Peter Reddaway obituary

No one outside Russia did more to publicise the plight of Soviet human rights activists and political protesters than Peter Reddaway, a British American academic, who has died aged 84. Known as dissidents and numbering only in dozens, they played a major role in highlighting the repression of independent thinkers in the Soviet Union. Reddaway was one of their first foreign champions. Thanks to his position as a Washington-based expert on Soviet studies, he frequently gave evidence to US congressional committees and helped to make the issue of dissidents a key element on the agenda of east-west dialogue during the cold war.

Although the terror of Stalin’s murderous rule had been lifted under his successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, one chilling new practice became common: the misuse of psychiatry to send dissidents to closed mental hospitals. Reddaway and Sidney Bloch, an Australian medical colleague, campaigned to have the Soviet Union expelled from the World Psychiatric Association. The Soviet Union resigned in 1983 before they were thrown out.

Other dissidents were put on trial and sentenced to long terms in prisons and labour camps. Information about their cases was hard to collect, but in 1968 Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Maxim Litvinov, a Soviet foreign minister in the 1930s, smuggled out of the Soviet Union a 15-page dossier with the headline A Chronicle of Current Events. It contained two dozen accounts of human rights violations in various parts of the Soviet Union. Litvinov asked that it be handed to Reddaway, whom he had heard discussing the plight of dissidents on the BBC.

A few weeks later Chronicle Number Two appeared. It followed the same format, just sheets of typed paper in Russian. Dissidents and their friends made copies by laboriously typing and retyping the material. It was known as samizdat , self-publishing. They had no access to machines that copied or scanned. Through his contacts Reddaway arranged for the chronicle to be translated into English and circulated to journalists and western government officials. Eventually he published the first 11 issues in a book, Uncensored Russia. The chronicle went on to publish 64 issues until it closed in 1982.

Reddaway also played a key role in the foundation of the magazine Index on Censorship . Litvinov had written to Stephen Spender suggesting the formation of an international committee of distinguished intellectuals to defend the human rights movement in the USSR. Spender created the Writers and Scholars International Trust. Reddaway worked closely with its director Michael Scammell to set up Index on Censorship, which still continues.

Reddaway was born into a family of distinguished Cambridge dons. His father, Brian Reddaway, was the professor of political economy at Cambridge. His mother, Barbara Bennett, was a physiotherapist. Brian wrote a book on the Soviet economy that may have sparked Peter’s interest in the country and prompted him to learn Russian when he left Oundle school and became a Cambridge undergraduate. Peter had an adventurous streak, and in 1961 he took four friends, myself included, in a Land Rover across the Soviet Union, staying in officially approved camp sites. Our vehicle turned heads everywhere and in Tbilisi excited admirers told us that ours was the first foreign car to use the Georgian military highway over the Caucasus since the second world war. It may have been true.

On graduation Reddaway won a 10-month British Council scholarship to study at Moscow State University. The friendships he developed there heightened his interest in Soviet studies. On return to London he made what seemed a naive mistake. He met a Soviet engineer who had defected in 1961, thinking he could get permission for his wife and children to leave Moscow and join him in the west. For two years the authorities refused. Reddaway was touched by the defector’s story and offered to take messages to his wife on his next trip to Moscow. As should have been expected, the KGB soon found out and Reddaway was told he was being expelled from the Soviet Union. The ban was assumed to be permanent.

It was an inauspicious start for someone planning a career in Soviet studies, but Reddaway later took comfort from the fact that it “conferred a certain compensating advantage” for someone interested in the human rights movement. “I could write freely on this subject without having to temper my views to avoid being put on a Soviet blacklist,” he wrote in his book The Dissidents: a Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990 (2020).

Reddaway enrolled in the London School of Economics for a PhD in Soviet studies and taught there until 1986. Khrushchev’s brief period of liberalisation had come to an end with a Kremlin palace coup in 1964. Hopes for reform of the Soviet system seemed dead. Reddaway wrote frequent newspaper and magazine articles about dissidents, which were meticulously researched and non-propagandistic, but always infused with optimism for eventual change. His work attracted widespread attention and in 1986 he was offered the directorship of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Washington-based thinktank. After three years he moved to George Washington University, where he stayed until retirement in 2004. He took US citizenship in the mid-90s.

Reddaway obviously welcomed the implosion of the Soviet Union’s authoritarian system under Mikhail Gorbachev . In 1988 he was allowed to travel to Russia again. Unlike the majority of western Kremlinologists and diplomats, he became a severe critic of Boris Yeltsin and his reliance on a new class of oligarchs. He saw how the Soviet middle class was impoverished by Yeltsin’s shock therapy reforms and his hasty privatisation schemes. While Bill Clinton and other western leaders kept silent when Yeltsin dissolved the new Russian parliament in 1993 and used tanks to evict its MPs, Reddaway was outraged.

Working with Dmitri Glinski, a Moscow academic, Reddaway published a book titled The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (2000). No one could accuse Reddaway of Soviet nostalgia. As ever, he was motivated by concern for human rights.

As for his view of Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, Reddaway saw him as a product of market bolshevism and the Yeltsin system. “If he does try to change the system ... he will find himself a prisoner of the system,” he wrote.

In 1972 Reddaway married Kathleen Teitgens. They divorced in 1987. Two years later he married Elizabeth (Betsy) Burton, who worked for the US Agency for International Development. They met as members of an Episcopalian church choir in McLean, Virginia.

He is survived by Betsy, his two children, Christopher and Rebecca, from his first marriage, and two stepchildren, John and Sarah.

• Peter Reddaway, academic and human rights champion, born 18 September 1939; died 28 July 2024