Paul Starobin at Politics and Prose

Thursday, February 1, 2024
7:00pm — 8:00pm ET
Politics & Prose

The future of Russia lies outside the country.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, some one million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile. Motivated by opposition to the war, by guilt for their country’s deeds, by personal hatred for the Czar-like Putin, and by a vision of a better Russia, shorn of autocracy, the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin’s rule.

Paul Starobin, a veteran analyst of Russia, travels to places like Armenia and Georgia to meet with exiles and has conversations with prominent figures throughout Europe and America, as he takes measure of this rebellion—and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams.

Putin’s Exiles is an indispensable work for anyone trying to understand Russia today—to go beyond Putin's propaganda and the tightly controlled narrative inside the country, and look outside its borders to the diaspora of Russian exiles, who are imagining and fighting for the future of their country.

 

Join author Paul Starobin and Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the future of Russia.

This event will be at Politics & Prose at Conn Ave. and is free with first come, first served seating.

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Paul Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief for Businessweek and former contributing editor of The Atlantic, has been writing about Russia and Russians for more than a quarter century. He is the author of three books, including After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, and Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. She is coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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