The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced today that three new scholars will join the research team at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Andrei Kolesnikov will join the center as senior associate and chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program. Alexander Gabuev has been named senior associate and chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program. Major General (retired) Vladimir Dvorkin, a longtime advisor and prolific author at the Carnegie Moscow Center, has assumed a new role as distinguished military fellow.
Andrei Kolesnikov will focus on major trends shaping Russian domestic politics, with particular focus on the fallout from the Ukraine crisis and ideological shifts inside Russian society. He replaces former Carnegie senior associate Lilia Shevtsova.
Kolesnikov is among Russia’s most prominent political journalists and is a longtime contributor to Novaya Gazeta, Vedomosti, The New Times, Forbes.ru, and Gazeta.ru, among others. He has written several books, including a biography of Anatoly Chubais, the prominent Russian reformer and former deputy prime minister. Kolesnikov holds a law degree from Moscow State University. He is a member of the board of the Yegor Gaidar Foundation. He speaks Russian, English, French, and Polish.
Alexander Gabuev will lead a new policy research program dedicated to Russia’s increasingly important relationships with countries in the Asia-Pacific. He will also contribute to the center’s work on Russian domestic and foreign policy developments. Before joining Carnegie, he was a foreign policy columnist and the deputy editor in chief at Kommersant-Vlast, a leading Russian political weekly. He joined Kommersant Daily in 2007 as a foreign desk correspondent covering Asia, Russo-Chinese relations, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, and the interplay between big business and Russian foreign policy. He worked as a China-based foreign correspondent for Kommersant from 2005 to 2006.
Gabuev holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Chinese history from Moscow State University, a diploma in Mandarin and Chinese culture from Zhejiang University, and a master’s in finance from the Higher School of Economics. He is writing a PhD thesis at Moscow State University on Chinese nationalism. He speaks Russian, Mandarin, English, and German.
Major General Vladimir Dvorkin has worked closely with the Carnegie Moscow Center since 2008. He is the co-author and co-editor with Carnegie Scholar in Residence Alexei Arbatov of multiple volumes on Russian strategic policy, nuclear weapons, and nonproliferation issues, most recently Missile Defense: Confrontation and Cooperation (2013).
In his new role at the Carnegie Moscow Center, Dvorkin will focus primarily on changes in Russia’s military posture and doctrine along with the implications for the international security environment. He holds a PhD in technical sciences and serves as chief researcher at the Center for International Security of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Dvorkin formerly served in the Strategic Rocket Forces and as director of the Fourth Central Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense from 1993 to 2001. He supported preparations for SALT II, the INF Treaty, START I, and START II, as well as made a significant contribution to formulating Soviet and Russian positions at the negotiations on strategic offensive arms control and reduction.