William Henry Chamberlin

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1897

Date of Death

1969

Political
Preference

William Henry Chamberlin was an American historian and journalist. He was the prominent author of several books on the Soviet Union and worked as the Moscow correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor from 1922 to 1934. In the 1930s, he held Communist sympathies and wrote extensively on the struggle for the Russian soul between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet communism. Over the years, however, Chamberlin came to doubt communism as he travelled in the Soviet Union, being especially repulsed by the dangers of collectivism and the famine of 1932-33. Towards the end of his life, he started to believe in the importance of individual rights and settled back in the United States. Because of his great knowledge of Europe through his work as a journalist, he was invited by the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace to write one of its most extensive blueprints, titled ‘A Durable Peace in Europe’ in 1944. In the last two decades of his life, he wrote on American foreign policy, Germany’s economic revival after the War, and the Cold War.