There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

Fiona Hill is an expert on Russia who served in the Trump administration as an adviser; as of 2022, she is the current Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program. Hill comes from Bishop Aukland in northeast England, an impoverished postindustrial town whose residents find social mobility almost impossible to achieve. Through talent and luck, Hill managed to obtain an education that allowed her tremendous opportunities, including a doctorate in Russian Studies from Harvard University. Hill lived in Moscow during the late 1980s. Watching the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aftermath play out during her graduate studies in the US fueled a lifelong fascination with the slippage between democracy and autocracy. During her tenure in the Trump administration, Hill testified in President Trump’s first impeachment hearing regarding his allegedly influence-peddling phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.