  | | Andrei Piontkovsky (born 1940, Moscow) is a Russian scholar, political writer and analyst.
He graduated from the Mathematics Department of Moscow State University and has published more than a hundred scientific papers on applied mathematics.
He was the Executive Director of a Moscow think tank, the Strategic Studies Centre, which has been closed since 2006. He contributes regularly to Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow Times, Russia Journal and the online journals Grani.ru and Transitions Online. A regular political commentator for the BBC World Service and Radio Liberty in Moscow, he has been an outspoken critic of Putin's "managed" democracy and has described Russia as a "soft totalitarian regime”.
Piontkovsky is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the international writers’ association, the PEN Club.
He is the author of several books on the Putin presidency in Russia, including most recently Another Look Into Putin's Soul. |
 | | Andrei Piontkovsky
ANOTHER LOOK INTO PUTIN'S SOUL
Translated by Arch Tait
Hudson Institute Washington, DC, 2006
Paperback, $14.95
ISBN 1-55813-151-5
209 pages
Buy from Hudson Institute |
| | | "The US President even claimed he could look into Putin's soul. I wonder how he managed to do that. In all my many involuntary encounters with the KGB, an officer's soul was one thing I failed to spot."
VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY, Cambridge, UK
"Andrei Piontkovsky is not only a penetrating analyst of the Russian scene. He is also a pleasure to read. He writes with a compressed elegance, a penetrating irony that combines wit with a rapier-like brutality. He makes you laugh even as you wonder at the audacity with which he goes after the actors on the Russian political and economic scene. The criticisms of the Russian scene in this book of occasional writings are sometimes exaggerated, even intemperate. But they are always stimulating, always illuminating, and often prescient."
SIR RODRIC BRAITHWAITE, HM Ambassador to Moscow, 1988-92
"When you read someone like Piontkovsky, you can see why they executed Socrates!"
YURI AFANASIEV, Rector, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow
"Andrei Piontkovsky is one of Russia's most original analysts. Although he is sometimes controversial - I myself don't always agree with what he writes - there is no disputing his sincerity, talent and deep concern over what is happening in Russia."
MIKHAIL KASIANOV, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation
"Gems of satire and political analysis, Andrei Piontkovsky's essays reflect the heart of a Russian patriot with a strong sense of universal justice. Avoiding narrow nationalism in his compelling views on Russia's place in the world, he has produced a book worthy of wide attention."
GENERAL WILLIAM E. ODOM
Former Director, US National Security Agency
"He is a profound thinker whose definitions and interpretations of the events in our lives have quite simply become part of the canon of Russian political thought."
ANDREI ILLARIONOV, former adviser to President Putin |