Speaker biographies

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at AEI. Mr. Aron was born in Moscow and came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union in June 1978. He has taught at Georgetown University and has contributed numerous articles on Russian affairs to newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. Mr. Aron also writes Russian Outlook, AEI’s quarterly essay on economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Russia’s post-Soviet transition. He is a frequent guest of television and radio talk shows and has been interviewed on 60 minutes, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, among others. Mr. Aron is the author of the first full-length scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989–2006 (AEI Press, 2007). He is at work on a book about ideas and ideals that inspired and shaped the latest Russian revolution (1987–91), to be published by Yale University Press.

Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. From 1994 until 2006 he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate and then director of the Russian and Eurasian program. A leading specialist on post-communist economic transformation—especially in Russia and Ukraine—Mr. Åslund has served as a senior economic adviser to the governments of Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Geneva, and Moscow. From 1989 to 1994, he was a professor at and founding director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. Mr. Åslund is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. A prolific writer, he has authored eight books, including two this year, and edited twelve. He has also published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Padma Desai is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems and the director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Desai was the president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies in 2001 and served as the U.S. Treasury’s adviser to the Russian Finance Ministry in the summer of 1995. She has researched and published extensively on issues of economic planning in the Soviet Union before she switched her research agenda to economic reforms in Russia and the emerging market economies. Ms. Desai has published eleven books, including Conversations on Russia (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Financial Crisis, Contagion, and Containment: From Asia to Argentina (Princeton University Press, 2003). She has written numerous articles in professional journals and the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In addition, she has shared her expertise on television programs such as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, the BBC, and Charlie Rose.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is also a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt is currently, inter alia, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. Mr. Eberstadt is regularly consulted by governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. He has also offered expert testimony before Congress on a variety of topics. Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988); The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995); The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999); Korea’s Future and the Great Power (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001); The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007); Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007); and most recently, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”: Measure and Mismeasure of Want in Modern America (AEI Press, 2008).

Jonathan Schiffer is the vice president and the senior credit officer in the sovereign risk unit of Moody’s Investors Services. For the past twelve years at Moody’s, he has been the lead analyst responsible for monitoring government bond ratings for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Mr. Schiffer recommended Moody’s multiple downgrades of Russia prior to the 1998 default, its initial investment grade rating assignment in 2003, and the initial investment grade ratings of Poland in 1996 and Kazakhstan in 2002. He is the author of Soviet Regional Economic Policy (Macmillan, 1989) and has been a professor in graduate and business schools in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Germany. During the early Gorbachev years, Mr. Schiffer ran a business consulting firm in Chicago specializing in U.S.-USSR trade and investment.

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