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David Hoffman
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BIOGRAPHY

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor and member of the editorial board of The Washington Post. He was previously assistant managing editor, foreign editor, Jerusalem correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, State Department correspondent and White House correspondent. He is the author of: The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (PublicAffairs, 2002), The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (Doubleday, 2009), which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Doubleday, 2015) and Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and His Daring Quest for a Free Cuba (Simon & Schuster, 2022.) He has also been a correspondent for the PBS investigative series FRONTLINE. He attended the University of Delaware and St. Antony's College, Oxford. He lives with his wife in Maryland.

Primary Contributions (1)
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Russian oligarchs, tycoons who reaped enormous fortunes in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When the centrally planned economy of the then-Soviet Union crashed, a group of quick-thinking men picked up the pieces and turned them into vast private wealth. They also became politically active…
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Publications (1)
The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia
The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia (September 2011)
By David E. Hoffman

In this saga of brilliant triumphs and magnificent failures, David E. Hoffman, the former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, sheds light on the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men— Alexander Smolensky, Yuri Luzhkov, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky—Hoffman shows how a rapacious, unruly capitalism was born out of the ashes of Soviet communism.