Eugene Lyons
Eugene Lyons ( born July 1, 1898 in Uzlyany; † 7 January 1985 in New York) was an American journalist. He transformed himself from a trailer to a sharp critic of communism in the Soviet Union.
For media and political activity
Lyons was born in 1898 as the son of a Jewish family in Uzlyany near Minsk in Belarus today. After immigration to the United States, he grew up in a poor neighborhood of New York, where he began to sympathize with the radical labor movement. His journalistic work began at the union Industrial Workers of the World, for which he mainly through legal proceedings against members of the labor movement, such as in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, reported. Later he worked in the New York office of the official Soviet news agency TASS. From 1928 to 1934 he was a foreign correspondent of the United Press in Moscow. In 1930, he managed to lead the first Western journalist an interview with Stalin.
Lyons had initially been close to the Communist Party USA, to be without been a member, by its own account, because he was not willing to take a leading responsibility, nor to submit to party discipline. During his time in Moscow but he developed into a resolute opponent of the Soviet Union. His impressions of that time he worked in his book Assignment in Utopia. As one of the first he reported on the famine in Ukraine at the beginning of the thirties.
From 1939 to 1944 he worked for the magazine The American Mercury, and thereafter for the Reader 's Digest. From 1951 to 1952 he was the first president of the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. From 1955 he was editor of the conservative magazine National Review. He died on January 7, 1985 in Manhattan.
Influence on the work of George Orwell
In Chapter Two Plus Two Equals Five in his book Assignment in Utopia Lyons refers to the slogan " 2 2 = 5", with which the Soviet government prodded the workers to realize the five-year plan in four years. For Orwell biographers of this Chapter shall apply in Lyons book as a template for the corresponding passage in Orwell's book 1984: " If the party says: 2 2 = 5, then it is so. "
Writings
- The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti. International Publishers, New York 1927.
- Modern Moscow. Hurst & Blackett, London, 1935.
- Moscow Carrousel. Knopf, New York 1935.
- Assignment in Utopia. Harcourt, Brace, New York 1937.
- Stalin, Czar of all the Russias the. Lippincott, Philadelphia 1940.
- The Red Decade. The Stalinist Penetration of America. Bobbs- Merrill, Indianapolis, 1941.
- Our Unknown Ex - President. A Portrait of Herbert Hoover. Doubleday, Garden City, 1948.
- Our Secret Allies. The Peoples of Russia. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1953.
- Herbert Hoover. A Biography. Doubleday, Garden City, 1964.
- David Sarnoff. A Biography. Harper & Row, New York 1966.