Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Aron 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.  He received a PhD from Columbia University in 1985 and taught at Georgetown University.  Aron has contributed numerous articles on Russian affairs to newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Republic.  He 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 his interviews range from CBS News' 60 minutes, PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, to NPR's All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.  Aron is the author of the first full-length scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, and Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006, published in 2007. He is at work on a book about ideas and ideals that inspired and shaped the latest Russian Revolution, 1987–1991, to be published by Yale University Press.