Eugene Lyons

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Eugene Lyons (born July 1, 1898 in Uzlyany , † January 7, 1985 in New York ) was an American journalist. He went from being a supporter to a sharp critic of communism in the Soviet Union.

Journalistic and political activity

Lyons was born in 1898 to a Jewish family in Uzlyany near Minsk in what is now Belarus . After immigrating to the United States, he grew up in a poorer neighborhood in New York, where he began to sympathize with the radical labor movement. He began his journalistic work at the Industrial Workers of the World , for which he mainly reported on legal proceedings against members of the labor movement, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti case . He later worked in the New York office of the official Soviet news agency TASS . From 1928 to 1934 he was the United Press foreign correspondent in Moscow . In 1930 he was one of the first Western journalists to conduct an interview with Stalin . Before him, only Paul Scheffer , Louis Fischer and Emil Ludwig had succeeded.

Lyons had initially been close to the Communist Party of the United States , but without having been a member, according to his own account, because he was neither ready to take on a leading responsibility, nor to submit to party discipline. During his time in Moscow, however, he developed into a staunch opponent of the Soviet Union. He processed his impressions from this time in his book Assignment in Utopia . He reported extensively on the famine in Ukraine at the beginning of the 1930s.

From 1939 to 1944 he worked for The American Mercury magazine and then for Reader's Digest . From 1951 to 1952 he was the first president of the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia . From 1955 he was editor of the conservative magazine National Review . He died in Manhattan on January 7, 1985 .

Influence on the work of George Orwell

In the chapter Two Plus Two Equals Five in his book Assignment in Utopia , Lyons refers to the slogan "2 + 2 = 5" with which the Soviet government encouraged workers to implement the five-year plan in four years. For Orwell biographers, this chapter in Lyon's book serves as a template for the corresponding passage in Orwell's book 1984 : "If the party says: 2 + 2 = 5, then so be it."

Fonts

  • The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti . International Publishers, New York 1927.
  • Modern Moscow . Hurst & Blackett, London 1935.
  • Moscow Carrousel . Knopf, New York 1935.
  • Assignment in Utopia . Harcourt, Brace, New York 1937.
  • Stalin, Czar of all the Russias . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1940.
  • The Red Decade. The Stalinist Penetration of America . Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1941.
  • Our Unknown Ex-President. A Portrait of Herbert Hoover . Doubleday, Garden City 1948.
  • Our Secret Allies. The Peoples of Russia . Duel, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1953.
  • Herbert Hoover. A biography . Doubleday, Garden City 1964.
  • David Sarnoff. A biography . Harper & Row, New York 1966.
  • Workers' Paradise Lost. Fifty Years of Soviet Communism. A balance sheet . Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1967.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stalin Laughs! In: Time. December 1, 1930
  2. ^ Moscow Scoop. In: Time. December 8, 1930
  3. ↑ Gottfried Niedhart: The West and the Soviet Union. F. Schöningh, 1983, p. 59.
  4. ^ Assignment in Utopia. Part 1, Chapter V: Working for the Soviets
  5. ↑ 20 Year Success?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Time. October 25, 1937@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.time.com  
  6. ↑ Hoover Institution Archives: Radio Liberty: 50 Years ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / hoorferl.stanford.edu
  7. ↑ Eugene Lyons, RIP-obituary. In: National Review. February 8, 1985
  8. ^ Eugene Lyons, 86, Early US Reporter in the Soviet Union.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: New York Times. January 10, 1985@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / select.nytimes.com  
  9. ^ Central Asian Political Transitions. Workers' Paradise Lost By Eugene Lyons (New York: Paperback Library, 1967) ( Memento of March 11, 2007 on the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Lyons, Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lyons, Gene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and anti-communist
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Uzlyany
DATE OF DEATH 7th January 1985
Place of death new York