Professor Gerrit Olivier is a South African academic and diplomat. He joined the apartheid diplomatic corp in 1983 and became the director of the communication and planning division. In 1991, he became the first diplomatic representative of apartheid South Africa to the Soviet Union and in 1992 he was appointed as the first South African Ambassador to the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. He is currently Extraordinary Professor in the Dept of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria.