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) and Russia's Revolution: 1989–2006 (AEI Press, April 2007). 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, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Times (London), Newsday, The National Interest, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement. A frequent guest on television and radio talk shows, he has commented on Russian affairs on 60 Minutes, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, CNN International, C-Span, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986. He previously practiced law and was an economic consultant, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was editor and publisher of Regulation magazine, and served on the White House staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Law School, Mr. DeMuth has published essays on domestic policy and politics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, Commentary, The American Enterprise, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
Padma Desai is a Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies in 2001, and served as the U.S. Treasury’s advisor to the Russian finance ministry in the summer of 1995. She has published extensively in professional journals 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. Her most recent publications include Work Without Wages: Russia's Nonpayment Crisis (MIT Press, December 2000), Financial Crisis, Contagion, and Containment: From Asia to Argentina (Princeton University Press, 2003), and Conversations on Russia (Oxford University Press, April 2006). Professor Desai has combined her scholarly activity with frequent contributions to the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, and appearances on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, CNN, BBC, Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and Charlie Rose.
Clifford Gaddy is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is the coauthor, with Fiona Hill, of The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Brookings Press, 2003), a study of how territorial misallocation of industry and people burdens today’s Russian economy. His earlier books include Russia’s Virtual Economy (The Brookings Institution Press, 2002; with Barry W. Ickes), in which the authors analyze the nature and evolution of the post-communist economic system in Russia; The Price of the Past: Russia’s Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Brookings Institution Press, 1996), and Open for Business: Russia’s Return to the Global Economy (Brookings Institution Press, 1992; with Ed A. Hewett). Along with Barry Ickes, he is currently writing two new books: Forty Years of Addiction: Resource Rents and the Russian Economy and Bear Traps: Pitfalls on Russia's Road to Sustainable Economic Growth.
Yegor Gaidar was the first prime minister to serve in Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s government in 1992, and was a leading architect of Russia’s post-communist economic reforms. He also served during the early 1990s as minister of economy and finance for the Russian Federation and as counselor to President Yeltsin. Before entering politics, he worked as a journalist for Pravda and as director of the Institute of Economic Policy under the National Academy of Economics in the U.S.S.R. Since leaving the Kremlin, he was elected as a deputy to the Duma and, until 2004, acted as a co-chairman of the Union of Rightist Forces, the center-right political party. Since 1996, he has been director of the Institute of the Economy in Transition, based in Moscow. He has had several books and over a hundred articles on economic reform and post-communist transition published. He is an honorary professor at the University of California–Berkeley and the Terry Sanford Distinguished Lecturer at Duke University.
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