Mary Elise Sarotte is the inaugural holder of the Kravis Chair at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. She is the author, among other works, of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate; The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall; and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. Her books have been named Economist and Financial Times Books of the Year, along with receiving other awards and commendations.
Sarotte earned her AB at Harvard University and her Ph.D. at Yale University. After graduate school, she served as a White House Fellow and subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge. Sarotte received tenure at Cambridge in 2004 before ultimately returning to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Sarotte is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Humboldt Scholar, and a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).
Historian Mary Elise Sarotte tells the inside story of the west’s efforts to secure a post-cold-war settlement — and how Putin seized on missteps and Russian grievances to destroy it
In 1848, the Austrian Empire was ruled by the absolutist equivalent of a lame-duck emperor. In March, a peaceful demand for civil rights escalated into a full-fledged revolution. The emperor and his advisors were forced to flee the capital city of Vienna.
On December 15, 1991, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker arrived in Moscow amid political chaos to meet with Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, who was at the time busy wresting power from his nemesis, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.