Dr. Stephen Bittner, Assistant Professor of History at Sonoma State University, is available to comment on the death of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his impact on Russia and the Soviet Union.
Bittner has a Ph.D. in Russian History from the University of Chicago. Before coming to SSU, he was a visiting professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C.
He is the editor of memoirs of Dmitrii Shepilov, a high-ranking official in the Soviet Communist Party who was implicated in an unsuccessful coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, and who later spent forty years in obscurity nurturing a grudge against the former leader.
Bittner is also the author of a book entitled "Khrushchev's Thaw and Moscow's "Left Bank,"" which is about Moscow's Arbat neighborhood, a Soviet version of Saint-Germain des Pres in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York. It is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
Professor Bittner can be reached at (707) 664-2447.
