Hi everyone and welcome to today's discussion. My name is Glenn Dyson and I'm joined today by

Alexander Mercuris and the guest today is Professor Nicola Petro. Welcome. Nice to be here.

A pleasure to have you again, Nicola. Thank you. So yeah, we had Nicola here before. He's a professor of political science at University of World Island.

But I also find it interesting you have a background as a practitioner from the US State Department.

At an interesting point in time, of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed,

where he worked for the US State Department as a special assistant for policy on

Soviet affairs.

I'm not sure if I got that title right, but anyways, I find this to be an interesting

background because it gives you a nice understanding and great perspective on, I guess,

the paths that were chosen and the different future, perhaps, which were not taken.

Obviously, if I may. seriously, it just struck me how similar, the similarity of the prospects that we face then and now, it was beginning to be clear in 1990 that the old world was

collapsing and people who had not thought ever in their careers to be facing the prospect of

a new world order in which the Soviet Union did not exist

and therefore could not be an enemy. Had a devil of a time, let me put it this way, had a devil

of a time facing that reality. And I think one of the things that brought my candidacy,

this was through the Council on Foreign Relations, to the fore, was the fact that I had already

been writing about the prospects of Russian social transformation and that what I and that I believe that

communism was rather an overlay onto a deeper Russian historical tradition which was

much more varied than the one that have been portrayed by the government. In some respects, I was right

in the resurgence of national identity and religion, I think, but in some ways I was wrong as well in that the collective nature of society, the idea of us being one unit,

which existed in Russia, but also to a large extent throughout the entire Soviet Union, had laid deep roots.

And I, having grown up in the Russian immigration abroad, really had an ear for the deeper

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