Svetlana Chervonnaya

Chervonnaya's ancestors hailed from Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus, having been forced to live in such places during Tsarist times due to antisemitic 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.

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] 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] 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.

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.

[2] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chervonnaya 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.