TONIGHT: Inside Russia: A Correspondent's Personal Notes at Pushkin House, London

Thu 12 April 2012 – 7.00pm
Talk
Inside Russia: A Correspondent’s Personal Notes 
by Bridget Kendall 
GB RUSSIA SOCIETY PROGRAMME


The BBC’s Bridget Kendall is probably best known for her reporting from Moscow at the end of the perestroika era, when as BBC Moscow correspondent as she charted the Soviet Union’s collapse, the failed coup of 1991 and the emergence of a new Russia under Boris Yeltsin.


In fact her acquaintance with the country goes back to the mid 1970s when she studied for a year in a provincial university in what was still the height of the Brezhnev era. Thirty years on, her
experience of ordinary life in a stagnating and strictly controlled Soviet Union is a useful reminder of just what living in Soviet Union meant on a day to day basis.


At that time, many experts still considered the Soviet system might remain entrenched for decades to come. But in fact, when she returned for a second year of study in the early 80s, she was witness to a rather different mood: the Soviet Communist empire was beginning to crumble, under the strain of a failing economic system that could no longer compete with its cold-war rival, compounded by an unpopular war in Afghanistan and the incompetence of an aging and ailing leadership.


In this talk Bridget will share her personal reminiscences from the Soviet era, chart her experiences of reporting on Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and the extraordinary collapse which twenty
years ago led to the end of the USSR, and offer some thoughts on the turbulent path Russia has travelled since then.


TO BOOK FOR THIS TALK PLEASE EMAIL membership@gbrussia.org
Tickets: £5
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/inside-russia-a-correspondents-personal-notes

BBC: Putin, Russia and the West

Vladimir Putin, after eight years as president of Russia and four more as prime minister, is stubbornly holding onto power. He has announced his intention to return as president and declared his party the winner in parliamentary elections that are widely seen as fraudulent. In Moscow 100,000 protesters have taken to the streets in the largest demonstrations since Putin took office.


Putin began his career as a KGB spy but when he became president, he made himself a valued ally of the West. How did he do it? And what made Washington and London turn against him?


This four-part series is made by Norma Percy and the team at Brook Lapping with a track record for getting behind closed doors with multi-award-winning series like The Death of Yugoslavia, The Second Russian Revolution, and Iran and the West. For the first time Putin's top colleagues - and the Western statesmen who eventually clashed with him - tell the inside story of one of the world's most powerful men.


In this episode, George W Bush meets Putin in June 2001 and declares he looked him in the eye and 'got a sense of his soul'. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice recall their discomfort. But Rice, the only Bush adviser in the private talks, reveals that, three months before 9/11, Putin gave Bush a prophetic warning about Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban. After 9/11, Putin describes how he convinced his shocked colleagues that Russia should align with the West. Sergei Ivanov, Russian's defence minister, tells how the Taliban secretly offered to join forces with Russia against America.


Broadcast on BBC Two, 9:00PM Thu, 19 Jan 2012
Available on BBC iplayer until
9:59PM Thu, 16 Feb 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01b3hkm/Putin_Russia_and_the_West_Taking_Control/