Dick Combs
"Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe"
Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008
Noon
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
1501 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43201
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Dick Combs was one of a core group of U.S. foreign service officers who specialized in Soviet and Eastern European affairs during the last three decades of the Cold War. He is author of Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe:
The Cold War's End and the Soviet Union's Fall Reappraised (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
Combs joined the foreign service of the Department of State in 1966, after learning Russian at the Army Language School and earning a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.
His foreign service assignments included two years at the U.S. Legation in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a total of eight years at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. In addition, he spent an academic year at the U.S. Army's Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and served two tours on the Soviet Desk in the State Department.
Combs was an assistant to Marshall Shulman, who was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's special advisor on Soviet affairs and director of the Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs. Combs also spent a year at the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, on loan from the State Department, supervising the Commission's work on the USSR and Eastern Europe.
He retired from the foreign service in 1989 to become foreign affairs advisor to Sen. Sam Nunn, in Nunn's capacity as chairman and later ranking Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Combs left from the Senate in 1995 to serve for three years as director of programs in the former Soviet Union and research professor at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a component of the Monterey (Calif.) Institute of International Studies.
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