Nadia or Nadya, was a Soviet intelligence GRU officer, translator, English teacher, wife of Alexander Ulanovsky, and mother of Maya Ulanovskaya.

[1][2][3][4] Nadezhda Ulanovskaya was born Esther Markovna Fridgant in Bershad in the then Russian Empire (now Ukraine).

Her father was a trader; her grandfather Nukhim Fridgant was a rabbi and possibly a descendant of a Hasidic tzaddik Reful (Friedgant).

[1][2][3] After the 1917 October Revolution, Ulanovskaya joined the Young Revolutionary International as an anarchist and changed her name from Esther to Nadezhda ("Hope").

), Ulanovskaya returned to Moscow, where, still in Soviet military intelligence, she studied at the Institute of Foreign Languages through 1941.

In 1947, she taught English at the Institute of International Relations; in December 1947, she was dismissed due to pending arrest.

[2] On 21 February 1948, Ulanovskaya was arrested for treason, specifically the transfer of information about the Great Purge for Australian Godfrey Blunden for the 1947 book A Room on the Route published in the US.

In May 1956, Soviet authorities reclassified her crime to "disclosure of official secrets," reduced the sentence to the time already served, and released her.

[2] In July 1977, C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times visited Ulanovskaya in Israel and published some recollections of her from his days in Moscow as bureau chief 1943–5.

On 26 July 1977, in London, Ulanovskaya appeared on an episode called "The Soviet Intelligence Apparatus" on Firing Line, a talk show hosted by William F. Buckley Jr.:[5] Ulanovskaya: When we were in the States [in the Thirties], it was the first time—not that I began to doubt, but that I felt, with some reason, we couldn't do what the capitalists had achieved...

[2][4] According to Sulzberger's 1977 memoir, Ulanovskaya had never heard of Alger Hiss, and her husband had no contact with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, or Donald McLean.

[3] Regarding the Hiss Case, Ulavoskaya wrote (quoted from the new English edition of their memoir): "My story has many parallels with that of Whittaker Chambers.