IVANOV, Igor Sergeyevich

Igor Ivanov (Игорь Сергеевич Иванов) was born September 23, 1945 in Moscow. A Russian politician, he was Russian Foreign minister from 1998 to 2004 and secretary of the Russian Security Council in the mid 2000s.

Ivanov graduated from Morris Torez State Foreign Languages Pedagogical Institute (now Moscow University of Linguistics) in 1969, and worked as a junior researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the early 1970s.

He worked as a diplomat in Spain from 1973 to 1983, before returning to Russia in 1983 and working at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the mid 1980s Ivanov was an adviser and aide to the Soviet foreign minister.

In 1991 he returned to Spain as Russian ambassador, serving there for two years. From 1998 to 2004 he was the Russian Foreign Minister and in 2004 was named secretary of the Security Council. He resigned from this position in July 2007.

Ivanov is generally considered to have avoided aligning himself with one or another political grouping or clan. He has maintained the image of a Western-style non-politicized civil servant. Though he generally favored further development of relations with Europe while foreign minister, Ivanov’s colleagues say that he avoided putting an emphasis on any particular region in Russia’s foreign policy and preferred maintaining a balance between the East and the West.