in equal. implementation of both punishment and arrests and people weren't interested people had a lot of problems with crime in the countryside and it tended to be crime that the state didn't prioritize things like drunken deeding theft hooliganism that post a real threat arson to people's daily lives prioritize so they wanted the ability to arrest people that destabilized their lives on the spot now you told me before the. people in academia really advise you against using the word democracy when it comes to stalinist russia because they include this notion of civil society that is central to today idea of democracy but. what you're describing just there wasn't talent terrorism at that point of time either there was somebody in moscow with a limb of the security apparatus the rest of the country was essentially

a lot of self governance is that an accurate challenge hereon ism is in general has sort of been debunked within academia simply because more regional studies have proved that they simply didn't have the manpower or the infrastructure to monitor people frequently you know i look at collective farms where they have seen district level officials once every one or two years so the rest of the time they're busy doing whatever they want on their own people in the west would see stalin's out for its courage this. popular participation as a sham because they would thing bad genuine democracy would be the impediment to his power but from what you're saying. it may have been quite the opposite that he saw it as a means of strengthening his power simply because again as you said he didn't have enough resources and manpower to reach every little corner for he actually gives an . view with roy howard in which he discusses his views on democracy he sees it as

a whip in the hands of the people to deal with incompetent local officials he encourages them to be active to root out those who are not doing a good job he says you know this person is not building a school if this is dirty if they are not providing the service he she tell us vote this person out because moscow simply didn't have the resources to monitor every single you know. region so there was this notion of political accountability very much so now i know that stalin himself was the head of the constitutional commission he personally worked on the drafts making edits i believe you started some of this. have you been able to draw any ideas about his own psychological profile based on things that he you know kept in took out not necessarily his psychological profile but he tended to be more practical then

the other drafters of the original draft was written by a couple of states and it tends to include a lot of very ideological things for example there was a clause in there that parents should teach their children to hate capitalists stalin and moves that because it's not really constitutional material a lot of the things he pulled out tend to reappear in legislative initiative things like the number of hours people should work that sort of thing this constitutional was adopted barely a year before the great terror of which so on millions of people are executed our son to the gulags. whenever the subject comes up in russia always centers on stalin and much less so on the role of the society at large played in allowing that to happen or even facilitating. the whole process having spent so much time studying the correspondence between you know ordinary people and their leaders do you think these progressive concert. offers an insight into the horrors that were followed

directly after well i know that the one nine hundred thirty seven repression is one of the reasons that scholars often cite to deal with the constitution you list you said how can you be serious about democracy if you then turn around violate everybody's rights and kill a bunch of people my research has shown that. certainly there were instances in the provinces of people using their new constitutional rights in ways that were threatening to the local power structure so having these new locus of power people were asking to open up churches people were collecting money to bring back priests and so a lot of this is genuinely threatening to the locals and so they certainly would like to get rid of them and arch getty has postulated that you see a lot of pushback from the regional bosses who are threatened by the opening up of the one nine hundred thirty six constitution and that leads to repression how much is the process are for oppression driven from the center and how much is it locally

was it locally mission well the thing is that the repression is sort of multi-pronged you have for example actions against national minorities that tends to be mostly driven because they already have catalogs of these people they have been watching a lot of the national minorities and those also tend to be related to national security issues you know particularly poles koreans. in this area people from the baltic states are often monitored then you also have the center just simply giving large quotas of the numbers of people that need to be arrested. and they let the locals decide who fills that quota but interestingly enough by nine hundred thirty nine or nine hundred forty most of them have had their sentence commuted and they're back in another position of power that's interesting i heard some western scholars complain of the haphazard nature of access to the archives i wonder if you needed any f.s.b. clearance for about do you have you ever got. an american spy well people

joke about it i've been told that i'm a very nice spy well most of the spies are usually very nice they have to go into group graces with people it's never been a problem in the archive part of it maybe my topic the constitution isn't particularly political right now and my current work for this is on collective farms which again is not sensitive if i was doing something on the secret police or even the second world war it may be a little bit different but here they've been great with access. much of samantha research focuses on the correspondence between the locals and the central authorities in moscow which was more direct than some would expect while the newspapers of the time filled with the praise of sylvia the chairman's individual letters often focused on the failures. we have a question. for. all the people who are contemporary. want to be very very socially benefiting from. if the soviet union didn't like to document

everything i wouldn't have anything to work with and everything that they've documented lets me see various aspects of people's lives for example the people there feel the ridge here in one nine hundred thirty four he's given a prize of a thousand roubles for his good work but later nine hundred thirty six he's considered. that person so you can see how. standings change based on their successful implementation of economic plans different changes in policy and you can see you know these people's rise and fall and fortunes reviews documents what is it like as a researcher to work around with documents like this i mean it would it be fair to describe them as a treasure trove or is it something pretty near. what i'm always excited by them. it's sometimes people think i'm odd because michael my grandmother took this beautiful document and they're like it's about harvest to sticks. do you think anyone before you or your work. so i'm not on this one but on this one

this is actually larry he's the guy that invited me to cure up and he put his book on education called this in documents so you can see right here in the front everybody has worked on it and even sometimes which pages they've used and his own way of the americans who come here and look at this one or is that this fellow is russian. nine hundred seventy nine.

i see unemployment rate is down the labor participation rate is high so this goes against all the doom mongers before the election to trump and of course nobody in mainstream media want to focus on this because it be lies there is spirity there. to begin to. open up a base. in the. us it will either be useful so we're talking to. each other. but not a lot of any of us come out of a skid but i'm about the same as art when i was up the money into.

total money i left my money. to say. there. was a long. long way to be made by. other people that was on the go. live. in a world of big partisan lot and conspiracy it's time to wait to dig deeper to get the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door. and shouting past each other

it's time. for critical thinking it's time to fight for the little for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. are. really ready. to write. having a native english speaker is both a barry t. and a curiosity for a provincial russian university some of those classes also rebuilt many cultural

differences in how the russians and the americans approach that world you've spent the last six years trying to get this claim. early soviet alive but i also assume you had to immerse yourself in the current realities of russia what are some of the cultural behavioral patterns that carry over. you know from from that time till now i mean things that shock me the sort of what things that shock you and things that are persistent. may reappear you know decades later oh you mean the what russia doesn't really have much of respect for law it's very interesting because americans are generally ruffalo as if there's a rule we don't even question it we simply get we stand in line we pick up our garbage. we just you know if there's a rule that says you need to have students do an evaluation that we don't even

question we just cannot the student evaluation i remember here for student evaluations teachers were scandalized the idea that students who didn't know anything would be evaluating them it would turn the entire system on its head and russians like to get around laws that they find annoying or inconvenient part of this is the think because to do things the correct way is often very difficult if not impossible there is sometimes i'm reminded of the novel catch twenty two when i live in russia because you know you need the sprogs to get this piece of paper but to get the piece of paper. now one of the characteristics of contemporary russia is how i live in its development that is you've got some regions like to look at for example where the local correction corruption has been brought to a minimum but at the same time you have regions in the caucasus where you can i do anything without the bribe and that reminded me of of the research you're involved in right now about the differences between the collective farms. that are gone

from your research is that what matters in russia the most is not they had you know what you call framework but you know the actual person in charge is that still the case. in russia i think very much so i think that personal networks are very important i think you know my students looking for jobs now it's often more important who they know than the qualifications that they have it's also you know if you're friends with somebody they maybe protect you they help you get resources that you don't have access to but you know the sort of good old boys' network exists in a lot of american small towns too and that's what it reminds me of the good old boys network and it's because the normal channels of communication often don't work certainly in the soviet union the only way to get things done was to ask your friend who you know paid someone with some falling key to get you some seed you know you see this most acutely during the war we have shortages of everything you have this barter system in the. chairman chairman become sort of the go to fixer.

one more carlo i found interesting was you mentioning that stalin wanted to have. competent technocrats staffing the state system and there is a similar desire on the part of the current putin administration to have the technocrats in charge her for some reason and i had this fellow and ministration of the president mr quinn find enough of those people do you think they. perhaps do they have a problem with the recruitment system or do they run against this informal system of relationship if you mention what's what's been the style of this era the level of education was a huge problem you know you have people that have and i have one guy he's the head of the. district land organization in the district he's a chronic alcoholic with a second grade education you know at some level you cannot expect competence from these people most people only had a elementary school education some people did have university but it was very

difficult and so just getting the level of education up so they could can you deal with the volume of paperwork and just regular work that they were expected to do they also expected an awful lot from the xp. and i feel deep deep sympathy for my right jeremy because they were expected to organize harvest on the collective farm they were expected to go out and do propaganda work they were expected just study leninism and marxism and they were expected to have all of these different meaning some of these people had like eighty four different meetings a month. they simply couldn't keep up and i think that modern russia faces a lot of the same problems that you have chronic understaffing of a lot of bureaucracy and even when you get staff it just seems like it doesn't work particularly efficiently because of this desire to fill out all of this paperwork with soviet union try to fix things a lot of the reforms involve more paperwork and more paperwork and i think in this

reliance on fixing things to paperwork reform is a problem that the putin administration. you said before the event that they hired have to tell me terribly as my russia was under govern in other words the central authority didn't have enough manpower resources to. fight welcome back the u.s. national security adviser on his russian counterpart of just wrapped up their closed door meeting in geneva john bolton those just started to speak let's listen in these talking to reporters. yes one specific thing they agreed on that the two national security council staffs would carry on their discussions with a view to deciding how to restore in certain respects. diplomatic and other exchanges between russia and the united states in ways in which we could cooperate and expand our common efforts so today

what we did was. cover the whole range of issues that the two countries have on nonproliferation on arms control on a range of bilateral issues counterterrorism illegal immigration cyber related issues. regional issues like syria the broader middle east afghanistan and ukraine. i think we made a lot of progress we identified certain areas where lines of communication could be restored and more work done by the affected agencies state department defense department other agencies as well there were some where the areas of disagreement remain we didn't see. much utility in resuming discussion there are going to be some things where we're going to consider

inside the united states government consider more fully what our position is and then decide to proceed from there. secretary patrushev i think is having his own press conference soon we might have had a. joint statement but i felt it was important to mention election meddling which we raised a number of times during these consultations today which lasted a little bit over five hours. but we weren't able to reach agreement on that so we decided to go ahead will each speak individually which is what i'm doing now but on the whole i would say we've made considerable progress and that's what the two presidents had in mind force and hopefully they'll agree with our assessment that in fact we did make progress so let me just stop there and i'm happy to answer questions following the procedure that sarah outlined.

yes mr bolton and if we make just ask a question see if we never hear reuters sanctions a two pronged question whether in your discussions and you gave mr pett to each other any details or. raise the issue of the microsoft hacking case that emerged this week did you ask him what there was any state russian state role behind that and then other sanctions relating to iran. did with that discuss and did mr patricia. seek any waivers or. you know exceptions to the november deadline write well i didn't raise the microsoft press announcement of it not being an institution of the u.s. government we didn't get into that specific we did talk about iran in the economic sanctions and i explained that our objective in light of the president's decision

to withdraw in may from the iran nuclear deal was to put maximum pressure on the regime and to tighten up the sanctions so that they would be at a minimum equal to the sanctions that were in effect in two thousand and fifteen but that we would actually be working to tighten them make them more extensive and more effective. said many times our objective is to have as few waivers as possible and that's something we're going to we're going to pursue them they didn't request any waivers that that subject didn't come up. which often unless of course that if decision see essentially in. your mansion. as you mentioned that you're seeing such a. good idea for serious live in the city

have you discussed this question of is the. way so much and you understand didn't go on the. fox saw coming back to pull it off thank you well this question of what to do with. the iranian forces and i would say both regular and irregular in syria was something we discussed. following on to what the two presidents discussed in helsinki. our objective is that all ronnie and forces return to iran now that that would be an objective that i think president putin would share it's far from easy to achieve and so we talked about a variety of ways in which it might be accomplished through a series of steps. really not because we were here to negotiate that point but to

examine what might be possible for others to discuss following on from this and it was in that connection that secretary patrushev brought up the suggestion that the russians had made previously to israel france and germany about they geographic construction of iranian forces in exchange for the united states suspending the imposition of the oil sanctions in now set for early november and that was a suggestion we had rejected before that we were jacques did it again today the sanctions are coming back into effect that's clear we did however go on to discuss what other possibilities there might be as i say that was really the the the broad objective we had to take the discussion that the leaders had and try and spread it out and make it more specific and find concrete ways to proceed so it was certainly

again here today a major subject of conversation as it was for the two presidents in helsinki. in the coming bruce new york times did you get onto the subject of stop negotiations were you able to agree a date for resuming talks on extending that treaty and if not what's holding you back. of the right about could you be able to think about what areas you did the progress into well we didn't set a date for the discussion about what to do about start and i'd be sure you characterize it that way what to do about new start because there are a number of possibilities that the us government itself has to consider what our position should be should we extend new start should we renegotiated should we drop that model of arms control and return to what we call the treaty of moscow in two

thousand and two negotiated the bush administration a very different non cold war method of. of of a treaty on strategic weapons that's a possibility all of these are things that the united states is going to consider along with what to do with the i.n.f. treaty which is also a subject we discussed today so part of our objective with respect to arms control was to lay out what what our thinking is and a transparent way of recognizing the u.s. government still reaching its final position so the russians could see how we saw it is it is i think a very useful step to take but we are very very early in the process of considering what we're going to do with new start or the i.m.f. treaty. i've been so i'm going to work for the a.f.p. news agency if i understood your introduction it's the usual discussions over

election tampering which was basically the barrier to a joint statement i'm wondering did you hear anything today that gave you up to ms and that russia was not committed to interfering in the midterm elections and what messages did you specifically send to warn your counterpart today that that would not be tolerated by the us administration. there are some double negatives in that question if i heard it correctly so at the risk of restating it. or to put my answer in the form of an answer to a question that might have been asked wasn't i made it clear that we wouldn't tolerate meddling in twenty eighteen and that we were prepared to take necessary steps to prevent it from happening we talked about it in a variety of ways in the area of cyber and information technology exchanges which we had stopped between the united states and russia earlier this year and i said at this point i didn't really see the circumstances were right to resume them again. i

don't want to understate how much progress we made in other areas but in that area it was as i've described. ok we'll take what we take two more one from each. ok frederick for the newspaper in geneva switzerland. i have a question regarding the un organs and you are here in geneva and i would like to know what's your administration the prison the trumpet mr asian how you look at this importance of geneva the u.n. the here. stand you still don't have the need to do you need ambassador here in the mission u.s. mission why is it so and maybe just a few words regarding late kofi annan just past the way you used to be

confronting him in the past and would be glad to have a few words for from your. well look it's sad for. coffee and family and friends and the u.n. community and. we obviously mourn his his passing. on the u.n. agencies in geneva you know i've been to geneva at least a million times in my diplomatic career so i've worked with all the agencies here it's a continuing us. priority to make the u.n. more effective to see its operations conducted in a more efficient way to see the agencies stick to their respective mandates. and to cooperate within the u.n. system to avoid duplication and overlap and a lot of that activity a lot of the budget authority is obviously centered here in geneva so it's it

remains a very high priority there there are a number of. embassies that haven't been filled yet in some cases because of the lack of action by congress for certainly working on that for example to get our ambassador to the u.n. agencies in vienna confirmed in the near future is a very high priority for the administration and to get somebody here obviously is important as well so we're working on all those things it's been a difficult process since the beginning of president trumps administration to get. nominees confirmed both for the judicial and executive branches and we've obviously got very high priority for us coming up with hearings in the confirmation of judge kavanaugh for the supreme court in september but before the senate goes out in early october it's certainly. our priority to get as many of our nominees confirmed

as as we can. mr bolton. yet from the b. imaging folks b.b.c. mr bolton it's not been very easy week for your president i'm just wondering as national security adviser whether you were told given the events of this week and admissions of pale since you've mentioned election meddling whether you're ever concerned that your own president is a security risk of course not i mean that's a silly question. and i just spoke to a motorway a few minutes ago and. we have performed here in exactly the way i think the two leaders would have expected us to and you know i honestly have a little faith in the american people who elected him president thank you very much . ok so.