Raisa D. Orlova (1918–1989)

Raisa Orlova was born in Moscow to a middle-class Jewish family. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1942, and during World War II, had the job of providing information to Soviet Friendship Societies in the West and escorting western visitors like Lillian Hellman around Moscow. After the war, she became a professor and scholar of American literature. She knew writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Joseph Brodsky. During the 1950s, she was allowed to worked on a journal devoted to foreign literature. In 1954, she renewed an old friendship with Lev Kopelev, a dissident intellectual who had spent 10 years in the Soviet gulag. She married him as her third husband. She served for a while as the English interpreter for Andrei Sakharov before he was sent into internal exile. Shortly afterwards, she and Kopelev left for West Germany. In 1983, they were stripped of their Soviet citizenship and permanently exiled. Her memoirs, including her long, slow disillusionment with Communism, were published in the USA in 1984.