Edmund Stevens

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Edmund William Stevens (born July 22, 1910 in Denver , † May 24, 1992 in Moscow ) was an American journalist who was a correspondent in the Soviet Union for most of his professional life .

Life

Stevens studied international law at Columbia University in New York . In 1934, just 24 years old, he took up a post in the Moscow agency of the Cunard shipping company . He quickly learned Russian and after a year took a job as a translator for a state publishing house that sold literature about the Soviet Union abroad. He also began writing reports on the Soviet Union for several British newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald .

Also in 1935 he married a Russian woman, the couple initially moved into a room in a communal hall . During this time he was recruited by the Comintern as a secret employee, and the NKVD secret police also listed him as a source. He was in close contact with US Ambassador Joseph E. Davies . On the eve of World War II , Stevens was so held in high regard by the Soviet authorities that they allowed his wife to move with him to the United States in 1939. At that time, Soviet citizens were usually only allowed to leave the country with an official order.

The " Christian Science Monitor " gave him a contract as a war reporter, Stevens initially reported from the theaters of war in Western Europe and North Africa. In 1942 he returned to Moscow with his wife. There he enjoyed the special trust of US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman ; he took him as an advisor to the US delegation to a meeting of Stalin and Churchill in the Kremlin.

Stevens took on the 21/22. On January 1st, 1944, he took part in a trip for Western journalists from Moscow to the site of the Katyn massacre organized by the Soviet Foreign Ministry . The delegation of correspondents had 17 members: eleven Americans, five British and one French. Most of the journalists did not question the "evidence" presented by the Burdenko Commission that the massacre had been committed by the Germans, as Ambassador W. Averell Harriman reported to the State Department . Stevens also gave the Soviet version in his book "Russia Is No Riddle" published in 1945. Almost 45 years later, he abandoned his reporting at the time: on the occasion of a visit by a Polish government delegation under the new Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Katyn, he wrote in November 1989 that he had already considered the Burdenko Commission's report in 1944 to be unconvincing.

In his reporting from Moscow during the Stalin era, he praised Stalin and described the Soviet Union as a democratic country. He defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and criticized the Eastern European societies that oppose Soviet dominance. Also in 1945 Stevens participated alongside Jerome Davis , John Hersey , Richard Lauterbach , Edgar Snow and Alexander Werth in a campaign by pro-Soviet journalists against the publisher and publicist William Lindsay White , who described Soviet society as a dictatorship in his book "Report on the Russians", which is characterized by repression and fear in the population.

In 1949 the editorial staff of the “Christian Science Monitor” transferred him to Rome . There he wrote another book: "This Is Russia - Un-Censored". In it he described the frustrated and exhausted post-war society in the Soviet Union. Most people are nothing more than “ work slaves ”. As the first American book author he described the anti-Semitic campaigns of the late Stalin era. He also complained about the censorship. He received the Pulitzer Prize for the reports on which the book is based . He was heavily attacked by the Soviet press for the book.

At the beginning of the brief thaw under Nikita Khrushchev , Stevens went back to Moscow with his wife. He has worked for several American and British newspapers and magazines, including " Time ", " Life ", " Newsday ", " The Saturday Evening Post ", " The Sunday Times " and " The Times ". The KGB informant Victor Louis worked for him temporarily as a translator .

His daughter Anastasija was accepted into the ballet troupe of the Bolshoi Theater , and the US press reported repeatedly about her career. Since he and his wife Nina were allowed to carry out icons and paintings and sell them through galleries in New York, and he was also allowed to buy a luxury apartment in the center, his Western colleagues suspected that he had very good contacts with the KGB . But he himself denied having worked with the Soviet services. Only after his death did it become known in the context of the VENONA project that he had done this very well and that he was also a secret member of the Communist Party of the USA .

He was buried in the cemetery of the Peredelkino artists' colony near Moscow.

Works

  • Russia Is No Riddle. Greenberg, New York 1945
  • This Is Russia - Un-Censored. Eaton Books, New York 1951

literature

  • Cheryl Heckler: To Accidental Journalist. The Adventures of Edmund Stevens, 1934-1945. Missouri University Press, Columbia MO 2007 ISBN 978-0-8262-1770-7
  • Harvey Klehr / John Earl Haynes / Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: The Secret World of American Communism. Yale University Press, Yale 1995, pp. 299-303.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical data, unless otherwise stated, according to: Edmund Stevens, 81, a Reporter In Moscow for 40 Years, Is Dead , New York Times , May 27, 1992.
  2. ^ Whitman Bassow: The Moscow Correspondents. Reporting Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost. New York 1988, p. 318.
  3. ^ John Earl Haynes / Harvey Klehr: Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, Conn. 1999, p. 237.
  4. ^ Harvey Klehr / John Earl Haynes / Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: The Secret World of American Communism. Yale 1995, p. 299.
  5. ^ Donal O'Sullivan: The American Venona Project. The exposure of Soviet foreign espionage in the 1940s, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 4 (2000), p. 625 ( PDF ).
  6. ^ Harvey Klehr / John Earl Haynes / Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: The Secret World of American Communism. Yale 1995, p. 299.
  7. ↑ Krystyna Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. Recent Research. Warsaw 2012, pp. 96–97.
  8. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 283.
  9. ↑ Edmund Stevens: Russia Is No Riddle. New York 1945, pp. 168-171.
  10. ↑ Vladimir Abarinov: Katynskij labirint Moscow 1991, p. 29.
  11. ^ Harvey Klehr / John Earl Haynes / Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: The Secret World of American Communism. Yale 1995, p. 299.
  12. ↑ William L. Oneill: A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990, p. 91.
  13. ↑ Edmund Stevens: Russia - Un-Censored. New York 1950, pp. 164-167, 184, 189.
  14. ↑ Soviet Article hits Boston Reporter, in: New York Times , August 25, 1950, p. 3.
  15. ↑ Victor Louis, 64, Journalist, Dies; Conduit for Kremlin to the West in: New York Times , July 21, 1992.
  16. ↑ US Girl for Bolshoi, in: Life , September 12, 1960, p. 30.
  17. ↑ Bolshoi's American Ballerina Guides Troupe on Tour of City, in: New York Times , September 4, 1962, p. 35
  18. ^ Whitman Bassow: The Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost. New York 1988, pp. 320-321.
  19. ^ Harvey Klehr / John Earl Haynes / Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: The Secret World of American Communism. Yale 1995, pp. 301-303.
  20. ↑ findagrave.com Edmund Stevens
personal data
SURNAME Stevens, Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stevens, Edmund William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Denver
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1992
Place of death Moscow