Georgy Arkadyevich Arbatov was a Jewish Soviet and Russian political scientist who served as an adviser to five General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was best known in the West during the Cold War era as a representative for the policies of the Soviet Union in the United States, where his fluent English helped make him a frequent guest on American television. He was the founding director and later emeritus director of the Institute of USA and Canada of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (ISKRAN), the Soviet and Russian think tank for the study of US and Canada.