In 1967-1972, I attended a foreign-language middle-high school in Burgas, Bulgaria, where we studied intensively English, Russian, and German. After serving two years in the military (1972-1974), I earned a B.A. degree in English Language and Literature from the Kliment Ohridsky State University of Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1978. I did a lot of English-Bulgarian and Bulgarian-English translation work before I was hired to serve as a diplomat at the Bulgarian Mission to the United Nations in New York City. During my tenure there from January 1980 to July 1988, I was personally responsible for, among other things, supervising all Bulgarian-English and English-Bulgarian translations, all U.N. speeches and official statements in English, and all other English publications released by the Bulgarian Mission. I did some translation work from Bulgarian and Russian into English, among other things, when I was an associate of the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. in 1989-1997. I earned a M.A. in political science in 1991 and a Ph.D. in political science in 2000--both from the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. I personally translated into English all the Bulgarian sources in my Ph.D. dissertation "Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Post-Communist Bulgaria." I did historical research at the Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, in 1990-1993 and then lectured extensively at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Newark, and Marion in 1994-2009, focusing mainly on Russian and East European societies, government and politics.