Led By Catherine Mannick

Tuesday, March 2, Thursday, March 4, and Thursday May 4    
3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.   3 sessions    King’s Chapel Parish House, 64 Beacon Street

Svetlana Babaeva, Washington Bureau Chief for Russian News and Information Agency (RIA Novosti), returns to Beacon Hill Seminars to lead a 3-part seminar on current trends in Russian politics, society and culture.

Topics Include:

• The Russian political system – how the federal system in Russia compares with the US system; recent and pending changes in Russian legislation, such as the extension of the Presidential term of office to six years. Prospects and forecasts on 2012 elections.
• Russian society – values, expectations, aspirations; is it an authoritarian society or not; how do the views of ordinary Russians compare with those of their American counterparts?
• Russian foreign policy and US-Russia relations before and after the upcom- ing nuclear summit and expiration of the START treaty

Cathy Mannick Executive Vice President of Cole Management, Inc., is a venture capitalist and private equity investor in Russia. She travels to Russia frequently and offer unique insights into Russia’s path toward a modern capitalist economy.

Svetlana Babaeva works as a US Bureau Chief for the Russian News and Information (RIA Novosti). Before that she worked for Profile Weekly – a Moscow-based business magazine as first deputy-in-chief and as a political columnist. In 2004-2006 she was a UK bureau chief for RIA Novosti where she came from the position of head of the political desk for Izvestia daily – one of the national Russian newspapers. She graduated from the Moscow Modern Law Institute, and for almost a decade worked in the Kremlin, government and DOD press corps of journalists.