Anders Åslund is a leading specialist on the East European economies, especially Russia and Ukraine. He is presently a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum. From 2015 to 2021, he was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center with a dual appointment in its Global Business and Economics program. From 2006 to 2015, he was a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. He also teaches at Georgetown University. He served as an economic advisor to several governments, notably the Russian government (1991-4) and the Ukrainian government (1994-7).

Dr. Åslund is the author of thirteen books, including How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of the Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2013), with Valdis Dombrovskis; How Latvia Came out of the Financial Crisis (Peterson Institute, 2011); The Last Shall Be the First: The East European Financial Crisis, 2008-10 (Peterson Institute, 2010); How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (Peterson Institute, 2009); Russia’s Capitalist Revolution (Peterson Institute, 2007); Building Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2002); How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995); Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Cornell University Press, 1989); and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985). He has edited sixteen books, most recently The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism with Simeon Djankov, eds. (2014). He has also published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The American Interest, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Åslund served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, and Sweden. From 1989 to 1994, he was professor and founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. He has also been a scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Brookings Institution, both in Washington, DC. From 1994 to 2005, he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate and director of the Russian and Eurasian program. In parallel, he was co-directing the program on post-Soviet economies at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Dr. Åslund received his doctorate from Oxford University (St. Antony’s College) in 1982. He has a B.A. from the University of Stockholm and an M.S. in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He was awarded the Golden Sign of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by President Lech Walesa in July 1991; the Cross of Recognition of the Fourth Class of Latvia by President Andris Berzins in May 2013; and the Leontieff Award in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2008. He is chairman of the international advisory council for the Center for Social and Economic Research in Warsaw, Poland, and of the board of international advisors for the Bank of Finland Institute of Transition. Dr. Åslund’s native language is Swedish, and he is proficient in English, German, Russian, Polish, and French.