Background
Olkhovsky was born June 22, 1930 in Ukraine. The family settled in Utica, New York Doctor Olkhovsky"s father went to work making T-shirts in a clothing factory and his mother found work in a laundry.
correspondent reporters supporter
Olkhovsky was born June 22, 1930 in Ukraine. The family settled in Utica, New York Doctor Olkhovsky"s father went to work making T-shirts in a clothing factory and his mother found work in a laundry.
In 1968 he completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Russian History at Georgetown University.
Doctor Olkhovsky, known as George by his friends and colleagues, became a farmworker picking strawberries. He served in the United States Army’s 101st Airborne Division during the Korean War at Camp Breckinridge and Fort Knox, Kentucky, becoming the division’s senior linguist.
By 1959, Doctor Olkhovsky earned a Bachelor and an Master of Arts in history from the University of Minnesota.
Doctor Olkhovsky came to the Washington, District of Columbia area in 1957 and worked as a Russian language instructor at the National Security Agency. From the mid-1960s until after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he continued to develop and teach Russian language and culture courses part-time to National Security Agency staff
In 1962, Doctor Olkhovsky became a full-time faculty member at GWU where he worked until retiring in 1998. His positions included several terms as Chairman of GWU’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.
He worked with well-known Soviet dissidents who came to the West including Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Amalrik, General Petro Grigorenko and Vladimir Maximov.
Doctor Olkhovsky"s efforts included assisting in the editing, publication and distribution of the dissident journal Kontinent published in the West. In the late 1970s he served as Kontinent"s United States correspondent and representative. From 1964 until 1983, Doctor Olkhovsky also worked part time as a broadcaster and writer for the Voice of America Russian Service.
In 1983, he took a two-year leave from GWU to be Deputy Director of Radio Liberty in Munich, a United States government-funded Radio station established during the Cold War to broadcast to audiences in the Soviet Union.
According to his Washington Post obituary, "When Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974, he told reporters that he had been amazed at the amount of straight news on Voice of America. The broadcaster he often heard was Doctor Olkhovsky."
Doctor Olkhovsky"s book "Vladimir Stasov and Russian National Culture" (1983) was about a Russian author and cultural critic who wrote extensively on the development of Russian music in the 19th century.
In 1941, the invading German army destroyed an about-be-published book that Doctor Olkhovsky"s father, Andrey Vasilyevich Olkhovsky, had written. In 2003, Doctor Olkhovsky was able to fulfill a promise to his father by editing and updating the manuscript and publishing the book, a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian music
Andrey Vasilyevich Olkhovsky was known in academic musicology circles for his 1955 book "Music Under the Soviets: The Agony of an Artist" This was the first study of Soviet music written in the West.
During the 1970s and 80s, Doctor Olkhovsky worked avidly in support of prominent Soviet dissidents working with various administrations and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
