John W. Parker is the chief of the Division for Caucasus and Central Asia in the Office for Russian and Eurasian Analysis at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research within the U.S. Department of State. During the final years of the Soviet Union, he served in the American Embassy in Moscow as the chief of the political/internal section (1989-91). In the 1980s he was an analyst of Soviet foreign policy in the Office for Soviet and East European Analysis at the U.S. Department of State. He has also been a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Brookings Institution. Parker is the author of Kremlin in Transition, two volumes. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.