Background

Alexey, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Moscow, and all my childhood years and then teenage years and college were in Moscow.

In looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

My mother probably gave me very basic, very fundamental values of what is good and what is bad about people and about reality. My father provided me, as far as I can think now in retrospect, with more sophisticated values of political and economic ideological nature. However, he never did it directly. Actually, as far as I remember, he was always very busy, and so I [learned] from him mostly by watching him and his friends, listening to their conversations, making my own judgment, and trying to follow good examples.

You had a very cosmopolitan background; from a young age, you must have learned a lot about the world.

Not really, because my young age was under the Soviet times when we were quite strongly isolated from the outside world by the Iron Curtain, by censorship. Our information was certainly extremely limited and selective. That continued until the mid-eighties, when I was already a researcher in the Institute of the World Economy, one of the principal academic institutions.

Where were you educated, and in what field did you study?

I studied international relations and international economy at a very famous college, which is called Moscow Institute for International Relations. It's a college which teaches students who become diplomats, or KGB, or high-ranking military, or economists. It has a very strong legal department, too. So it was an elite college which I graduated from.

What did you do your doctoral dissertation on?

In Russia, we have a different system from the United States. We actually have two Ph.D. dissertations. It's more like Germany. My first Ph.D., which corresponds to an American Ph.D., was on [Robert] McNamara, decision-making on major weapon programs in the Pentagon. I was very interested in that subject already at that time, and very much interested in defense policies, security issues. I defended it in 1976.

Then I had my second doctoral dissertation -- Germans would call it "Doctor-Doctor" -- in the early eighties. It was fully dedicated to Soviet - American strategic balance, evolution, and negotiations on strategic arms reductions.

How did the fall of communism affect your thinking about the world and the goals that you had for your career?

The fall of communism certainly surprised me very much. However, it didn't affect much of my views, because I already gotten quite disillusioned with the system since the early seventies, when I was already a researcher in the Academy of Sciences and where I could read a lot of foreign literature and talk to foreigners, and started to understand that Soviet policy was not always correct. Later, I began having very serious doubts on the Soviet domestic political system and economic system. Of course, I was affected by the works of Solzhenitsyn. So by the time communism collapsed, I was not sorry about that.

From the very beginning of the Gorbachev era, I joined, very actively, Soviet reforms which were started under Gorbachev, and participated in many negotiations and activities that dictated to putting an end to the Cold War, to achieve major disarmament agreements with the West and with the United States in particular. But, certainly, when it all fell apart in 1991, it was a surprise, a shock. However, I had very great hopes about the future of Russia as a democratic country. That is why it was not so hard for me to come from one period to the other one.

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