Manana Aslamazyan, a media and television expert who has worked with Russian journalists for more than 15 years, is Executive Director of Internews Europe based in Paris.

Aslamazyan and Alexei K. Simonov launched Russia's first freedom of speech organization in 1991, the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF). In 1992, Aslamazyan began to work with Internews Network to organize events for newly formed independent TV stations around the former Soviet Union. She became its first foreign staff person and by 1994, was managing the Russian operation, which in 1997 registered as a fully independent Russian non-commercial organization. In 2006, in response to changing legislation and its increased focus on training, Internews Russia re-organized as the Educated Media Foundation (EMF).

As director, Aslamazyan led Internews Russia/EMF in the creation of numerous innovative and ambitious projects. Aslamazyan's constant drive to respond to the changing needs of Russian media led to the launch of Internews Russia/EMF's month-long Journalism School, the News Factory newsroom automation project, and the Russian-American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue. Internews Russia/EMF was forced to shut down in 2007 following a raid on its Moscow headquarters and filing of criminal charges against EMF and Aslamazyan that were widely seen as politically motivated. In 2008, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that the charges against Aslamayan had no legal basis.

Aslamazyan has served as an expert to the Russian Duma Committee on Information Policy, and from 2000 to 2004, she was one of three representatives of civil society on the influential Federal Competition Commission of Ministry of Press, TV Broadcasting and Mass Media. She is a board member of the prestigious Academy of Russian Television and served for three years as a Vice-President of the National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters (NAT).

Aslamazyan serves on the boards of several Russian nonprofit organizations, Internews Network, and Internews International, which unites local Internews organizations around the world.

Co-sponsored by CREES and Internews Network

Sponsored jointly by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Michael Eskin (Ph.D., Rutgers 1998) studied comparative literature, German, American, and Russian literature, and philosophy. Before coming to Columbia, he was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Nabokovs Version von Puskins "Evgenij Onegin": Zwischen Version und Fiktion - eine Ubersetzungs- und fiktionstheoretische Untersuchung (Sagner 1994); Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (Oxford University Press 2000); and Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grunbein, Brodsky (Stanford University Press; forthcoming). His articles have appeared in such venues as PMLA, Poetics Today, Semiotica, New German Critique, and TLS. He has also edited special issues of The Germanic Review (77/1, 2002) and Poetics Today (25/4, 2004). Currently, he is working on two book projects: one, dealing with philosophical autobiographies; the other with poetic inscriptions of time.

Michael Eskin's areas of teaching and research are: nineteenth- through twenty-first-century literature and intellectual history; post-world war II and contemporary poetry and culture; interdisciplinary and philosophical approaches to literature (ethics and literature, hermeneutics, semiotics), literary theory and criticism, the theory and practice of translation, as well as the theory of fiction and narrative.

Jointly sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of German Studies, Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Comparative Literature, and the DLCL Philosophy Reading group.

Jeffrey Gedmin is President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc. and in that capacity directs Broadcasting and Internet operations in 28 languages to countries stretching from Belarus to Bosnia and from the Arctic Sea to the Persian Gulf. Dr. Gedmin is author of the book "The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany" (1992) and editor of a collection of essays titled "European Integration and the American Interest" (1997). He was also executive editor and producer of the award-winning PBS television program, "The Germans, Portrait of a New Nation" (1995) and co-executive producer of the documentary film titled "Spain's 9/11 and the Challenge of Radical Islam in Europe," aired on PBS in the spring of 2007. Jeffrey Gedmin has taught at Georgetown University and is an honorary professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the board of the Council for a Community of Democracies (Washington, D.C.) and the Program of Atlantic Security Studies (Prague, Czech Republic), Gedmin holds a PhD. in German Area Studies and Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Dr. Gedmin's piece "Reporting Among Gangsters" on human rights violations perpetrated against journalists in Central Asia, appeared in the July 2, 2008 edition of the Washington Post.

Abstract:  Russia is the country that has the largest amount of weapon-usable fissile materials in its disposal, most of which has been produced during the cold war. In the years following the end of the cold war. Russia has undertaken significant effort to downsize its nuclear complex, leading to its serious transformation. This transformation, however, left the basic structure of the nuclear industry, most of the production facilities and most of the fissile material intact. Substantial amounts of weapon-usable fissile materials are still in storage, moved from one facility to another, or used for research and other purposes, creating security risks. Although the dangers associated with continuing presence of weapon material are generally acknowledged, the task of reducing this danger, by either eliminating the material or removing it from circulation and consolidating in a mall number of safe and secure storage sites, has proven difficult. The talk analyses the progress that Russia has made so far in consolidating its weapon-usable materials and describes the challenges that it is facing in further advancing this goal.

Pavel Podvig is a researcher at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In 2008-09, Podvig is CISAC's acting associate director for research. Before coming to Stanford in 2004, he worked at the Center for Arms Control Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), which was the first independent research organization in Russia dedicated to analysis of technical issues related to arms control and disarmament. In Moscow, Podvig was the leader of a major research project and the editor of the book Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (MIT Press, 2001). In recognition of his work in Russia, the American Physical Society awarded Podvig the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award of 2008 (with Anatoli Diakov). From 2000 to 2004, Podvig worked with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and earlier with the Security Studies Program at MIT. His current research focuses on the Russian strategic forces and nuclear weapons complex, as well as technical and political aspects of nuclear nonproliferation, disarmament, missile defense, and U.S.-Russian arms control process.

Podvig received his degree in physics from MIPT and his PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Since 2001, Podvig has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a member of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists and is serving as the Chair of the Committee in 2008.