Paul R Gregory, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and is the Cullen Chair of Economics at the University of Houston. He was the coordinator of the Russian Petroleum Legislation Project funded by the World Bank and major international energy corporations, served as an economic adviser to the government of Ukraine, was a visiting professor at Moscow University and the Free University of Berlin, and was a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research (Berlin). He has been active in the former Soviet Union for more than twenty-five years.