Wolfgang Leonhard
| Wolfgang Leonhard link Amazon (Author, historian) | |
|---|---|
 Wolfgang Leonhard in 1990 | |
| Born | 16 April 1921 |
| Died | 17 August 2014 |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | St Antony's College (Oxford) |
| Parents | Susanne Köhler,Rudolf Leonhard |
| Interests | Marxism, USSR |
German historian who wrote a working paper on The Soviet Union and East Europe: Their Problems, Contradictions and Perspective for the 1981 Bilderberg | |
Wolfgang Leonhard (born Vladimir, since 1945 Wolfgang) was a German historian. Leonhard wrote a working paper on The Soviet Union and East Europe: Their Problems, Contradictions and Perspective for the 1981 Bilderberg.[1]
Background
His mother Susanne Leonhard emigrated with him to the Soviet Union in 1935 escaping the National Socialists. She was arrested one year later in the course of Stalin's mass arrests and sentenced to twelve years in a labor camp in Siberia. Young Vladimir stayed in Moscow, attended a communist cadre boarding school.
Career
In April 1945, Leonhard was chosen as a member of one of the two groups of German communists who were the first to return to Germany as soon as the Red Army had reached German territory. He was flown to the Soviet Occupation zone in East Germany, where he threw himself into building of a German socialist state.Soon disillusioned with the Stalinist SED, he fled to Yugoslavia in 1949. From there he went to the West Germany, where he worked as a political writer and as an expert on Eastern Europe.
After his postgraduate studies at St Antony's College, Oxford University, from 1956 to 1958, and his work as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Russian Studies of Columbia University, in New York City, in 1963 and 1964, Leonhard became a professor at Yale University. Leonhard taught Soviet history and the history of international Communism at Yale from 1966 to 1987.
