Edward Kline  (USA)

Edward Kline (1932-2017 ) was born in New York in an entrepreneurial Jewish family with roots in Hungary, Germany and Ukraine. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in mathematics, served in the US Army during the Korean War, and led the family chain of department stores, “Kline Brothers” for the next thirty years. In the 1960s he became interested in the Soviet Union and in 1968, in cooperation with the British Slavist Max Hayward, founded the non-commercial Chekhov Publishing House in New York to publish books that were banned in the USSR. Thanks to his publishing house, the books “A Stop in the Desert” by Joseph Brodsky, “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler, the first volume of “Memoirs” by Nadezhda Mandelstam and other works in Russian were published. 

In 1972, together with the Russian physicist and publicist Valery Chalidze, Kline founded the Chronicle Press, which published human rights books in Russian and, in particular, the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events in Russian and English, as well as documents from e.g. the various Helsinki Groups in the USSR. Kline was President of the Sakharov Foundation (USA), and over the years helped many Russian human rights defenders. In 2010 the Moscow Helsinki Group awarded Edward Kline an honorary diploma for his historic contribution to the protection of human rights and the human rights movement.