in personalist regimes the leader decides when it's time to go. usually they decide too late because there's all kinds of informational insin testifies of people as lower levels in bureaucracy to hide the bad news. so, we can't always assume that leaders who are politically unchallenged are getting the best information about what is going on in the country. >> were there any questions or comments from the panelistses you wanted to spend more time responding to. >> in steve and keith and vicki's view about how do we handle this tradeoff, this accounting for the specificity that is clearly there in the russian case. the foreign policy chapter in the book is the one i struggled with the most because in lots of ways russia i an atypical autocracy and foreign policy and there's a whole literature in social science about the foreign policies of autocracy that it looks as large and cross-national decisionmaking about foreign policy, and i didn't cite that literature because i think russia is very different from other kind offered autocracies and i want t

collective decision-making at the highest level and in the yeltsin era you had those that have a personalistic ruler but he had to struggle every year to get the budget passed through. and that was an epic battle each year and the point i want to make is that putin's russia is very different, very different from that and that collecting so much power in his own hand it allows them to do certain things but not others and a lot of those other things are important for building power within russia if you have the power to expropriate people it's very difficult to get people to invest. it's difficult to get businesses to innovate and that's kind of the paradox and steve talked about in some of his writing as well about if you have all power you don't have the time and energy to resolve all problems and it creates lots of unintended consequences and i try to point those out in the book we can devote a lot of time having back and forth on the questions. but let's give the audience a chance. here's the first question. one topic that has not been mentionedus is in the discussion through the table of co

and the era of collective decision-making at the highest levels in the yeltsin era he was a personalistic ruler but had to struggle every year to get the budget passed. that was an epic battle each year. the point i went to make it is very different from that. that collecting so much power in his own hands allows him to do certain things but not others and then it is very difficult to get people to investing get businesses to innovate. and that is the paradox that steve is talked about in his writing as well of the omnipotence if you have all power you to start have the time and energy to resolve all problems and that creates unintended consequences i point out in the book. >> here is the first question. one topic not mentioned through the table of contents is the role-play from the policy choices is a very well documented. to be in charge of the contract approval from the early 19 nineties and became involved in the scandal for authoritarian groups many find themselves cooperating with organized crime and that having those in their careers before they made it to a high-power position doe