Stephen Dewar

Stephen Dewar is Irish and has degrees in economics and computing from Trinity College Dublin. He has lived and worked in Russia since early 1996. During this period he has been bugged, followed by various security services, nearly deliberately murdered by police special forces, threatened with murder on other occasions, and formally accused of being a spy selling the secrets of travel agents to western intelligence services. Despite these problems he is happily married to a Russian girl.

During this period he was mainly an economic development consultant to Russian government ministries at national and regional level, except when he was unemployed or when he tried his hand as a business news reporter and then strategy adviser to the Chief Executive at “Russia Today” (the Russian state-owned 24/7 English-language satellite TV news channel). He has also acted in American, British and Russian movies and TV series, been dialogue coach to an international cast of film actors and actresses on another film, practiced lifestyle journalism, copy-editing corporate brochures and publications, and working with the Ministry of Education on an interactive multimedia English language teaching course, so the next generation of Russian schoolchildren will sound just like him.

Previously he has been an academic, farmer, small businessman, public servant, editor/journalist and, briefly, the chief executive-designate of an African safari and hunting company. He has edited, written and contributed to a number of academic books and monographs on Russian and EU-Russian issues and has written numerous articles for a variety of magazines and newspapers in Russia, Europe and the United States. He is 64.