Peter Reddaway, academic and voice of Soviet dissidents

If the KGB had thought they could intimidate Peter Reddaway by expelling him from the Soviet Union in 1964, they were very mistaken. He would not be allowed to visit the country again for 24 years but became in the meantime one of the most effective international voices highlighting the Soviet persecution of dissidents, and the defiant strength of their independent life.
He had befriended a Russian engineer who had defected to the West and asked him to pass on greetings to his wife when Reddaway, a graduate student, visited Moscow. The Soviet authorities followed him and ordered his expulsion because of activities “outside the scope of his work as a student”.
His new status as a Soviet persona non grata was, Reddaway reflected later, a kind of liberation, enabling his future career as publicist of human rights abuses. “I could write freely without having to temper my views to avoid being put on a Soviet blacklist,” he said.
Crucial to his effectiveness was access to reliable information from inside the Soviet Union. In 1968, a dossier smuggled out of the country entitled A Chronicle of Current Events reached him via the BBC. It had been courageously compiled by a so-called samizdat underground publishing network and detailed extensive human rights violations.
As more editions of the Chronicle emerged, Reddaway collated all the information into thematic chapters and published a book in 1972 entitled Uncensored Russia. It described arrests, searches, trials and what was termed the “descent into hell prisoners endure”.
Reddaway became a respected commentator on life in the USSR, drawing attention in The Times to the “Jekyll-and-Hyde” existence of the Soviet citizen, inhabiting “not only a real, meaningful, inner life, but also a false, public looking-glass one”. He described such a citizen as “relentlessly urged by the mass media and his schooling to be grateful to the [Communist] party for life’s abundant joys … in his heart and his private conversation he is usually indifferent or hostile to this same party”.
He said later: “At an early stage I started to believe that the Soviet system was built on a weak foundation of party dictatorship and extreme ideological rigidity and would, therefore, eventually, collapse.”
With his friend and fellow Anglican Michael Bourdeaux, he helped found Keston College, which researched and publicised the suffering of religious believers under communism. Reddaway, recalled Bourdeaux, was “the most activist of us, often pushing us to undertake new projects and openly to challenge the political attitudes which surrounded us”. It could be hard to attract attention towards the Soviet world while western opinion was still influenced by the backlash against McCarthyism or focused on issues such as apartheid.
One of Reddaway’s most distinctive campaigns was on the abuse of psychiatric care that was employed to punish dissidents. He co-wrote a book with Sidney Bloch called Psychiatric Terror (1977) and his pressure helped force the USSR to leave the World Psychiatric Association.
Peter Brian Reddaway was born in Cambridge on September 18, 1939, where his mother was a physiotherapist and his father a professor of political economy who had studied the Soviet Union. His interest in Russia came partly through his family, and at school in Oundle Reddaway was impressed by a talk given by a refugee from the Hungarian revolution of 1956, which was suppressed by the USSR, and decided to study Russian at Cambridge. He was sent for his first lessons to a former Tsarist diplomat living in a small Irish town.
During university holidays he went on adventurous camping trips with friends to the Soviet Union, driving a Land Rover on terrible roads. They enjoyed extravagant hospitality in Georgia and also visited Ukraine, which raised his awareness of the USSR’s huge diversity. He later wrote about the plight of groups including the Crimean Tatars and citizens of the Baltic states.
After graduating from Cambridge, Reddaway studied at Harvard and then, before his expulsion, at Moscow University. He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics and moved to the United States in the 1980s as director of the Kennan Institute, before becoming a professor at George Washington University.
He was first married to Kathleen Teitgens and they had two children, Christopher and Rebecca. After that marriage ended in divorce, he married Elizabeth Burton, who worked for the US Agency for International Development.
As the USSR liberalised under the premiership of Mikhail Gorbachev, Reddaway was finally allowed to visit in 1988. He believed the collapse of the Soviet Union soon afterwards was not an “authentic revolution” however, and worried that the way its “internal empire” had ended “seems likely to produce exceptionally baneful consequences”.
In the 1990s, during the era of Boris Yeltsin, he was dismayed by the rise of the oligarchs and western support for “shock therapy” economics that were “based on a mixture of ignorance and arrogance”, impoverishing many and leading to massive corruption.
In the early 2000s he published a book, with Dmitri Glinski, called The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. This new kind of Bolshevism, he argued, was a top-down imposition that created its own threats to freedom and human rights.
Reddaway lamented that the anti-Soviet resisters he had admired so much had been “pushed off the political stage”. His 2020 book, The Dissidents: a Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, honoured their bravery and influence in sustaining “independent thinking and action” despite all that was done to them. Their story gave him some hope for the future. “It will take even more time and effort for Russia to become a democracy. Nevertheless, long and hard does not mean impossible.”
Professor Peter Reddaway, academic and human rights campaigner, was born on September 18, 1939. He died on July 28, 2024, aged 84