Author: gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

A Push-back to the CEPS Task Force Report on “More Union in European Defence”

Solutions to the perceived Russian threat to European security must not be left to military experts alone, as this report demonstrates. Europe must tap into the relevant multi-disciplinary expertise coming from area studies if it is to do better. Read on…

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Boris Nemtsov, R.I.P., 27 February 2015

The slaying of Boris Nemtsov yesterday was a contract killing of great political moment carried out by professionals who had done their research of the location very thoroughly to ensure their own invisibility to surveillance cameras and a magnificent background of the Kremlin for suggestive journalism. And so the notion of a provocation remains uppermost. Read on…

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Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mitteleuropa, or why Germany is as responsible for the growing disaster in Ukraine as the USA

Contrary to the widely held view among political commentators, Angela Merkel is not doing Obama’s bidding on sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. She has her own policy which just happens to overlap with US policy in the region in some respects. This new German foreign policy is loaded with potential problems not only for Russia but for the EU and for the United States. Read on…

 

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