complete and unquestioning loyalty. in fact, his apartment in new york was known as the morgue. he was enraged when his candidate, former president grant, didn't get the nomination, but he was apoplectic when he realized that he couldn't control garfield. the attempt on garfield's life was his ticket back into power. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> up next on booktv, masha gessen, a journalist based in moscow, talks about the rise and continued influence of vladimir putin in russia. this is about an hour. >> thank you. an amazing introduction. i have to stand on the little box to reach this.

i'm going to read from the epilogue to the book, which i was actually incredibly lucky to have been able to sure into the book at the last minute. because otherwise would've been outdated the minute it came out. this book was all different in tone, much more personal than the rest of the book. but i like it and so i'm going to read from it. this is called a week in december. saturday december 3, i'm driving my family to see a comedy in central moscow. snow is late this year. the city feels like it is been plunged into hermit darkness. excessive lighting on the garden ring, circles the city center does little to change that you. but i am struck by a giant

illuminated structure. one might call a poster or billboard, that the description to justice. it sits atop a two-story building on 18th century and it appears taller than the building. it is backlit and illuminated around the edges. inside the frame, putin and medvedev, one wearing a red tie and the other blue. they look pass each other over a giant caption, united russia, together we will win. kumar is the parliamentary election. that makes today by law a day of silence, meeting any and all camping is banned, outdoor advertising include. i pull over, take a picture of the monstrosity with my cell phone and uploaded to facebook. within an hour the picture collects 17 comments, no world record come but more reaction than i expected on saturday night. even more surprising, those come indeed are not my usual gang of

friends. pigs, rights and marketing niche. you think we would have seen worse but it still wants you to throw out. i have not voted in a parliamentary election form than a dozen years because putin's laws rendered in elections meaningless. political party could no longer get on a ballot without the kremlin's approval, members of parliament were no longer elected directly and the votes were rigged anyway. but a couple of months ago when a group of well-known liberal writers, artists and political activists called on people to go to the polls and rights and ups and on about i criticized the ideal online as a losing tactic. the government has made a mockery of the elections, but you cannot -- what we need is a meaningful alternative like a reason to vote. in the back and forth the following the publication of the people chimed in with actual reasons to go to the polls the first to make sure that the party of these did not vote in

your name. second come to vote for one of the party opposition parties on the ballot so that putin's united russian did not win a majority in parliament. amazingly they went viral. having written in her dissertations on elections, my girlfriend woke up today and asked me did i dream it or did you say you're going to vote? yes, i'm going to vote. why? i can't quite explain it but i feel something. i said this because over the last few days i've had several discussions with my friends. we have been trying to decide which party today. thousands of people including a number of my friends are registered and trained as volunteer election observers either on their own or as part of an effort organized by a scientist. they will be spending tomorrow at the polls trying to force all attempts at falsification.

sunday, december 4, i go to the polls a half are before the close. so that i can catch the election thieves red-handed if they've already used my name to the. but no, neither i number 90 when her grandmother registered at the same address has voted. nor don't serve any other violation. i cast my vote uneventfully, underground, posted to facebook and go to a former colleague's 40th birthday party. it is a mixed crowd, book punishing people, designers and at least one manufacture, my friends when the people who seem to know and when. and everyone is talking about the election. thirtysomethings come into declaring i voted for the first time in my life. after a while it gets predictable to anyone who reached legal majority after putin came to power will under

this space minutes after walking through the door. a couple of guess who worked as observers regaled us with tales of violation. young people who are paid to hide dollars under their clothing and flip them along with their own. tomorrow we will find out that many officials have no regards for actual balance. none of this is news to me. what is due is the fact that we're talking all this at a party late into the night and that we all put. something else, too. the election observers tell us their fellow include a schoolteacher, a businessman's wife who arrived in a range rover and other people who are not like us. something has shifted. not only for us media junkies. what do you think will take for people to take to the streets? i'm not sure, i say, but i feel

like something isn't there. monday, december 5. driving the kids to school i listen to reports of partial returns on to read the united russia supposedly has just under 50% of the votes to i know this is not an accurate figure but it is considerably lower than the seller falsified results of the previous parliamentary election in united russia supposedly get 66% perhaps this time the true numbers are so low that some elected officials felt they could take a lie only so far. as i will also find out later today, some resisted altogether to put their nose to the -- when the results from just those precincts were counted united russia came in second by just over 23% of the vote, turning the communist party. assuming this is represented it

would appear the official count more than doubled the real one. citizen observe also reported 49% of eligible voters took part, far more than any other recent russian election to approaches for the plan tonight, and i plan to go. i do not want to. the way it works out for anyone planning to stage an can a public rally or demonstration has to notify the authorities 10 to 15 days in advance. this weekend and deny permission for specific number of purchase when. if permission is denied by the demonstration goes on anywhere, participants are likely to be arrested and roughed up in the process. if permission is granted the police set out a space for the expected number of participants and metal detectors at the perimeter. they have to undergo sometimes unpleasant search procedure and can hold a rally behind a police cordon to quite literally talking to themselves. i dislike illegal gatherings even more than illegal ones but once every few months i feel i must go.

this is one of those times. my friend instant messages me with a quote from today's new times article in the russian election. she spent several years in moscow as a foreign correspondent democracy is an action. she adds, if it wasn't so sad it would be quite funny. yeah, i respond to something is afoot but it isn't going anywhere. i go to the protest. it is still unseasonably warm from oscar which means it is cold and miserable. temperature around freezing and pouring rain. who is going to break this kind of weather to fight a hopeless fight for democracy? everyone. at least everyone i know. i approached the park where it is slated to take place with two friends, and as we walk, people attach with us. we two of my former reporters, the when she took turns calling in from the scene of the peter

siege disaster nine years ago. one is no a radical us and has spent a fair amount of time and should the other recently quit his editorial job in a dispute over pre-election censorship. as we draw closer we cannot even make out the metal detectors in the crowd. been worse but come the cordoned off area has filled up and police will not delay any more people through. this things to at least five other people in the park, and that is huge. we walked industry along the along the park, looking over a low fence. there are not hundreds but thousands of people in the park. with ourselves in an informal area until dr. park a long history our buses that brought the police are waiting prison transport people. the police looked on in different as a a dozen of us climbed over the fence to join

the demonstrators. the rain keeps coming to my hair so i might teach you like about to fall. i'm happy to be standing there freezing and it is saying hello to friends up in from other directions. they are comes by phone, the photographer, they're a writing separately is his son of a college sophomore born a year after the soviet union collaps collapsed. and now my editor more 15 years ago. remember how we used to count the number of people at a demonstration in the '90s by mentally breaking the crowd into quadrants. i can't do it anymore. neither can it. i cannot remember the technique nor can i distinguish anything in the crowd in the rain in the dark. but i'm certain that more than 5000 people there, as was will range up to 10,000 that makes this the largest protest in russia since the early 1990s but as the rally breaks up i invite a group to my apartment. the women accept the invitation but the men said they will join a march to central election committee billy budd a march is

clearly legal and i fear they will be arrested. indeed, it will be about 300 arrests and there will be violence. but to be something else. in about an hour when i'm cooking late supper and people are sipping cognac in my apartment stilted warm-up, -- in another hour, six young men i have not met will be at my apartment disheveled and both dissatisfied, embellishing the story of the prisoners rescued as they tell it and we tell. i think i have seen this before. this is the moment the fearless, someone enters a prisoner in her vehicle to rescue his brothers and the police in riot gear moved aside and. it is a tiny move of great change. i am going to fast forward a couple of days from monday to the following saturday.

be saturday december 10 to. driving in from where the children, i listen to the radio. so what if 35,000 people have stayed on facebook they're going to the protest? i've heard of people getting seven or facebook rsvp so party and not a single actual guest. it is the weekend after all. people will be getting lazy. they want to sleep in or stay away and they'll figure someone else will go to the protest. as i get closer to mayakovsky square i see people flowing to in every direction. people wearing white ribbons, white scarves, white hats. it still has not snowed so the white they where in kerry has to compensate. i meet up with a. and at the metal detector, the

police are calm and polite. inside we wander into the square, scanning for familiar faces. at monday's protest i knew everyone was there because i could see them all. today i know they're all here because i cannot see them for the crowd. even texting becomes impossible. we talk it homemade banners people have brought. one features a graph of the official reports overlaid with one that tells the real story. we don't trust you, says the poster, referring to the mathematician who gave the world the bell curve. i did not vote for these, claimed another banner. i voted for the other acyl. i demand a recount. there are so may people who. they are all normal. i've heard like a million jokes and they're all funny.

if you send years -- somewhere in the distance there is a stage. i cannot see it but i could hardly any of the speakers. one of my friends removes a trick from the early 1990s when people would bring portable radios to listen to the speakers. she turns on the radio and herself a. gives us the highlight of speech. we look around and occasion join in chance. new election, freedom, russia without putin. the speakers include a writer, a well loved long blacklisted television anchor and assorted actors. her father speaks about election fraud. they have not yet gotten the

message that power has shifted away from the kremlin. and anticorruption blogger is still in jail. a journalist reaches address to the protesters. the billionaire who suspend his political career two months ago is still silent. on monday he will announce his running for president, but by then it will be too late to win credit with the revolution crowd. imr and thermal underwear, two jackets and moon boots. it is no way to dress or standing still in the russian winter. after couple of us must find that i decide to leave other people are still arriving. walking away from the protest i stopped on a pedestrian bridge to look back at the crowd. there are a lot more than 35,000 people there. letter s. with full range is 150,000. -- later estimates will range to 100,000. strangers are shouting the latest news across tables.

the protest is drawing to close, the police representative has mounted a state. he says, today we acted like the police of a democratic country, thank you. there is a blog. at our table there's a moment of silence. this is great, all of us starts and looking at want another incredulously. this is great. how long ha has been to any of s have been able to say unequivocally this is great about something happening in our city? i leave life-and-death restaurant to return to my family. i drive over the bridge, the largest bridge over the moscow river just as the police leave people out of this corporate their hundreds and hundreds of them. for the first time that i can remember, they do not get a knot in my stomach when i look at police in riot gear. i'm stuck behind an orange truck with a snowplow. it still has not snowed so i'm not sure what the truck is doing out on the street by notice a

white balloon tied to the corner of the pub. in the evening, putin's press secretary tells journalists the government has no comment on the protest and promises to let them know if a comment is formulated. a few minutes later, the television station taken away 10 years ago there is an actual report on the protest. i watch it online, it's been years since i've had a working television in my house, and i recognized him that i'd observed in other countries when i covered the revolution. becomes faith when you turn on the television and the very thing spouting propaganda at yesterday, the very same backdrops, start having human lenders but in this case though this woman gives my head an extra spin because i can storm of these journalists when the last spoke human about a dozen years ago. as i approach, it starts to

snow. by morning the countryside will be covered in white. upon. [applause] >> thank you. today is march 8, march 10 looks to be a major rallying time. could you speak about some of your anticipation regarding that? >> i wish i were there. that's my strongest feeling about it. i'm worried because what putin clearly faces, the election on march 4, was his final word an

argument. so he expects, first of all, he expects the protest to do so, and if it doesn't fizzle but i think he expects the police to break up the demonstrations. even though the demonstrations on march 10 is legal, but there was a legal demonstration in moscow on march 5, 3 days ago, which was rather brutally broken up towards the end. so that's part of my concern for the other part of my concern is that i am worried that some people have been very demoralized by the election on sunday. and sort of we didn't expect any better but it is still depressing. >> okay. in the questioners from the audience? okay, we will come back around again. i have a bundle of them myself. i wonder if you talk a little

bit, too, about the making of this book, and actually the timing of it? because you been working on this for a while. you hadn't completely anticipated that it would be segueing so simply and eloquently with the target of an election. >> well, actually the book's publication was time for the election. we just didn't realize it would be such an eventful election. i assumed putin would run for president again this year. this wasn't clear when the book was scheduled. so that assumption proved correct, but i did not count on the protest. >> okay. all right. one thing i had meant to ask you before, and this is slightly off-topic, but i wonder if you

would care to comment about this odd cultural organization that we encountered around to called -- would you want to set that aside? >> i'd like to set that aside, thank you. >> questioner here. if you can just dan and we will rush a microphone around to you. >> i just read a book about the russian revolution, and it appeared from the book that it was the bolsheviks that were solidifying force that completed that revolution. the czar was the enemy but there was that political force. do you see the possibility of some political force cole sing pashtun coalescing in russia that would indeed change the situation where at least it would be, a democratic country?

>> it's a little early to talk about political force because we don't yet have political space in which this force could exist. what has happened over the last 12 years is that all democratic institutions have been destroyed. nbd has been taken over by the state and has been no public conversation. so as a result there are no politician. so what we need is the transition in governments for at least a year or two, after put in place, and before real elections can actually take place. now, that was in 1917 as well. the transitional period began february, but by october the bolshevik revolution had occurred. >> the questioner here and did another slightly further back. >> what's the relationship

between the police and the ssb and the point of a question is, how far do you think the police will go going forward in quelling the protest? >> welcome of the police and ss b. r. to. the ssb, unlike the soviet kgb does not have a sizable armed force of its own. so putin will have to rely on the police and then troops which are part of the same, but a separate agency from the police, under to quell the demonstrations, he coded doesn't trust the police in moscow and st. petersburg. they have given every indication that too cooperative with the protesters. and so last weekend of the troops were in to control moscow because moscow police are not trusted. so we need the troops to come over to our side as well. >> and a follow-up question, are you worried about your own safety when you move back?

>> i worry sometimes. i mean, i don't want to overstate this because there are people, people i know who have actually been brutally attacked. i'm not one of them. >> do you think the protesters might have some point, violent at one point? in one of the protest he was thinking of, sort of threatened to take the kremlin, you know, we have enough people to take it. >> his rhetoric has a way of getting away from them.

and i think it was very clear he couldn't believe he was saying what he was saying. he was rather remorseful afterward. there's always that risk, and certainly when things happen is the movement has been radicalized significantly since its beginning three months ago. three months ago people came out for fair elections, and it was very clear during his first large protest that i'd described that happen on december 10, there were a lot more people willing to chant along for free elections for new elections and people who were willing to chant along with putin. been putin made his remarks that the white ribbons remind him of condoms, and then you could just deal the mood change. and as -- purchase as many

people willing to shout down with putin as there will people, we are coming with their elections. that process of radicalization a continuing, the brazen way in which the election was stolen on march 4 certainly contributed to that. and even though the movement has been consistently peaceful and all we've ever talked with his use peaceful tax, i worry that i may be underestimating the radical potential, the very many young people who are involved in movement whose stations have started running out. >> what do these protesters expect to involve the united states government? the obama administration has a poor track record when it comes

to providing at least vocal support to protests in other countries. so what could they possibly expect from the u.s. government today? >> nothing. but actually, putin has accused the protest movement as being funded by the state department. which is not true. the protest movement is funded completely, domestically. i've covered protest movements that were funded by the state department. this is not one of them. at this point is extremely important for the protest movements credibility to be perceived domestically grown, domestically funded. so, in fact, i don't see we need the united states government to do or say anything in the

foreseeable future. >> i notice your use of social media when you talk about your epilogue. has that changed how communication between groups are going, and is that limited to the cities because that's where most of the wi-fi might be? and have you been disappointed or pleased with how news media across the world has reacted to the russian citizens meetings, and has that been a true and accurate representation, in your view? >> social media, first of all, the city's question. russia is a urban country. statistically russia is 80% suburban but, in fact, the rural

population is so dispersed and so for the most part, either older or in a drunken stupor, unfortunate view. so mostly people live where there's broadband internet at this point. social media is important as a tool. but i think, you know, there's this sort of romantic notion that social media create nothing where something was before. it helps make those connections more efficient and more effective. it can't create connections where they didn't exist before, and that has been one of russia's problems with the systematic destruction of public space that has occurred over the last few years. it's the connections that have been lacking, information has

not been flowing. so people have wanted the kremlin to break through those information barriers. and that's where media came in handy. again, your second question was? right, the news media. i have been happy that the press has been covered widely in taking suzy, which i think is sort of a consequence of the recent example of arab spring. but think a lot of the reporting has been lazy and have stereotypes not related to reality. the most destructive is the middle-class revolution which is, a stereotype advanced by the clinton. this was the kremlin's first reaction, not putting himself, but it's been right in manned.

they said this is a protest of irritated urbanites. in fact it's not a protest of irritated urbanites. unless you count the fact that all of us are urbanites. it's a really broad-based movement, and surveys have shown that involves people fall in, levels, all education is, basically people of working age all over the place. and there's also the stereotype that the protest movement is limited to the two capitals, moscow and st. petersburg, which is also not true but as i said, there were protests in 99 russian cities in the summer. that never went down by couple in february because they couldn't get permits. so they did stage protests. people put out their toys and

puppets and place little tiny banners in their toys arms and planted them on the lawn in front of city hall, which i denied him permission to demonstrate. so since then that city has banned toy protests. [laughter] there's also, the example of the town, when i say 99 cities, right, russia actually has very few large, about a dozen truly large cities. the rest are small towns. there are places like this town outside of moscow, population 140,000, really a chord town because moscow sucks at everything. from the standard 120 people came out to this. in a town like that, these people expect to be personally known by the people who passed them on the street. so this is either extreme

courage or extreme confidence that the sentiment is shared by the people around them. >> i believe there is a question in the rear, and then we will come around speculative and to this, but i was going to ask if you could speak about the people of the interior, the ones who are willing to be busted and to show support for putin. and the ones who don't join the protests, what's their mood or their motivations be? what is there what? on start. >> their mood or motivation. what do they want to? >> that's actually a great potential army of protesters. because these are mostly people who have been forced to take part in pro-putin rallies.

they are state employees, over their students, college students at state universities. they have been threatened with expulsion or firing if they don't take part. so reports from the pro-putin rally, the pro-putin victory rally just outside red square in moscow on sunday were that they were at one point trying to break through the cordon to get out of the rally. and that one point they did break through any large group of them headed for the subways to leave. so i think their general mood is that they have been humiliated and forced to do something against their will, and this is an extremely short sighted strategy. >> hi. i have two questions.

one about russian -- based on your knowledge and experience, what do you think in the current circumstances how far he is able to go to become an independent politician? what is your feeling about him, how honest he is. that's one question. the other question may be even more difficult, is how long putin's power may last? >> that's an easy -- >> ten years, 12 years, 25 your? >> a few months to a couple years. not more i think. but the other is an example of the russian superrich each of whom have been personally committed by putin.

he was asked to get into politics last year, asked by the kremlin. to take over this dormant right liberal party. and this is sort of the standard criminal practice, to get some parties together for puppet elections, and then sort of let them lie dormant for a while. and then breathe a little life into just in time for the next election. so he was handed one of those parties, the right deal. and he got serious about it very, very quickly. he is a guy who action has a lot of trouble doing something halfway. so he started doing it all the way. he was holding policy meetings every weekend. he was calling and local leaders to join the party. he was warned by the criminal

that this was more activity than the expected of him. [laughter] didn't listen, and showed up at his own party congress only to find himself locked out. the party, the kremlin had handed him a party and had taken it back. so prokhorov organize his party, and gave an impassioned speech, saying that he would fight this, he would fight the kremlin of tears or he would go all the way and he would come back and he promised to come back in 10 days with a specific plan for his fight. and then he disappeared. completely disappeared from public eye for two months. and during this period, we have to assume that he was threatened to do something that i think would be humiliating very public, especially for someone who so used to having his way as

prokhorov was, and just to be forced to disappear. must have been extreme humiliation. then when he apparently had demonstrated, he was yanked out again and told to run for president. and he has run a very subdued campaign for president. what's interesting is that despite the fact that it is being anything but a vigorous campaign, independent exit polls show he came in second. second to putin. so i think he feels that he has real potential to take putin on. he has clearly been testing the waters. on sunday night he conceded very quickly here but then on monday he said the elections hadn't been fair. and on monday night he spoke at the demonstrations. if he keeps going like this, he may, if he feels that he can

without extreme risk to his own life and his fortune, he going like this, i think he has great potential. and he clearly wants to. >> is there a question or over here? >> would you comment on the relationship between the kremlin and abramovich? >> actually abramovich is another interesting case in point. he is a putin crony who accumulated extreme wealth during the early putin years. clearly did not feel safe keeping that money in russia, or even keeping himself in russia.

so despite his apparently happy relationship with the government of took his money and moved to london or he has been living for the last nine years. he was recently in court with his former business partner, who is suing him for billions of dollars, alleging that abramovich with the kremlin's help forced him to sell his assets for little or no market value. and abramovich's testimony in court has really been his only public statement ever. he's another one of those guys who doesn't like to have a face. his testimony was incredible. i mean, he confirmed everything that we've never heard about kremlin corruption.

and it was very clear that he assume, his audience both in the courtroom and as equally in russia, people were following the trial very closely, that his audience was prepared to hear how corrupt the putin system was. and it's also clear that he's probably not going to go back to moscow anytime soon, having made the statements. >> is there a question up front? yes, right here. >> add an interview i think last night on charlie rose, you talked about how being a journalist in moscow is not only dangerous but frustrating, and what it's like -- the freedom of information act, something journals here take for granted but i wonder if you could comment on how it was to tackle this story at book length,

knowing what the obstacles would be to research and writing and how that shaped the way you tackled this as a writer? >> it's a trap, because the system that i'm trying to describe is a closed system that doesn't let information is key. but, of course, it's a very difficult situation to describe. so ultimately i did a lot of interviews, a lot of reporting for the book iv sleep but i don't think that's the most vital part of the book. i think it's the colonels of new information are of interest to russia geeks, but what i think was much more important thing to do was take information that had been out in some form or another, some i don't been published in russian, some of it hadn't been published but was available in russia, and it

hadn't been systematically analyzed. the story hadn't been told. and that's what i tried to do. i try to take information that demanded to be organized and interpreted, and try to organize and interpret it. been that's actually part of my regular work as a journalist in moscow. i sort of made this accidental discovery last year that what was most successful among my readers were long detailed stories of corruption stories that they were familiar with. because it's like when we were talking are here today, don me this wonderful comparison, trying to make, make out shapes in a fog. and you sort of know what's

happening. you have a general idea this is happening. someone lays it out and says okay, this is how it's done. this is the structure. this is the schema think the it all falls into place. and it works because it affirms your general impression of what's going on around you, and it also helps you articulate what is happening. >> thank you. a question or over your by the post. >> thank you. two questions. first, could you tell us a little bit why you think putin's time is limited to two years, you say? and second, what structure changed you think need to be made to the russian political system to prevent another reoccurrence or event of what the country is now?

>> what structural changes -- what? >> the structural changes to the political system in russia would prevent russia from being a summer position in another five years or 10 years? >> the reason that i think putin is not going to build hold on to power for much longer is that sort of the other side of what, the flipside of what he has done to russia, by destroying democratic institutions from is he has deprived his own regime of any sort of legitimacy, other than fear and the cooperation of population. he is not accountable to the voters, but voters are not obligated to consider him a legitimate leader because they didn't vote for the assholes, they voted for the other assholes. when a system like that begins

to disintegrate, it actually happens pretty fast but because people lose their fear and people stop go operating in the daily work that perpetuates the regime. journalism, state television stopped reporting stories in the way they're expected to do. the police don't follow orders that they don't think should be followed. that's where it started happening. local bureaucrats don't do their part for the large corruption machine. and it also starts to descend, which is what i think will happen in russia. now, what needs to be done is democratic structures need to be restored. putin has, over the course of his eight years, during his first two terms in russia,

completely decimated electoral institutions. very systematically step-by-st step-by-step, just destroyed them. in the first year of his presidency, he also basically a loud, enable the executive branch to take over the judicial branch so there's no independent judiciary. immediate have been taken over by the state. all of that needs to be restored, rebuild, build from scratch. is there a guarantee that those structures won't be able to be destroyed again? no. but the reason that he was able to do because he has the full cooperation of the russian population for quite a long time. maybe this time we will be wiser and we will not cooperate with another dictator. >> we have time for probably a

couple more questions. the gentleman your and one here. >> what's the meaning of the button you're wearing? >> it says we will come again. and it's a white ribbon in the form of a check signed, meaning it alludes to the voting. and this has been one of the popular chance of the protest, we will come again and there will be more of us. we tried to print up as many of these buttons as possible because we have the hope, there's always the counting problem. so i have this idea that we will print up hundreds of thousands of these buttons and we will give them out one button per person at the protest.

and that way we would know how many buttons we got rid of, but there's the capacity to carry out the project. we have handed out about 20,000 of them, and also we wanted people to leave the protests with something that they could then where to show that they have been there. to signal to other people, to feel like dissidents. so that's what it says we will come again, because this is the sort of thing you can wear from protest to protest. >> the last few years russia has done very well in terms of the cost of energy throughout the world. we know that the oligarchs, the

cronies, hockey players and women tennis players are doing fine. how is the general population doing? have they reached any of the rewards of his good fortune? >> yes. statistically the country as a whole has benefited a great deal from the wealth, and i think that's part of what accounts for the long time that putin went unchallenged, because it's hard to talk about how bad things are when things are really very, very good. in the sense that people's standards of living changed exponentially in the early 2000s. people were able to afford completely new kind of clothing, completely new lifestyle. restaurants in moscow were opening up a dozen a week. good food, good one, all that

sort of has a way of making life sweeter. at the same time, russia has not mitigated any of the many disadvantages of sudden extreme wealth, especially when it is related to the natural resources. the ruble is too strong for people to live comfortably at this point. everything is just so expensive. everything is imported because there's no point in manufacturing in russia. so that's part of what accounts for the extremely high price of living. people have been, everyone but the superrich, have been priced out of moscow real estate. [inaudible] >> exactly. imagine that most of the

country, wants to live in manhattan or want to live in more hadn't or has to commute. explosion in the number of private cars has been a disaster. it's not unusual for people to spend two, three, four hours a day traveling. so the infrastructure just can't keep up. and, of course, the gap between the superrich and the rest of us is huge. and its ostentatious that moscow has a tight number of bentleys and mercedes. not only are you sitting in traffic in your little trashcan of a car come but you're also seeing those mercedes with flashing blue lights which can be had for a lot of money, passing you by as they rush to

do the superrich business. >> okay, i think we will -- elicited anything else, i think we will have the last question. >> i'm curious about, because i knows the protest movements in, say, libya, egypt, north africa, or even your, occupy wall street. do you have, they seem to spring up and then they kind of get, they disappear or they get, in egypt's case the military, in tunisia i'm not quite sure what's happening there, but occupy wall street kind of evaporates. in russia, do you have progressive political party to aspire to? is there a political party that the protesters would consider joining?

or is it that kind of a vacuum at that level? >> there's a vacuum at that level because there are no legal parties because the political party system has been destroyed. in a sense, that offers a something of an advantage over, say, occupy wall street because there are no structures. it can't be swallowed up by a political party because those political parties don't exist. and, obviously, the danger of fizzling is there, and i'm scared, but the danger, not so much. >> okay. thank you. we wish you all good. thanks. thank you all for coming. [applause] >> we will reconvene out in the lobby where books are for sale.

thank you again. >> is there a nonfiction author book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> get back the last 10 years and draw three lessons. one, the most important lesson is that the most important thing to happen in united states in the last 10 years was nothing. the last 10 years never saw another successful terrorist attack in the united states. and i think the most important question to ask is, why, and whether it was worth it. to me, the most important decision was one that president bush made as commander in chief and chief executive with the constitution on the very night of 9/11 which was to treat the i think the way we thought about it in the justice department at

that time was that if any country had attacked us in the same way on september 11, as al qaeda did. no one would've had any doubt we were at war. the only difference was that al qaeda was not a nationstate. only issue is could we be at war with a non-nation state. i think president bush made a decision for the country that night. that was an important decision because once you make that call, then the united states can turn to the laws and rules of warfare to deal with al qaeda and the threat of terrorism. all of those i think were not just in our invasion of afghanistan, these troops and drones to wipe out much of al qaeda's existing leadership, but also was put fully on display i think in the successful operation to kill osama bin laden over the summer, which i think of as president obama's

greatest foreign policy and national security achievement in the last two and a half years. there you saw intelligence provided by people who have been detained under the laws of war, electronic surveillance, producing more intelligence, all pulled together to look at where osama bin laden had been hiding, and then they use of military force to go out and kill him. under the rules of the criminal justice system, which administrations of both political parties have used in their approach to terrorism before 9/11 we would have instead inside osama bin laden and sent out people to try to arrest him after he had committed a crime. they switched to the approach of war made our policy for looking, to try to stop people like osama bin laden interest groups from attacking the united states before they could attack. the second lesson i would draw from the last 10 years and also helps us to look forward is that

after 9/11 we treated intelligence and information differently. we tried to broaden the scope of intelligence available and to deepen it. so to take one example before 9/11, because of civil liberties concerns, which i think were quite valid at the time to put in place, we prohibited our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement agencies from sharing and communicating information. if you read the 9/11 commission report carefully, some of the commissioners believe that that wall is actually instrumental in preventing us from identifying the identity of two hijackers who were known by the cia to be in the country before 9/11. things like the patriot act, enhanced interrogation of three top al qaeda leaders, enhanced electronic surveillance, all of loud us to gather more information, but pulling down that wall between law enforcement intelligence allowed us to analyze that information more