Andrei Kovalev is a historian by profession - there was no profession of ‘political scientist’ in the USSR - and a former staff member of the Institute of USA and Canada of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Diplomatic Academy. He served as a member of the secretariat of President Mikhail Gorbachev, a member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, and in the office of the Federal Human Rights Ombudsman Vladmir Lukin. During his time at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Andrei Kovalev was engaged in what essentially was the work of a dissident: breaking down the totalitarian system through abolishing the repressive use of psychiatry, the freeing of political prisoners, and the ‘pushing through’ of a number of path-breaking laws, including those regulating foreign travel and religious freedom. Andrei Kovalev is the author of France at the Crossroads of World Politics’ [in Russian] (Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, Moscow, 1983), A Witness from Behind the Scenes of Russian Politics [in Russian] (Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart, 2012) and a number of articles in the journals Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn', Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, SShA: rkonomika, politika, ideologiya, Obozrevatel, as well as the newspapers Izvestiya, Novaya gazeta, Komsomolskaya Pravda. Convinced of his complete incompatibility with the regime of Vladimir Putin, he has moved to live in Brussels.