Svetlana Chervonnaya

In March and April 2010, Chervonnaya was a visiting scholar at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

In 2009, backed by a grant from The Nation Institute, a foundation associated with the American magazine The Nation, Chervonnaya launched a scholarly website on Soviet espionage in America, "DocumentsTalk." The site contains primary source documents in pdf form, biographies of leading participants, as well as interpretative discussions. Since May, 2010, she is running the website on her own.

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. In America, Chervonnaya's work has been seen on the Discovery channel (1997), A&E History Channel (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003), and PBS (1999, 2002).

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. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, she has emerged as one of the preeminent specialists on the Espionage history of the USSR and the United States. In this capacity, Chervonnaya has been a consultant and contributor to a number of television documentaries, working as Associate Producer and research historian of "The Rosenberg File: Case Closed," the Moscow Field Producer of "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies," as the Russian Production Coordinator of "Mystery of the U2" and other documentaries.

Upon completion of her university work, Chervonnaya was given a post as a member of the junior research staff at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, the leading research institute for American studies in the Soviet Union, where she concentrated in the study of American political opposition movements. After two years she was promoted to the rank of Junior Fellow and became a Senior Fellow at age 33. She was awarded the Soviet equivalent of a Ph.D. degree in 1977 and remained at the institute for three decades.

Chervonnaya married in 1970 and has two children, a daughter born in 1974 and a son born in 1987. Her husband, a physicist and mathematician, died of cancer in 1989.

Chervonnaya graduated from secondary school in 1966 and enrolled in Moscow State University in the department of history, where she was admitted to the elite American history program on the basis of a competitive examination taken at the end of her second year. 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.

Chervonnaya's work in the field of espionage history has been the object of some debate. From the middle 1960s onward, scholarly debate on the history of Soviet-American relations and the history of the international Communist political movement has been divided into two more or less mutually exclusive camps — "traditionalism" and "revisionism." These two interpretative constructs are highly correlated with matters of contemporary politics, with "traditionalists" apt to be believers in traditionalist conservatism and "revisionists" apt to be liberal or radical critics of militarism and nationalism.

Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya (Russian: Светлана Aлександровна Червонная, born October 14, 1948) is a Russian historian specializing in the political history of the Cold War period and Soviet espionage activities in the United States of America. Along with Ellen Schrecker, Chervonnaya is among scholarly voices arguing against post-Soviet American triumphalism. In the post-Soviet period, Chervonnaya has worked as an investigator and producer of documentary television shows seen in the United States, Germany, and Russia.

Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya was born in Moscow on October 14, 1948 to ethnic Jewish parents. Chervonnaya's ancestors hailed from Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus, having been forced to live in such places during Tsarist times due to anti-semitic restrictions upon Jewish residence.

A great uncle on Svetlana's mother's side, Efim Dreizer, was a victim of the Great Terror of the 1930s. 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. His family were treated harshly as the family of a so-called "enemy of the people" and met death and exile during the terror. They were "rehabilitated" (restored to full citizenship rights) during Khrushchev's "Thaw" of 1956-1958; Efim Dreizer was posthumously rehabilitated only in 1988, during Gorbachev's Glasnost campaign.