Keir Giles will be joining us this week to deliver his lecture: 'What Drives Russia To Confront The West?'
Ahead of his talk at the Manchester Lit & Phil, we had chance for a quick Q&A with Keir.
For more information about the event, including instructions for how to register, click here.
If there's a specific question you'd like to ask Keir, then you'll have a chance on Wednesday as part of the Q&A section of the event, when Keir will be taking questions from the audience.
Q: To kick things off, you have devoted a large amount of your professional career to studying Russia. When did your interest begin?
A: I started learning Russian at school, and then in France, Finland, and eventually Moscow shortly before the end of the USSR. Since then, yes, I've spent 30 years working with or on Russia in one way or another.
Q: Naturally, people will always compare the current political tensions to the Cold War. Is this a fair comparison, or is it outdated?
A: It's true that there are some features of what is happening today that remind us of the Cold War. But that risks being a misleading comparison because there are key differences.
Toward the very end of the Cold War relations between Moscow and the West were at least relatively stable and predictable - but we should also think of the decades before that, full of proxy wars and dangerous confrontations.
Russia's idea of how it needs to deal with the rest of the world, with hostility and aggression in any domain where it thinks it will bring an advantage, is once again a major challenge to peace and stability not only in Europe but wherever Moscow feels an ambition to expand its power and reach.
Q: If the West views Russia as unpredictable and irrational—how does the Kremlin view the White House?
A: Watching the Russian attitude toward Donald Trump has given a case study in how Russia understands, or often misunderstands, politics in Western democracies.
Trump's image swung between being Moscow's puppet in the White House, to a figure of fun, but underlying it all was the persistent Russian belief that Western leaders have more power than they really do - that as in Russia, they can disregard democratic processes and order change or new policies.
The success of the US government at maintaining rule of law and frustrating some of Trump's more extreme and dangerous initiatives confirmed not only his own suspicions about the "deep state", but also deepened Moscow's conviction that the West is fundamentally untrustworthy.
Q: Can you recommend any reading material—either by yourself or someone else—for anyone with an interest on the topic?
A: One of the most striking things I found when researching my own book, Moscow Rules was how consistently past descriptions of Russia still ring true today.
Again and again I found diagnoses of the Russia problem from past centuries that could be repeated word for word today.
One of the best explanations of Russia comes from the 1970s: Tibor Szamuely's "The Russian Tradition".
There is also anything by Edward Crankshaw, including "Russia and the Russians".
Among the many, many present-day authors covering the topic I'd recommend Angela Stent.
**Please note that booking closes at 1730 on the day of the event, and we are not able to process registration requests after that time. If you believe you have sent a registration request but have not received a confirmation email with joining instructions, then please contact the office as soon as possible. Enquiries regarding bookings sent to the office after 1730 on the day of the event may not be answered.**
