04 March 2013,  

Transitions Forum

Five Traps for Putin (Event Details)

A conversation with journalist and author Oliver Bullough, and Ben Judah, visiting fellow at the European Stability Initiative and author of the Legatum Institute's new report 'Five Traps for Putin', an examination of the contemporary Kremlin.
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At the moment, Vladimir Putin seems very much in charge. Since December 2011, when more than 100,000 protesters gathered in Moscow demanding genuinely free elections, Putin and his colleagues have regained control of events. However, the disintegration of the Moscow protest is not the same thing as the return of stability.

Though it may not appear so on the surface, the era of “managed democracy” and “Putinism by consent” is coming to an end. In his new paper, Ben Judah identifies five risks to Putin’s grip on power and to Russia’s stability in general.

Speakers

Ben Judah, Visiting Fellow, European Stability Initiative; Associate Fellow, ECFR

Oliver Bullough, Journalist and Author

Moderator

Anne Applebaum, Director of Global Transitions, Legatum Institute

About the speakers

Ben Judah is the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin published by Yale University Press and a visiting fellow at the European Stability Initiative, in Istanbul. He reported for Reuters in Moscow and was a research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations working on Russian politics.

His reporting from across the former Soviet Union – including on the Georgian War in 2008 and the Kyrgyz uprising of 2010, has featured in the Financial Times, the Economist, Foreign Policy, Prospect and Standpoint. A dual British and French national he spent his childhood in Romania and the former Yugoslavia before reading Modern History and Politics at the University of Oxford.

Oliver Bullough is a journalist and author from Wales. His Let Our Fame Be Great, a travel-history about the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus, won the Cornelius Ryan award in the United States, the Oxfam Emerging Writer prize in Britain, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. His next book, The Last Man in Russia is published by Penguin in April. His journalism is published in the New Statesman, Prospect, the New Republic and elsewhere.

About the Transitions Forum

Five Traps for Mr Putin is part or the Legatum Institute's 'Transitions Forum', a series of projects dedicated to the economics and politics of radical political change.

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