that we are lucky enough to live in the west, won't have as much control, but i think the key challenge for the western world is not is sent to pretend this isn't happening, it is to say the world is changing. power is diffusing. how are we going to react to it? how are we going to strike a bargain with the chinese and the brazilians, the indians, the indonesian's? because they don't necessarily want to play by our rules but we want to keep some of our rules so i think what is required is but expending the circle but also having a serious conversation about what kind of norms and what kind of rules can major powers in the different political systems in the different values? >> what do you teach your georgetown university? >> i teach fraga class is in the

international politics this semester and i'm teaching one course called temporary debates and international security, and there is a class that looks at what our people arguing about in foreign affairs for international security. what are the cutting edge debates and then i have the grand strategy and historical perspective which is a book class about the imperial management where we start with the romans and then go up through the ottomans, the germans, the japanese come and we end with the era of american. so the senior seminar if you will and it's covered a lot of history. spec what was your area of expertise on the national sycophant council? >> principally on europe, and you may recall but the first term of the clinton administration was bosnia, the

balkans was coming undone so i basically did everything but the balkans because anyone can touch the balkans disappeared into a black hole. so i spent a lot of time worrying about the european union, trade relations, the enlargement of nato and dealing with the emergence of central and eastern europe from soviet bloc trying to make sure that transition went well. >> and this is the cover of the new book, no one's world, the rest, the wising rest and the coming global turn published by oxford. thank you, professor. >> thank you. >> next on booktv david talks about the history of the soviet union and the millions of victims of communism he says have been forgotten.

this is about one hour and 15 minutes. >> hello. welcome everyone to the globalization of international fares program here in new york city. my name is jonathan crystal, the director of the program. as is customary i should ask you to take a moment to silence your cellphone before we get started. our program was founded by the late james cheeks and tonight's even to russia and the communist path as part of the memorial seekers series co-sponsored by foreign affairs magazine which you can find in the back of the room over there. the globalization international fares program brings students from colleges and universities around the world with an internal and organization during the day as international affairs with leading scholars and practitioners in the evening.

you can find out more about the program at www.bard.edu/bgia. it's my pleasure to introduce david satter talking about his new book with a long time ago and it never happened anyway, russia and the communist past. you can order it in the back of the room. i see some people picked it up when they came in. this is the third book about russia, the fall of the soviet union and darkness that on the rise of the russian colonel state all of which are on the yale university press right now. he's a senior fellow at the huntsman institute and teaches at the johns hopkins school of defense international studies among a variety of other affiliations. he said a long career as a reporter focusing on the soviet union and now russia and has written for an extraordinarily wide variety of publications from all across the political spectrum and he's taken a long a

biography. this is the first of the semester so a little about the format. he will speak for 25 to 35 minutes of which i don't enforce vigorously and then we will open the floor to questions which i will moderate. before we begin, tonight i just want to take a moment to speak to be the former faculty member who is the vice president and director of the east-west institute for putting me in touch with david satter and rachel manning and with that i turn the floor over to david. [applause] >> thank you, jonathan and all of you for calling. i'm very glad to be here. i often come to new york but this is the first time i've

spoken to a bard event or before a bard event and i hope it won't be the last time. the book that i've written and i want to discuss is the culmination of years of thinking about a problem that bothered me even before i set foot in russia and bothers people to this day in the west often did very little result which is what is it exactly that distinguishes russia from the west. why is it so difficult for americans and other westerners often to understand what goes on there. napoleon said there are only two countries in europe. there is rational and everyone else. and i think there's a distinction which he accurately noted is the distinction between

the two different ways of looking at the individual human being. in the united states in the west in the country's of the world that are under western influence for better or worse the individual is understood as an end of itself. it can't be used for just any purpose when as in russia this ecology is the individual is the means to an end. what this means for the history of russia is millions of people can be sacrificed and for political ends and their def can be very little noted. the lessons of mass atrocities can be overlooked, and they can continue to influence the political situation in the country in one generation after another.

i you remember when i was a correspondent in the soviet union a friend of mine came back after being completely unnerved by something he had seen. he was driving along outside of moscow and was watching as the plane came in for a landing and one of the airports, and as it approached he saw smoke coming out of one of the propellers, one of the engines and then the engine caught fire and the plane exploded in a fireball but that wasn't frightening thing. the frightening thing was -- and this was at the heart of brezhnev when i was the times' in moscow but was written in is what happened next. there were no sirens, there was

nothing on the radio, nothing on tv, there were no roadblocks, there was no change of any kind, and he was very close to the airport. it was as if nothing had happened. in other words was more important to keep silent than it was to do something about the crash, to notify those whose relatives might have been involved to see if there was any chance of helping a survivor. none of that was important. of life as a society went on as if nothing happened. later on i was intrigued and horrified by the extent to which people in russia disappear. of course in the west with the united states if somebody is appears, especially if it's a child, there is a general alarm and it's a cause for panic and

extraordinary measures to try to locate the person, but in russia thousands of people disappear without a trace and they do so every year. in the first years of the yeltsin reforms a strange thing happens in the country. the state assigns apartments, many of them in of good conditions suddenly began to be worth money, and the elderly alcoholic mentally ill in some cases residence of the russian apartments which suddenly had a value began to disappear and oftentimes they were found in the forests especially after the snow melted. sometimes they were even found on garbage streets and the west discussed that somehow or another they had signed over their apartments to mysterious companies which now began to

possess hundreds of these apartments to make huge amounts of money off of them. this criminal conspiracy was only possible and existed in virtually every major russian cities and it was a sign that the times i remember in moscow walking along and seeing a blood children notice attached to a bulletin board in the area i was living and it said are you sick, ill? do you need help? we will pay your rent and take care of you on the condition that the apartment signed over to us in your will. it was clear to me that anyone agreeing to that arrangement would find that there will was

being executed very quickly, and such was the case. yet during all the years that this apartment racket was going on, very few if any steps were taken by the authorities to do anything about that. but the incident that actually typified the situation more than any other for me was the one that used to introduce the book and this was the story of a young billiards player who had too much to drink one might and ended up in a dumpster. he was put there either by people who knocked him unconscious and robbed him or as a practical joke or because he collapsed and lost consciousness

and someone thought someone was angry at him. we will never know the reasons why, but the dumpster was picked up by a garbage grinding trucked and he woke up inside the bend of the truck with the blades of the disposal machine going at full speed, and he found a place, a little corner where he could avoid the blades andsñsñsñ called theçñ equivalent of 911 n hisñs cell phone.;ñ;ñ;ñ;ñ because of the efforts of the investigative reporter for what russia is only truly independent newspaper, the transcript of that telephone call that went on for almost a half an hour was preserved in which he begs the officers at 911 were the people

who were working there to please call the police and find the truck before he's placed by the blades, and of the woman to whom he was talking and i think there was more than one that reacted with total indifference and asked really all idiotic questions in response to his statement that i'm caught in the back of the stroke i'm going to dhaka year unless you do something she said well how did you get there or there was another question he gave the address where he thought he might have been picked up where he thought he was and she said who are your friends, who put you there, what was their ied? in same questions under the circumstances.

is all this an accident? does it exist are these just random incidents or things that could have happened in another society? well, to some extent things happen everywhere but there is something about the content for individual human life that so consistent in russia and reflects so much the priorities of the society and the social intellectual tendency that existed for generations actually for centuries that it's impossible to ignore. traditionally before the soviet union was created, the political and religious authorities refused in russia was thought to