Maurice G. Hindus
Maurice Gerschon Hindus (1891–1969) was a Russian-American writer, foreign correspondent, lecturer, and expert on Soviet and Central European affairs. He was born into a large Jewish family in Bolshoye Bykovo, in the Russian Empire (now Belarus). After his father died, the family was poor. They moved to New York City in 1905. Hindus worked as an errand boy, went to night school, and attended Stuyvesant High School. In 1908 he moved to Upstate New York to work on farms, finished high school there, and then studied literature at Colgate University, graduating in 1915. He gave lectures on Russia and later did graduate study at Harvard.
During World War II he spent three years in the Soviet Union as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote four novels and traveled to Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine in 1947. He married Frances McClernan in 1957. Hindus died on July 8, 1969, in New York City, at age 78, after spending the previous weekend in North Brookfield.
Career highlights: Hindus started as a freelance writer. His first book was The Russian Peasant and the Revolution (1920). In 1922 he lived among Russian émigrés and wrote articles for Century Magazine; the editor sent him to Russia to study farm life, which led to Humanity Uprooted (1929) and Red Bread (1931). Some critics felt he was not always objective about the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s, but he focused on life and events there. He visited Russia several times, stayed three years during World War II, and wrote Mother Russia (1943) about wartime conditions. In the Cold War he criticized the Soviet government but remained sympathetic to the Russian people, writing Crisis in the Kremlin (1953) about peasants. His work helped Americans better understand the Soviet Union and its alliance in World War II.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:14 (CET).