Dartmouth Events

Who Is Vladimir Putin?  

Wednesday, Oct 10  |  4:30pm  |  041 Haldeman Center  |  Dartmouth College

Philip Short, Author, BBC Correspondent, Magro Family Distinguished Fellow in International Affairs, Dartmouth

Almost 20 years after that question was first posed by a US journalist at Davos in 2000, the answer is still a matter of vigorous disagreement. Is Putin a thug? A murderer? The authentic voice of post-Soviet Russia? A new tsar? Or all of the above? Philip Short discusses the problems of making a balanced appraisal of America's nemesis.

Sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Free and open to all.

Bio:

Philip Short was born in Bristol in 1945 and was educated at Sherborne and Queens’ College, Cambridge. He worked for the BBC for 30 years as a foreign correspondent, initially in central Africa and then in Moscow, Beijing, Paris, Tokyo and Washington. In 1997, he spent a year teaching comparative politics at the University of Iowa. He now lives with his wife and daughter in southern France.  

His first book, a life of the Malawi leader, Hastings Banda, was published in 1974. The Dragon and the Bear, a comparison between China after Mao and the Soviet Union after Stalin followed in 1982. His biography of Mao Zedong was published in the United States in 2000 and has been widely regarded as the definitive account of the life of the Chinese leader. A revised edition incorporating new archival material, Mao:  The Man Who Made China, was published in London in 2017. He has also published a biography of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, and a life of the French President, François Mitterrand. He is currently working on a biography of Vladimir Putin.