Dimitri Simes

Dimitri K. Simes (Russian: Дмитрий Саймс; born October 29, 1947) Dimitri K. Simes is President and CEO of The Center for the National Interest and Publisher of its foreign policy bi-monthly magazine, The National Interest. Mr. Simes was selected to lead the Center in 1994 by former President Richard Nixon, to whom he served as an informal foreign policy advisor and with whom he traveled regularly to Russia and other former Soviet states as well as Western and Central Europe.

Before the Center was established, Mr. Simes served as Chairman of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was also a Senior Associate. Earlier, he was the Director of the Soviet and East European Research Program and a Research Professor of Soviet Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to his work at SAIS, Mr. Simes was a Senior Research Fellow and subsequently the Director of Soviet Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition to teaching at SAIS, Mr. Simes taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University.

Mr. Simes was born in Moscow in 1947, and both of his parents were prominent human rights lawyers in the Soviet Union. His mother, Dina Kaminskaya, was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, and his father, Konstantin Simis, was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Their representation of dissidents in the Soviet Union “attracted the disapproval of officials,” and they were eventually expelled from the Soviet bar and forced to leave the country. Dimitri Simes graduated with an M.A. in history from Moscow State University. From 1967 to 1972, he was a research assistant and later a research associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs (an influential foreign policy think tank in the Soviet Union at that time) where he also studied at a post-graduate level prior to emigrating to the U.S. in 1973.

Simes is the author of After the Collapse: Russia Seeks its Place as a Great Power (Simon & Schuster, 1999), which predicted the rise of Russian authoritarian nationalism. Mr. Simes frequently writes for newspapers and journals as well. His articles have appeared in Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and several other prominent publications. He was a columnist for The Christian Science Monitor, and The Los Angeles Times Syndicate. He has served as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council as well as to CBS and NBC.