was
in graduate school. Then in the nineteen nineties, you'd meet
(36:42):
all these Americans who were fluent in Russian training to
become Russianists, Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, and then suddenly there were no jobs.
The field of sovietology vanished, almost overnight. Instead you'd meet
those guys former Sovietologists driving taxis. Americans stopped looking at Russians,
(37:02):
but Russians kept on looking in Americans. I asked Sarah
he about Zorn's legacy down to today, and he talked
about how all propaganda is a cocktail, a mix of
truth and lies. Still, that the basic racity is the same,
except that it's now turned turned outward. So whatever creates confusion,
(37:23):
whatever creates conflict is good enough. And again, you can't
you can't just sell a cocktail which is completely untrue,
which which is completely completely fake news. It's not just
a cocktail lately, not just one drink. Instead, it's a
whole cocktail party. In the United States, Americans told the
(37:46):
story of the collapse of the Soviet Union in nineteen
ninety one has a story about the failure of communism
in Moscow. The Hammer and Sickle is lord for the
last time, and an era comes to an end. But
in certain quarters of Russia, in the mind, say of
(38:09):
someone like Vladimir Putin, the story of that collapse wasn't
a story about the end of communism. It was a
story about foreign meddling and Western interference and a failure
of the Soviet leadership to defend against it. Russians told
the story of a coup conducted by the United States
and its allies by way of misinformation campaigns and propaganda.
That's what brought down the uss Are, they said. Zorn
(38:33):
admired Putin, and the feeling was mutual. In two thousand
and one, Zorn sent Putin a copy of his latest book.
President Putin dictated a thank you note to Professor Zorin,
dated September twelfth, two thousand and one, the day after
the terrorist attacks on the US, and then Putin added
a handwritten PostScript. I have always followed your work with
great interest and pleasure. Almost everything has been brilliant and
(38:56):
shown remarkable talent. Wishing you all success. Americans, though, challenged
Putin's authority and his legitimacy, especially after parliamentary elections held
in two thousand and eleven, which involved blatant fraud. Some
of it caught on camera by Russians and shared on
social media. The US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
(39:16):
had words, we do have serious concerns about the conduct
of the election. Anti Putin protesters marched in Moscow, chanting
Putin is a thief. Putin, furious, blamed Clinton for inciting
the protests. They've been organized on Twitter and Facebook, and
so to thwart them, Putin charged one of his cronies
with taking control of social media, and that guy financed
(39:39):
an outfit called the Internet Research Agency. Its purpose was
to conduct misinformation campaigns within Russia to silence Putin's critics
and stop the protests. Ludmilla Savchuk first became a troll
slayer back in twenty fourteen. That's from a story about
a Russian Ludmilla Savchuk who infiltrated the Internet Research Agency.
(40:01):
We think of that place now as a troll factory,
but really it was an office building in Saint Petersburg.
It employed hundreds of Russians. Their job was to create
fake social media accounts and post fake stuff. Later, save
Check spoke to Charles Mains for PRIs the World. I
wanted to get them there to see how it works so,
(40:23):
of course, but the most important thing was to see
if there was some way to stop it. Sav Check's
reporting showed the people who worked at this Internet Research
Agency were attacking Putin's critics in Russia. Soon after, the
IRA would expand its efforts by attacking the United States,
amplifying American political divisions and discontent by posing as fake Americans. OMG,
(40:49):
this new anti Hillary ad is brilliant. It's fantastic. Spread
it far and wide. White boyfriend shows true colors on
his black girlfriend over Trump hashtag black Lives Matter. When
Valentine Zorin went to interview the Imperial Wizard of the
KKK in nine seventy one, he didn't invent the clan.
(41:12):
But at the Internet Research Agency they created fake Facebook
pages right and left, like back the Badge or Black Matters, Blacktivist,
Heart of Texas United, Muslims of America being Patriotic, Secured Boarders,
and LGBT United. Their Facebook posts were shared millions of times.
(41:33):
They also bought more than three thousand ads on Facebook
around the time of the twenty sixteen election. More than
half the ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency had
to do with race. A quarter were about crime and policing.
These ads weren't advancing an agenda. They took all sides.
They were just trying to get people riled up. But
(41:54):
Donald Trump, when he took office in twenty seventeen, defended Putin.
I say it's better to get along with Russia than not.
Will I get along with them? I have no ideas.
Putin's a killer. A lot of killers, get a lot
of killers. You think our country is so innocent? Critics
said Trump was Putin's puppet, But maybe it's more accurate
(42:15):
to say Trump was Zorin's vindication. A deeply, profoundly cynical
blend of money, sex, and viciousness now at the center
of American political life. Zorn died in twenty sixteen at
the age of ninety one, just a few months before
Trump was elected. Still, Trump would have made the perfect
subject for a Zorn documentary, a kind of capitalist supervillain,
(42:39):
the sort of person who, for his own purposes, would
incite a mob to attack peaceful protesters. I love the
old days. You know what they used to do to
guys like that when they were in a place like this.
They'd be carried out of a stretcher folks. In the
nineteen seventies, Zorin needed Soviet television to make and distribute
(42:59):
his propaganda, But in twenty sixteen it was American companies
that provided the distribution network for all kinds of propaganda.
They made an awful lot of money off of it,
to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. After Trump's election, a special council
investigated allegations that Russia had meddled in the election. The
Senate Health hearings in twenty eighteen, Main Senator Susan Collins,
(43:22):
a Republican, questioned Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, about
the nearly four thousand Twitter accounts created by the Internet
Research Agency, accounts that, by Twitter's own estimate, reached about
a million and a half people. My question to you is,
once you have taken down accounts that are linked to Russia,
(43:46):
what do you do to notify the followers that they
have been following or engaged in accounts that are not
what they appear to be. We simply haven't done enough.
I listen to that exchange and I had to wonder,
how would Congress have reacted in the nineteen seventies if
American television networks were broadcasting Zorn's documentaries four hours a day.
(44:10):
I think they would have stopped them. But today the
trolls are still trolling, and no one's managed to stop them.
Very few Americans remember Valentine's Oran. The closest thing to
Zorin that most Americans know. That's borat Aya Shamash my name,
a borat I generalist for Kazakhstan. That's Sasha Baron Cohen
(44:33):
playing a reporter from the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan,
allegedly making Razoran style documentary film about the United States.
Although Kazakhstan and glorious country it have a problem too.
This is why Ministry of Information have decided to send
me to US and greatest country in the world to
(44:55):
learn a lessons for Kazakhstan. Borat provincial ignorant, fascinated by
the United States, and through sheer idiocy and clumsiness, able
to cast light into its darkest corners. Barrett is part
of the weird after life of Zorin, the long afterlife
of Soviet and Trumpian propaganda about the United States at
strange cocktail of truthtelling and bullshitting. After the end of
(45:21):
the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Zorin's Americanism was replaced with the Americanism of places like
the Internet Research Agency study Americans just enough to know
how to create fake accounts. It doesn't matter if you
successfully interfere in an election. You just need to make
Americans worried that you might be interfering in an election.
(45:42):
Between the first Borat film and a sequel released just
before the twenty twenty election, Boortt recapitulates that history, the
history I've been trying to reconstruct this episode and the
first film Borat is a cartoons or in put. In
the twenty twenty sequel, Borett ends up running a troll factory.
Now we are part of the global community, influencing elections
(46:06):
are all the world. The Cold War was a battle
of ideas, of propaganda, and of espionage, spy versus spy. Trolls.
Russian or American are the last Cold Warriors left standing,
A ragged and almost accidental army of ponds and fools
and puppets, endlessly commenting, tweeting, retweeting, making so much noise
(46:29):
that hardly anyone could even tell any more what it
is they're actually arguing about. They're fighting bewildered war that
should be over on a barren battlefield, trying to convince
you to trust no one and believe nothing. This season
on The Last Archive, it sometimes feels as though I'm
(46:50):
a genealogist, piecing together a family history, the ancestry of misinformation.
Somehow We're all the children of Zorin Now. The Last
(47:12):
Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey.
Our editors for this episode were Julia Barton and Karen
Shakerji Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Simfinett.
(47:32):
Our research assistants are Kamani Panthier and Lilly Richmond. Our
full proof players are Yoshia Mau, Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bossi,
Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert
Riccotta and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production
of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain,
John Schnarz Carl mcgliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek,
(47:56):
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Daniella Lacan. Many of our
sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star
Jenette Foundation. Special thanks to Paula Bossi, Dina Fainberg, Alec Sandrad,
Justinis and Charles Mains, and particular thanks to be Korcentino
for playing a twelve year old me. If you like
(48:17):
the show, please remember to rate, share, and review. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.
Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
things go. A corridor of the mind stalked with evidence,
packed with proof. I've got this one box in here
was stuff from my childhood, old report cards, softball team photographs,
(00:39):
girl Scout badges. In this Russia in Review magazine I
made out of magic markers and construction paper in nineteen
seventy nine, when I was twelve in seventh grade for
social studies. It's got an article on the space race,
A little history that starts with Sputnik. There's a story
about Samovars, a little biography. Joseph Stalin, a Russian dictator,
(01:05):
was a man who instilled terror in people his early life.
Made been the cause of this, plus fake ads, Apski Coolska,
the communist at Kola. I made up one article called
on tour in Moscow, where I meet people on the
street and I say things like hello miss Where American
reporters would you mind a short interview? I loved imagining
(01:26):
myself as a foreign correspondent. All expenses were paid. I
was all packed in money from my trip to Russia.
What I didn't know when I was twelve was at
the same time as I was imagining flying to Moscow
to interview Russians about communism. A guy named Valentine Zorin,
the Walter Cronkite of the Soviet Union, was flying to
(01:47):
the United States from Moscow to interview Americans about capitalism
for Soviet television. So step back across the passage of
time to follow in the footsteps of a Soviet reporter
by historian of sorts. Valentin Zarin, known as the Walter
(02:16):
Cronkite of the Soviet Union, is filming a documentary on
the United States. In nineteen seventy eight, Valentin Zorin went
to southern California. He went to Disneyland. A local public
TV station sent a reporter out to Anaheim to cover
his visit. The sinister gentleman in the Navy blue jacket
might have bought his way into Disneyland, as thousands of
(02:37):
Russians have, but Valentin zorn wanted to bring a film crew.
The Soviet newsman had been forbidden to film Universal Studios
and the Hollywood Sign and he said the influence of
right wing conservative forces in Los Angeles were beginning to
hedge him in. Zorin had been complaining about conservatives who'd
been decrying his visit, but at Disneyland, Zorn said he
(02:59):
didn't want to talk politics. Mister Zen, are you still
sensing the right wing and conservative influences you spoke of
a day or two ago. I think that Disneyland not
good place for such discussion. Right, Welcome to the last archive.
(03:21):
The show about how we know what we know and
why it seems lately is if we don't know anything
at all. I'm Joe Lapoor. This season, I'm trying to
trace the history of doubt. I've been arguing that the
rise and spread of new kinds of doubt over the
course of the twentieth century was accelerated by changing technologies
of communication, beginning with the radio, by the increasing sophistication
(03:44):
and complexity of scientific research, and most of all, by
the lies told in wartime, the First World War, the
Second World War, and the Cold War. This episode, I
wanted to think about something a little different, not lies exactly,
but mutual misunderstanding, misperception and misinformation. This episode sewing doubt
(04:05):
as foreign policy. Look right at the top here, let
me put a few cards on the table. Here's a
really good reason to look at Soviet propaganda. It's a
lot like Trump propaganda, the stuff Donald Trump said, the
whole of his campaign, the whole of his administration, the
whole of his post presidency. In Soviet propaganda, as in
(04:29):
Trump's America, nothing is what it seems. All the news
is fake and there are conspiracies everywhere. This has been
happening for a long time. In twenty sixteen, right after
the US election, a certain sort of Russian misinformation operation
made headlines and brought reporters to a nondescript building in
Saint Petersburg. What's allegedly happening here the manufacture of fake news.
(04:53):
This is a so called troll factory. Troll factories are
only the latest weapons in a very very old propaganda war.
But that's why I want to take a close look
at the ideological weapons valentin's or In helped build and
the hazardous waste left behind. But I've got to confess
I had never heard of him until Julia Barton, the
(05:15):
last Archives brilliant editor, told me about him. I'm just
a big USSR nerd and I was doing a bunch
of research, and as one does, I ran across some
of Zorin's stuff while doing that, and it just fell
into this rabbit hole of Zorin. Julia found a bunch
of Zorn's documentaries on routube that's Russian YouTube, and watched
(05:36):
his work over and over. It's so well made, and
a lot of Soviet TVs not that watchable, and this
is very Differentia. Julia showed me one of his films,
a little number called America Autumn nineteen seventy one. When
(06:01):
this film opens, Zorin is sitting on a rock in
the woods. He's holding a small book in his hands,
maybe a book of poetry. He's looking directly into the camera. Yeah. Boys,
what's on the mind of Americans as they find themselves
near the end of the year nineteen seventy one? What's
(06:24):
on the minds of Americans? We will try to answer
this question by visiting bureaucrats in DC on the streets
of New York. Like, the footage is just so fun.
It has this kind of mix of you know, James
Bond and David Attenborough in which we are the monkeys,
(06:45):
you know what I mean. Yeah, not a normal position
for Americans to feel themselves in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And
they love that about it. That there's also kind of
I was thinking about you know, nineteen sixty eight and
Planet of the Apes and sort of like looking on
a kind of fallen version of what America is through
the eyes of some different people. Yeah, Julia got interested
(07:08):
in Russia as a kid at the same age as
I did. In eighth grade, I did a paper about
the Russians and how the Russians were people, and I
was just like, I get it now, I understand this
country that we're not supposed to understand. You know, it's weird,
this thing. Julia and I share Americans, our age share
(07:29):
as if it's a generational marker. But unlike me, Julia
got hooked, studied Russian, traveled to the Soviet Union, and
then later when she was older, she got obsessed with Zorin.
The americanist who studied us. Valentine Jorn was born in
nineteen twenty five, joined the Communist Party when he was
a student in Moscow. He got the best education, but
(07:52):
mixed in with mass and history was a steady diet
of Soviet conspiracy propaganda. Like in nineteen forty five, when
after FDR died, one of Zorn's professors claimed to prove
beyond a doubt that Roosevelt had been poisoned on orders
of Harry as Truman. Okay, so that's bonkers, but it
tells you about the education Zorn got, and it says
(08:13):
a lot that he believed this. Apparently all his life.
In Zorn's America, nothing was what had seemed. All the
news was fake, and there were conspiracies everywhere. In the
nineteen fifties, Zorn trained to become a diplomat, but his
mother was Jewish and the Soviets didn't trust Jews to
serve as diplomats, so instead he became a radio commentator
(08:34):
and continued his studies, earning a doctorate in history, Doctor Zorn,
Professor Zorn. In nineteen sixty three, a few days after
Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John F. Kennedy, Zorn
says he made his way to Dallas to investigate. He
began a quest to unmask America. He worked as a
reporter or documentary filmmaker and a television news commentator for years.
(08:58):
He hosted a show that was the Russian version of
Meet the Press. He was everywhere. He loved this joke.
I turned on the radio, Zorn turned on the TV.
Also's am I needed to turn on the iron but thought, Betra,
I don't really get that joke, but I still love it.
The point is he really was everywhere. He was the
(09:18):
Soviet Union's best known americanist and quite a serious journalist.
His take on the world was so persuasive that it
became the take on America. And he also got to
go to places that a lot of americanists in the
Soviet Union never even got to go to America. M Yeah,
(09:39):
and then he's also you know, this kind of sexy,
devonair guy with a cigarette holder and his quoft hair
and right cool croppy glasses, like, you know, he's very
alluring and so like the combination of like the physically
alluring sort of intellectual, which is an unusual let me
(09:59):
just say it's an unusual mix. Yeah, and he's funny.
He's funny. Yeah, but then he's also reductive, right, but
which is also appealing. Right, But I am we will
sit in the powerful Senate chambers and sit with the unemployed.
We'll see things through the eyes of wolf Street trade
there and the eyes of the protesters against war and poverty.
(10:23):
That's America Fall of nineteen seventy one. There's a rule
about propaganda. It's going to have some basis. In fact,
the whole point of Soviet anti American propaganda at just
this moment was to unmask the myth of American greatness.
As the historian Dina Feinberg has pointed out, Zorin made
(10:44):
most of his documentaries about America during Day tat warming
period in US Soviet relations, during Americans were trying to
understand Soviets, and Soviets were trying to understand Americans on
the theory that mutual understanding was the only way the
Cold War could end. There are all sorts of Russianists
in the United States and all sorts of Americanists in
(11:04):
the Soviet Union, everyone calling for understanding, including American President
Jimmy Carter. Each of us has only one nation. We
both share the same world. Believing that Americans and Soviets
share the same world. That was Day Tante. Zorin, like
(11:27):
all Soviet journalists, followed directives from the State. His film
America Autumn nineteen seventy one came out at the very
beginning of Day Tante, so it's a softer take on
the United States. But if you go back just one
year to nineteen seventy just before Day tante. You see
a very different Zorin, more adversarial, more die capitalist pigs.
(11:50):
I want to understand this transition better. The problem is
I don't speak a word of Russian. So I called
it my Harvard colleague, Sir he Pokey, a professor of
Ukrainian history. He's the author of a terrific new book,
Nuclear Folly, a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Surrey
and I we'd taught history classes together, but I'd actually
never known much about his own history. He was born
(12:12):
in Russia and grew up in Ukraine. I was fascinated
to see that you were born in the year of
spot Nick. Yeah, I am a Spotney generation yesterday sister
child here. So and you said you grew up watching
Zorin as a kid, well as a teenager. Certainly my
father was watching him, and actually I watched him as well.
(12:37):
And again that was the window on them on the American,
on the United States. For a generation of Soviets, Zorn's
films were pretty much their only window on the United States.
Sir Hay born in nineteen fifty seven had watched Zorin
on TV as a teenager, but he had not seen
any of those films since, so we watched them together,
(12:58):
starting with an early series called Masters Without Masks. It
was a lot more over the top than Sir Hay remembered.
It begins with a pretty hair raising video montage of
scenes from all over the US, set over blaring James
Bond music, Americans as decadent capitalists with really nice cars
and exciting clothes. Yeah, it's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. Oh my gosh.
(13:28):
So it's nineteen seventy, he's just starting and it's just
the deepest Cold War and the most I don't know,
I almost don't believe my eyes. So we're looking at
it is such an like a massively captivating assembly of stereotypes.
Like it's just like sex and money and it's a mess.
(13:50):
They're crazy over there. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely absolutely, and
and of course it's runsome money. It's controlled by money,
and it's it's it's awful, it's decadent, Sarah. They'll explain
to me. The the Zorn expose is look one way,
but people in the Soviet Union south differently. You go
(14:11):
for something that actually you want to see it, okay,
And there are people dancing right Okay, this is interesting.
This is school, okay, and there is Cassine. Ah, well,
we don't have casina. It would be interesting to see
what does care You know, like it's an indictment of
this excess, but it's also like, ooh, yes, yes, yes,
(14:33):
I would like to see that. That's Sarah and I
both ended up being historians. Kind of knocks me out.
The parallelism and also the inversion. Teenage sarahy in Ukraine
watching Zorin and becoming fascinated by the United States. Me
in the United States making my magazine about Russia. I
had magic markers. The USSR had television. Ask Julia Barton
(14:58):
how Soviet TV worked. Keep in mind, the Soviet Union
is the biggest country in the world by far. It
has eleven time zones, and like, what can link all
those people together? It's television. So everything that gets made
something special like this is broadcast to millions of people
over and over and over again. And the thing that
(15:20):
Soviets are the most curious about and really want to
see is news from abroad, much more so than Americans
ever have been. Americans and Soviets we were looking at
one another, peering through holes in the iron curtain. Zorn
was looking through that curtain too, but he wasn't exactly
(15:42):
looking for the truth about the United States. Destant was
a nice idea, but there was still a war on
and even though his films appeared softer now, Zorn was
looking for evidence of America's corruption, It's inner evil, evidence
of its darkest secrets. Cold War Soviet propagandists wanted to
(16:12):
unmask America. One way they did that was to focus
on the brutality of Jim Crow. That led to an
American response. In nineteen fifty two, the US Attorney General
argued for an end segregation on the ground that did
a crippled American foreign policy. He wrote, racial discrimination furnishes
(16:34):
grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts,
even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our
devotion to the democratic faith. Exposing American hypocrisy worked really
well for Soviets, depicting the US as the land of
the free, but really the home of the oppressed. But
there's also, you know, the belief that communism is at
(16:57):
this vanguard of social change, and so they're looking for
signs that this vanguard is advancing in places like the
United States. It's about um, you know, capitalism falling apart,
falling on its own sword. Usually Alabama, which you know,
WILLISAO one in American Autumn. Zorn goes to an office
(17:23):
building to visit the National Socialist White People's Party, American
neo Nazis. Soren's smoking a cigarette, He's super casual. He
rings the doorbell and then amazingly, these Nazis let the
Soviet film crew inside party of our party. Who can
(17:44):
be summed up two words, white target. We believe that city.
Zarren's argument in this film is that there's a direct
connection between neo Nazis and the US government, a direct
connection between neo Nazis and the two major American political parties.
(18:05):
Soren's documentary takes us from the offices of the White
People's Play to a rally for George Wallace, the segregationist
one time governor of Alabama who ran for president in
nineteen sixty eight and again in nineteen seventy two. I
had my friends are he walked me through this point
in film. Okay, so basically he goes, he interviews this
(18:26):
white supremacist and then he says that in Washington, they
told us, okay, how many of those crazies are out there?
And he says, well, there is a lot of them.
Wallace is one of their leaders, and he got ten
million goals, said the last elections. So the connection between
(18:46):
between white supremacists and mainstream American politics. After going to
the George Wallace rally, he's off to Alabama's cotton fields
and shanties with poor black families. Soran says, it's one
of the centers of American racism. Stems at agenas of Shiprison.
(19:08):
If you pressing a cross burning footage of a cross
burning in the clan. He was very proud of taking
an interview from from I don't know the leader or
one of the leaders of Kuklux Klan. Yeah, I think
it's Robert Shelton, okay, right, because he said that that
(19:28):
footage was actually bought by a lot of TV companies
all over the world, and he was the one who
got it. The footage was such a scoop that Zorn
sold it to foreign broadcasters to get it out in
front of even more of yours. In this incredible scene,
Zorn sits down with an Imperial Wizard of the KKK
(19:50):
in a little fancy parlor with a framed picture of
Hitler on the wall behind them. You don't often get
to meet a grand wizard, Zorn says in voice over.
And yet here we are talking with mister Shelton. Can
you tell me? Can you tell me about basically the
(20:11):
organization advocates Christianity. Here in the Imperial Wizard's parlor, Zorin
found what he was looking for, the evil secret, the
ugly face behind the mask of American democracy, white supremacy.
(20:33):
But actually Zorin wasn't all that interested in social issues
or in how politics worked in the United States. He
was interested in stories that reduced power struggles to moral struggles,
struggles between good and evil. For his biggest story, Zorn
needed a different supervillain, not a clansman, but a capitalist.
(20:53):
A capitalist too, Zorin would claim, had conspired to kill Kennedy.
Valentine Zorin, one of their respected as far as the
Soviet goes mouthpieces of the Kremlin, is trying to counter
charges on Moscow Radio that President Kennedy was a victim
of a leftist fanatic. That's CBS newsman Walter Cronkite. After
(21:17):
the Kennedy assassination, Cronkite's reporting on Valentine Zorn's claim that
Kennedy could not have been killed in Dallas by Lee
Harvey Oswald acting alone or God forbid, on orders from Moscow.
He has said, those who know how the security of
President Kennedy is organized know that it is not possible
for a fanatic to commit such an assassination. Valentine Zorin says,
(21:41):
and this terribly inflammatory statement by one of the king
fins of Soviet propaganda in Moscow. He went on to say, quote,
it is not accidental that it took place in the
Southern States, which are well known as a stronghold of
racist and other fascist scum. Lee Harvey Oswald looked to
(22:02):
be a leftist fanatic. He'd taught himself Russian and in
nineteen fifty nine had traveled to the Soviet Union. But
Zorn claimed that Kennedy had been killed not by a
loane leftist but by a conservative conspiracy, a capitalist conspiracy.
We repeat, in case anybody could mistake the import of
these words, that this is Soviet propaganda broadcast by Moscow
(22:26):
radio commentator Valentine Zorn. This was Soviet propaganda, sure, but
of course a whole lot of Americans also suspected that
Oswald hadn't acted alone. Even after the government published its
official report, American conspiracy theorists poured over the evidence, especially
footage of the assassination. At the same time, agencies like
(22:46):
the KGB only added fuel to that fire. Zorn meant
to go further than spreading rumors he would conduct an investigation.
He went to search for the answers to Kennedy's assassination
in the place where it happened, Dallas, Texas, and there
Zorn got obsessed with a Texas oil tycoon named H. L. Hunt.
Zorin talks a lot about Hunt in a film called
(23:09):
called The Puzzles of Dallas. H L. Hunt's mansion fronts
a lake in Dallas, and as it turns out, our
editor Julia Barton, grew up just a few blocks away
in the less glamorous back end of the neighborhood. Julie
and I watched The Puzzles of Dallas together. I was
a kid there, and a lot of the shots are
like kid angle shots, like they're in the back of
(23:31):
a car that's just like endlessly driving. They even drive
past the freeway exit that we always got off at
on I thirty, you know, to go home. So I
was like when I saw that sign, I was like,
that's my exit, you know, like get off, go to
my house. Julie didn't know about hl Hunt when she
was a kid, but later on she too got fascinated.
(23:51):
You know. Hunt was a gambler. He won his oil
rights through through a poker game. He was awesome Jeeves Bond, Yes,
and he was coming. And he was an ardent, outspoken
anti communist who at his own you know, propaganda outfit,
(24:12):
which he financed through a money losing grocery operation HLH Foods.
And he lived in a in a mansion that looked
like a plantation, and he raised the flag every morning
with his wife. And it's just like a he had
a naked cat. Hl Hunt is basically a Bond villain
(24:34):
or better doctor Evil. He wasn't just an oil tycoon.
He was an American propagandist. He was really the anti
zorin mister Hunt. It's often been said that that you
have what is called a conspiratorial view of history. In
other words, if you see reds under every couch and
(24:58):
cover and where they're not really there, do you think
you're over alarmed about the way things are going. However
alarmed I am. I don't think I'm alarmed enough. I'm
playing the United States. The Communist Party today is a
weak read. Indeed, I don't think that Jedger Hoover would
agree with your conclusion. Hunt financed his own radio show, Lifeline.
(25:21):
He's very proto Rush Limbaugh, where his announcers spouted anti communism.
If the vast majority of Americans suddenly were to cease
believing in the individual dignity of man, we would all
begin looking to the government for everything, and freedom would
be lost to a paternalistic statism. Hunt's radio show attack
(25:43):
not only statism and communism, but also socialism and well
just plain taxation, whether we like it or not. This
is an extreme time in the history of our nation.
In the communist schedule, the time is now, the target
is you. Ah Hunt was the anti Zorin he had
(26:03):
that radio show, wrote a column called Hunt for Truth,
and he had a publishing outfit called Facts Forum. But
Zorn did Hunt one better. He peddled a conspiracy theory
in which Hunt and the Texas Oil Block, led by
Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Remember Johnson was also from Texas,
had wanted Kennedy dead and had gone so far as
(26:23):
to arrange for Kennedy to be killed because Kennedy was
about to regulate the oil industry. Kennedy. Because of Zorn,
Hunt was possibly better known in the USSR then in
the United States. I hadn't known much about him, but
(26:45):
Hunt still seemed weirdly familiar to me from an old movie.
Sure this is because everything reminds me of an old movie,
but apparently everything reminded Zorn of an old movie too.
Soviet propaganda is laced through with plots straight out of Hollywood,
and so are most modern conspiracies, including those about fake
pandemics and stolen elections. Every conspiracy theory feels like a
(27:09):
remake of an old movie, because for something to work
as a conspiracy, it has to work as a story. Specifically,
hl Hunt reminded me of a character from one of
my favorite Cold War thrillers, Billion Dollar Brain, from nineteen
sixty seven. If you haven't seen it, one easy way
(27:33):
to picture it is to know that it inspired the
Austin Powers movies. It's that campy. My love for Billion
Dollar Brain has nothing to do with Valentine Zorn and
a whole lot to do with Michael Caine, who plays
a sort of lazy, half asked spy working his way
into the center of a vast conspiracy run by a
wealthy oil tycoon who lives in Texas. He's named General Midwinter. Boy.
(27:56):
I tell you and I know the Texas is the
only truly hopes a man this world. General Midwinter is
hl Hunt. This isn't just me in my overdeveloped sense
of coincidence. The writer act based the character on Hunt.
Hunt Ran the Facts form. The fictional Midwinter runs a
propaganda outfit called Facts for Freedom. Midwinter also is prone
(28:19):
to see conspiracies everywhere, maybe because he's up to some
pretty conspiratorial hijienks himself. I'm leaving a flusha a world
of shape for freedom. You don't understand the kind of
love I have for this great country of ours. Love
not built that way, my way anymore. I love my
count baby. I might dreamy to make the thing I
love strong. Do you understand me? Yes? Strong? Strong, strong strong.
(28:46):
It's all here in Billion Dollar Brain, produced by the
same man who made the James Bond films, films that
Zorn constantly ripped off for his own documentaries. I'm always
struck by how in the late sixties and early seventies
and everything from spy thrillers to Soviet propaganda, everyone has
an ulterior motive and shady supervillains hold the fate of
the world in their hands. Midwinter Hunt, Julie and I
(29:10):
were both amazed by this Cold War central casting. But
there's something about Hunt that must have lent itself to
I guess you know the kind of the comic book
character treatment, right, because he was I mean, just as
you say listing off. He lived in a house that
was designed after Mount Vernon, so it was a southern plantation,
(29:32):
like the guy is a parody of a certain sort
of American magnet with the ten gallon hat and the
anti communist brochures. Yeah, and Soviet TV. I mean they
loved all these guys, Howard Hughes, you know, all of
these any any eccentric capitalists who's over the top is
(29:54):
I mean, they're just built for the caricature that worked
really well with Soviet propaganda. Midwinter was fun. He was
a fantastic supervillain. When Billion Dollar Brain came out, though
critics accused it of being anti American because by indicting
Midwinter for being an oil tycoon like Hunt, it played
(30:14):
right into Soviet propaganda. Especially Zorin's His specialty was state monopoly.
So there was this kind of Leninist worldview that the
United States was not controlled or did not work according
to the structures that it claimed to work. It didn't.
It didn't matter about the separation of powers, it didn't
matter about institutions like Congress and the White House and
(30:38):
the courts. That the real power centers in America were
state monopolies were control of resources. So you had the
steel monopoly groups, you had the oil monopoly groups, this
kind of thing under this sort of like rubric of
how things work in the United States, democratic elections are
(31:00):
a joke and we're just all chumps. So in American
politics today there are lots of conspiracy theorists on the
left and especially on the right. All of them require
a lot of cynicism about America, exactly the kind of
cynicism Soviet propagandists loved, and Russian propagandists still love. Zorin.
(31:25):
Though he didn't have to choose between left and right
conspiracy theorists, he just advanced both of them, Samuel, even
the abolition colleges run Dallas Kant sam Beasts. In the
(31:45):
film The Puzzles of Dallas, Zorin talks a lot about
how big everything is, biggest airport in the world and
best rodeo, and then he talks about how awful everything is,
the biggest crimes, the highest rate of suicide. Meanwhile, there
are puppet masters like hl Hunt lurking in their mansions.
But all the films in Zorin's nineteen seventies series work
this way. You see incredible footage of these big cities,
(32:08):
while Zorin rates explaining that capitalism brings all sorts of
glitz and goods to the rich and unbearable misery to
the poor. Julia, though, found it strangely moving watching our
hometown Dallas. But there's this other element to it, which
is true that he's a guest, and he's a stranger
in a strange land, and he's trying to explain it,
(32:29):
and it's impenetrable in some ways, you know, And I
just felt like, you know, that's actually true of a
lot of us. That we often in America especially, we
move around a lot, We go to places where we've
never been before. We think we know a thing, it's familiar,
and there's like McDonald's and like gas stations, and then
we start talking to people we feel foreign and that
(32:52):
this feeling of being an uncomfortable guest is kind of
everywhere now. Zorn's film about where I grew up in
the nineteen seventies, it's called Boston contrasts it with dazzling footage,
bird's eye footage, a flyover tour of the city, the Harbor,
(33:14):
the Financial District, the Charles River, Beacon Hill, Stero drive,
all over music ripped off from Paul McCartney's band Wings.
This too, is just more James Bond because that song
was the theme song for Live and Let Die. I
had a similar response to watching the Boston Contrast film,
(33:37):
a lot of which were shot in seventy four, which
are the Boston bussing riots, right when white families in
Boston were you blocking buses that were bringing black children
to their neighborhoods. It's brutal, horrible moment in the history
of Boston. But then there's also all this footage of
the tea party ship, because nineteen seventy three was the
(33:58):
two hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and this
goofy ship was brought over across the Atlantic and became
a museum. Julie and I had the same unsettling reaction
to watching Zorn visiting the America of our nineteen seventies childhoods.
It was weirdly comforting, even when he was pointing out horrible,
(34:20):
uncomfortable truths like the deep and violent racism of Boston.
I came to think that his weird appeal to us
was because he was a foreign reporter, a stranger in
a strange land, instead of the way I sometimes felt
in Trump's America, a stranger in my own country. When
(34:52):
I pointed in Moscow, I was not a word that
I was expected. There was a many procession of two
black automobiles awaiting my arrival. Two dark haired men in
black three piece suits appeared from the cards and walked
towards me. That's twelve year old me or a young
friend of mine, pretending to be reading an investigative report
called Communism in Russia that I made up for my
(35:15):
seventh grade social studies project in nineteen seventy nine. I,
realizing they are Russian police, picked up my Loga janned
with a deep sigh, started off to meet them. With
insincere grins upon their slightly aged faces. They explained in
slightly broken English that they would guide me during my day.
My report ends with me leaving Moscow disappointed. I considering
(35:39):
the remains of my trip Triviual. It was the same
over and over. I loved it. Everyone told me it
sounded like some of them were brainwashed, but some of
them were sincere. A few years after I wrote that,
the Soviet Union began to open up under the new
Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and after Gorbachev began to hold
(35:59):
talks with the US President Ronald Reagan, Americans and Soviets
began to look at one another a little differently. In
nineteen eighty eight, Valentine Zorin interviewed President yi Are in
the White House in Washington. This was just before Reagan's
(36:20):
first visit to the USSR. I'm looking forward to seeing
your country and well as much as possible with the
meetings that will be going on. The next year, the
Berlin Wall fell, and then in nineteen ninety one, the
Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. I was
in graduate school. Then in the nineteen nineties, you'd meet
(36:42):
all these Americans who were fluent in Russian training to
become Russianists, Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, and then suddenly there were no jobs.
The field of sovietology vanished, almost overnight. Instead you'd meet
those guys former Sovietologists driving taxis. Americans stopped looking at Russians,
(37:02):
but Russians kept on looking in Americans. I asked Sarah
he about Zorn's legacy down to today, and he talked
about how all propaganda is a cocktail, a mix of
truth and lies. Still, that the basic racity is the same,
except that it's now turned turned outward. So whatever creates confusion,
(37:23):
whatever creates conflict is good enough. And again, you can't
you can't just sell a cocktail which is completely untrue,
which which is completely completely fake news. It's not just
a cocktail lately, not just one drink. Instead, it's a
whole cocktail party. In the United States, Americans told the
(37:46):
story of the collapse of the Soviet Union in nineteen
ninety one has a story about the failure of communism
in Moscow. The Hammer and Sickle is lord for the
last time, and an era comes to an end. But
in certain quarters of Russia, in the mind, say of
(38:09):
someone like Vladimir Putin, the story of that collapse wasn't
a story about the end of communism. It was a
story about foreign meddling and Western interference and a failure
of the Soviet leadership to defend against it. Russians told
the story of a coup conducted by the United States
and its allies by way of misinformation campaigns and propaganda.
That's what brought down the uss Are, they said. Zorn
(38:33):
admired Putin, and the feeling was mutual. In two thousand
and one, Zorn sent Putin a copy of his latest book.
President Putin dictated a thank you note to Professor Zorin,
dated September twelfth, two thousand and one, the day after
the terrorist attacks on the US, and then Putin added
a handwritten PostScript. I have always followed your work with
great interest and pleasure. Almost everything has been brilliant and
(38:56):
shown remarkable talent. Wishing you all success. Americans, though, challenged
Putin's authority and his legitimacy, especially after parliamentary elections held
in two thousand and eleven, which involved blatant fraud. Some
of it caught on camera by Russians and shared on
social media. The US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
(39:16):
had words, we do have serious concerns about the conduct
of the election. Anti Putin protesters marched in Moscow, chanting
Putin is a thief. Putin, furious, blamed Clinton for inciting
the protests. They've been organized on Twitter and Facebook, and
so to thwart them, Putin charged one of his cronies
with taking control of social media, and that guy financed
(39:39):
an outfit called the Internet Research Agency. Its purpose was
to conduct misinformation campaigns within Russia to silence Putin's critics
and stop the protests. Ludmilla Savchuk first became a troll
slayer back in twenty fourteen. That's from a story about
a Russian Ludmilla Savchuk who infiltrated the Internet Research Agency.
(40:01):
We think of that place now as a troll factory,
but really it was an office building in Saint Petersburg.
It employed hundreds of Russians. Their job was to create
fake social media accounts and post fake stuff. Later, save
Check spoke to Charles Mains for PRIs the World. I
wanted to get them there to see how it works so,
(40:23):
of course, but the most important thing was to see
if there was some way to stop it. Sav Check's
reporting showed the people who worked at this Internet Research
Agency were attacking Putin's critics in Russia. Soon after, the
IRA would expand its efforts by attacking the United States,
amplifying American political divisions and discontent by posing as fake Americans. OMG,
(40:49):
this new anti Hillary ad is brilliant. It's fantastic. Spread
it far and wide. White boyfriend shows true colors on
his black girlfriend over Trump hashtag black Lives Matter. When
Valentine Zorin went to interview the Imperial Wizard of the
KKK in nine seventy one, he didn't invent the clan.
(41:12):
But at the Internet Research Agency they created fake Facebook
pages right and left, like back the Badge or Black Matters, Blacktivist,
Heart of Texas United, Muslims of America being Patriotic, Secured Boarders,
and LGBT United. Their Facebook posts were shared millions of times.
(41:33):
They also bought more than three thousand ads on Facebook
around the time of the twenty sixteen election. More than
half the ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency had
to do with race. A quarter were about crime and policing.
These ads weren't advancing an agenda. They took all sides.
They were just trying to get people riled up. But
(41:54):
Donald Trump, when he took office in twenty seventeen, defended Putin.
I say it's better to get along with Russia than not.
Will I get along with them? I have no ideas.
Putin's a killer. A lot of killers, get a lot
of killers. You think our country is so innocent? Critics
said Trump was Putin's puppet, But maybe it's more accurate
(42:15):
to say Trump was Zorin's vindication. A deeply, profoundly cynical
blend of money, sex, and viciousness now at the center
of American political life. Zorn died in twenty sixteen at
the age of ninety one, just a few months before
Trump was elected. Still, Trump would have made the perfect
subject for a Zorn documentary, a kind of capitalist supervillain,
(42:39):
the sort of person who, for his own purposes, would
incite a mob to attack peaceful protesters. I love the
old days. You know what they used to do to
guys like that when they were in a place like this.
They'd be carried out of a stretcher folks. In the
nineteen seventies, Zorin needed Soviet television to make and distribute
(42:59):
his propaganda, But in twenty sixteen it was American companies
that provided the distribution network for all kinds of propaganda.
They made an awful lot of money off of it,
to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. After Trump's election, a special council
investigated allegations that Russia had meddled in the election. The
Senate Health hearings in twenty eighteen, Main Senator Susan Collins,
(43:22):
a Republican, questioned Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, about
the nearly four thousand Twitter accounts created by the Internet
Research Agency, accounts that, by Twitter's own estimate, reached about
a million and a half people. My question to you is,
once you have taken down accounts that are linked to Russia,
(43:46):
what do you do to notify the followers that they
have been following or engaged in accounts that are not
what they appear to be. We simply haven't done enough.
I listen to that exchange and I had to wonder,
how would Congress have reacted in the nineteen seventies if
American television networks were broadcasting Zorn's documentaries four hours a day.
(44:10):
I think they would have stopped them. But today the
trolls are still trolling, and no one's managed to stop them.
Very few Americans remember Valentine's Oran. The closest thing to
Zorin that most Americans know. That's borat Aya Shamash my name,
a borat I generalist for Kazakhstan. That's Sasha Baron Cohen
(44:33):
playing a reporter from the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan,
allegedly making Razoran style documentary film about the United States.
Although Kazakhstan and glorious country it have a problem too.
This is why Ministry of Information have decided to send
me to US and greatest country in the world to
(44:55):
learn a lessons for Kazakhstan. Borat provincial ignorant, fascinated by
the United States, and through sheer idiocy and clumsiness, able
to cast light into its darkest corners. Barrett is part
of the weird after life of Zorin, the long afterlife
of Soviet and Trumpian propaganda about the United States at
strange cocktail of truthtelling and bullshitting. After the end of
(45:21):
the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Zorin's Americanism was replaced with the Americanism of places like
the Internet Research Agency study Americans just enough to know
how to create fake accounts. It doesn't matter if you
successfully interfere in an election. You just need to make
Americans worried that you might be interfering in an election.
(45:42):
Between the first Borat film and a sequel released just
before the twenty twenty election, Boortt recapitulates that history, the
history I've been trying to reconstruct this episode and the
first film Borat is a cartoons or in put. In
the twenty twenty sequel, Borett ends up running a troll factory.
Now we are part of the global community, influencing elections
(46:06):
are all the world. The Cold War was a battle
of ideas, of propaganda, and of espionage, spy versus spy. Trolls.
Russian or American are the last Cold Warriors left standing,
A ragged and almost accidental army of ponds and fools
and puppets, endlessly commenting, tweeting, retweeting, making so much noise
(46:29):
that hardly anyone could even tell any more what it
is they're actually arguing about. They're fighting bewildered war that
should be over on a barren battlefield, trying to convince
you to trust no one and believe nothing. This season
on The Last Archive, it sometimes feels as though I'm
(46:50):
a genealogist, piecing together a family history, the ancestry of misinformation.
Somehow We're all the children of Zorin Now. The Last
(47:12):
Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey.
Our editors for this episode were Julia Barton and Karen
Shakerji Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Simfinett.
(47:32):
Our research assistants are Kamani Panthier and Lilly Richmond. Our
full proof players are Yoshia Mau, Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bossi,
Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becca A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert
Riccotta and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production
of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain,
John Schnarz Carl mcgliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek,
(47:56):
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Daniella Lacan. Many of our
sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star
Jenette Foundation. Special thanks to Paula Bossi, Dina Fainberg, Alec Sandrad,
Justinis and Charles Mains, and particular thanks to be Korcentino
for playing a twelve year old me. If you like
(48:17):
the show, please remember to rate, share, and review. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.