Jonathan Steele

Jonathan Steele is a British journalist.

"Jonathan Steele is The Guardian's Senior Foreign Correspondent and its in-house columnist on international affairs. He is also an Assistant Editor at the paper.

"After taking a double first in classics at King's College Cambridge, he spent two years at Yale University where he obtained an MA in economics. His journalistic experience began when he worked as a volunteer on the Mississippi Freedom Summer project in 1964, helping black Americans to register to vote and writing freelance articles.

"He joined the Guardian the following year as a reporter. During forty years on the paper he has been a leader-writer, foreign news editor, East European correspondent, Washington bureau chief, and Moscow bureau chief. As Chief Foreign Correspondent in the 1980s he travelled widely, covering wars in Southern Africa and Central America.

"A regular visitor to Afghanistan, he was the only Western newspaper correspondent in Kabul when Soviet forces withdrew. He also covered the Taliban takeover in 1996. He covered the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, and Iraq twenty years later.

"In Moscow from 1988 to 1994 he reported on the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the USSR. He was the only English language reporter to reach Mikhail Gorbachev's prison dacha during the August 1991 coup where he interviewed the Soviet president, a feat which won him the London Press Club's Scoop of the Year award.

"In his present role he regularly travels to the Middle East as well as western and eastern Europe.

"He has twice won the International Reporter of the Year title in the British Press awards. He has also won the same title in the Amnesty International annual awards.

"A frequent broadcaster on the BBC and CNN, Mr Steele is known for his well-researched and radical insights. He has written numerous books on international affairs, including South Africa, Germany, and the Soviet Union/Russia. His 1983 work, The Limits of Soviet Power, challenged the Reagan/Thatcher assumptions that Moscow's global might was on the increase. His most recent book Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy argued that long-standing Russian traditions would undermine Western expectations of a rapid transition to democratic practice after the fall of Communism."

• Winner of a special award in 2005 from the Martha Gellhorn Prize
• Panelist, International Conference on Civil Resistance and Power Politics (2007)
• Oxford Research Group: Associates
• Council, Royal Institute for International Affairs