Simon Pirani

Journalism – Other services – My abbreviated CV

Journalism

I write mainly on business, finance and industry in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and occasionally in the CIS and eastern Europe and more generally. I contribute to specialist publications including the securities market weekly Financial News, the development banking newspaper Emerging Markets, the monthlies Trade Finance and Corporate Finance (in the Euromoney group) and industry journals such as Gas Matters and Metal Bulletin. I contribute occasionally to national newspapers, including the Guardian, and to publications of the Economist Intelligence Unit. I sometimes write more generally on emerging markets and other international business issues. I undertake research projects and investigations for business clients, NGOs and others.

Other services

  I work in partnership with TOTAL RUSSIAN as a consultant to companies on a range of cultural, linguistic and business issues related to working in Russia and the former USSR.

  Together with a colleague, I do Russian-English and English-Russian translations for business clients.
 

My abbreviated CV

 From mid 2007 I am working as a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, as editor of a forthcoming book on gas markets in the CIS. The Institute published my extended article, Ukraine’s Gas Sector (PDF), in July 2007.

 My book The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite is being prepared for publication by Routledge in early 2008. It is based largely on my PhD dissertation, for which I was awarded a degree in August 2006 by the University of Essex.

 I continue to work as a business and financial journalist, as I have done since 1997. Prior to that I worked as an industrial reporter, an editor and sub-editor. I have been travelling in the former USSR regularly since 1990.

  I have extensive editing and production experience. In 2000 I took charge of production for the launch of the European Lawyer, the highly successful international magazine for commercial lawyers. I worked as a sub-editor in the award-winning production team at the Sunday Mirror from 1990 to 2000; I worked regularly on the Guardian business desk (1992-97) and at the Observer (1996-99).

  I believe in high journalistic standards and I am committed to the development of the profession. I have represented my colleagues in various posts within the National Union of Journalists over the past 20 years and currently serve on the union’s Appeals Tribunal. In 2004-06 I acted as organiser of a two-year series of courses for Ukrainian journalists, run by Charter 4, a Ukrainian NGO, on media and trade union issues.

  After covering the miner’ strike of 1984-85 as an industrial reporter, I worked as the freelance Editor of the North East Miner (journal of the North East Area National Union of Mineworkers) from 1988 to 1990, and as freelance Editor of the Miner (national journal of the National Union of Mineworkers) from 1990 to 1995.

  I completed a BA (Russian Studies) degree at London University (School of Slavonic and East European Studies), graduating in June 1997 with first-class honours. I speak Russian and French.

  I was born in 1957 in South-East London, where I live today.

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