Speaker biographies
Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. 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, Mr. Aron 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 of London, Newsday, The National Interest, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement. A frequent guest on television and radio talk shows, Mr. Aron has commented on Russian affairs on 60 Minutes, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, CNN International, C-SPAN, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. He worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1994 to 2006 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.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies foreign policy and international organizations. Ambassador Bolton served as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. From May 2001 to May 2005, he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security. Prior to this, Ambassador Bolton served as senior vice president of AEI and also held a number of positions in public service, including assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, 1989–1993; assistant attorney general, 1985–1989; assistant administrator for program and policy coordination, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 1982–1983; and USAID general counsel, 1981–1982. From 1983 to 1985, Ambassador Bolton was an associate and then member of Covington & Burling, LLP.
George G. Bovt is a Russian journalist and commentator who served as editor-in-chief of Profil (a Russian weekly magazine) and Business Week Russia from 2004 to 2007. Prior to that, he served as deputy editor-in-chief and then executive editor-in-chief at Izvestia, a leading Russian daily newspaper, from 1999 to 2004 and deputy editor-in-chief at Segodnia, a Russian daily, from 1997 to 1999. He worked at Kommersant from 1991 to 1997. Mr. Bovt also worked at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences, from 1985 to 1991. The author of numerous publications and reports on foreign and domestic policy, Mr. Bovt is currently a regular columnist for Izvestia, the Moscow Times, and Russia Profil.
Padma Desai is the 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. Ms. Desai 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. Her publications include eleven books and numerous articles in professional journals and the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Ms. Desai has shared her expertise on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, the BBC, and Charlie Rose.
Andrei Kortunov is the president of the New Eurasia Foundation in Moscow. He also serves as the president of the Information Scholarship Education Center (ISE) and is a member of the educational board of the Open Society Institute. Until recently, he also served as deputy director and head of the foreign policy department at the Institute for the USA and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Formerly the head of the Moscow Public Science Foundation and an advisor on the Committee of International Relations of the Russian State Duma, Mr. Kortunov works extensively with the global academic community. He has been a syndicated columnist (Novosti) and has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, the BBC, ITN, and the CBC, as well as on numerous Russian TV programs. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Miami, and the Moscow State University of International Relations, among others.
Andrew Kuchins is a senior fellow and director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Previously, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was director of its Russian and Eurasian Program in Washington, D.C., from 2000 to 2003 and again in 2006, and director of the Carnegie Moscow Center in Russia from 2003 to 2005. Mr. Kuchins has taught at Georgetown University, and he served as the associate director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University from 1997 to 2000. He has also been executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (1989–1993) and senior program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993–1997). Mr. Kuchins conducts research and writes widely on Russian foreign and security policy. He is currently working on a book titled China and Russia: Strategic Partners, Allies, or Competitors and is a member of the editorial boards of Pro et Contra and Demokratizatsia.
Johannes F. Linn is the executive director and a senior fellow at the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings, he worked at the World Bank from 1973 to 2003. In 1987 and 1988, Mr. Linn served as the staff director of World Development Report 1988. In 1991, he became the Bank’s vice president for financial policy and resource mobilization, and then worked as the Bank’s vice president for Europe and Central Asia from 1996 to 2003. From 2004 to 2005, Mr. Linn was the project leader and lead author for the United Nations Development Programme’s Central Asia Human Development Report. In addition to his research on key development challenges, Mr. Linn has written and published extensively on development and global governance issues.
Fyodor Lukyanov has been editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs—Russia’s leading journal on global development issues—since its inception in 2002. He comments frequently in a number of media outlets, including the business daily Vedomosti, the Moscow Times, the radio station Echo of Moscow, and Gazeta.ru. Mr. Lukyanov has an extensive background in media and has worked as a correspondent and editor for the Voice of Russia radio station and Russia’s Channel 3 television station, as well as a commentator for Segodnya, Moskovskie Novosti, Vremya MN, and Vremya Novostei newspapers. He also frequently comments on Russian foreign policy for international media. In addition, Mr. Lukyanov is a member of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an independent organization providing foreign policy expertise.
Mikhail Margelov is chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Council of Federation, Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He represents the Pskov region. Mr. Margelov has a wide range of foreign policy and media experience at the highest levels of the Russian government. In December 2000, he was elected to represent the Pskov region in the Council of Federation, in which he joined the committee for foreign affairs and was elected chairman in 2001. From January until March 2000, Mr. Margelov served as a consultant to President Vladimir Putin’s election campaign, during which time he was in charge of contacts with foreign media. In 1996, Mr. Margelov worked for President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign as chief coordinator for advertising, and he subsequently served in the public relations department of the administration.
Michael McFaul is the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law and the deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is also the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he codirects the Iran Democracy Project, and a non-resident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One of the foremost experts on Russian political transition, Mr. McFaul is the author and editor of several monographs, and he comments frequently in the media on American foreign policy and international politics. He has appeared on all major radio and television networks and has published in many notable newspapers and journals, including the Chicago Tribune, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Moscow Times, The New Republic, the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Washington Times and The Weekly Standard.
Rajan Menon is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. He has served as an academic fellow and senior advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the National Bureau for Asian Research, and—while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations—special assistant for arms control and national security to Representative Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY). Mr. Menon is the author or editor of nine books and monographs and has written more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. He has also written extensively for such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, washingtonpost.com, the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. He also frequently comments for radio and television, including on ABC, CNN, NPR, the BBC, the CBC, and Radio Australia. Mr. Menon consults for various U.S. government organizations on national security issues and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Vladimir A. Ryzhkov is a deputy in the Russian State Duma and a member of the Duma Federal Affairs and Regional Policy Committee. He represents the city of Barnaul in the Altai region of Siberia and was first elected to the Duma in 1993. One of the founding members of the independent deputies group, in 1997, Mr. Ryzhkov was elected deputy president of the State Duma. In 2005 he became part of the political council of the Republican Party of Russia and is now a leading member of the Russian democratic opposition. He is also the author of numerous publications on topics including history, legislation, political science, and international affairs.
Jonathan R. Schiffer is the vice president/senior credit officer in the sovereign risk unit of Moody’s Investors Services, where, for the past twelve years, 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. In this capacity, he recommended Moody’s multiple downgrades of Russia prior to the 1998 default and its initial investment grade rating assignment in 2003 and the initial investment grade ratings of Poland in 1996 and Kazakhstan in 2002. Mr. Schiffer is the author of Soviet Regional Economic Policy (Macmillan) and has been a professor in graduate and business schools in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Germany. In the early Gorbachev years, Mr. Schiffer ran a business consultancy in the Chicago area specializing in U.S.-USSR trade and investment activity.
Lilia Shevtsova is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Moscow Carnegie Center and an associate fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Ms. Shevtsova is also a professor at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Relations and a member of the Women in International Security advising board. She is also a member of the boards of the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University, the New Eurasia Foundation, and the Liberal Mission Foundation. Ms. Shevtsova serves on the editorial boards of The American Interest, Journal of Democracy, Pro et Contra, and Demokratizatsia. She is the author of a number of articles and publications, including Putin’s Russia and Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality.
Dmitri Trenin is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. Mr. Trenin served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, achieving the rank of colonel, working as a liaison officer in the External Relations Branch of the Group of Soviet Forces (stationed in Potsdam), and serving as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva in 1985–91. He taught area studies at the Defense University in Moscow from 1986 to 1993 and held posts as a senior research Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome and as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow from 1993 to 1997. A member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Mr. Trenin is the author of several books and a frequent commentator in the media. He also serves on the editorial boards of International Politics, Pro et Contra, Insight Turkey, and Baltic Course.
View Event Details
