DotOrg Foundation Advisor

 
INFORMATION
EDUCATION
  Name
Company
Title
Address

Telephone
Fax		 Mikhail P. Kazachkov
DotOrg Foundation
Treasurer
51 Broad Street
Salem, MA 01970
978/594-5067
978/594-5071		   - PHD, theoretical physicist at Leningrad State University
 

Snapshot of Relevant Experience

10 Years      Work Within Non-Profit/Non-Commercial Sector
7 Years        Policy Analysis and Development
7 Years        Business Operations
7 Years        Internet Industry Experience

 

EXPERIENCE

 

Current Positions: Chairman, GIST, Inc., Arlington, VA
President, INOK, Inc., Somerville, MA
Director of International Marketing, Public Opinion Foundation, Moscow, Russia
President, Freedom Channel, Inc., Boston, MA
  
   
Global Information Industries and Technologies, Inc. (GIST)
Arlington, VI		 1997-Present

Chairman of the board
Active in the day-to-day activities of this consulting company. GIST publishes a monthly industry newsletter, weekly Internet distributed News Flashes, and is preparing the third edition of its Russian Telecom Investors Guide available both in book and CD ROM form. The scope of GIST has expanded from Russia and the CIS to other emerging markets including China and Latin America. The latest GIST contract is to advise the Russian government on the privatization of its stake in the national telecom holding company, SvyazInvest. GIST has been involved as the telecom expert of an Arthur Andersen led international consortium.
Freedom Channel
Sommerville, MA		 1992-Present

President
Led a team of top Russian television professionals and, working with American colleagues, created Freedom Channel, an American 501 c(3) focusing on Russian media, polling and the telecommunications industry. Over a two year period Kazachkov was executive producer for over 20 documentaries, filming in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil and the U.S. The programs were produced and aired nationally in Russia to an estimated audience of 15 to 25 million per segment. A series of Freedom Channel election spots received the Soros Foundation award for the best television work of the 1993 campaign -- the first free election to the Russian Parliament in post-Soviet Russia.

In 1994 Freedom Channel advised the State Duma in the creation of its own radio and television service. In 1995 Kazachkov edited the White Paper on the future of Russian telecommunications presented to the State Duma. The White Paper was prepared by a team of experts from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and MIT. In late 1996 the World Bank’s InfoDev program awarded Freedom Channel a grant to draft guidelines for Russia’s national policy in telecommunications and information technologies. The results were presented in May 1998 at a Freedom Channel conference in Moscow. In September 1999 Freedom Channel finished a project supported by the National Endowment for Democracy to build an Internet accessible database of the best criminal defense strategies for Russian human rights activists.

Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA		 1991-1993

Senior fellow for the Visitors Human Rights program at the Edward R. Murrow Center for International Communications at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
National Academy of Sciences
Leningrad, USSR		 Leningrad, USSR


Researcher

  • Published more than a dozen papers in his field, ten of them in Western scientific magazines.
  • Researcher in theoretical atomic physics till his KGB arrest in 1975.

EVENTS

  • Kazachkov was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1975 and spent 15 years as a dissident prisoner in the GULAG.
  • He was the last political prisoner to be released in the USSR in November 1990. In July 1991 the highest court of Russia threw out his high treason charges.

Kazachkov is active as a business consultant for American and European companies operating in the Russian and CIS markets, as well as for Russian high technology and telecommunications companies seeking to enter western markets.