Richard Sakwa

Professor, University of Kent in Canterbury

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. Professor Sakwa has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs. Books include Communism in Russia: An Interpretative Essay, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 (with a Russian version published by Rosspen in 2011), The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Putin and the Oligarch: The Khodorkovsky - Yukos Affair (London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 2014) and Putin Redux: Power and Contradiction in Contemporary Russia (London and New York, Routledge, 2014). His latest book is Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, an extended paperback version of which was published by I. B. Tauris in 2016. He is currently working on Russia against the Rest: Problematising the New Cold War (contracted for Cambridge University Press).