September 21, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at AEI. He is the author of the first full-scale scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Since 1998, he has written Russian Outlook, a quarterly essay on economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Russia’s post-Soviet transition, published by AEI. He has contributed numerous essays and articles to newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (London), Newsday, The National Interest, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement. A frequent guest of television and radio talk shows, he has commented on Russian affairs for, among others, 60 Minutes, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, CNN International, C-Span, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.

Nikolas Gvosdev is a senior fellow in strategic studies at the Nixon Center and the executive editor of The National Interest. Before coming to the Nixon Center, he served as associate director of the J. M. Dawson Institute at Baylor University, as associate editor of the Journal of Church and State, and as a contributing editor to Analysis of Current Events. He is the author of several books, including Imperial Policy and Perspectives toward Georgia, 1762–1819, and was a coeditor and contributor to Civil Society and the Search for Justice in Russia. He also holds nonresidential fellowship appointments with the Institute for Global Democracy and the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the foreign policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution. She is a frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs and has researched and published extensively on a diverse range of issues related to Russia, relations among the states of the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus region, Central Asia, ethno-political conflicts in Eurasia, and energy and strategic issues. Her book with Brookings senior fellow Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, was published by Brookings Press in December 2003. Before joining the Brookings Institution, she was director of strategic planning at the Eurasia Foundation in Washington, D.C. from 1999 to 2000 and continues to serve as an adviser to the foundation’s president. From 1994 to 1999, she was associate director of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project (SDI) at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and from 1991 to 1994 she was director of Harvard’s project on ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union, coordinator of Harvard’s trilateral study on Japanese-Russian-U.S. Relations, and a research associate at the Kennedy School of Government. She is also a trustee of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting; on the advisory board of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute in New York; a board member of the Russian language international news service, Washington ProFile; and on the editorial boards of Demokratizatsiya and the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been a consultant to The Hague Initiative (an international roundtable on the resolution of conflicts in the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union, with a special focus on the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya) and has testified before Congress on the impact of the second war in Chechnya, on human rights in Central Asia, and on the role of the Central Asian states in the U.S. war against terrorism.

Radek Sikorski is the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative and a resident fellow at AEI. He was Poland’s deputy minister for foreign affairs from 1998 to 2001. As the country’s deputy minister for defense in the first democratically elected government after the fall of Communism, he spearheaded Poland’s drive to join NATO. From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a war correspondent to Afghanistan and Angola, contributing to the Spectator (London) and National Review. He is the author of Dust of the Saints: A Journey to Herat in Time of War (1989) and The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland (1997). His photograph from Afghanistan received the World Press Photo Award in 1988. From 1981 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a political refugee in the United Kingdom.

Vladimir Socor is a senior fellow of the Jamestown Foundation, specializing in NATO enlargement, the South Caucasus, the Baltic States, and Moldova. He is a regular contributor to Jamestown’s Eurasia Daily Monitor and wrote for Jamestown’s Monitor from 1995 until 2002. He writes a fortnightly column on post-Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal Europe and continues as a guest lecturer at Harvard University’s National Security Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington, D.C. From 2002 until the present, he has been a member of the study group on the future of NATO, sponsored by the Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes. Previously, he was a senior analyst for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute.

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