Amy Knight


Amy W. Knight is an American historian of the Soviet Union and Russia. She has been described by The New York Times as "the West's foremost scholar" of the KGB.

Life and career

Amy Knight was born in Chicago in 1946. She gained a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan. She went on to gain a Doctor of Philosophy in Russian politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1977. She taught at the LSE, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University and at Carleton University. She also worked for eighteen years at the U.S. Library of Congress as a specialist in Russian and Soviet affairs. Knight also writes for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Globe and Mail, and The Daily Beast.
In 1993–94, she was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.