It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.

The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.