The Mind of Vladimir Putin

Event Details

Television Broadcast: April 13, 2014

CLIFFORD GADDY, an economist specializing in Russia, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His book  Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (with Fiona Hill),  attempts to answer the question, "Who is Mr. Putin?" Drawing on many sources, including their own personal encounters with Putin, Gaddy and Hill argue that there are, in fact, several "real Putins” who have been shaped by many influences. Gaddy’s other books include Bear Traps on Russia’s Road to Modernization and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold. In the mid-1990s, Gaddy was an advisor to the Russian finance ministry.

YURI URBANOVICH is a lecturer in the departments of politics and Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia. He served as a consultant to the Soviet Delegation at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament and to President Jimmy Carter on a trip to the Republic of Georgia for preliminary assessment of the relations between the opposing sides (Georgians and Abkhazians) after the brutal conflict of the early 1990's.