Sergei M. Plekhanov

Sergei M. Plekhanov (born May 7, 1946 in Moscow, Russia) is a former Soviet Union government adviser who served under the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev. He is also the former Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada in Russia, specializing in Russian politics and Russia-United States relations. He is an associate professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada, a position he has held since 1993.

Education and career

Dr. Plekhanov received B.A. and M.A. in international relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1968 and a Ph.D. in History from the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. From 1988 to 1993 he was the Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada. He has taught as Visiting Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Occidental College in (Los Angeles), and served as Soviet Affairs Consultant with CBS News from 1988 to 1991. Plekhanov wrote the Russian subtitles for the HBO television film Stalin in 1992 starring Robert Duvall.

Since his arrival in Canada in 1993, he has been a frequent commentator on Russian and East European affairs for Canadian TV, radio networks and print media including TVO's Studio 2, The Agenda, CBC News, CBC's Sunday Edition and CTV News. He has consulted Canadian and US governments on Russian affairs and testified at hearings at the Parliament of Canada and US Congress.

CBS News 1988-1991 and controversy

Plekhanov became a Soviet politics consultant for CBS News in 1988. In January 1990, Plekhanov appeared on the air. Plekhanov's second banana to long- standing Soviet spokesman Georgi Arbatov as Deputy Director of the Soviet government's Institute on the USA and Canada. Some analysts watched closely every Plekhanov appearance from the beginning of 1990. Although every utterance toed the Gorbachev line, CBS has repeatedly failed to properly identify Plekhanov as an official of the Soviet government, which created some controversy.

In his first appearance, on CBS This Morning January 15, he was identified as Deputy Director of the USA and Canada Institute, but the screen read "Soviet Expert." When Dan Rather interviewed him right after Bush's State of the Union address on January 31, the screen read "Institute on the USA." The average viewer had no reason to believe the Institute was anything other than a typical private think tank. CBS never noted it is an arm of the Soviet government. In Plekhanov's seven appearances on the CBS Evening News since his appointment as a consultant, CBS identified him once as a "Soviet political scientist" and six times as a "Soviet foreign affairs analyst." CBS did not once explicitly identify Plekhanov as a government official until the June 4 Nightwatch, when host Charlie Rose introduced Plekhanov as a "Soviet expert on the United States," but his on-screen label read "Soviet Government Adviser."

Current positions and written works

• Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, York University
• Coordinator of the Post-Communist Studies Program at York Centre for International and Security Studies (York University)
• Senior Associate of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto

Plekhanov has published widely on issues of post-communist transformations in Russia, Russian foreign policy, US-Russian relations, and American politics. A brief and selective list of his works:

• Co-editor, with Harvey Simmons: Is Fascism History? Selected papers presented at the conference held at York University 28-29 October 1999. Toronto: Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2001

• Co-author and co-editor, with John Logue and John Simmons: Transforming Russian Enterprises: From State Control to Worker Ownership. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995

• Co-author and co-editor, with John Logue and John Simmons: Preobrazovanie predprijatij. Amerikanskij opyt i rossijskaja dejstvitel'nost' ( "Enterprise Reform: The American Experience and the Russian Reality") - a revised and updated Russian edition of the above. Moskva, Veche-Persej, 1997)

• “Organized Crime, Business, and the Russian State”, in: Felia Allum, Renate Siebert (ed.). Organized Crime and the Challenge to Democracy. New York and London: Routledge, 2003

• “Civil-Military Relations in Post-Soviet Russia: Rebuilding the “Battle Order”?” (with David Betz), in: Natalie Mychajlyszyn, Harald von Riekhoff (ed.) The Evolution of Civil-Military Relations in East-Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003

• "NATO Enlargement As An Issue in Russian Politics", in: Jacques Levesque (ed.) The Future of NATO: Enlargement, Russia, and European Security. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999

• "Soviet Perceptions of Long-Term Western Developments, Goals and Constraints", in: Klaus Gottstein (ed.) Mutual Perceptions of Long-Term Goals. Can the United States and the Soviet Union Cooperate Permanently? Campus Verlag - Westview Press, 1991

• “Political Consciousness of Right Radicalism”, in: Eduard Batalov and Yuri Zamoshkin (ed.). Political Consciousness in the USA: Traditions and Modernity. Revised and expanded edition. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984

External links

• Sergei Plekhanov at the Internet Movie Database
• The New Yorker archives
• Peace Magazine Interview, 2001