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Napolitano: 0:33
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, November 7th, 2025. Dr. Gilbert Doctorow will be with us in just a moment on: Are the Russians Losing patience with the pace of the war? But first this.
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2:03
Dr. Doctorow, welcome here and thank you very much for accommodating my schedule. This is not your usual day or your usual time. You’ve been traveling, I’ve been traveling, and we managed to meet at this hour, 3 o’clock New York time, 9 o’clock Brussels time on Friday afternoon.
Is Russian society evolving during the special military operation and if so is it going towards self-confidence or is it reverting back to the old Soviet Union or somewhere else?
Doctorow: 2:41
It’s a very complicated society. Look, there are 150 million Russian Federation citizens now. You cannot take a reading of five or ten people and say that you were confidently speaking about all of Russian society. However, what you can say is that so many people who are on your show, who are on other authoritative talk shows, and who have their own platforms, are speaking as if their knowledge of some people, particularly high-level people who invite them to Russia for events, that that limited knowledge is the whole of Russia.
Dead wrong. You very kindly referred to my academic title as a PhD in Russian history. But my writings and my speaking these days is based primarily on what I see and know as somebody who has lived and worked and who visits regularly Russia today under the difficult conditions of getting there. And that is a different Russia.
When you have a bank account, when you deal with notaries, when you buy and sell apartments, This is living in the country and meeting a great many people, and not just those who are kindly treating you because they expect you to say what they say about their country.
So my words are not intended to be a comprehensive take on Russian society, but I’d like to introduce some of the complexities, and particularly what I picked up in the last few weeks because they bear, I was there 17 days, it bears directly on your question. And I saw for the first time we sat at a dinner, the Unity, Russian Unity Day, dinner. The Russians used to celebrate the 7th of November for the Russian Revolution, but they moved it three days earlier, or four days earlier. And now November 4th is celebrated as Russian Unity Day. If you ask people what it stands for, they have a hard time explaining because basically it goes back to 1610 or whatever it was when they had a time of troubles and Russia was invaded by Poles, Moscow was held by the Poles.
Yes, Poles. And they liberated themselves from the Poles, and so we have National Unity. Well, anyway, they celebrated. And we had a dinner, a festive dinner, five people there. I’ve known them for years, for decades, I can say.
And we never discussed directly the question of how the war is being handled until we did this week. And I can tell you, answer your question directly, four out of four of these people with different backgrounds, one worked for maybe 30, 40 years, maybe 50 years, designing ballistic missiles in the defense industry. Very patriotic. His wife was a former spokeswoman for the mayor’s office in Petersburg. At this level, they are high in Russian society and in loyal Russian society.
They all said one thing. The war has to stop. It’s going on for much too long. The fellow in the defense background, who knows a thing or two about designing weapons, said it’s clear what’s going on. The general staff is using the territory of Ukraine now for target practice, for testing new weapons.
And the day after we had this discussion, on the fifth of this month, the Financial Times had a lengthy article detailing precisely that, listing one after another the latest modifications made to Russian glide bombs, these are the dumb bombs from the Soviet Union which are stockpiled in vast quantities and have been upgraded to glide bombs. And so there are people in the government who, and particularly in the military, who are motivated to keep this war going.
Napolitano: 7:18
Your friends who are educated and patriotic, I think that’s a fair way to describe them from this, to summarize the description you’ve given. Are they just impatient, normal human impatience, or do they see some sort of regression in Russian society because of the duration and cost of the war?
Doctorow: 7:44
Well, the latter, the last points you’re mentioning, we didn’t discuss it at the dinner table. I discussed that, it was introduced not by me, but by my interlocutor when I was at the Russian Union of Journalists. And I heard precisely this question coming up of the war. Well, no war in any country lends itself to the progressive evolution of society. It always is a tightening of the screws and of an illiberal move in a society.
Napolitano: 8:25
You and I are using the common English word war. President Putin uses the technical legal phrase special military operation. There was obviously a difference. However, what do the Russians use? Do they say it’s a war, not World War II, we’re not being invaded by the Germans, it’s not 1812, we’re not being invaded by Napoleon? Do they use special military operation, which connotes a refined, finite, limited goal, or do they use the word war?
Doctorow: 9:00
Nobody speaks about special military operation any more. It’s a war. And I heard precisely what you expect to hear about a war. The apartment that we maintain with my wife on the outer borough of St. Petersburg, happens to be near a helicopter base, which brings in at night, wounded, injured, severely injured Russian soldiers from the war.
Now they are not flown in by helicopter from the front obviously. They are brought to some point in the Russian Federation by a normal plane, a fixed wing plane, and then they are offloaded onto many helicopters who take them to specialized hospitals in various cities across the country, including St. Petersburg. We hear this. A taxi driver was describing how many of these flights are coming in, how the local hospital, military hospital is overloaded now.
What people talk about is not so much deaths, they talk about casualties, about the maimed, about those who have lost limbs. When you listen to Russian television now-
Napolitano: 10:17
While they’re talking about this, and while the Russian military is making gains against Ukraine, but also experimenting with new weapons and refurbished old weapons, as you’ve described, what is the economic viability of life in Moscow and St. Petersburg. How well stocked are shelves? What is inflation like? Are there gas lines?
Doctorow: 10:46
Well, I was in Moscow in May, my last trip five months ago. I was only in Petersburg for these 17 days. As I have written, I write travel notes. And I did that on this trip, publishing on my Substack platform.
As I noted, when you go through the shops quickly and pick up this or that, amongst staples, what are ordinary commodities, milk or butter or cheese, the prices look stable. You have to spend a little bit of time and use the kind of care that you use anywhere. When a Mars bar gets smaller, that’s inflation. When the same thing in Russia, they change the way that many portioned foodstuffs like cakes or buns or whatever, a bakery, they’re no longer by piece. They’re now by 100 grams in little tiny letters so that the customer will be embarrassed when the price asked at the cash registers is three times what they thought they were going to pay for that bun or that cake in the store.
They are playing tricks. Stores are playing tricks to extract a much higher price than you would expect now or that people did expect. Saying that, I think overall inflation is probably not far from the 10% described, But in some items, it’s way out of whack. I can tell you right now that in May, I bought the usual 250 gram package of coffee, ground coffee, and the price was close to what it is in Belgium. This time it is 40% higher in the St. Petersburg supermarket than it is in the supermarket in Brussels. That is a hell of an inflation for coffee coming presumably from the BRICS friends in Brazil. So these things are more sophisticated to figure out. But I can tell you inflation is there, people are aware of it. But the big issue is the maimed, wounded, and killed soldiers.
Napolitano: 13:03
Are journalists free to criticize the government over its handling of the war or even to criticize the moral and legal basis for the war?
Doctorow:
On the latter, no. The former, yes. You can say that the war is being mishandled. You can argue that more drastic efforts should be made to subdue Kiev or to decapitate the regime.
You can say that. You cannot say that the war is a bad idea. That is, you cannot make openly anti-war positions. And the Union of Journalists, under the successor to the KGB, which is called the FSB, were instructed recently to throw out members who are against the war. And they did that in St. Petersburg to their great regret.
Napolitano: 13:54
Is there any validity to the rumors which spread in the past 36 hours in Moscow, not picked up in mainstream media but alternate media, we see this, of a falling out between Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov.
Doctorow:
No, I’m not aware of that. This would be detected much more closely in the West than it would have been in Russian media. The question of Mr. Lavrov, he is widely respected. I know that you respect him greatly. And the world at large has a great deal of respect for Lavrov for what he’s achieved and for his long service. But let us be completely frank. Mr. Lavrov is not, never was an independent actor. He is the implementer of the president’s policies. He is not a maker of policy.
Napolitano:
Correct.
Doctorow
And so if-
Napolitano: 14:56
Well, but that’s the case with any secretary of state or foreign minister.
Doctorow:
That’s the way it should be, but it isn’t always. But yeah–
Napolitano:
Right, right. Does Vladimir Putin want the war to end?
Doctorow:
That’s an interesting question. If he really wanted it to end, if that were his highest priority and in line with the general principle of the Russian government that Vladimir Putin wants to spare Russian soldiers’ lives. Well, the best way to solve it, spare their lives, is to end the war tomorrow by decapitating Kiev. Now, I’m not saying something out of turn. This very idea has been broadcast on Russian state television by none other than Vladimir Solovyev and a few of his panelists. And if people say, oh, you’re listening to Russian television, well, yes, Russian television is very closely controlled by the government and it let this pass. So there are people within the government who would like the war to be ended now. And Mr. Putin is obviously not one of them.
Napolitano: 16:07
Is there a credence in your view to the argument that Putin is intentionally waging a war of attrition? You and I have talked about this, but not in a number of months. So maybe you feel the same as you did a few months ago, or maybe you feel differently. The president is intentionally waging a war of attrition to destroy a generation of young men in Ukraine so that Russia doesn’t have to put up with this again.
Doctorow:
No, I don’t believe that is in line with Mr. Putin the man. As I said, as I’ve written, there are contradictory notes coming out of this visit, including the very interesting coda to a famous opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, which ends in a statement, a very powerful message about Russian culture, Russian culture being very Christian in the sense of turn the other cheek, not looking for revenge and so forth. Mr. Putin is to all appearances, a deeply, a deep believer in these values of Russia as no Soviet leader ever could be. So there’s a big change. The question is whether this peculiar feature of Russian culture which Mr. Putin embodies isn’t leading us to World War III because it is not appreciated by this very secular Western European and American leadership. They don’t get it.
So the two sides are working on, and here as I raise it, we have the famous clash of civilizations of Sam Huntington in which the Eastern Orthodox faith was described as a separate civilization. But there was no mention by Huntington or no thinking that it could lead to a clash. Well, my friends, we have that potential today because Putin is operating under different cultural values from what Washington, London or Berlin are operating under.
Napolitano: 18:30
Let me bring you back to the first question I asked you: Is Russian society evolving during the war? And if the answer is yes, can you say if it is moving towards self-confidence or back toward the old Soviet Union or in some other direction?
Doctorow:
Charles Dickens was very clever when he opened the Tale of Two Cities with that statement “it was the best of times and it was worst of times”.
Napolitano:
Right.
Doctorow:
Life is contradictory. What I saw on this visit is contradictory. The Soviet society was a sick society. In 25 years in power, Mr. Putin has done a great deal to make it a healthy society. I have described in my notes the idiocy of bureaucratic requirements as they pertain to Russian citizens and certainly as they pertain to foreigners who are trying to register and follow the laws, they are idiotic. They impose a great task on the bureaucracy that serves the people in these local administrative offices. Those people are very kindly. They are very helpful.
Soviet officials, whom the public dealt with, were not friendly. They were nasty. They were underpaid. And they were disagreeable. The Russian officials, officials of today are very nice people.
So that’s all positive. The sickness of the Soviet days is gone. But Elon Musk would agree with me, the Russians could fire half of their bureaucrats and life would be twice as good.
Napolitano:
The Russians could fire half of their bureaucrats and life would be twice as good. Can I take from you that if you detect any direction of Russian society evolving, it’s towards self-confidence, it’s not toward the old Soviet Union? I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I’m going-
Doctoorow: 20:33
For society, I agree with you completely. But the problem is that in any war, the worst elements come to the fore. And censorship comes to the fore. And the abuses of power at the low levels come to the fore.
In the 1990s, the traffic police were a burden on anyone with a car because they were stopping everybody, giving them fines to be paid in cash on the spot, going into the pockets of the police. That has come back. It’s come back. The Putin government has lost its control over these ills because it’s so absorbed by the war.
Napolitano:
Were you as a non-Russian, I’ll just throw this example out, permitted to have a Russian telephone with a Russian telephone number in the two or three weeks you were in Russia?
Doctorow: 21:32
I have had a Russian telephone since 2009. The Russians were never controlling the access of foreigners to their phone system. It was never an issue. In fact, in the past you could get a SIM card at the airport. You arrive in Moscow or Petersburg and they were selling SIM cards for temporary use, either loaded with so many rubles on the SIM card or whatever.
Now not only is that gone, but anyone who is a foreigner has to be resident, has to be registered with GosUslug, which is a multifunctional interface between all government services and citizenry and has to have a Russian health insurance policy. You tell me what the connection is between having a Russian health insurance policy and having a phone number. Not much.
Napolitano: 22:39
Wow. Where do you think the war will be in the spring, six months from now?
Doctorow:
Right where it is now. I disagree with all of the– Look, I have looked, I’ve written my War Diaries, volume one, and already it was coming to me then, back in May, that my goodness, we’ve been making projections, and making projections all based on good military logic that the Ukrainians have lost the war and should admit it. We were missing the point that the West wants this war to go on. First it was the Biden administration that was orchestrating the whole thing. And now that Trump has pulled the United States out of the leadership role, now it’s the Europeans who want the war to go on.
And so the notion of that, if the Russians take Pokrovsk it will be the end of the war, is utter nonsense. They still have to reach the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper. Well, what does that mean? If the Europeans keep on supplying arms, if they move in and create military bases in Ukraine, then the Russians will have not achieved their objective of the special military operation. So this war can go on for years.
Napolitano: 23:55
Professor Doctorow, pleasure, my dear friend. You are sometimes a contrarian, but I love it because it challenges people and makes them think. And your observations, of course, are unique because of all your interaction in Russian society, which you just concluded in a three-week trip. Thank you, Gilbert. We look forward to seeing you your usual day and time next week.
Doctorow:
Well, very kind of you. And I hope this sets minds thinking.
Napolitano:
It surely does. Thank you all the best. Have a fine weekend.
Still to come, it’s the end of the day and the end of the week. That means at four o’clock, At four o’clock Eastern this afternoon, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable will review all of this.
24:42
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
Gilbert Doctorow 