Economist, author, professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and associate director of the Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He diagnosed deficiencies in Moscow's economic policies for decades and was among the first Kremlinologists to predict the downfall of
Mikhail Gorbachev. He was an authority on the Soviet economy, charting its downs and potential ups. He pioneered scholarship on the environmental damage inflicted under Communist domination and the emergence of a post-Soviet economy driven by oil and gas production. As early as 1987 he painted a grim picture of the consequences of perestroika and glasnost, the liberalization programs that Gorbachev had put in place.