Great Americans in St. Petersburg
The history of Americans in St. Petersburg is book-ended by two revolutions - the American Revolution that ended in 1783 and the October Revolution of 1917. The former saw the young United States, eager to expand its diplomatic contacts, send several talented statesmen to St. Petersburg to woo the Imperial Court, the most famous among them John Quincy Adams. This period also saw the brief Russian career of the great American sea commander John Paul Jones.
The October Revolution and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, meanwhile, not only caused a number of highly talented Russians to emigrate to the Unites States, among them scientists, academics, composers and writers, but also brought to Petrograd a group of idealistic young journalists - among them John Reed, Louise Bryant and Alfred Rhys Williams - who were among the most ardent foreign supporters of the Soviet cause.
While the contribution of emigres Russian scientists to US technology was undoubtedly vast, less celebrated is the contribution that Americans have made to Russian engineering. First, George Washington Whistler was instrumental in the development of Russia's first railways in the 1840s (and his son, the great painter John Abbott McNeill, would later claim St. Petersburg as his birthplace). Then, over a century later, two American-born Soviet spies, Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, laid the foundations for Soviet microelectronics, working under assumed identities in top-secret Lenigrad laboratories.
Born in Scotland, John Paul Jones adopted the US as his home just as the Revolutionary War was breaking out. His seafaring feats against the Royal Navy made him a hero, and he went on to serve in the Russian Imperial Navy under Catherine the Great.
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The sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams served only one term in office, but had a distinguished career as a statesman and diplomat, which included five years as the first official US envoy to the Imperial Court in St. Petersburg.
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A plantation owner from South Carolina, Henry Middleton became an influential politician in his own state and, thanks to his European background, also proved successful as one of the first US Ministers to Russia in the 1820s.
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Invited to St. Petersburg by Emperor Nicholas I, George Washington Whistler was a skilled and energetic engineer responsible for supervising the construction of the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway, the first long-distance line in Russia.
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Son of the engineer George Washington Whistler, James Abbott McNeill Whistler was one of the most famous artists of the late 19th century. He spent five years in St. Petersburg as a child, and would later claim the city as his birthplace.
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A Russian aristocrat born Pyotr Dementyev, Demens arrived in the USA in 1880 and made a fortune building railroads in Florida. He founded the city of St. Petersburg, FL., and in later life wrote memoirs and essays on Russian politics.
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An eminent and innovative historian in St. Petersburg before the October Revolution, Mikhail Rostovtzeff continued his career in America, writing two enormously influential works about the economy of the Ancient World.
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Described by Vladimir Lenin as "the head of our chemical industry", Vladimir Ipatieff fled the Soviet Union at the start of Stalin's Terror and continued his career in the United States, pioneering the chemistry of petroleum products.
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Vladimir Zworykin, who is often described as "the father of television", was a White Russian who arrived in the United States in 1919. Among his many patents were two cathode ray tubes that formed the basis of television technology.
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One of the most influential and controversial sociologists in America, Pitirim Sorokin rose from humble origins to become a highly original academic and thinker in Russia and the USA, where he founded the department of sociology at Harvard University.
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A life-long communist, Albert Rhys Williams became the favoured foreign journalist of the Soviet regime, a committed propagandist for the Soviet Union who remained entirely unaware of the horrors committed under Stalin's regime.
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The wife of John Reed, Louise Bryant was a journalist and political activist among a small group of left-wing Americans who witnessed the events of 1917 in Russia and promoted understanding of the October Revolution in the USA.
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A young firebrand journalist from New York, John Reed wrote
Ten Days that Shook the World, the definitive account of the October Revolution, which he witnessed first-hand. He is the only foreigner to be buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow.
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A giant of 20th century literature, Vladimir Nabokov was a son of the St. Petersburg aristocracy whose extraordinary facility with language allowed him to become one of the greatest ever prose stylists in both Russian and English.
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The founder of Objectivism and the author of
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum to a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg. Her brutal experience of the October Revolution was instrumental in shaping her radial and controversial theories.
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Responsible, with his partner Alfred Sarant, for major innovations in Soviet military technology and computing, Joel Barr was a communist from New York who fled to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and lived to see the collapse of his adopted country.
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Alfred Sarant and his partner Joel Barr were talented American engineers and committed communists who spied for the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War, and under assumed identities became key figures in Soviet microelectronics.
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Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Joseph Brodsky was the leading poet of the Leningrad underground. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, he found a new home in America, where he was feted as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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When Californian Joanna Stingray came to Leningrad as a tourist in the 1980s, she was planning a pop career in the US. Instead, she became an ambassador for Soviet underground rock, promoting some of Russia's most famous bands in the West.
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