William Henry Chamberlin

William Henry Chamberlin (February 17, 1897 – September 12, 1969) was an American historian and journalist. He was the author of several books about the Cold War, communism and US foreign policy, including The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (1935), which was written in Russia between 1922 and 1934 while he was the Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

He had communist sympathies until he lived in the Soviet Union. Then, he gradually turned anticommunist. He predicted that intervention in World War II would help communism in Europe in Asia and so was a non-interventionist.

Chamberlin was born in Brooklyn and educated in Pennsylvania schools and later at Haverford College. At 25, he moved to Greenwich Village and was deeply affected by the cultural bohemianism and Bolshevik politics there. He worked for Heywood Broun, the book editor of the New York Tribune. He also published under the pseudonym of A.C. Freeman and was a socialist pacifist who supported communism in the Soviet Union (von Mohrenschildt 1970).

He arrived in the Soviet Union as a young man and soon found work with the Christian Science Monitor for which he would work until 1940. He also acted as Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He was initially a Marxist and a sympathizer with the communist revolution. During his stay, he changed to being a critic. His first book, Soviet Russia, published in 1930, detailed the policies of the New Economic Policy and was, on the whole, supportive of the changes brought by the Russian Revolution.

However, even then, he had his doubts. Toward the end of his stay, he became convinced of the errors of Communist policy. He met his Russian-born wife, Sonya, in the US, where she and her family had immigrated, visited the Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932 and 1933. They witnessed the Holodomor famines, produced by forced collectivization (von Mohrenschildt 1970).

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