Author

Douglas Smith is an awarding-winning historian and translator and a Resident Scholar at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. He studied German and Russian at the University of Vermont and has a doctorate in history from UCLA.

Over the past twenty-five years Smith has made many trips to Russia. In the 1980s, he was a Russian-speaking guide on the U. S. State Department’s exhibition “Information USA” that traveled throughout the USSR. He has worked as a Soviet affairs analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany specializing in Russian nationalism and served as an interpreter for late President Reagan.

Smith has taught and lectured widely in the United States, Britain, and Europe and has appeared in documentaries for A&E and National Geographic. A regular contributor to The Seattle Times and other publications, he is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Fulbright scholarship and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center. 

His newest book, Former People: The Destruction of the Russian Nobility, 1917-1941, is scheduled for publication in 2012 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux