on social media sites. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. here's our primetime lineup for tonight.

>> you're watching booktv on c-span2. coming up next, fiona deans halloran recounts the life of political cartoonist thomas nast. a regular contributor to harper's weekly, mr. ness made popular the donkey and elephant as symbols of the democratic and republican parties. this is about 40 minutes. >> good evening. welcome to the filson historical society. i'm the director and i want to thank you for joining us tonight for what i know be a very interesting program, "thomas nast: the father of modern politcal cartoons" with fiona deans halloran.

i want to thank you for being here. i was remarking this is the first time i can remember in a long while that we've had sunshine when we started an evening program. so i appreciate you coming in and being with us. our mission at the filson is to tell significance with of kentucky and ohio valley region history and culture. a part of that culture and political culture are cartoons. we have a really nice cartoon collection here. we have one example of actually thomas nast cartoon over here that our speaker might have time to point to later, and we will see. integrating additional questions, the curator can certainly bring you up to speed. if your not a member of the filson, we would love to have you join us. we are a private nonprofit historical society. were not supported by government funding, so we would appreciate your membership. this is the commercial part of our program. i will not move along to while

you are here, i want to thank c-span for being here and also i see a number of students here from presentation academy, and i believe trinity. we always welcome you, and thank you very much for joining. fiona deans halloran is a department chair of u.s. history and ap history teacher at rowland hall-st. mark's school in salt lake city. prior to her position, she was an assistant professor at eastern kentucky university and a visiting assistant professor at base college but she earned her ba at american university, and her ph.d in american history from the university of cal the -- california, los angeles. she's been a research fellow at the huntington library, and at university. in addition to "thomas nast: the father of modern politcal cartoons," she has contributed to europe, workings, and encyclopedia of our late

american world. she published numerous essays and chapters including shout i trust? and fathers, preachers, rebels and men, 1820-1925. and oppose everything, propose nothing. please join me in welcoming fiona deans halloran to the filson. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, mark, and thank you also to judy miller and to jayme and scott who helped to bring here. and help answer any questions people have got today, and for my very closest friends and instinct an e-mail to say stop worrying.

that was very nice, thank you. and effective. so just before we begin i would like to mention this image on your right because it's not after a cartoon in the sense of public cartoons but it's a particularly charming example of something thomas nast it all the time which is a thank you note. rather than send traditional notes he tended to draw himself which is done here, they typically as you can see, short, chubby and unkempt. he loved to draw his facial hair all over the place. and he has written this little note saying the family of henry watterson, the editor of the local paper, for welcoming him here in louisville. he did all the time with drawings of himself. of the because he really liked it. up early because of having grown up in newark city with a very inaccurate -- very inadequate education, he was not capable of writing a thank you note. his wife -- if she couldn't do it for him he didn't do it

because his spelling was phonetic german accent spelling. and his handwriting can only be described as horrific. so people often want to know how it came to write about thomas nast, and it's a story that originated in graduate school in california when i was contributing material for an encyclopedia being produced by my advisor, and i chose to stand off of the list thinking it would be entertaining. and then what i want to look for material about him i couldn't find any, and i thought on the world's worst graduate student and they should take me out. i'm pathetic and everyone would know. i called my advisor and i said i don't know what i'm doing. she said let me look. she looked and she called me back and said it's fine, it's not you. there is nothing about him. so it turns out that what existed at that time was a biography published in 1904 by albert bigelow paine who was a newspaper writer for a children's magazine and

newspaper, and who, this was his big break writing this book. there was a picture book published in 19 safety which is wonderful text but approximately 57 pages of it, so that's not enough. and then there was quite an odd book but a great book if you're interested in eccentric trees published in the 19th by roger fisher which is both a book about nixon and a book about thomas nast. so you can imagine that, go ahead. it's not the usual book, but it is really an interesting book when you get around to that mentally. then there are a few very good articles. so it seemed like a good idea to write about them as a dissertation topic. and as a way to bring his life back and provide him with the historical legacy which i think he deserves which he has not enjoyed. it has been a fascinating way to spend a decade, and it's made me a tiny bit evangelical on the subject of his value to american

history, which i think has been neglected. i will introduce you to them briefly so you have a sense. he was born in 1840 and landau, which at the time was part of bulgaria. he emigrated to the u.s. in 1846 with his mother arriving in new york city. he was not a great student because he arrived precisely at the moment that you would become literate, except that he was expected to perform a human language he did not speak. his mother enrolled him in an english speaking school. a little boy directed into line and returned at that was was a staking line and he went home at lunch does not i'm never going back to school. although she did find other schools for him, german-speaking schools, it didn't fit. by 1 13 is basic on the street every day, the result of which that at 15 he gave up entirely on his education and talked his way into a job with the illustrated press.

this is his drawing of himself doing the. and you can see that always he liked to draw himself as short and messy and not terribly defined. so he worked first for frank leslie, and then more meaningfully and much longer for harper's weekly. those of which were dueling banjo's so to speak. and he primarily moved to harper's because frank leslie didn't like to pay his employees. at harpers he built a career that catapulted him into fame and fortune for a while, and an enduring place. and in his prime he was the most famous cartoonist in the united states. he produced not just cartoons but also illustrations and christmas drawings. illustrations of the civil are specially famous now, and this is one of the illustrations he produced which depicted the attack on a border town by

guerrilla fighters. and so much great about this drawing is they're doing everything that you can imagine. they're drinking, committed vandalism, they're hanging a baby upside down. they are stealing pocket watches. people are being painted. it's really very bad. unfortunately his career and did not so much with a bang but a whimper. the friday pace with which he produced cartoons, particularly in the early 1870s again to wear out his arm and shoulder. as a consequence he had to stop cartoon for a while several times and he also, his work began to decline. people start to move on to other cartoonist who they thought were better. and then after a conflict with his editor and publisher of "harper's weekly" in 1877, he began to feel very dissatisfied with his position at the newspaper. in the 1880s he returned.

he tried to maintain his grip on working for other papers, and they'll pick you tried to bully career as a painter, and failed. he tried to establish his own paper. that also failed. and finally the only complete collection is at the university of minnesota's archives, and -- finally he turned to his connections and theodore roosevelt administration did one of the people at work for theater was the titles were for abraham lincoln and nast had known him for like 40 years. and so he called up theodore roosevelt administration, looking for some diplomatic signature that would help them pay his bills and give them some honorable retirement. and he succeeded at this but it was unfortunate because he got an appointment in ecuador in july of 1982, only to contract tel aviv and his dead in in thw

weeks. so it did not end in work out the way he'll. so when it comes to his legacy, which some people like to talk about a lot, he's famous for physics. primarily for first, the popularization of the elephant and the dog as symbols of the democratic and republican party. that did not originate the use of the donkey. that predated him by decades. he did link the elephant to the republican party, and that connection he exploited quite frequently as part of a larger symbolic world that he filled with lions and lambs and dogs and cats lies, and people as animals and animals as peoples. whatever animals were useful to them at the moment. he's also famous, second, for his designs of santa claus.

this is one of the earliest ones that he drew during the civil war. he started to produce christmas drones to go in harper's holiday edition. usually the first paper of january. because the paper appeared almost a week before. so the last week of december would be dated the first of january. those early illustrations rely on patriotic sentiment. you can see santa has arrived and has already distributed toys to the low rumble and is going to give out items of comfort to the soldiers. so it was very sentimental and very patriotic for the need for chair in the coldest months among the men. later, santa drones tended to adhere more completely towards a family-oriented ethos. but if you find it a little overwhelming, these are typical of the later ones where family at this at the heart of the. and help to create the christmas with which we are all familiar, which did not preexist. that is, it starts to develop in

the 1840s. argue that christmas was a very different holiday but it comes in this period of 20 years around the civil war to be very home oriented, very child focused. santa is transformed into this fat, jolly, bearded sometimes tight smoking, deutsche laden person. nast was a big part of the creation of those images. you can see them doing that he. nast's children are the kids you see in the pictures. one of the great fun things about the pictures if you to go by you by your you will see more and more children because that's how that works. and they often, sometimes surprisingly -- so nast's children are the children you see any strong and often with the center of demonstrating the value of christmas, the promotion of christmas. so they're the ones who are waiting, on christmas eve, and they want to wake up to the present and they're the ones who are placed before a roaring fire

with stockings. so he was a very great lover of family, and incorporated that into his work by putting these children in his own home to many of the background in peace drawings are his own home in new jersey. .. >> this, on the lower left, ta a plate that up until last year you could buy from williams

sonoma at winter time, and the others, of course, are christmas ornaments which are always available in various places. so if you really like the santa illustrations, you need not do without. the third thing that cemented nast's reputation, of course, was his crusade against boss tweed. tweed was the face, really, of urban political corruption for those americans who were most concerned about reform of politics and particularly reform of politics in the cities which was a significant obsession to have late 19th century among protestant reformers. nast, until he became embroiled in this crusade, wasn't terribly interested in urban corruption. he was to the extent that he lived in a city and that there were some things which he had commented upon before, particularly the swill milk which was the selling of tainted milk in the cities that was trucked in.

it had chalk in it and sometimes could kill children he had participated in an effort to stamp that out in his very earliest years as a cartoonist, but he was very interested in these years in national politics and in the republican party and not super focused on new york's political machines. but when "the new york times," which was a brand new paper, so it's kind of entertaining to see them in their infancy. in fact, at the moment they were the scrappy underdog. so when "the new york times" initiated an investigation into spending on city projects that were overseen by tammany hall, nast joined them as the illustrator of some of the points they were trying to make. and his cartoons, ultimately, were as important in some ways as the evidence produced by whistleblowers, because the cartoons helped to show the ways they were skimming funds off these government contracts. and the visual evidence in the cartoons was unmane bl. --

unmistakeable. anyone could understand them which was the famous complaint. so, obviously, this is not complicated, right? even a person who is illiterate knows what's happening here. and boss tweed all wore this big diamond stick pin. tweed was bloated and greedy for more and totally unrepentant. so the tiger says what are you going to do about anytime and that was typical of tweed whose whole position was, and that's tweed -- hard to see in this scan, but tweed is up on the left in the stands watching with satisfaction. tweed just really rejected the idea that anything could touch him for quite a while during this scandal, and nast got more and more forward in his descriptions of what was wrong with this urban corruption and why people should care about it even when it benefited them in a short-term way. and one of the unrepenitent, so they're portrayed as the

vultures and their waiting for the storm to blow over, and on the right this is a very famous image which has been reproduced where it says, oh, who stole the people's money, oh, it was him, it was of him. and many of these cartoons were reproduced about a decade ago during the enron scandal when "the new york times" would run this bottom one to suggest that no one was willing to take responsibility. combined with nast's work in the 1868 and 1872 presidential campaigns when he championed u.s. grant, these cartoons from the tweed campaign really paid his reputation and really launched him into fame on a level that he had never anticipated, though he welcomed it warmly. as you would. but these are the things for which everybody already is interested in nast, and i would suggest to you that i think he ought to be famous at least in part or in addition for three other things. the first is that he insists in his lifetime that people treat

him as an artist. he was trained as a painter. when he cropped out of school -- dropped out of school, what he started to do was go into museums and paint paintings that he thought were interesting. he found someone who had a private institution like this one and convinced that guy to let him take the entry fee at the door and keep it, part of it, as like a job, right? and then he would sit there and paint the paintings, and this is pretty great for a 14-year-old. and so he had this training, and he produced oil paintings his whole life -- sketches, drawings, water colors -- and he displayed them, tried to sell them, so he really wanted people to understand that part of him as an artist. and he worked as an illustrator through his career sometimes satirical, he made fun of confederate cross roads kentucky. but he also did lots of book like dickens and lots of other books which were not intended to be funny. of he was really illustrating a

story. he was not a modest man. he reveled in the fame that cartooning provided to him, but he also thought of himself as an artist, and he thought just because his work employed politics did not mean that that was not a form of fine art. so he asserted a connection between art as it appeared in newspapers and as it appeared in many galleries and exhibitions. and i think that's something people ought to know about him, because many cartoons today feel what they do has an artistic value in addition to its political meaning. second thing i think he should be know known for, he insisted that people be his life -- the owner of harper's weekly and his editor -- offer him the respect that was due to his position as a political thinker in his own right. in other words, he was not an mow. as a young man, he learned how to do what he did. e tested his gifts under the tutelage of the man on the upper left, fletcher harper, one of

the harper brothers who founded harper and brothers, now hard per and roe, one of the first really important publishing houses in the united states which helped to create a domestic market for books. fletcher was the baby of that family, and he founded harper's weekly as his pet project. and he supervised it personally. but in the late, by the late 1860s, the support of fletcher harper, who seems to have treated nast much like a son certainly within the office, he gave him his head and let him do the things he thought he needed to do, that support helped nast the to really become an independent contributor to harper's weekly. if he had an idea, he just drew it. and if ore contributors including george william curtis who would later be the editor-in-chief, disliked that position, that was just too bad. eventually, nast lost the battle. once fletcher harper died, george william curtis knew this

was his moment, and he struck at nast to try to force him to knuckle under to whatever he thought. and if the two disagreed, curtis took the position of i'm the editor. without harper's support, nast couldn't fight back. but for nearly 20 years he did succeed in building a position that allowed him to decide what he would portray and how he would portray that thing, what he would say about it. so if he disagreed with the line that the paper was taking as a well, that was how it was. and that independence really helped to establish the importance of the editorial freedom for the work cartoonists do. and, of course, it's not the last battle between editors and contributors, right? but he used his celebrity to make the point that editorial cartoonists understand the political world in a unique way, and they cannot be understood to be thought of as employees, nor can their talents be harnessed to the ideas of an editor. so he made a big deal if public about how you couldn't just call

him up and send him a letter, people did this all the time, wouldn't it be funny? you should do this. and on very rare occasions people would tell stories about him hearing that and responding with a cartoon. but most of the time, into the circular file. third of the things i think people ought to know about him is that he was at the center of a really complicated web of interconnected 19th century figures including james redpass on the upper right, and i know people are always saying to me it's about nast. but he's an amazing person. this is a man who fought for free soil in kansas in the 1850s, we friended, supported, defended and wrote the first boigty of john brown, represented haiti to attract african-american immigrants, traveled through the south under a pseudonym before the civil war reporting on slavery, advocated home rule so strenuously that he became the leader of the land league in new york, led the attempt to create an integrated

school system in charleston, south carolina. but, wait, there's more. helped to edit the autobiographies of jefferson and ve arena davis, published the early works of louisa may alcott. and founded the most famous lie see qualm bureau in 19th century america. not bad, right? that's now nast met him. redpath acted as an agent for many of the most famous lecturer ors of the time including henry ward beecher, the famous preacher, and mark twain. redpath originated a lecturing system and made it more professional, he also personally identified speakers and sought their participation. so in nast's case, he literally chased him down. nast wouldn't answer any of redpath's letters, so he found out nast was getting on a ship for england, and he got on the

same boat. so he corners nast and talks at him until nast in a desperate effort to gets redpath to go away says, well, if you can convince my wife. so redpath goes back to morris town and talks sally into it which worked out great financially, but nast hated lecturing really, really badly. but i want you to see this is a fascinating person through whom nast knew lots of other people. nast was also friends with james parton on the left, his wife's cousin. james parton was a widely-read and influential essayist. he wrote lives of aaron burr, voltaire, andrew jackson, thomas jefferson. in addition to being a full-time writer for newspapers. and his wife, whose pseudonym was fannie fern, was a novelist and also an essayist in her own right. she was older than parton, and she had built her career from the ashes of her early private

life despite her family's disapproval, and she went on to be an ab will bigsist and influenced -- ablutionist. the influence of this woman who his wife despised, disapproved of, but was very strong willed and lifelong friends of mr. nast and made all these points to him kind of about equality and justice. and then, of course, i assume you know the gentleman on the bottom, another client of james redpath. mark twain was part of a wide network of humorists among whom nast found many friends. and the two men constantly exchanged letters. twain went on to hire nast's biographer, albert bigelow payne, which initiated a relationship which lasted until the end of twain's life. one of them is the twain papers as we know them were produced by

payne who came to know twain through nast. and then, of course, last but probably not the best was u.s. grant. in some ways grant was the most important influence on nast's wife aside from his wife,ly. the cartoonists just idealized, loved president grant starting when he was a general and helped him get elected president twice. and nast loved being close to the white house, but he also had a true and tender affection for grant as a man, and they occasionally entertained one another. so president grant sometimes came to morristown. one example was after grant's world tour, so when he ended his presidency -- which was not a great time if his life -- he went on a world tour, and he dined at buckingham palace, and the japanese emperor welcomed him. and he gets home and comes to dinner in morristown, and nast says sally want withs to know what do you want for dinner, and grant said if you knew what they had served me, all i want is

corp.ed beef -- corned beef and cabbage. [laughter] and evidently, he was very satisfied. so that's a lot of people you didn't come here to hear about, but so what, right? his wife's circle of friends of which this is a tiny sampling helps to demonstrate the way 19th century networks operated. humorist to writer to politician to activist to showman to preacher and on from there. and the way at which nast stood at the center of some of these networks. he knew people. he knew interesting people. he knew important people. and he incorporated everything; the news that he read, the world around him, the ideas of his friends into the work that he produced. so understanding him and the world of the 19th century requires understanding that all these people were related in various complicated ways, and his cartoons are the product of his artistic training and his political thinking and his immersion in this world of interesting people. now, thomas nast, who you can see was very entertaining himself sometimes, right? he was friends with this

photographer in new york named napoleon throney he was, like, i need a blanket and a rough. [laughter] okay. you know? good times. he's a really fun person to spend time with. there's a great story from the harpers about how one of the younger generation came home to his brown stomp in new york city, and these z are tall, skinny houses. and he hears what sounds like a herd of elephants, and he asks his housekeeper what is happening. and, apparently, nast had come to speak with him, but since he wasn't home had snuck up to the nursery and were leading them on a game of chase through the house. so he's a great, great, very entertaining person. now, thomas nast died broke. he lost his fortune in a series of bad investments, and as you know, he died relatively young -- 62 years old. today his work survives primarily in glimpses. there'll be a shot to demonstrate the he was

anti-catholic and so was everyone else. there'll be a shot of santa on a dessert plate. there'll be a repurposed cartoon in the financial pages to demonstrate some point. and that's partly because he left his wife and family with almost nothing. his wife had to auction his belongings in several auctions in 1906 '7 and '8 in order to make ends meet, and she sold his correspondence, she sold his collection of stuff. and as a result there's basically no large collection of nast's materials anywhere. the biggest ones are at places like the huntington library where there's 91 items, some of which are repetitive. and if you are rivetted by how many easels someone owned when they died, that is for you. [laughter] but if you have questions about why he thought certain things, it's not going to cut it. there's just not a lot out there. and it's a shame. because his limited legacy is, if part, a reflection not of the

power of his pencil, but of the power of documentation in history. if you die without money, if you die unexpectedly, if you let your papers scatter to the wind, then you may sacrifice your legacy to fickle favors of historical fashion. and i think that nast deserves better than that. so i came in the course of writing the book to hope that somehow it would help to restore him to the center of our understanding of the 19th century, or at least to a position more in keeping with his significance to our shared history. ms. . [applause] >> i think there was an intent that there would be questions and answers, and -- there is? mark says, yes. so if anyone -- yes, gentleman. >> reformers were probably, mostly moralists?

>> yeah. >> and i -- what about the bosses like boss tweed and pendergast and michael curly and honey fits? doesn't they serve a useful social purpose for the immigrants; provide jobs? >> yeah. >> and entertainment and so forth? >> so as immigration spiked in the late 19th century, it filled the the cities with immigrants from a variety of places. and one of the ways that those communities got access to political power, to a voice in the governance of the place where they lived was by dominating the politics of those cities. and, yes, it was a symbiotic relationship. the political machine rewarded ordinary people with jobs and also with the ability to complain if something wasn't right. and with access to some of the money flowing into the city from various sources. people who opposed that tended to come from the native-born,

the protestant and the elite, and they absolutely disliked the idea that immigrants and often catholic citizens would have that much power within the city. so one of the discussions that has swirled around this tweed ring thing in particular, but around all urban corruption is to what extent you ought to see the reformers as obnoxious do of gooders who are really mad because they don't get to have the say all the time, and to what extent it's true in a kind of capital t true sense that people like tweed were corrupt and that's bad in and of itself, and, therefore -- [laughter] i see what you think, and, therefore, that he had to go. so people find the position they find most congenial. as i say nast, he was aware of it, of course. one of the things about nast was if you got on his bad side, if you irritated him or poked at him, that was a big mistake. because, you know, you don't want the drag gone to turn its attention to you.

so up until a certain point, he was not that into it. tweed made the mistake, according to nast, of sending a lawyer to speak to him. he lived in harlem. and -- which was a village at the time. and this fellow came by, and he said, oh, mr. nast, this tweed thing, it's unfortunate. aren't you tired? wouldn't you like a vacation? [laughter] like to europe? i know people who would give you $100,000, and you could go on a fabulous trip. that is a fabulous trip in 1871. that's amazing, right? and nast said, oh -- nast is a very humor rouse person, of course, and he said, well, do they have $200,000? and the lawyer said, yeah. what about $300,000? at which point the lawyer realized he was being played, and he left. and a few days later nast says he saw big, hulking thugs outside the house. so his response to that, first of all, was to get especially

pugnacious. this was a mistake because now he's mad, and that's not a good idea. and also to go to morristown, new jersey, and buy a nice house for his wife and family. so he moves his family to new jersey partly to get away from the rough and tumble of that crusade in in the city. and partly, i think, because he was becoming upper middle class and wanted people to know it. and and he also then becomes much more committed to this thing because it's clear to him that it has attracted attention. and on the one hand, he doesn't like to be told what to do, and on the other hand, nast is an incredibly ambitious person. so when he sees that it bothers you, oh, he's just going to keep doing it. he once was in washington, d.c., and carl shirts, the senator, pulled him aside and said you make me look ridiculous, and nast just laughed in his face and wrote a gleeful letter home like, that, that, he doesn't

know. i'll d hah hah. one tries to translate. so it was a terrible mistake to attract his attention in that way. and one of the things that happened with the tweed campaign is what had been an elite attack on a particular kind of political struggle was transformed by nast into this moral crusade in ways which maybe didn't reflect all the complexities. >> [inaudible] >> so he obtained a diplomatic appointment, but what happened was he needed money because he had a couple of terrible investment failures. so he invested in an investment house run by grant's son which failed because ward turned out to be a crook and stole everyone's money. and this was the tragedy that precipitated nast's death. he had a little bit of money which he invest inside a silver

mine in colorado. so he found himself with no money. i mean, no money. so he tried to get a diplomatic appointment. the problem is, of course, everyone wants a diplomatic appointment. and he got a letter from the roosevelt administration among other things that said, listen, people die in the south because who would leave diplomatic service of? it's not strenuous. so he couldn't get any of the good ones. he thought, oh, they'll send me to vienna. they didn't. they sent him to ecuador and a place which was notoriously deadly because of yellow fever. and his wife was very unhappy, very worried about it, but it paid $4,000 a year, and that was enough to keep them afloat, and so he took the job. i think there's a lot to be said for the argument that he would have gotten a better deal had he been a less controversial person. the problem is if you spend your whole life making enemies, then even your friends are limited in their ability to offer you assistance. so he bumped up against the fact that -- and by 1902 his career

was in decline, so it wasn't as if they offended him, he could really hurt them. he couldn't. so, you know, somebody like that, they sort of pile on at the end, and that was one of the reasons he ended up many such an unlikely place. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. he made friends with the german consul, and e wrote letters and hot of letters with drawings, of course, his writing wasn't so great. he wrote these hi hair yous letters home to his wife, and he kind of settled in and got sick. and he literally laid down in a hammock, and within four days, within a week he was dead. >> [inaudible] >> no? >> doctor, thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv.

>> but what it is, is a memoir, first of all, it's a little bit of a memoir of my travels in russia, it's a memoir of a number of the people who are in the book. we've gone through 20 years together, so it's a memoir of the last 20 years since the soviet union fell apart. it's a history. it's a history of the oil industry, but also in parallel it's a history of russia these past 20 years, the initial collapse in the 1990s and then the gradual recovery the decade after. so we end up with the russia that we see today after this long siewk l in the russian -- cycle, and the russian oil industry has gone through the same cycle. it's a biography, it's a multiple biography of a number of people, but in particular of the clan that e emergencied in the -- emerged in the 19 t 0s from the city of st. petersburg and came to moscow with putin in

the year 2000x you could um up the last -- sum up the last 20 years of russian history by saying this is the revepg of st. petersburg over moscow as the clans from st. petersburg take over and are very largely without much exaggeration are in command. this is very much a st. petersburg crowd. so it's a history of the emergence of that crowd, and this is the latest chapter in the 300-year rivalry between the two capitals. so it's a tale of two cities. it's a murder mystery, but i can't give you the names of the guilty ones in every case. but you can draw your own conclusions. there are some marvelous unsolved mysteries that may be unraveled someday. most never will. it used to be said in rush saw in the -- in russia in the

1990s that you could tell if a business was profitable from the trail of bodies. if there were no bodies, it wasn't worth paying attention to, because it couldn't possibly be profitable. i'll leave it to your imagine nawtion why, for example, the international red cross was highly profitable by that measure in the 1990s in russia. one clue is the subsidies that you could get for the import of tax-free alcohol and tobacco to benefit good causes such as the red cross. this was profitable and, therefore, of interest. it's even a science fiction story. because what we're dealing here really when you come right down to it is the meeting of two alien civilizations after 70 years of the soviet period. the oil industry in particular grew up in almost complete isolation from the west, and this is virtually a unique case. we have other places where oil

industries have group up, where oil industries are run by national oil companies, but in almost every case -- in fact, in every case, these industries were first founded by foreigners and then were taken over. not so in the case of russia where from the 1920s on at my rate for all practical purposes the oil industry was home grown and developed its own culture, its own civilization even as the soviet union did with its own hedge and its own culture -- its own hedge and its own culture. i sometimes like to tell my class that is the story of russia in the 20th century is very much that of a country who decided capitalism didn't work. so it's as though they all piled into a space capsule and started a completely different civilization in which the market was thrown out and prices and profits and private ownership and built that civilization and actually made it run for nearly

six, seven decades. not well, but it ran. of and then they decided that it wasn't working particularly well, so they all piled back into their space capsule and came back to earth. which is something remarkable. this is something russians do every so often. they will conduct these massive social science experiments on themselves. this isn't the first time they've done it. so here they are back on earth again, and the oil industry suddenly faced the world, oil industry. and so the book is very much how these two civilizations have come to terms with one another. which has not been easy, because these past 20 years have been a time of revolution in the global oil industry. and so suddenly you land on earth, and you suddenly find yourself -- at least in the oil industry -- faced with a race. and the question is, how have the russians done in that race? talented oil people that they are, talented