Martin Dewhirst  (UK)

While still at grammar school, Martin Dewhirst (b. 1937) found Russian and German literature far more stimulating than French and English-language literature, while quickly developing a strong aversion both to Communism and to Nazism.  After training in the RAF as a Russian interpreter during his National Service, he was lucky enough to learn about the real Russia from scholars such as Dimitry Obolensky and the real USSR from scholars such as Leonard Schapiro.

Dewhirst first visited Moscow in March 1959, and on his very first evening there was given a home made, hand bound, book of poetry to take out to the West.  This resulted in a lifelong interest in Russian and Soviet censorship and in what became widely known later as Samizdat.

After studying in Oxford and at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from 1964 to 2000 Dewhirst lectured at the University of Glasgow, periodically, from 1970 to 1990, working in the Samizdat Section of Radio Liberty in Munich.

He participated in the Sakharov Hearings in Rome and helped to organise the subsequent Hearings in Lisbon and London.  More recently he has been comparing and contrasting the German response to the Holocaust and the Russian response to the GULag.