Fiona Hill

and the Soviet Union.

I decided to study Russian.

I get a scholarship to study Russian.

And then, you know, cut a long story short, I ended up getting a scholarship to the United States and, you know, amazingly to Harvard to study in what was then the Soviet Union program.

And as soon as I duly got a master's in Soviet studies, the Soviet Union went up and left on me, collapsing into multiple parts.

And I decided I'd study history.

Yeah, it was the ash heap of history.

So I thought, well, history, I've got to retrain quickly, retool.

My dad had gone from being a mind hospital porter.

I didn't quite make the same transition, but I studied history.

I ended up doing lots of various things around at Harvard.

I get a job with Graham Allison, the famous Kennedy School of Government professor who's still going strong into his 80s and writing all kinds of things.

I mean, somebody who many of our listeners are very familiar with.

And it's, you know, working with Graham as, you know, one of his many assistants.

You know, I end up into the world of public policy and, you know, end up variously getting, you know, when I've graduated with everything and finished working with him, jobs down in Washington, D.C.

And it's all about timing.

Because I spent all of this time looking at the, you know, what had happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union to all the different constituent parts.

Why wasn't it moving in the directions that we anticipated?

And I start getting, you know, kind of a bit of an obsession back in 2000 as I'd landed at the Brookings Institution as a as a fellow then.

With a colleague, Clifford Gaddy, who is a pretty well-known expert on Russia and the Russian economy, we started getting a bit of a fixation on Vladimir Putin, who's still with us, of course.