Biography
He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1974, and began working for them then, and received a PhD in history from the USSR Diplomatic Academy in 1981. He was then Director of the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)/ Russian Federation. He also served as a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, and was Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation from 1992 to 1994.
Prior to his current diplomatic post, Churkin was his country’s Ambassador to Belgium from 1994 to 1998, and to Canada from 1998 to 2003. He was then Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, a post he held from 2003 to 2006.
He has also been the chairman of the Senior Officials of the Arctic Council. He is fluent in Russian, Mongolian, French and English.
Churkin won some notoriety in 1986 when, as a 34-year-old second secretary, he was selected by then-Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to testify before the United States Congress on the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident. This was reported as the first time in history a Soviet official testified before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The choice of Churkin, then a relatively junior diplomat, was due to his reputation as the most fluent English-speaker in the Soviet Embassy; media reported he possessed "an array of English slang." Churkin's performance led to his being parodied in a Washington Post political cartoon series, Mark Alan Stamaty's "Washingtoon", as Vitaly "Charmyourpantsoff".
Read more about this topic: Vitaly Churkin
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