February 17, 2005
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.
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.
Michael McFaul is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, and a non-resident associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1995, he worked for two years as a senior associate in residence at the Moscow Carnegie Center. He is also a research associate at the Center for International Security and Arms Control and a senior adviser to the National Democratic Institute. He serves on the board of directors of the Eurasia Foundation, Firebird Fund, International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, Institute of Social and Political Studies, Center for Civil Society International, Institute for Corporate Governance and Law, the steering committee for the Europe and Eurasia division of Human Rights Watch, and the editorial boards of Current History, Journal of Democracy, Demokratizatsiya, and Perspectives on European Politics and Society. He is the author and editor of several monographs, including, with Kathryn Stoner Weiss, After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and, with Nikolai Petrov and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Political Reform (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004). His articles have appeared in Constitutional Political Economy, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Democracy, Political Science Quarterly, Post-Soviet Affairs, and World Politics. He also comments on current Russian and U.S.-Russian affairs, including articles in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Moscow Times, New Republic, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard. During the 1995 parliamentary elections in Russia, he worked as senior consultant and commentator for CBS News. During the 1996 presidential election, 1999 parliamentary election, and 2000 presidential election in Russia, he served as a commentator and adviser for CNN.
Eugene B. Rumer is a senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. He is a specialist on Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. Prior to joining INSS, he served as a visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1999–2000); a member of the secretary's policy planning staff at the Department of State (1997–99); and as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (1996–97). Prior to government service, he worked for the Rand Corporation for eight years, first as an analyst based in Santa Monica, California, and later as a senior staff member and resident representative in Moscow, Russia.
Nikolai Zlobin, a former professor at Moscow State University, joined the Center for Defense Information in 2001 as a senior fellow and director of Russian and Asian programs. He writes a regular column for the Russian daily Izvestia and has been a contributor to many international publications. He serves on the editorial boards of several academic periodicals and is the executive editor of Demokratizatsiya. He is president of Washington ProFile, the international news and analysis agency he founded in 2001. He is a former political adviser to the Kremlin. The author of eleven books and more than 200 academic articles published in more than fifteen languages, his latest book, International Communications, was published in 2004 by M.E. Sharpe. His editorial opinions have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, and Chicago Tribune, among others. He coauthored the first non-communist high school history textbook used in Russia and other post-Soviet counties. He also is the recipient of several prestigious teaching and research grants, including two MacArthur Foundation awards, two from the Truman Institute, and another from the Soros Foundation.
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