Calling upon his extensive background as a former CBS News Correspondent in Moscow, Jonathan Sanders brings years of research experience to this project. As a News Correspondent, he provided a history-based perspective and eyewitness reporting on all major political, economic, social and scientific developments across Eurasia. Most notably were his stories on the Chechen war for independence; Russian Presidential Elections; and breaking special news events, particularly the failed coups against Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

He spent 1977-78 as a Fulbright Scholar at Moscow State University and received a PhD from Columbia's History Department in 1985. Professor Sanders is the author of Russia 1917: The Unpublished Revolution; V.V. Shul'gin: The Years; Comrade X Was Wrong: Soviet, TV Coverage of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster; and with Heidi Hollinger, The Face of Modern Russia's Political Opposition (forthcoming, North America: summer 1999; Russia: Nov. 1999).

From its founding until summer 1988 he served as assistant director of the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. Sanders created the Working Group on Soviet Television at Columbia University and helped spread its technological innovations to many other university-based Soviet Studies programs. He also served as Assistant Director at Columbia University of the Russian Institute School of International and Public Affairs between 1980 and 1982, and as Princeton University's Ferris Professor of Journalism from 1998-1999.