Colette Shulman, Soviet Analyst With On-the-Ground Insights, Dies at 94

Colette Shulman, whose career as an influential analyst of Soviet affairs began in the late 1950s as a Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service, writing about ground-shaking events and the lives of workaday people, died on June 20 in Danbury, Conn.She was 94.Her death, in a hospice center, was from colon cancer, her brother, Robert Schwarzenbach, said.Ms.

Shulman “was always someone who had insight into a system that for so many in this country was opaque, was distant, was at worst, demonized,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, said in an interview.With a master’s degree in Russian history, Ms.Shulman arrived in the Soviet capital in 1955, two years after the death of Joseph Stalin, teaching at, and running, the Anglo-American School of Moscow until she was hired by United Press the next year.Ms.

Shulman worked to cut through the thicket of obfuscation and propaganda to illuminate the political and cultural trends of a geopolitical adversary that, under Nikita Khrushchev, continued to terrify and baffle many Americans.“We were seriously challenged in our reporting,” she later recalled in an article for Harriman Magazine, published by the Harriman Institute — founded as the Russian Institute — at Columbia University.“No travel outside Moscow without permission, and then only to major Soviet republic capitals.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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