Thomas Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked on Soviet and Russian affairs for the past 40 years in and out of government. He served as the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration and as a political officer at the American Embassy in Moscow for eight years just before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. His writings on Russian domestic politics and foreign policy and US-Russian relations have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, as well as in leading Russian news media.