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CNN Special Reports
The Most Powerful Man in the world. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired July 07, 2017 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:00] FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, CNN: Winston Churchill, famously said of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery instead an enigma. Prime Minister Churchill meets Vladimir Putin.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He's very much of a leader. He's been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.
HILLARY CLINTON, (D) FORMER UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He was KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Vladimir Putin is a thug and a murder and a killer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's the richest man in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars corrupted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: What does he want from Donald Trump?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Putin is going to eat him like a sandwich.
CLINTON: He rather has a puppet as a president.
TRUMP: You're the puppet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Just how powerful is he?
Putin has a trample authority. I don't see him checks. He was powerful.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: So powerful he rigged the American election?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course Putin want Hillary to lose. He despise Hillary Clinton.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whom you'd you like better? ZAKARIA: While Russia celebrates, Americans asks, what does he want?
And is he really the most powerful man in the world?
December 5th, 1989, it was a cold night in Dresden, East Germany. And it would change the course of Vladimir Putin's life. The Berlin Wall had just formed. All over East Germany, angry crowds roamed the streets and lashing out symbols of communist rules.
That night in Dresden, they found a target, the local KGB headquarters. A mob surrounded the building. As the hour grew later, the crowd grew larger.
Inside peering through the curtains was a young KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Putin.
MASHA GESSEN, PUTIN BIOGRAPHER: He was terrified that they were going to storm the building.
ZAKARIA: Putin was a junior officer, but the boss was away, he was in charge.
EDWARD LUCAS, SENIOR EDITOR, THE ECONOMIST: The Berlin Wall has come down police wanted to help and he called for instructions.
ZAKARIA: Desperate for help, Putin dialed KGB headquarters in Moscow over and over again.
Finally, one official told him simply, Moscow is silent.
GESSEN: And I think it felt like a deep betrayal to him.
ZAKARIA: Vladimir Putin was on his own. He went down into the bounds of the building and fired up the furnace.
DAVID REMNICK, EDITOR, THE NEW YORKER: He finds himself in a basement at a furnace shoveling documents as he hears demonstrations out on the streets.
LUCAS: They are burning the secret files safe pass that the furnace is flowing fire.
ZAKARIA: Putin torched thousands of pages of KGB documents in secrets. As the crowds closed in, with the fire still raging, Putin went downside and faced the mob by himself. There are armed guards inside, he told them. They will shoot you.
LUCAS: And he's able to bluff his way out of this and tell the crowd, don't try it here, you are going to get hurt.
ZAKARIA: Putin's threat worked, the mob dispersed.
REMNICK: This is the drama that stays with Putin all the time. The fear of popular uprising.
ZAKARIA: Vladimir Putin quells that fear with absolute control. This is what control looks like.
In one of the world's busiest cities. The streets are empty for Vladimir Putin's motorcade.
[22:05:02] Twelve million people simply disappeared on Putin's inauguration day.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
ZAKARIA: The event was perfectly produced for Russian television. Every detail flawlessly planned.
Almost every detail.
A few Russians did not follow the script.
JULIA IOFFE, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Literally a block away from his inauguration was a cafe called janjok (Ph) where the opposition lie together and drink wine and drink coffee. And the riot descend on the cafe and start arresting people sitting at their tables outside and turning over the tables and breaking cups and plates.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, no.
ZAKARIA: The crackdown was not shown on Russian television.
IOFFE: For 94 percent of Russians, their main source of news is television. If it didn't happen on television, it didn't happen.
ZAKARIA: Putin controls television.
REMNICK: There is absolutely no critical words about Vladimir Putin on the Russia era. None. Not one word.
ZAKARIA: Putin controls everything in Russia.
ROBERT GATES, FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Putin has an untroubled authority.
REMNICK: I don't see any checks on his power. He's able to make singular, rapid decisions, the absolutism there is unlike anything I've seen in Russia.
ZAKARIA: All that power is propped up by an astonishing approval rating, over 80 percent and that's according to American pollsters.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WOLF BLITZER, HOST, CNN: Donald Trump wins the presidency.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But when the United States elected a new president. It looked like Russia had fallen for a new leader.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE) ZAKARIA: There were toasts all over Moscow at the parliament known as
the Duma. On talk shows and at bars.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are the champions of the world.
ZAKARIA: But, one man seemed utterly unsurprised by Trump's victory.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
GESSEN: He's happy to say credits. And that means that he won the U.S. election. The man who's simultaneously the president of Russia and in charge of the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Putin.
ZAKARIA: Trump's impersonators are everywhere in Russia.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: You're fired. You're fired. You're fired.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But, it could be an American TV program that best describes the Putin/Trump's relationship.
GESSEN: I think Putin views Trump as an apprentice.
ZAKARIA: At the heart of all this are some deadly serious questions. Does Vladimir Putin have some kind of hold over Donald Trump. Did he tamper with the American elections?
I tried to ask him, Mr. Putin did not agree to answer my questions but his closest aide, Dmitry Peskov did.
DMITRY PESKOV, KREMLIN SPOKESMAN: The answer is very simple, no. You're humiliating yourselves saying that a country can intervene in your election process.
America in each country, the country of the most powerful country in the world, this is simply impossible.
ZAKARIA: We will get the truth of all of this. But to do that, we need to go back to the final days of the country that Vladimir Putin loves.
[22:10:06] GATES: I think that down deep in Putin, there is this sense of extraordinary humiliation over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because it wasn't just the Soviet Union, it was the Russian empire.
ZAKARIA: Putin returned from his KGB posting in 1990 to a country he did not recognize. The USSR had been transformed by Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of openness known as Glasnost. REMNICK: A lot of things happened very quickly.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Coca-Cola.
REMNICK: A romance with things west.
ZAKARIA: Freedom came fast and it exposed the rock of the heart of the Soviet communism. Across the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of people began demanding democracy and national independence. It was once again what Putin feared most.
The people rising up. And finally, the people won.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tonight in Moscow, at the Kremlin, the red flag of the failed Soviet Union at last came down and the flag of Russia throve.
GATES: Three hundred years of history erased.
ZAKARIA: Soviet institutions like the KGB simply seized to exist.
DAVID SANGER, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Vladimir Putin views the breakup of the Soviet Union as he said himself to be the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
ZAKARIA: It was a traumatic time and it sparked a profound change in Vladimir Putin. He became a politician, deputy mayor in his hometown of St. Petersburg. It was not a big job but Putin clearly had big dreams.
He commissioned this rarely seen documentary about himself, presenting Vladimir Putin, the credit reads "In Power." Weirdly the soundtrack is from the Broadway show, "Kent."
The ambitious Putin may already have been looking toward Moscow because the Russian people were desperate for strong leadership. Under President Boris Yeltsin, the new democracy was a mess.
GESSEN: The entire Soviet system, it just collapsed.
ZAKARIA: The oligarchs, the men who profited on the spoils of communism, they became fantastically rich.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are selling more of its top fine cars in Russia than in all the rest of Europe.
ZAKARIA: But ordinary Russians was sinking into desperate poverty. There were dire food shortages even starvations.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know how to feed my kids without milk. I just don't know what we are going to do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: President Boris Yeltsin was in charge but he seemed increasingly unstable.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's drinking and he's barely being propped up.
ZAKARIA: Russians began calling for a new leader.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're tired of the embarrassment of Yeltsin.
ZAKARIA: Waiting in the wings was Vladimir Putin. He had taken a job in Moscow in the Kremlin hierarchy and he had risen through the ranks with lightning speed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From city bureaucrat to Kremlin's super star.
ZAKARIA: He had just becoming acting prime minister when it became blindingly clear the country needed a new president.
REMNICK: So Yeltsin was ready to topple all over. They settled on Putin because they knew that Yeltsin could retire and not be put in jail.
ZAKARIA: Boris Yeltsin was notoriously corrupt but Kremlin power brokers wanted to protect him.
[22:14:57] REMNICK: So the deal was made, the deal was made. The deal was made.
ZAKARIA: December 31st, 1999.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The surprise announcement from Boris Yeltsin that he is resigning as president and turning over power over to his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin.
ZAKARIA: In the very first moment of the 21st century, Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. His first words.
"We live in a competitive world and we are not among its leaders." And right away, Putin began to change his country. He joins soldiers on the front lines of the war in Chechnya. He reassured Russians that better times were ahead.
"I think we'll get paid and we'll have work."
ZAKARIA: The country quickly fell in love with Vladimir Putin. The number one song in Russia was called "A Man Like Putin."
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's just very -- he's a beautiful man, you see?
ZAKARIA: But, the biggest surprise, America also loved Vladimir Putin. President George W. Bush thought he found a kindred spirit.
GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I looked the man in the eye I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.
ZAKARIA: Even Hollywood fell for the new Russian president.
He bonded with stars at a charity dinner. But the honeymoon would soon come to a crashing halt.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: He was a KGB agent, by definition, he doesn't have a soul.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Next, when Vladimir Putin met Hillary.
REMNICK: It is important to remember how much he despise Hillary Clinton.
[22:20:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How many times will she leave her mark? How many ways will she light up the world? This is the woman.
(APPLAUSE)
ZAKARIA: At the heart of hacking scandal that rocked the 2016 presidential election was an old grudge.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHELSEA CLINTON, HILLARY CLINTON'S DAUGHTER: Ladies and gentlemen, my mother, my hero and our next president. Hillary Clinton.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: It went beyond. It was personal. Vladimir Putin was not a fan of Hillary Clinton.
REMNICK: Of course, Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. He hated Hillary Clinton.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
H. CLINTON: Prime minister, we had a lot of problems.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: The tensions between the leaders had been brewing for years. In 2001, another American leader George W. Bush vouched to Putin.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BUSH: I was able to get a sense of his soul.
H. CLINTON: Thank you, thank you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But on the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary Clinton had a different take.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CLINTON: I could have told him he's a KGB agent, by definition, he
doesn't have a soul. I mean, this is a waste of time. Right?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Originally Mrs. Clinton said that you as a former KGB agent, by definition, can't have no soul.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Putin's reply. "Statements shouldn't be guided by their hearts, they should use their heads." Clinton had a lot of tough words for Putin over the years.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
H. CLINTON: He is a very arrogant person to deal with.
We have to stand up to his bullying. He's somebody who'll take as much as he possibly can.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But, it was what happened in 2011 that marked a point of no return. It began with the Arab Spring protest early this year. The kind of popular uprising that Putin dreaded.
REMNICK: He begins to see himself through the eyes of Hosni Mubarak.
ZAKARIA: Mubarak of Egypt was facing prosecution. Syria's Bashar al- Assad was on the ropes. Libya's strong man Muammar Gaddafi met a particularly gruesome fate, brutally killed after begging for his life.
Putin may have feared the same bloody fate for himself. Just a few weeks later, rebellion arrived in Russia. Tens of thousands rallied in the streets of Moscow. The biggest protests there since the fall of the Soviet Union.
[22:25:05] IOFFE: People were hanging of lamp post. People were in the streets. It's a really shocking.
ZAKARIA: Putin was now living the same nightmare he had endured as a KGB officer in East Germany from 1989. This time, it is in his own backyard.
And he wasn't even president at the time. He was prime minister. Having handed the presidency over to his associate Dmitry Medvedev.
IOFFE: As the winter went longer and longer and got colder and colder, the protests got bigger and bigger.
ZAKARIA: As Vladimir Putin saw people turning against him, Hillary Clinton weighed in.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
H. CLINTON: The Russian people like people everywhere deserved the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
IOFFE: When Putin hears something like that, I imagine he hears Bush talking about Sudan Hussein. He hears that as they are coming for me. They're trying to drive me from my power. What the hell do you know about my people and whether they deserve to have their voices heard? Like, I'll you if they should have their voices heard.
ZAKARIA: Russians had a lot of reasons to be angry.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
ZAKARIA: That fall it was announced that Putin would run for president again for a third time. That meant that he could potentially rule Russia until 2024.
IOFFE: Some people said, oh, my god, I'm going to die with this guy in power.
ZAKARIA: A few months later, Putin, the elections for Russia parliament were a farced.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
H. CLINTON: We do have serious concerns about the conduct of the elections.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LUCAS: Hillary Clinton called out the election's reading. She went quick how badly that was going to have it done.
ZAKARIA: With his back against the wall -- Putin turned the tables. He blamed the protests on Hillary Clinton, blaming that she was the one who incited them with her complaints about the election.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
H. CLINTON: There are growing restrictions on the exercise of fundamental rights.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
REMNICK: Quote/unquote, "she sent a signal," that was his words.
ZAKARIA: Putin's strategy propelled him to victory. In March 2012, he won the re-election handedly. Fighting back tears after a tense fight to maintain his power. He may have won the day but Vladimir Putin never forgot about the woman who had kicked him when he was down.
Do you think he'd resolved you interfered with my elections to conflate this game?
GATES: I think that that's the line of thinking that led him to the intervention. I mean, I'm totally convinced that Russians were meddling and intervening covertly.
ZAKARIA: U.S. Intelligence concluded, that Putin personally ordered the campaign to influence the American election, in part because he holds a grudge for Clinton's comments in 2011.
Putin has denied that Russia was hacking the democrats.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): I don't know anything about it. You know how many hackers there are today. It's an extremely difficult thing to check.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: The Russians allegedly focused their attack on a particularly weak target, the Democratic National Committee.
SANGER: You could have broken into the DNC with a can opener. This took less work to get into the DNC's computer systems than it took the Watergate burglary to get into the DNC offices back during the Nixon campaign.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: More than 1900 e-mails released just--
ZAKARIA: In the middle of a tight race embarrassing e-mails mysteriously leaked from the Clinton campaign were all over the news.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: WikiLeaks has released a new batch of stolen e- mails.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Another round of stolen e-mails.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Clinton campaign know this could be a--
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This latest leak pretty much a Trump dream come true.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:30:05] ZAKARIA: Donald Trump was delighted by Clinton's misfortunes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Russia, if you're listening, I hope you are able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: Donald J. Trump will become the 45th President of United States.
(END VIDEO CLIP) ZAKARIA: In the end, America's election went Putin's way.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton.
DMITRY PESKOV, KREMLIN SPOKESMAN: Hillary Clinton was quite negative about our country and her attitude.
TRUMP: It wouldn't be bad to get along with Russia, right? It wouldn't be bad.
PESKOV: And to the contrary the other candidate, Donald Trump was saying that we'll have to find some understanding.
TRUMP: When people like me, I will like them, even Putin.
PESKOV: Whom would you like better?
H. CLINTON: This is not the outcome we wanted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Hillary Clinton suffered one of the most shocking defeats in American history.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it, too.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: At least in part, some observers say because of the alleged hacking operation.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: This is painful and it will be for a long time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Putin had apparently avenged his old grudge.
TRUMP: So help me God.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations Mr. President.
(APPLAUSE)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: And he may have achieved even more.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The 45th president of the United States-- DAVID REMNICK, EDITOR, THE NEW YORKER: If Donald Trump is in some way compromise, if the Russian government had something that it feels has on him in terms of leverage, that's a very serious thing. I don't suggest for a second that I have the answer to this question. But we can't just let this matter dropped.
ZAKARIA: Up next.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A prominent Russian opposition figure has been shot and killed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Four of shots hit him in the back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right out in the open just blocks from the Kremlin.
ZAKARIA: The story of Vladimir Putin might want the world to forget.
[22:35:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA: February 27, 2015, nearly midnight. A man and woman walked across the Moskvoretsky Bridge, right next to the Kremlin. A highly monitored area littered with surveillance cameras. All those cameras but amazingly, this grainy, far away video is the only footage that exists of a critical moment in recent Russian history.
Inside the circle of what a Moscow TV station reports to be Boris Nemtsov and his girlfriend. Nemtsov was of course the well-known Russian opposition leader who led the protests in 2011. The station says that while the snow plow hides the two from camera's view Nemtsov was killed and shot four times in the back.
(BEGIN VOICE CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A Russian opposition had been shot and been killed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Four of the shots hit him right in the back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right out in the open just blocks from the Kremlin.
(END VOICE CLIP)
ZAKARIA: So who murdered Boris Nemtsov?
Vladimir Putin condemned the killing calling it shameful and impunitive. And five Chechens were recently found guilty in connection with the murder but many doubts remained.
JULIA IOFFE, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: The assassination was extremely professional.
ZAKARIA: Russian born journalist Julia Ioffe says that only one group could be that professional. IOFFE: Nemtsov's girlfriend who he was walking with didn't realize
that he had been shot until the car was already driving off. It was quick and professional and nobody has that kind of training outside the government.
ZAKARIA: Senator John McCain takes it one step further.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, (R) ARIZONA: Vladimir Putin is a thug and a murderer and a killer and a KGB agent. He had Boris Nemtsov in the shadow of the Kremlin.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PESKOV: This is personal insult. This is a lousy behavior from a politician.
ZAKARIA: That is Putin's top aid and spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
PESKOV: It's nonsense. It's nonsense. There is nothing to command on.
ZAKARIA: Over the course of Putin's time and power, his regime has been accused of involvement of the deaths of many of its critics including the journalists Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
The scholar of Russian studies Stephen Cohen response.
STEPHEN COHEN, PROFESSOR OF RUSSIAN STUDIES, NYU AND PRINCETON: Even a shred of evidence there is not a single plot to sustain these allegations. But they take on a kind of folklorist reality.
(FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
ZAKARIA: The allegations that Putin might have paid a role in Boris Nemtsov's murder may stem in part from the evidence that Nemtsov had been accumulating against the president.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nemtsov was about to reveal information that would prove Russia's involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.
ZAKARIA: That Ukraine report was released a few months after Nemtsov's murder. But there was an early Nemtsov report published in 2012 that also was embarrassing for Putin. It claims the president had 43 planes, 15 helicopters and 4 yachts at his disposal including one super yacht.
[22:40:01] Then there are the palaces. Nemtsov's report says there were 20 presidential palaces available to Putin at any time. One of the palaces known in the press simply as Putin's palace was set to be worth $1 billion.
PESKOV: This is not true. This is actually reverted to commenting of reality. ZAKARIA: Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov says every world leader
especially the leader of a nuclear power like Russia or the United States has access to state owned homes and planes and helicopters that are safe and have secured communications.
PESKOV: Of course, he uses these vehicles displaying these residences but it's not his property. The rumors about his wealth or the rumors about the palaces has nothing to do with the reality. It's just - it's just lies.
ZAKARIA: The rumors of Putin's wealth, well, some of them are simply staggering.
BILL BROWDER, CO-FOUNDER, HERMITAGE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT: And some people including myself believe that he's one of the richest man in the world, or one of the richest man in the world.
ZAKARIA: Bill Browder was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, now he's one of Vladimir Putin's toughest critics. We talked in 2015
You think he's the richest man in the world?
BROWDER: I really think that. And I'm not saying that crazily
ZAKARIA: Get an estimate his net worth?
BROWDER: Two hundred billion.
ZAKARIA: Really?
BROWDER: I believe that it's 200 billion.
ZAKARIA: That would make Putin almost two and a half times wealthier than the man whom Ford says is the world's wealthiest, Bill Gates.
PESKOV: All these rumors, all these accusations about billions and billions of dollars of his fortune, this is not true. Don't believe in that. He's got nothing. He's got what he writes in his personal financial declaration every year.
ZAKARIA: Putin's most recent financial declaration says that he personally owns less than half than an acre of land or roughly 900 square foot apartment and a 200 square foot garage, into which maybe he puts the vehicles listed in that documents, a vintage Russian Sedan, a Russian four by four, and a trailer like this one. The document does not say how much Putin has in the bank or in investments. Top U.S. Treasury official Adam Szubin talked to the BBC.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ADAM SZUBIN, UNITED STATES TREASURY SECRETARY: I'm not in the position to give you figures, but what I can say is that he's supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110 a year. That is not an accurate statement of the man's wealth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: But if Putin was getting rich, he surely wasn't the only one in Russia.
Take this statistic. In 1996, when Putin just moved to Moscow and begun his climb to the top, there were no billionaires in all of Russia.
By 2014, Russia had 111 billionaires according to Forbes. And while Moscow now has multiple Bentley dealership to satisfy Beverly billionaires, the average wage in Russia is less than $450 a month. That's lower than the average wage in China according to Straw Poll.
But despite all the allegations, despite all the accusations, the fact remains Vladimir Putin is remarkably popular in Russia. Why? We'll tell you when we come back.
[22:45:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAKARIA: The most powerful man in the world is also the most popular. Vladimir Putin's approval rating has soared as high as 86 percent in recent years, consider that American presidents are happy when they break the 50 percent mark.
How has he done it? Partly it's the colt of Putin. He has mastered the art of the manly photo opt. He rides horseback barely chested, finds ancient treasures underwater. He rides a submarine to the bottom of the Black Sea, he flies planes. He fights forest fires.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is something ridiculous about a middle age world leaders riding around shirtless on a horse like Conan the Barbarian and after a dozen donuts. Who thinks this looks good?
REMNICK: Everything that we find ridiculous about Vladimir Putin is very appealing in a media universe that he controls absolutely.
ZAKARIA: Perhaps the foundation of the Putin juggernaut is a political tourism no matter where you live. It's the economy stupid.
After the chaotic years of Boris Yeltsin, Putin stepped in and stabilized the country and he rode the wave of ever rising oil prices which in Russia's resource rich economy translated into rising wages and storing stocks indices.
Then in late 2014, the party stopped. Oil prices slumped and soon after came western economic sanctions, Vladimir Putin has navigated hard times well. He has slashed social spending, implemented an austerity program, allowed the ruble to fall, and his central bank has kept inflation in checked.
[22:50:00] Putin is a fiscal conservative.
REMNICK: The outward seeming aspect of wealth it looks closer to Dubai than it does to Moscow 30 years ago. Just an amazing transformation.
ZAKARIA: Add to the economics Putin's secret sauce, nationalism. And it surged in 2014 after an invasion that shocked the world.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Bigger nations must not be allowed to bully the small.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Vladimir Putin grabbed a piece of Ukraine for Russia. The west was horrified.
EDWARD LUCAS, SENIOR EDITOR, THE ECONOMIST: That was something that Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. We thought those days were gone.
ZAKARIA: But it all looked very different through Russian eyes.
HENRY KISSINGER, FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE: I have never met a Russian who accepted the notion of Ukraine as a totally separate state.
ZAKARIA: Of course many Ukrainians deeply resented the invasion, but not Russians. They see it as the revival of a deep sense of power and national destiny.
ROBERT GATES, FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Putin has given them their pride back. Russia is once again a great power.
ZAKARIA: Putinism is an ideology of social conservatism, or anti- westernism, but above all of national power. Putin might say he has made Russia great again. Sound familiar?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We will make America great again.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAKARIA: Like Putin, Trump has used nationalism to boost his support. But many believe that Donald Trump is no Vladimir Putin.
REMNICK: Putin is a much more practiced, subtle, cunning player. He's playing in poker terms a couple of deuces at the highest level. He has reasserted Russia on the world stage from a position of relative weakness like nobody I can think of. That's an amazing feat of geopolitics.
[22:55:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HOWELL: Finally, here are my thoughts on he, whom we have called the most powerful man in the world. First let me explain the title.
The United States and China for that matter are more powerful countries than Russia of course but the power of a head of state is determined both by the country's strength and the capacity he or she has to exercise that power unilaterally, unconstrained by other institutions, parties or political forces. And combining those two metrics, it's easy to see why Vladimir Putin
rises to the top. He has created what he calls a vertical of power unlike any we have seen in any great nations. As the Russian chess grand master Gary Kasparov has noted, himself a harsh critic of Putin. The entire structure of Russian political authority rest on one man.
When the czar died, after all, you knew the process by which his successor, his son, would be elevated. When the general secretary of the Soviet communist party died, the standing committee in the politburo would select his successor.
But when Putin dies, I almost if, what will happen? No one knows. To understand Putin, you have to understand Russia. The last hundred years for that country have seen the fall of the czar, the collapse of democracy, the Great Depression, World War II with its tens of millions of Russians dead. Stalin's totalitarian brutality, the collapse of communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin's years of chaos and corruption.
And then comes Vladimir Putin who ushers in almost two decades of stability and in popular perception rising standards of living and increasing prominence and respect in the world.
Respect is important. Russians have immense national pride. Russia is after all the largest country on the planet, 48 times larger than Germany. It encompasses 11 time zones and straddles Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It is also a rich country containing some of the largest deposits of raw materials from oil and natural gas to nickel and aluminum.
Culturally it has often thought of itself as the third Rome, preserving Christianity even as Rome and Byzantium fell to the barbarians.
Putin understands Russia. But he also understands the world. He's not foolish enough to make a frontal assault on America or Europe. He knows how to use power asymmetrically with cyber tools and disinformation.
He understands the vulnerabilities of free societies, their internal divisions and discord and the gaping openness. He understands the fragility of institutions like the European Union and NATO and ideas like integration and diversity.
In other words, Vladimir Putin understands us very well. The question is do we, does Donald Trump really understand him?
[23:00:04] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
