Douglas Smith

An award-winning historian and translator, Douglas Smith is the author of seven books on Russia. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Over the past forty years Douglas 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 and has served as an interpreter for late President Reagan.

Douglas has taught and lectured widely in the United States, Britain, and Europe and has appeared in documentaries for National Geographic, the BBC, and Netflix. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center.

His book Former People was a bestseller in the UK. It won the inaugural Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2013, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen Book of the Year by Andrew Solomon in Salon. His 2016 biography Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs was a finalist for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2023, he published a new translation of Konstantin Paustovsky's epic memoir The Story of a Life to international critical acclaim.

His latest book, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna, will be published in 2026.