ATHENS, Ohio -- Ambassador Oleg Grinevsky, former director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Middle East Department, will speak on "Weapons of Mass Destruction Capabilities of Iraq" at 4 p.m., Friday, March 7, in Scripps Hall's Anderson Auditorium at Ohio University. The event is free and open to the public.
Oleg Grinevsky graduated from the Moscow Institute for International Affairs, where he also completed post-graduate doctoral studies. In 1957 he entered the diplomatic service at the Soviet/Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He has been awarded the Honorary Doctorate by the Southampton University in the United Kingdom. He served as a political advisor to the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Gorbachev governments. He was the director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Middle East Department from 1978-1983.
In 1984, Grinevsky was appointed head of the Soviet Delegation to the CSCE Stockholm Conference, where he helped negotiate the 1986 Stockholm Document on Confidence and Security Building Measures, the first agreement made during the Perestroika era. He was Gorbachev's Ambassador-at-Large and worked with prominent leaders of the era, including Margaret Thatcher, Franz Vranitzky, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Al-Qadhafi. In 1989, he headed the U.S.S.R. delegation to the Vienna Conference on Conventional Armed Forces Reduction in Europe (CFE) and the European Conference on CSBM's.
From 1991 through 1997, Grinevsky served as the Russian Ambassador to Sweden. Between 1977 and 2000, he was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. From 1999 until 2002, he was the diplomat in residence at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a visiting scholar at the Mershon Center.
Grinevsky is currently the Putnam/Ewing Visiting Professor in the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University. He is a published author on issues of international security, disarmament and Middle Eastern policy.
Grinevsky's lecture is sponsored by the Center for International Studies and is part of the International Studies Forum a series of lectures on diverse topics of international concern.
