Alexander Vassiliev
Encyclopedia
Alexander Vassiliev is a Russian
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, writer, and espionage historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 living in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. A former officer in the Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 Committee for State Security
Committee for State Security
The Committee for State Security , popularly known as State Security was the name of the Bulgarian secret service during the Communist rule of Bulgaria and the Cold War ....

 (KGB), Vassiliev is known for his two books based upon KGB archival documents: Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, co-authored with John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes is an American historian who is a specialist in 20th century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress...

 and Harvey Klehr
Harvey Klehr
Harvey E. Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University; he is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America ....

, and The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: the Stalin Era, co-authored with Allen Weinstein
Allen Weinstein
Allen Weinstein is an American historian, educator, and federal official who has served in several different offices. He served as the Archivist of the United States from February 16, 2005 until his resignation on December 19, 2008...

.

Early years

Alexander Vassiliev was born in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

 — then the capital of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 — on May 1, 1962.

Vassiliev joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

 in 1983 while he was a student at Moscow State University
Moscow State University
Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...

 (MGU). He graduated form MGU with a degree in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 in 1984.

Vassiliev was married in 1983 and fathered a son in 1986. He was divorced in 2009.

Vassiliev worked in the international department of Komsomolskaya Pravda
Komsomolskaya Pravda
Komsomolskaya Pravda is a daily Russian tabloid newspaper, founded on March 13th, 1925. It is published by "Izdatelsky Dom Komsomolskaya Pravda" .- History :...

(Young Communists' Truth) from 1984 to 1985. In 1985, he became a student in the Andropov Red Banner Institute of the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

 of the USSR, completing his studies there in 1987.

Career in Russia

Vassiliev worked as an operative of the First (American) Department of the First Chief Directorate
First Chief Directorate
The First Chief Directorate , of the Committee for State Security , was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence collection activities by the training and management of the covert agents, intelligence collection management, and the collection of political, scientific and...

 of the KGB from 1987 to 1990.

In February 1990, Vassiliev resigned from the KGB for political and moral reasons. He resigned from the Communist Party in that same year. He returned to the editorial staff of Komsomolskaya Pravda, where he worked as a reporter and then columnist, writing mostly about international issues and espionage from 1990 to 1996. He also worked as an author and presenter of several political shows on the First Channel of the Russian TV ("Ostankino") from 1991 to 1993.

In the summer of 1993, Vassiliev received a telephone call from Iurii Kobaladze, press officer of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation, requesting a meeting. Kobaladze asked Vassiliev to participate in a book project with Crown Publishers, a division of Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

, which had arranged for a five book series based upon KGB archival documents, each edited by one Russian and one American editor. The SVR (successor to the KGB), was in the midst of a budgetary crisis and sought to improve its image as an effective service and had agreed to the proposal. Although having misgivings, Vassiliev finally agreed to work on a book dealing with Soviet Espionage in America in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the project.

In the fall of 1993, Vassiliev signed a book contract and met the American chosen by Crown to work with him, historian Allen Weinstein, a specialist in the Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...

 spy case. Vassiliev quit his television job and in early 1994 began to work on the book project in earnest, working with archival documents provided at the press bureau of the SVR.

Documents housed in SVR archives were carried to Vassiliev at the SVR press office; he was allowed to made copious notes both summarizing and transcribing their content in the presence of two SVR officers. Although locked up in a safe each night with the archival material, no one checked what he was writing and Vassiliev was allowed to take notebooks home as he filled one and brought in another. A total of eight notebooks were kept, along with a number of unbound pages. Vassiliev later recalled that he attempted to transcribe as many documents as possible verbatim and painstakingly noted archival file and document numbers for each.

The writing of draft chapters for Vassiliev's first book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — The Stalin Era, began in 1995, with each vetted by the SVD Declassification Commission, the head of the archives department, and Kobaladze. Vassiliev was unable to name Americans who assisted Soviet intelligence in his draft chapters owing to SVR regulations which forbid the "outing
Outing
Outing is the act of disclosing a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person's true sexual orientation or gender identity without that person's consent. Outing gives rise to issues of privacy, choice, hypocrisy, and harm in addition to sparking debate on what constitutes common good in efforts...

" of agents and sources, so cover names were used in Vassiliev's draft. Many cover names were already well known in the United States, however, and American author Weinstein had little difficulty understanding who was who and retained control over the final draft.

Beginning in 1995, the political environment began to change in Russia, Vassiliev later recalled, with the popularity of Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...

 plummeting and an anxious mood sweeping the country. A conservative nationalistic
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

 restoration seemed to be in the offing, headed by Russian Presidential candidate Gennady Ziuganov. Adding to the difficulty, Crown Publishing found it necessary to cancel the five volume book deal for financial reasons, throwing the entire project into doubt. In January 1996, Vassiliev was informed that he would be receiving no new files from the archives.

Emigration

Feeling a communist-nationalist restoration somewhat likely and their own safety tenuous, Alexander Vassiliev and his wife Elena decided to emigrate to Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 in 1996, leaving his precious notebooks with trusted friends for safekeeping rather than risking losing them to inquisitive officials at the airport. Copies of his draft chapters for The Haunted Wood were transferred to computer disks and some key documents were transcribed prior to their leaving. The resulting book based upon these materials was published in the United States by Random House in 1999.

The years 2001 to 2003 were filled with two legal actions related to The Haunted Wood. After losing his cases in June 2003, Vassiliev took some time away from the bitter subject which had taken the last ten years of his life. Then in 2005 he became interested in Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 and decided to check the article for Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...

 to see how accurate it was. At the end of the article was an external link to the website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 of historian John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes
John Earl Haynes is an American historian who is a specialist in 20th century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress...

, on which Vassiliev found a document in his own handwriting which he had introduced at his London trial, along with some comments questioning the accuracy of the document. Vassiliev wrote a letter to Haynes attempting to set the matter straight — and a book collaboration project was born.

Vassiliev managed to recover his original notebooks with transcriptions and summaries of secret Soviet foreign intelligence archival documents and these served as the core of a second publication. In May 2009, Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

 published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, co-authored by Haynes, Vassiliev, and Harvey Klehr
Harvey Klehr
Harvey E. Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University; he is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America ....

 of Emory University
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...

, another widely recognized scholar in the field of American communist history.

Upon completion of the project, Vassiliev donated his original notebooks to the U.S. Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

. The contents of these were scanned in original film, transcribed into Russian, and translated into English, and are now available online in all three forms through the Cold War International History Project
Cold War International History Project
The Cold War International History Project is part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Project was founded in 1991 with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is located in Washington D.C....

 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , located in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968...

.

Vassiliev worked in the BBC Russian Service
BBC Russian Service
The BBC Russian Service was part of the BBC World Service's foreign language output, one of 33 languages it provided.-History:The BBC Russian Service began broadcasting on 26 March 1946....

 as an online producer from 2000 to 2009. He served as a co-publisher, editor, and designer of The Hyde Park, a Russian magazine in London, from 2004 to 2006.

In 2009, Vassiliev published his first novel, an espionage thriller called Russian Sector. This book was released in both Russian-language and English-language editions.

As of 2010, Vassiliev was living in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 and working full time as a writer and publisher. Vassiliev's current endeavor involves the editing and publication of parallel Russian-English texts of classic Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...

 for language students. The initial titles in the series included works by Mikhail Lermontov
Mikhail Lermontov
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov , a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837. Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature alongside Pushkin and the greatest...

, Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

, and Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

. Similar French-English parallel texts are also planned, with Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...

by Gustav Flaubert released in 2010.

Alexander Vassiliev vs Frank Cass

Vassiliev launched two lawsuits in association with The Haunted Wood, representing himself as a litigant in person
Litigant in person
A litigant in person, in the United Kingdom, is an individual, company or organisation that is not represented in court by a solicitor or barrister, but nevertheless has rights of audience...

 in both cases.

In July 2001, Vassiliev sued for libel Frank Cass & Co., publisher of the journal Intelligence and National Security, in The High Court of Justice
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...

 in London, over the article "Venona and Alger Hiss" by John Lowenthal, published in Autumn 2000 issue of the journal.

In January 2003 Frank Cass's lawyers offered Alexander Vassiliev to settle the monetary claim for more than 2,000 British pounds and promised not to republish the John Lowenthal article. Vassiliev rejected the offer. In May 2003 Frank Cass proposed to settle the case for 7500 pounds, but Vassiliev rejected that offer, too.

The trial Vassiliev vs Frank Cass started on June 9, 2003 and concluded on June 13, 2003, with Judge David Eady
David Eady
Sir David Eady , styled The Hon. Mr Justice Eady, in legal writing Eady J, is a High Court judge in England and Wales. As a judge he is known for having presided over many high-profile libel and privacy cases....

 presiding. Frank Cass & Co. prevailed on the basis of "fair comment."

Alexander Vassiliev vs Amazon.com

Also in July 2001, Vassiliev sued Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 for libel over allegedly defamatory assertions published by John Lowenthal, lawyer and friend of Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...

, on its The Haunted Wood page. Lowenthal's hostile review declared that Vassiliev and Weinstein's book, "particularly in its use of KGB archival files, is unreliable and, for the most part, unverifiable. Where it is verifiable at all, it turns out to be wrong."

The judge decided that the contents of John Lowenthal's allegations in the article and in his review published on Amazon.com were similar, and there was no need to have a trial of Alexander Vassiliev vs Amazon.com, which meant Vassiliev lost that one as well. Amazon.com defense was based mostly on the Communications Decency Act
Communications Decency Act
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the United States Supreme Court struck the anti-indecency provisions of the Act.The Act was...

of 1996, which it claimed gave them immunity from prosecution.

On June 3, 2002 the contents of John Lowenthal’s review of The Haunted Wood were altered.

Works

  • The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — The Stalin Era. With Allen Weinstein. New York: Random House, 1999.
  • Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. With John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
  • Russian Sector. London: Alexander Vassiliev, 2009. —Novel.

Additional reading


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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