Speaker Profiles Anatoly Adamishin

Anatoly Adamishin is a Russian diplomat, politician and businessman. He was Deputy Foreign Minister in the USSR from 1986-7. Subsequently, he was Ambassador of the USSR, and then the Russian Federation, to . From 1994 to 1997, Adamishin was the Ambassador of to the .

Rodric Braithwaite

Rodric Braithwaite served in military intelligence in Vienna in 1951 and 1952, studied French and Russian at Cambridge, and joined the Diplomatic Service in 1955. He had postings in Jakarta, Warsaw, , Rome, Brussels (British delegation to the European Community) and Washington. He was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 1972-3. He was a member of the Sherpa team for the G7 Economic Summits (1984-8), British ambassador in Moscow (1988-1992), and Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister Major and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (1992-3).

He regularly speaks and writes on Russia and other matters. He has written three books on Russian affairs: “Across the Moscow River” (2002), about the collapse of the ; “Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War” (2006), which has appeared in eighteen languages; and “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989” (2011), which has appeared in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Japanese. “Coming of Age in Warsaw” was privately published in 2014. He is currently working on a book about Russian and Western perceptions of the nuclear confrontation.

Mary Dejevsky

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn, and a member of the Chatham House thinktank. She is a past Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and contributed the introductory essay to the Britannica Guide to Russia. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent.

Tuomas Forsberg

TUOMAS FORSBERG is Professor of International Relations at the University of Tampere. He is also deputy director of the Centre of Excellence on Choices of Russian Modernisation at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki. Previously he has worked at the University of Helsinki, at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany and at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. He gained his PhD at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1998. His research has dealt primarily with European security issues, focusing on the EU, Germany, Russia and Northern Europe. His publications include Divided West: European Security and the Transatlantic Relationship (co-authored with Graeme Herd, Blackwell 2006) and articles in journals such as International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Security Dialogue and Journal of Common Market Studies.

Alexey Gromyko

Alexey A. Gromyko is Director of the Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences, European Expert at Russkiy Mir Foundation, President of the Russian Association of European Studies (AES). He is a specialist in international relations and European integration.

Dr Gromyko is the chairperson of the Scholarly Council of the Institute of Europe, the editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal "Contemporary Europe". He is also Member of the Dissertation Council of the Russian Diplomatic Academy, member of the Academic Council for the Russian foreign minister and of the Academic Board of the Security Council of Russia.

He is a co-founder of the Russian NGO "For the Support of the United Nations". He is Doctor of Political Science and was Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford University (2004) and Senior Visitor at St Antony's (2007).

Marcus Holmes

Marcus Holmes is assistant professor of government at the College of William & Mary. His research and teaching interests are in international security, international relations theory, foreign policy and diplomacy. He directs the Political Psychology in International Relations student-research lab at William & Mary. Holmes has published article in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics, International Studies Perspectives, Review of Policy Research, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Journal of Transportation Security, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Homeland Security Affairs. He also recently co-edited Digital Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2015) with Corneliu Bjola (University of Oxford). He earned his doctorate from The Ohio State University and has previously taught at Georgetown University, The Ohio State University, and Fordham University.

Ian Kearns

Dr Ian Kearns is the Director of the European Leadership Network. Previously, Ian was Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in the UK and Deputy Chair of the IPPR’s independent All-Party Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. In 2013 he co-edited Influencing Tomorrow: Future Challenges for British Foreign Policy with Douglas Alexander MP, the Shadow Foreign Secretary. He also served in 2010 as a Specialist Adviser to the Joint House of Commons/House of Lords Committee on National Security Strategy.

Jack Matlock

During his 35 years in the American Foreign Service (1956-1991), Jack Matlock served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for European and Soviet Affairs on the National Security Council Staff from 1983 until 1986, and Ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1981 to 1983.

Before his appointment to Moscow as Ambassador, Mr. Matlock served three tours at the American Embassy in the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1981. His other Foreign Service assignments were in Vienna, Munich, Accra, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, in addition to tours in Washington as Director of Soviet Affairs in the State Department (1971-74) and as Deputy Director of the Foreign Service Institute (1979-80). Before entering the Foreign Service Mr. Matlock was Instructor in Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth College (1953-56). During the 1978-79 academic year, he was Visiting Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.

Since his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1991, he has held academic posts at Columbia University, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Mt. Holyoke College and the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was George F. Kennan Professor from 1996 to 2001.

Robert Service

Robert Service is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He studied Russian literature and classic Greek for his undergraduate degree at Cambridge and political science for his master's at Essex. When completing a doctorate on the Bolshevik party in the revolutionary period, he was a research student at Leningrad State University. Before moving to Oxford, he worked first at Keele University and then at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. In the Gorbachev years he co- organised the research exchange between the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow; he also co-convened the Soviet Press Study Group at the School. Among his books are biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and the newly-updated Penguin History of Modern Russia. His latest book, The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991, was published in October 2015.

James Wilson

James Graham Wilson received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2011 and works on the Foreign Relations of the United States series at the Department of State. He is the author of The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War, available in paperback from Cornell University Press.