Svetlana Chervonnaya

Svetlana Chervonnaya in the summer of 1990 as a visitor at Harvard University.
This article is about the historian of Soviet-American espionage, not to be confused with Svetlana Mikhailovna Chervonnaya, a historian specializing in the republics of the Caucuses.

Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya (Russian: Светлана Aлександровна Червонная, born 1948) is a Russian historian specializing in the political history of the Cold War period and Soviet espionage activities in the United States of America. Along with Ellen Schrecker, Chervonnaya is known as one of the leading scholarly voices arguing against post-Soviet American triumphalism. In the post-Soviet period, Chervonnaya has also established herself as an investigator and producer of documentary television shows seen in the United States, Germany, and Russia.

Biography

Early years

Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya was born in Moscow on October 14, 1948 of ethnic Jewish parents. Chervonnaya's ancestors hailed from the Ukraine, Poland, and Belorussia, having been forced to live in such places during Tsarist times due to anti-semitic restrictions upon Jewish residence.[1]

Chervonnaya's father was an investigator in the Procurator General's Office in Moscow, part of the People's Commissariat for Justice headed by Andrei Vyshinsky.[1] He worked non-political cases including economic crimes, gang crimes, and homicide cases.[1] By the time Svetlana started school, he had left the Procurator's office and became a criminal defense attorney.[1]

A great uncle on Svetlana's mother's side, Efim Dreizer, was a victim of the Great Terror of the 1930s. He was arrested, confessed under duress, tried in the first Moscow show trial in 1936 and executed for purportedly participating in a criminal plot in the Red Army directed by Leon Trotsky.[1] His family were treated harshly as the family of a so-called "enemy of the people" and met death and exile during the terror. They were "rehabilitated" (restored to full citizenship rights) during Khrushchev's "Thaw" of 1956-1958; Efim Dreizer was posthumously rehabilitated only in 1988, during Gorbachev's Glasnost campaign.[1]

Chervonnaya graduated from secondary school in 1966 and enrolled in Moscow State University in the department of history, where she was admitted to the elite American history program on the basis of a competitive examination taken at the end of her second year.[1] She specialized in the study of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the post-World War II "New Left" in America, writing her diploma work on Malcolm X and black nationalism.[1]

Chervonnaya married in 1970 and has two children, a daughter born in 1974 and a son born in 1987. Her husband, a physicist and mathematician, died of cancer in 1989.

Career

Soviet period

Upon completion of her university work, Chervonnaya was given a post as a member of the junior research staff at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, the leading research institute for American studies in the Soviet Union, where she concentrated in the study of American political opposition movements.[1] After two years she was promoted to the rank of Junior Fellow and became a Senior Fellow at age 33. She was awarded the Soviet equivalent of a Ph.D. degree in 1977 and remained at the institute for three decades.[1]

Despite her post at the Institute of the USA and Canada, Chervonnaya decided not to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a fact which, combined with her Jewish heritage, made foreign travel impossible during the Brezhnev era.[1]

Chervonnaya's initial academic work related to the study of the contemporary black and Hispanic movements in the United States, about which she published repeatedly in the leading Soviet American studies journal and in books.

Chervonnaya became interested in the spy cases of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss in the 1980s, at a time when such topics were regarded as off-limits in the USSR.[1] Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, she has emerged as one of the preeminent specialists on the Espionage history of the USSR and the United States. In this capacity, Chervonnaya has been a consultant and contributor to a number of television documentaries, working as Associate Producer and research historian of "The Rosenberg File: Case Closed," the Moscow Field Producer of "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies," as the Russian Production Coordinator of "Mystery of the U2" and other documentaries.[2]

Post-Soviet period

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chervonnaya has worked as a freelance writer and producer of documentary television programming, participating in the production of shows for broadcast in Russia, Germany, and in the United States. In America, Chervonnaya's work has been seen on the Discovery channel (1997), A&E History Channel (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003), and PBS (1999, 2002).[3]

In 2009, backed by a grant from The Nation Institute, a foundation associated with the American magazine The Nation, Chervonnaya launched a scholarly website on Soviet espionage in America, "DocumentsTalk." The site contains primary source documents in pdf form, biographies of leading participants, as well as interpretative discussions. Since May, 2010, she is running the website on her own.

In March and April 2010, Chervonnaya was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.[4]

Historical disputes

Chervonnaya's work in the field of espionage history has been the object of some debate. From the middle 1960s onward, scholarly debate on the history of Soviet-American relations and the history of the international Communist political movement has been divided into two more or less mutually exclusive camps — "traditionalism" and "revisionism."[5] These two interpretative constructs are highly correlated with matters of contemporary politics, with "traditionalists" apt to be believers in traditionalist conservatism and "revisionists" apt to be liberal or radical critics of militarism and nationalism.

The criticism of traditionalist historians has occasionally verged on ad hominem attacks. US Air Force historian Eduard Mark has called Chervonnaya "one of the USSR's more prolific propagandists in the twilight years of the USSR,"[6] while Haynes has similarly described Chervonnaya as a "Moscow historian/propagandist."[7]

As a scholar who has explored recently opened archival material on espionage and rejected several interpretations of documents regarded by some "traditionalists" as axiomatic, Chervonnaya remains a somewhat controversial counter-voice to what has been called the "Cold War triumphalism" of traditionalist scholars.[8]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 Svetlana Chervonnaya, "An Unfinished Story," DocumentsTalk.com, Moscow.
  2. ↑ "Svetlana Chervonnaya," Yahoo TV. Retrieved August 15, 2010.
  3. ↑ For details, see the annotated list of documentaries in the "Works" section on this page.
  4. ↑ "Svetlana Chervonnaya," Kennan Institute. Retrieved August 15, 2010. Due to visa difficulties, Chervonnaya's visit was postponed two months from the planned "January–February" window.
  5. ↑ The phrase "revisionism" in this context is not to be confused with the Holocaust denial movement, which ascribes to itself a similar description.
  6. ↑ In Re Alger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB Journal of Cold War Studies 11.3 (Summer 2009): 26-67
  7. ↑ Narcissistic Histrionics comment on History News Network July 29, 2009
  8. ↑ The phrase is that of historian Ellen Schrecker. See: Ellen Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism. New York: The New Press, 2004.

Works

Select Books and chapter contributions

As was commonplace among academic publishing in the Soviet Union, many of Chervonnaya's publications take the form of chapters written for collective book projects:

Select Articles

Documentaries

External links