Thank you for listening.

Well, follow that.

Thank you very much, Guli.

That was an extraordinarily moving and stimulating and thought-provoking lecture.

In the spirit of this being a different kind of presentation for this afternoon, I'm going to be quite brief.

I'm just going to pick up a few themes, as they seem to me, from what Guli has talked about.

There will undoubtedly be others that will have occurred to you.

Please, for the listeners, if you could summarize the central argument of your article.

We all know, I think, that the Ukrainian strikes on logistics targets and petrol and oil refinery are something new and important, right? Particularly, I think, because the Russian state's way or the Russian regime's way of dealing with discontent, with people that are unhappy about the war, but also people who might be unhappy about the lack of freedoms, the lack of political choice, right? The default mode has been always, we have made your life stable.

So stability is the mantra that underlies the legitimacy of the regime, right? And very often people say, I don't necessarily say this, but the kind of standard way of understanding Russian politics in a nutshell is you give up your political rights and we guarantee some economic growth, some economic redistribution, but most of all, security and stability.

And so you can see that Ukraine striking things like what it's called Wildberries or Azon, which are the equivalent of Amazon.

fundamentally puts into doubt at some level, even among Russians who allow themselves to be totally cognitively detached from the war, right? And we should also say that's a kind of understandable reaction, right? That people don't want to be associated with what their country what's being carried out in their name people don't want to have that moral cognitive load of feeling responsible for it and so this really brings it home so it's bring bringing the war home in a way that becomes impossible for even the most cynical or detached people to ignore now you quote the end of the article and of course i'm being a little bit provocative nobody could know what pressure points will cause or will lead to a kind of unraveling.

But I'm just planting the idea that it doesn't matter how hard and repressive a regime is, We saw that with Assad's Syria.

It doesn't matter how effective and sophisticated a regime's surveillance and repressive capacities are.

I remember people comparing it to that, the late Soviet period, yeah.

Jeremy, please take, uh, take the floor and, and let us know what you think.

Well, thank you, uh, for inviting me, and, um, it's, uh, a privilege and a pleasure to engage with Anna's work.

Um, and so what I'll start by saying is, uh, kind of perhaps a bit of a recap on, um, on the book, um, and then I'll dip into, uh, some empirical moments from the, from the book because I think one of the, one of the things that makes this book important is that, um, so much that is written about authoritarian regimes and societies is done increasingly, um, through a telescope and, um, through a, a kind of methodological and theoretical telescope, which can sometimes, uh, bring some problems with it.

And then I'll quickly wrap up by going through, I think, some, uh, key points that resonate with other people's work, with my own work, and my key takeaways.

So as, um, Anna notes at, at the beginning of the book, um, what she's looking at is the desire, uh, of promising young adults to, uh, which is interesting that, that, Anna, you, you called them here, um, in your talk these, uh, potential strategic elites, and that's something that we could come back to.

But, uh, in the book, y- you use this term promising young adults, and their desire to become competitive in their society renders their support vital for both the, quote, "fiscal survival and political legitimacy of regimes" like the one in Russia.

Now, as such, their doubts, hopes, fears, ambiguities are crucial to a better understanding of present-day authoritarian trajectories, right? And, and as, as we've already started discussing today, it's not really about Russia.

So I would stop it here, um, and I hope I covered most of the, of the big and also the smaller questions.