Peter Reddaway

Peter Reddaway (born September 18, 1939) is a British-American political scientist, a Russia expert, known primarily for his study of its human rights and dissident movement.

Peter Reddaway graduated from Cambridge University and did graduate studies at Harvard, Moscow State University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science where he later taught. Reddaway moved to the United States in the 1980s and served as Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (1986–89). From 1989 until his retirement in 2004, he was Professor of Political Science at the George Washington University, teaching courses on Soviet and post-Soviet history. He is currently Emeritus Professor at this university.^[1]

Starting from the early 1970s, Reddaway was closely involved with the Soviet dissident and human rights movement. He published some of his articles about it in the Dissent Magazine.^[2] Reddaway has provided a testimony on corruption in Russia to USA congressional hearings.^[3] According to one of Reddaway's presentations, "by 1998, Yeltsin's regime and the Russian state had become not just dangerously weak and corrupt, but also... financially dependent on Russia's wealthy elite"; he viewed Vladimir Putin as a product of the Yeltsin system, who, "if he does try to change the system... will find himself a prisoner of the system."^[4]