Speaker biographies
Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at AEI. He was born in Moscow and came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union in June 1978 at the age of twenty-four. Mr. Aron has contributed numerous articles on Russian affairs to newspapers and magazines and 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 on television and radio talk shows. His interviews range from CBS News’s 60 Minutes and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation. 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 he most recently published Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006 (AEI Press, 2007), a compilation of essays analyzing events over the past fifteen years in post-Soviet Russia.
Jonathan Brent is editorial director at Yale University Press. He is the author of the forthcoming Myshlayevsky’s Chin: A Portrait of Russia from the Soviet Archives (Atlas Books, 2008) and Stalin’s Last Crime (HarperCollins, 2003). He edited A John Cage Reader (C.F. Peters, 1984) and The Best of TriQuarterly (Washington Square Press, 1982). He has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune and been featured on TV and radio programs on CNN, NPR, and FOX News, among others. He has been at Yale University Press since 1991, before which he served as editorial director for Northwestern University Press. He serves on the executive board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation and is the co-founder of the Yale–Hoover Institution Digital Archive Project.
Michael A. Ledeen, the Freedom Scholar at AEI, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism; Iran; the Middle East; Italy; intelligence; and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the National Security Council and the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. He most recently authored The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) and The War against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened, Where We Are Now, How We’ll Win (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).
Ronald Radosh is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books, including Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (Encounter Books, 2001), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (with Mary Habeck, Yale University Press, 2001), The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton, Yale University Press, 1997), Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964–1996 (Free Press, 1996.), and The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (with Harvey Klehr, University of North Carolina Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in such publications as Partisan Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, the Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard. Mr. Radosh has served as a senior research associate for the Center for Communitarian Studies at George Washington University, professor of history in the Graduate Faculty of the City University of New York, research director for the United States Information Agency, and associate director of the office of the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
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