Aleksandr Golts is a Russian journalist. Between 1980 and 1996, he was part of the editorial board of Krasnaya Zvezda, a Soviet, then Russian, military daily. Between 1996 and 2001, he served as a military editor for Itogi, a premier Russian news magazine. Between 2001–2004, he served as deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian weekly Yezhenedelnyi Zhurnal. 2005-2022 served as the deputy editor of the journal’s website, ej.ru. He also worked as a military analyst for the New Times magazine and the Moscow Times newspaper in Moscow.
From 2022 – analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
Golts spent a year as a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) between 2002–03. While there, he completed his book Russian Armed Forces: 11 Lost Years (publication info below). In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. In 2016 and 2020 he spent year-long terms as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Uppsala University (Sweden). While there, he wrote two books: Military Reform and Militarism in Russia and Surviving the Cold War: Experience of Diplomacy.
In 2013, he was awarded Gerd Bucerius-Förderpreis Freie Presse Osteuropas, given by the ZEIT-Stiftung and the Fritt Ord Foundation.
Publications
Russian Armed Forces: 11 Lost Years (Moscow: Zacharov Press, 2004).
Military Reform and Militarism in Russia (Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2019).
To Survive the Cold War: The Diplomatic Experience (Moscow: AST, 2021).
Co-authored Works
The Russian Military: Power and Policy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
K. Spohr Readman, ed. Building Sustainable and Effective Military Capabilities. A Systematic Comparison of Professional and Conscript Forces. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004.
Alexander M. Golts and Tonya L. Putnam. “State Militarism and Its Legacies: Why Military Reform Has Failed in Russia.” International Security 29, no. 2 (fall 2004): 121–150.
Alexander M. Golts. “Conscription: A Basic Question of Civil-Military Relations in Russia.” In The Russian Armed Forces in Transition: Economic, Geopolitical and Institutional Uncertainties, edited by Roger N. McDermott, Bertil Nygren, and Carolina Vendil Pallin, 209–222. New York: Routledge, 2011.
“The Armed Forces in 2020: Modern or Soviet?” In Russia in 2020, 371–394. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011.
Heidi Reisinger and Aleksandr Golts. “Russia's Hybrid Warfare: Waging War below the Radar of Traditional Collective Defence.” NATO Defense College, research paper no. 105, November 2014.
