Professional Affiliation

Director of Russia Programs, National Security Archive

Expert Bio

Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs (since 2001) at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. She is the author, with Thomas Blanton, of the book The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, (Budapest:  Central European University Press, 2016), and editor of the book by the late Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Missiles of November (Stanford: Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012).  Dr. Savranskaya won the Link-Kuehl Prize in 2011 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, recognizing the best documentary publication over the previous two years, for her book (with Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok) “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2010).  She is author and co-author of several publications on Gorbachev’s foreign policy and nuclear learning and the end of the Cold War, and numerous electronic briefing books on these subjects.  She serves as an adjunct professor teaching U.S.-Russian relations at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C. (since 2001).  She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University, where she studied with Professors Robert Pastor and Thomas Remington. A “Red Diploma” graduate of the Moscow State University in 1988, she went on to study at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1989-90, before moving to Emory, where she won a dissertation fellowship from the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and worked as a Hewlett Fellow at the Carter Presidential Center in 1993.  Her articles and chapters have appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Cold War International History Project Bulletin, and the Cambridge History of the Cold War, among many other publications.  She is currently working on the new project documenting the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs in the 1990s.