Robert Legvold (PhD, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1967), is a member of Executive Committee of The Harriman Institute. He specializes in The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states. Primary interest: The international relations of the post-Soviet region and their impact on the international politics of East Asia and Western Europe.

From 1978-1984, Director of Soviet Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; from 1984-1993, Associate Director, then Director of the Harriman Institute. His most recent books are Russian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century and the Shadow of the Past (Columbia University Press, 2007); with Bruno Coppieters, Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution (The MIT Press, 2005); with Celeste Wallander, Swords and Sustenance: The Economics of National Security in Belarus and Ukraine (The MIT Press, 2004); Thinking Strategically: The Major Powers, Kazakhstan and the Central Asian Nexus (The MIT Press, 2002); with Sherman Garnett, Belarus at the Crossroads (The Carnegie Endowment,1999); and with Alexei Arbatov and Karl Kaiser, Russian Security and the Euro-Atlantic Region (M.E. Sharpe, 1999). With Timothy Colton, he co-edited After the Soviet Union: From Empire to Nations, Norton, 1992. His most recent essays are, “The Role of Multilateralism in Russian Foreign Policy,” in Stina Torjesen, ed., The Multilateral Dimension in Russian Foreign Policy (2007); “U.S.-Russian Relations: An American Perspective,” Russia in Global Affairs, October-December 2006; "Clinton's Foreign Policy and the Revolution in the East, in Todd G. Shields, et. al., eds., The Clinton Riddle, (2004); "All the Way: Crafting a U.S.-Russian Alliance," The National Interest, Winter 2002-2003; "Russia's Unformed Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, September-October 2001.

Research Interests: The foreign policies of the post-Soviet states and of the major powers toward the post-Soviet space, the history of Soviet foreign policy, and the new historiography of the Cold War