Website : Open World Leadership Center
James Billington served as the Librarian of Congress in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 2015. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, and is a former professor of history at Harvard and Princeton universities. He is also the former director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Center and the publication The Wilson Quarterly.
He is the recipient of numerous international honours and orders of merit, including more than 40 honorary doctorates from around the world.
He is also the author of several books,including Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism, The Icon and the Axe, Fire in the Minds of Men, Russian Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, August 1991, The Face of Russia, and Russia in Search of Itself, among others.
photograph: Library of Congress Photo/Abby Brack Lewis
In the turbulent decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, conditions have worsened considerably for many Russians, and a wide-ranging debate has raged over the nature and destiny of their country. In Russia in Search of Itself, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a noted expert on Russia, examines the efforts of a proud but troubled nation to find a post-Soviet identity. The agenda has not been controlled from the top-down and center-out as in Russia's past. Nor has...
This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century....
