The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and the Harriman Institute present:
“Putin’s Accumulating Failures”
February 6, 2026
12:00pm-1:30pm
1302 IAB
With Harley Balzer, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University
Moderated by Peter Clement, Deputy Director and Senior Research Scholar, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies; Adjunct Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Event Description:
The volume “FAILURE: Russia Under Putin,” edited by Harley D. Balzer and Steven A. Fisher, was published in July 2025. Since that time, the premise that Putin has failed to fulfill most of the promises he has repeatedly made to the Russian people has been confirmed. Harley Balzer and Peter Clement will provide a summary of the volume and update their chapters on Human Capital (Balzer) and Foreign Policy (Clement).
Speaker Bio:
Harley Balzer retired in 2016 from his positions in the Department of Government, School of Foreign Service, and Department of History at Georgetown University. He was appointed Director of Georgetown’s Russian Area Studies Program in 1987. During his tenure he expanded the staff and oversaw its transition to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. He succeeded in the Center becoming one of the Title VI Area Studies Institutions. Prior to coming to Georgetown he taught at Grinnell College and Boston University, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Russian Research Center and the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society.
Dr. Balzer lived in the Soviet Union for full years 1975-76 and 1985-86 on IREX and Fulbright-Hays grants, returned regularly during the Gorbachev era, and visited the Russian Federation more than 50 times since 1991. He organized the initial visits to the U.S. by the Russian Federation’s first Ministers of Education (Eduard Dneprov) and Science & Technology (Boris Saltykov). Dr. Balzer’s research interests include comparative authoritarianism, focusing on Russia and China; science and technology; education; and social history. His publications include “Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform” (1989); “Five Years That Shook the World: Gorbachev’s Unfinished Revolution,” (1991), which was named a CHOICE outstanding academic book; and “Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History” (1996).
