Following its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s future seems almost as uncertain as its past. Over the past thousand years it has evolved into the largest, and one of the most powerful, countries in the world, known as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, before reinventing itself thirty years ago as the Russian Federation.
Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality, and crafted to suit the needs of the moment. But in the wrong hands these myths can morph into something sinister and destructive.
Expert and former British Ambassador to Moscow Sir Rodric Braithwaite unpicks fact from fiction to discover what lies at the root of the Russian story, more relevant to the rest of the world now than ever. He will be joined by Bridget Kendall, the BBC Diplomatic Correspondent from 1998–2016.
In-person and online event.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Sir Rodric Braithwaite is a former British diplomat and author whose long Foreign Office career took him to Indonesia, Poland, Italy, America and Russia. He was British Ambassador in Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union, which he described in Across the Moscow River (2002, Yale). Rodric Braithwaite was subsequently foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister, John Major, and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He is author of Moscow 1941 (2010, Profile Books), a bestseller translated into nineteen languages, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan (2012, Profile Books), and Armageddon & Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation (2017, Profile Books). Rodric is a member of the Pushkin House Book Prize Advisory Board.
Bridget Kendall was the BBC’s Moscow Correspondent in 1989, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power. From 1998 to 2016 she held the senior role of BBC Diplomatic Correspondent, reporting on major conflicts such as those in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. An authority on Russia and East West relations, Kendall has interviewed numerous global leaders throughout her career including Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. Her book The Cold War; a New Oral History was published in 2017. Kendall was appointed the first female Master of Peterhouse, the University of Cambridge’s oldest college, in 2016.