Expert Bio

Amy Knight earned her PhD degree in Russian politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1977. She has taught at the LSE, Johns Hopkins, SAIS, and Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and also worked for eighteen years at the U.S. Library of Congress as a Soviet/Russian affairs specialist. In 1993-94, she was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Knight has written over 30 scholarly articles and has contributed numerous pieces on Russian politics and history to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and The Daily Beast. Her articles have also been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wilson Quarterly. From 2000 to 2006, Knight wrote frequently on Russian affairs for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

She is the author of six books: The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988); Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (New York: Hill and Wang, June 1999); How the Cold War Began: the Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies, (Carroll & Graf, 2006); and Orders To Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St. Martin’s Press, 2017).

Wilson Center Project

Security Policy and the Transition to a Civil Society: The Soviet Union as a Case Study

Project Summary

how authoritarian governments making the transition to democracy discard their traditional reliance on a repressive security police comparative approach, uses the experience of states that have made democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe in order to shed light on the Soviet situation