I knee the tide would turn again. If you introduce a special in year 1, then you are almost back to where Bristol history once was. Glad to hear that the terror of contact hours does not dictate everything anymore. I always felt that simple refusal to bug the trend is possible. Then and now.

But students like the sense of community specialist seminars create. And they do sense researcher excitement, even if it puzzles them. Your/our curriculum used to be far more generous with this before reform gripped it. We did not resist but complied. We gave them hours but took away intimacy.

That and general post-imperial trauma. To understand Putin, one has to start with the domestic: both Soviet and post-Soviet. The colour revolutions were triggers not reasons.

They took jewels that belong to the French people and were displayed for all to see in order to profit a few. The jewels, made carefully by craftsmen, will almost certainly be broken up. The romantisation of the heist derives from the myth of Robin Hood but ignores that here the public got robbed.

I think I tutored you in Magdalen. Long time ago. In my first year teaching.

He escalates when military situation poor and pretends concession when he is strong. He will always try to confuse and pull one over his partners and foes alike, even if that affects him negatively long term. That is how he had been trained.

Putin will never settle for a negotiation that does not meet his key points, including Ukrainian disarmament. This is mainly for personal reason but also a matter of his political and physical survival.

The movies he likes are all Hollywood 1930s. Triumph of the Will uses the modernist language of Babelsberg and constructivism (especially shade and light) and applies it to medieval German architecture: a master stroke of redefining the modern and the archaic simultaneously for a German audience.

I agree on the comparison. It is fascinating how great power status and isolation by virtue of size shaped both societies. I thought that already in the 90s. But I don’t think Putin has anything interesting to say about that, because he is caught in the Soviet discourse of US as morally inferior.

Thanks for this. I must say reads to me like run-of-the-mill justification for imperialism. Similar to the French and Habsburg variety rather than the British one, but no less destructive for language and culture. And immigrants at least make a choice to accept another state as home.

You did the listening for four hours, so you are the expert. But I have heard many variations on the quote you posted, and I have always understood it as a swipe against the US. It is a standard to get Europeans on side, since we are ‘rooted’ too. But who knows what Putin wanted to say…

Does not really matter. I guess the gist is that he thinks Americans inferior because they are not rooted, while Russian people live more ‘organic’ lives in their ‘natural‘ habitat. Russian nationalist propaganda has long had a ‘soil’ tenor. I heard it echoed a lot in interviews even before 2022.

whatever native soil means for a country that had massive urbanisation in the 1930s and again in the 1970s. Also the Soviet Union had incredibly high internal mobility. Few Soviets died in the place they were born in.

It is worthy to mention that Al Rieber was part of a professional and personal partnership with Marsha Siefert that shaped history at CEU for decades. Any tribute to him has to include Marsha. My condolences and sympathy.

I also think that if one listens to Putin his Soviet socialisation comes out loud and clear. He plays a combined Stalinist Brezhnev playbook. There is very little modern about Putinism. He fights 19 th century wars when the 21st century climate crisis is about to make everything irrelevant.