In the fourth episode of a series diving deeper into Brown Political Review Magazine articles, Multimedia Director Mitsuki Jiang interviews BPR Editor-in-Chief Bryce Vist (’25) about his recent article, “Everybody Wants to Rule the Motherland.” His article is featured in the Competition edition of the BPR Magazine and can also be found on the BPR website.
Mitsuki Jiang: Hi, I’m Mitsuki with the Brown Political Review’s Multimedia Board. Welcome to our fourth episode of Beyond the Article, which is a series where we interview writers on their inspiration for and content of their articles. I’m here today with Bryce Vist. Hi, Bryce!
Bryce Vist: Hi!
Mitsuki: Bryce is concentrating in Economics and IAPA, and he’s the Editor-in-Chief for BPR.
Bryce: Well, one of them anyway.
Mitsuki: Bryce recently wrote an article on the state of the Russian opposition, titled “Everybody Wants to Rule the Motherland.” It’s featured in the Competition edition of the Brown Political Review magazine. Your one sentence synopsis for this article is, “the Russian opposition seems no closer to uniting after the death of Alexei Navalny.” Could you give a brief summary of your article and argument, just for anyone who maybe hasn’t gotten a chance to read it yet?
Bryce: Yeah absolutely. So after Alexei Navalny died in a Siberian prison (a lot have called the Gulag actually), there was a great outpouring of grief both within Russia and in the international community, and I noticed that a lot of our Western media outlets have, over the years but especially after his death, referred to him as the leader of the Russian opposition. And I knew anecdotally that while that might be true in some general sense (because he was the most public facing figure of the opposition), in actual fact, this is an opposition that’s been really riven and divided by various factional disputes for over a decade at this point. So, I wanted to investigate a little more thoroughly as to just how bad is that factionalism? and is there any real opportunity for everyone to coalesce after the death of this so-called “leader” of the opposition? What I seem to show in my article is that the answer is no. It was a very factionalist opposition during Navalny’s time and [Navalny] didn’t really contribute to making it a less factional opposition. And after his death, there really aren’t any signs that that’s going to get any better.
Mitsuki: Okay. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some detail into your writing process. How did that look for you?
Bryce: Well, I realized very quickly that I wanted to pitch this article, so even when I was doing the pitch, I had to do some preliminary research just to make sure that I wasn’t going to lie and say, “Oh, this is a factional dispute,” [but] actually there aren’t any factional disputes. Once I got selected to write for the magazine, it was a lot of research. It was a lot of trying to actually nail down, you know, “what are these most important factions?” and trying to get some good polling data as to what opposition-supporting Russians actually want to see in their leaders and who the current leaders of the factions are and why they’re the leaders, and so on and so forth. And then from there, I did a lot of research, both in English and in Russian. On the Russian side, [I was] trying to nail down some of the statements that these people have made and isolating their disputes. And then on the English side, what has our media been saying and maybe some sources that would be more accessible to the average reader. In terms of actually writing it, I’m very much a sit down and grind it out person. I know there are a lot of people who will write 200 words in an hour and come back to it the next day and write 400 more, and then the next day, 600 more. I have never been able to operate that way. For me, it’s just sit[ting] down [for] six, seven hours, whatever it is, and just grind[ing] out a draft.
Mitsuki: Speaking of pitching the article. So, as a non-staff writer, there’s a lot of opportunities to pitch articles to the US, World, [and] Special Feature sections of every BPR magazine issue. For anyone who might be interested in writing for BPR, could you maybe explain what the process is like for that?
Bryce: Yeah absolutely. So if you are a Brown or RISD student, we publish a magazine twice a semester. That means that twice a semester, there’s an opportunity to pitch to our magazine. And again, as you’ve said, that’s to a World section, to the United States section, or to the Special Feature section. The special feature changes every issue. We have Competition now, [and] before that was Excess. In the past, we’ve had special features like Scars, Corruption, Games, Shadows, just these sort of very general concepts that nonetheless you can make something political out of. We publish our deadlines, of course, within the semester. At that point, you submit a pitch not especially long, 300 words, perhaps, maybe with a 40 to 50 word thesis at the end. Those pitches are discussed by our panel of editors. Ultimately, if you know, everyone in the room really likes a pitch, we’ll contact you and get into the process of writing a political article. And then obviously, it’ll be beautifully illustrated by our creative team. Hopefully, you’ve seen our magazines around. They’re extremely beautifully illustrated and [the] Creative [Board] does an excellent job. I think it’s a great opportunity to sort of get published in a fairly large magazine, at least by student standards, and just have something to share with family, friends, employers, whoever else it might be.
Mitsuki: I know you had a word limit for this particular article specifically because it is featured in the mag, so I’d love to dive a little bit deeper into the issue. I think one of the core problems that you identify is [that] the main Russian opposition leaders (like the Navalny party, then there’s Katz and then Gary Kasparov and Co.) are unwilling to unite over their differences and conjoin forces to lead the charge against Putin. So is the Russian public also equally split and stubborn in their willingness to set aside differences over petty issues? Or would people be more willing to unite if the leaders could send a unified message?
Bryce: It’s a very good question, and it’s an open question. One of the things that I do try to emphasize at the end of my article is that really, aside from all this factionalism (which from what I could tell, some of it is actually disputes over strategy, but some of it is also just absolutely petty, childish quarreling between people who don’t like each other very much), the bigger problem for the opposition as a whole is that it’s really not that popular. I found a poll that I thought was really remarkable where a broad cross-section of the Russian public was asked by one of the few remaining reputable, independent pollsters whether they would prefer an “honorable candidate who shares their views” or Putin. This is the craziest kind of push-pull, right? I mean, literally the candidate of your dreams or Putin. And that question ended up split 50/50. So when you’re operating in an environment where you’ve got half of the electorate basically selecting Putin over the ideal person, you already have a hill to climb, right? The argument I’m trying to make is [that] that hill is tough to climb at the best of times. But if you’re also having these stupid, childish disputes, it’s just absolutely not going to happen. At the end of the day, I do make an argument for unity (to the extent that unity is going to be able to be achieved)—to uniting on the largest common platform that all of these people can basically co-sign, which is probably a very generic, anti-corruption type [of] platform, and deferring the really serious issues (like, for example, what to do with the Ukraine war [or] after getting rid of Putin). But at the same time, admittedly, my article is very pessimistic because I don’t see this happening. I mean, I think it’s very doubtful.
Mitsuki: Yeah. You also mentioned in your article that Western media tends to paint Navalny as the unquestioned leader of the Russian opposition. I definitely believe this because, to be honest, I hadn’t really heard of any other factions of the Russian opposition, and for example, [had] only heard of Kasparov in the context of chess. Why do you think this idolization exists to begin with? What role do you see the Western media also playing in the future of the Russian opposition?
Bryce: It’s a great question. I mean, I think Navalny, for a start, [has] been around on this stage for a while. He nearly won the Moscow mayorship in 2013. [That] was like a big coup because an opposition figure very nearly [got] to this important summit of power. Then after that it was, to some extent, a matter of his personal heroism. We have these repeated poisoning attempts, and nonetheless, he comes back again into Russia knowing he’s going to be poisoned again or imprisoned again or beaten up again or whatever else it might be. And I think that resonated with a lot of people, that this person is willing to undergo these personal sacrifices for his country. So I think that was a good deal of [his rise] as well. Beyond that, his Anti-Corruption Foundation (which the Russian acronym is FBK) put together a number of really, really embarrassing exposés on the Putin regime’s corruption and the way in which these oligarchs live in this secret palace that Putin constructed pretty much with state funds. All of this was really deeply embarrassing. Obviously, that put a target on his back, but it also made the Western media go, “Wow, there’s this courageous person who’s exposing all [of] these difficulties that are occurring in Russia at the moment.” With respect to these other opposition leaders, Maxim Katz, who you’ve mentioned, is a person who lives in Israel whose presence is really exclusively on YouTube and who streams only in Russian. Realistically, it’s going to be difficult for Western media, even insofar as they know of him (and I’m sure, for example, The New York Times does, or The Washington Post does) to really feature this person as a major figure. Obviously, the question for mostly uninformed readers is going to be, “Who the hell is this guy and why am I hearing about him?” Right? Whereas [with] Navalny, people can think about the poisonings, you can think about the exposés, [you] can think about [how] this is a person who was nearly at political power, and that’s someone that you can maybe read about. It’s really the same for Kasparov, who, as you say yourself, you know him in the chess sense, not in the political sense, and that makes sense because politically, though within Russia he is an important opposition figure, he hasn’t really made a name for himself as an opposition figure in the West. So I think it’s natural that the media is not really reporting on him.
Mitsuki: So post-Navalny, where do you see Western media in terms of how they report on [the] Russian opposition?
Bryce: It’s a great question. So after his death, his widow, Yulia Navalny, has tried to take up her husband’s mantle a little bit and sort of become the leader of the Russian opposition. In some ways, I think in my view, she’s repeated some of the errors of the past. She’s again picking what, in my view, are really petty quarrels, like [with] another oppositional-line figure in Russia, Boris Nadezhdin, who ran as an anti-war candidate and then was banned from the presidential election as a result of that. He posted on X after Navalny’s death, [saying] that people can have different views about him, but we should acknowledge that he was an important figure in Russia, and she actually responded to him and said, “Oh, from people like you,” and we don’t need to hear that, you know, you can have different views about Navalny. That “Navalny was a hero and you’re whatever you are, so stop badmouthing him.” And this is really childish and petty and just not something that’s going to help construct a meaningful coalition. I also understand that this was in a time of grief for her, and that she can be forgiven for that type of personal outburst, but it’s really not the sort of thing that’s going to build any significant bridges going forward. But ultimately, it does remain to be seen whether these opposition figures are going to give up on their dream of “I’m going to rule” rather than “the opposition is going to rule.” And that’s what the title is trying to get at, right? “Everybody Wants to Rule the Motherland.” One of the big complaints about Navalny from his co-oppositionists, frequently in times of conflict, was [that] Navalny want[ed] to be the person who freed Russia from Putin more than he want[ed] to see Russia free from Putin, if that’s a distinction that makes sense. And Khodorkovsky, who’s one of the people in the Kasparov camp, was interviewed and mentioned something along the lines of, “I’m scared of Navalny because I think he can become another Putin if he enters power.” I do worry that we’re seeing this again—the same exact cycle. Everyone wants to rule the Motherland rather than they want someone who’s not Putin ruling the motherland.
Mitsuki: So I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the possibilities of the flip side, which would be responses from the Russian government, so Putin’s party, if you will. If, hypothetically, and I know you said this was super unlikely, but [if] the Russian opposition were to be able to unite and gain tons of ground that way, how do you see the government response?
Bryce: Well, it’s an interesting question, in large part because there have been these sort of isolated movements. I mean, throughout the 2010s, there were actually pretty large anti-government protests, isolated ones and largely restricted to municipalities. But they did exist, and they did happen. Ultimately, it’s a combination of stuff. Some of it is just plain old repression, right? Everyone was protesting, [then] the cops come, you know, [you] get in the car and you’re getting sentenced to jail. Some people were just beating them up. Some stuff is assassination and murder of prominent leaders. Boris Nemtsov, pretty famously, was assassinated on the Kremlin bridge by two assassins who actually didn’t do a very good job covering up their ties to the Kremlin. And that was, to an extent, perceived as deliberate, sort of a warning, “We’re coming for you.” So these are all the exact same old tactics. And yet, nonetheless, it keeps happening. There was this weird fight a few years ago with the governor of one of the remote Siberian regions, who decided to stand up to Putin, and that was also a random flashpoint, just very briefly. So it does keep happening that we do see these little heartbeats of internal resistance. Ultimately, the current Russian state has proved very successful at eliminating all of those heartbeats, at least so far. In the future, perhaps if the opposition presents a united front, that’ll get harder. Or perhaps they can coordinate actions and so on. But I mean, even going back to the hypothetical of can the opposition unite? It’s not even clear whether the opposition is interested in uniting in doing actions. One of the polls that I looked at for opposition members had one of the questions being, do you support the killing of a pro-Ukrainian war propagandist (like people who get on TV and say Ukrainians are subhumans and we need to eliminate them for the good of our society). And there’s a 30 yes, 70 no split on that question ([the question being] is it morally justified to kill them?) How are you just going to build around that disagreement? This is something fundamental enough where it’s like, where are we going to find common ground with a thing like this? When you have this really fractionalized opposition, it is really difficult. Even on issues more basic than that, like for example with the Ukraine war, suppose the opposition gets into power, should we stop this [war] entirely? Or are we honor bound to prosecute this war to the end, the best we can, despite the fact that we shouldn’t have gotten into it in the first place? And then there’s the antecedent question, which is, well, how about the Crimean Peninsula, which we grabbed in 2014? Should we give that back? Or is that ours now? And there’s not a consensus on any of this. In part, that is why I’m making the argument that all of this has to be deferred to after. Just forget about it, kick the can down the road, get Putin out of the way, then we can talk. I recognize there’s a really big counter argument that says, well, if you don’t get any clarity on any of these questions, no one’s going to be interested in your movement. And I do see that. But at the same time, taking a strong stance on any of this might cut off enough of the populace to actually make taking power impossible.
Mitsuki: I never realized how complex the dynamics in the Russian opposition were, and you did an incredible job of presenting your argument. Thank you. Is there maybe anything else that you wanted to include that you couldn’t because of the word limit?
Bryce: Well, I was given a soft limit of 1300 and a hard limit of 1400. At first, I was actually really nervous about that because I was worried that I couldn’t fill the space. I was like, “oh my, I’m gonna have to create nuance where there isn’t any.” Because I’ll be honest, when I began researching, I myself didn’t know about these currents. Then, as I actually began researching, I was like, oh no, hold on. Now I have the words to really demonstrate carefully all of these little nuances and show that these are very deep running cracks. But I think the word count actually ended up being perfect. I think I ended up in the 1350 to 1400 range, so just using my space to the full. There wasn’t anything where it’s like, “oh, dang it, I wish I would have included that,” but, you know, I’ve been shocked by the word count.
Mitsuki: If you’ve made it to the end of this episode, don’t forget to check out Bryce’s article in the Competition issue of the BPR magazine. It’s a great read, super relevant in the context of today’s world. And again, it’s titled “Everybody Wants to Rule the Motherland”. Please consider following BPR podcasts wherever you get them and please, please subscribe to the magazine for more amazing articles like Bryce’s. Thank you Bryce for your time!
Bryce: Thank you. Thanks to everyone for tuning in.