Leon Aron is a biographer, an essayist, a historian of ideas and an expert on Russian domestic and foreign politics. Born and raised in Moscow, he holds an MA, an M. Phil and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

His most recent book is Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Uses of War (2024), which was praised by Susan B. Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, as "perceptive, historically grounded, beautifully written and very worrisome," and by Fiona Hill, distinguished senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who found it "an incisive chronicle" by a "skilled analyst with deep knowledge of the interplay of events that brought Putin to, and then well-beyond, the point of no return."

He is also the author of the first major biography of Boris Yeltsin, the eponymous Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (2000); the essay collection Russia's Revolutions (2007); and an intellectual history of modern Russia, Roads to the Temple: Memory, Truth, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987–1991 (2012).

In 2014, President Barack Obama appointed Aron to the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, on which he served through 2020. He was co-chair of the Russia Study Group of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He has testified many times before Congress on Russia's policies and U.S.-Russia relations.

He lectures about Russia and has commented on Russian affairs for PBS, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, BBC, and SKY News programs, among others. His articles on Russia's post-Soviet political evolution, literature, and foreign and domestic policies have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Harper’s, Politico, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Spectator and elsewhere.

Leon Aron lives in Washington, DC.