Svetlana Chervonnaya

Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya (Russian: Светлана Aлександровна Червонная, born 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 known as one of the leading scholarly voices arguing against post-Soviet American triumphalism. In the post-Soviet period, Chervonnaya has also established herself 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 the Ukraine, Poland, and Belorussia, having been forced to live in such places during Tsarist times due to anti-semitic restrictions upon Jewish residence.

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 worked non-political cases including economic crimes, gang crimes, and homicide cases. By the time Svetlana started school, he had left the Procurator's office and became a criminal defense attorney.

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.

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