The Russian Ambassador, the Soviet-American-Republican Professor and the Heritage Foundation
Part 3 of a 5 part series — Chapter 2; the Grand Old Putin Party.
Dr. Edward Lozansky credibly claims a long relationship with former Russian Ambassador Kislyak dating back to their days as physicists in the former Soviet Union.
He also held a close partnership with Paul Weyrich, the deceased co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, which has since become a driving force behind the people staffing the Trump Administration.
Former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Dr. Lozansky graduated from the same Soviet physics institute —Moscow’s prestigious MEPhI, a top nuclear physics university — which likely indicates that both were Communist Party members, who were highly trusted with state secrets by the totalitarian regime in the Kremlin.
Decades later, Sergey Kislyak took the number two job in Russia’s Foreign Ministry in 2003, just one year before the state agency published Dr. Lozansky’s doctrinal book on lobbying in America.
In 2008, Deputy Foreign Minister Kislyak became Ambassador to the United States, a position he held through 2017, when he was recalled not long after the American public discovered his unusual role in the 2016 elections and his meetings with current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former NSA Gen. Flynn, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and others.
Today, Dr. Lozansky lives in Moscow, where he still gives regular radio interviews about US-Russia relations and gives his pro-Trump views on NPR and the BBC as well as frequent columns in the conservative Washington Times newspaper, some of which are paid placements.
He hosted former Ambassador Kislyak at the World Russia Forum frequently, but let slip that they go back decades in a Russian-language presentation posted to Lobbying.ru’s YouTube account.
Watch Dr. Lozansky speak to a GR.ru conference in 2011 and (minute 11) call former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak a “colleague where we studied” aka a classmate in advanced studies:
The two men certainly could have a relationship based upon the public data we know about their schooling.
Sergey Kislyak is a 1973 graduate of MEPhI.
Dr. Lozansky is both a 1966 graduate and current professor at MEPhI.
That’s where Dr. Lozansky currently teaches a course about US-Russia relations every Tuesday night at their Institute of International Relations, where he began giving lectures in February 2014.
Of course, Russian state media currently identifies him as Moscow State University (MSU) Professor Lozansky.
Dr. Lozansky’s American University in Moscow has had public ties to MSU since the 1991 when the school founded the Russian-American University, which the New York Times reported that he founded in a story entitled “Soviet students study the art of the deal, avidly.”
But it definitely wasn’t a normal institution of higher learning.
“He hardly tries to hide it,” said Atlantic Council senior fellow Anders Åslund. He continued:
“Instead he has this strange American University in Moscow. One only wonders when the authorities will take interest in him.”
However, another school, Moscow International University, strangely has the same founding tale as American University in Moscow, but no current links to Lozansky. It recently removed its entire historical back story in a total rebranding since we published our first report on Dr. Lozansky last May.
Last year, he brought American filmmaker Oliver Stone to MEPhI after he released a pro-Putin documentary.
Kislyak appeared at Lozansky’s World Russia Forum events in D.C. five times, in 2009–2011, and in both 2014 and 2015.
Watch Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak address the June 2014 World Russia Forum in English at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.:
Lozansky’s journey from the Soviet ruling class to dissident to Republican conservative movement insider
During the days of the Soviet Union, Dr. Lozansky worked at Moscow’s top nuclear physics laboratory, the Kurchatov Institute, during the peak of the Cold War before he emigrated to the US, via Rome.
Dr. Lozansky left the Soviet Union in 1976 arriving in America soon thereafter and rapidly gained notoriety as a Soviet Jewish dissident who grew unusually close with the Pentagon. Unusually, his entire family was given exit visas with him, but amidst his frequent news media coverage, that fact was only reported by American news media in 1982 for the first time.
Dr. Lozansky and his evocative story and very public advocacy for Dr. Andrei Sakharov quickly traveled from his first home in America as a professor in Rochester, New York through his Republican Congressman, and into the public debate on Capitol Hill in 1979 .
From the floor of the House, his message went rapidly to the White House and into bilateral superpower affairs when President Jimmy Carter discussed it at a summit meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Dr. Lozansky also helped found the first Young Republicans club chapter in Moscow in 1982.
The professor befriended Republican Senators Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, who very publicly championed his cause to bring his wife Tatiana from Russia to America.
He later wrote a book about bringing his wife to America entitled “For Tatiana: When love triumphed over the Kremlin.”
Ultimately, he became an advisor to President Reagan on the infamous SDI program a/k/a “Star Wars,” and remains a high-level Republican conservative movement insider to this day.
“The Bonners wanted nothing to do with him,” says Ånders Aslund, “They obviously understood that he was a KGB agent from the go.”
Indeed, the Sakharov Institute’s permanent records at University of Rochester contain minutes of a meeting where the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Soviet dissident scientist’s wife Elena Bonner remarked that neither she, nor her husband, had heard of Lozansky until her arrival in America in 1986.
When Glasnost arrived, the professor grew close to officials of the Russian Embassy, according to the New York Times, by acting as an unofficial host for chess champion Garry Kasparov, now a leader of the political opposition to Putin.
In 1990, the Times reported that he set up Russian-American University and with an American professor began teaching students in Moscow “the art of the deal.”
That year, he introduced the father of Russia’s modern foreign intelligence service to the head of the Cato Institute, in Moscow.
Heritage Foundation’s Russian Ties
Dr. Lozansky was a close, lifelong associate of Heritage Foundation’s late co-founder Paul Weyrich, a relationship that grew tremendously in the latter years after the fall of the Soviet Union until his demise.
Paul Weyrich also co-founded the influential statehouse lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (A.L.E.C.) and the Council for National Policy, as well as coined the term the “Moral Majority.”
In a recent Washington Times sponsored post, the Soviet-emigre called Weyrich his “good friend,” noting a proposal that the conservative leader delivered to former President George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, Weyrich spoke glowingly of Dr. Lozansky at the launch of Russia House his “unofficial” trade mission for the new Russian Federation.
They remained close until the Heritage Foundation co-founder’s death in 2008.
The pair embarked on a very ambitious project with Congressional Republicans under the auspices of the Free Congress Foundation — which Paul Weyrich also founded — to help Russian officials reorganize the KGB, the military and their police.
They memorialized the effort just one week after Russian President Boris Yeltsin issued an order banning the old Soviet Communist Party.
Heritage Foundation’s Moscow office opened in 1991 and was on the same floor as Dr. Lozansky’s American University in Moscow for many years, according to his 2010 testimony in the Congressional record aimed at getting America to drop the Soviet-era, Jackson-Vanik sanctions which were still in force against Russia until 2012.
Dr. Lozansky noted for the record that they were allowed to operate in Moscow, even though he believed they held views contrary to the government, a condition which would not persist in Russia for much longer.
That same year, Weyrich expressed relief on C-SPAN that one of his close associates — who went on to be the head of Russia’s deeply flawed post-Soviet privatization schemes in the 1990s — was released from detention at the end of the August coup that brought President Boris Yeltsin to power.
Former RISS deputy director Evgeny Volk led Heritage Foundation’s Moscow Office from 1994 until the branch closed in 2010.
Heritage Foundation also used to employ expert Russia analyst Ariel Cohen, who was a Valdai Club expert until 2013, when his last blog post appears, and who has since joined the Atlantic Council, as a voice against the Kremlin’s current direction. His analysis of Russian intentions that he termed the “Primakov Doctrine” from the late 1990s about the founder of modern Russian foreign intelligence should be mandatory reading for anyone seeking to decipher Putin’s strategic worldview.
Last year, the Heritage Foundation’s communications office denied ever having an office in Moscow in response to our inquiries.
Read more about Paul Weyrich and Dr. Lozansky’s ties to Sergey Primakov in these stories from Chapter 1 of the Grand Old Putin Party series:
For the next seventeen years, Paul Weyrich would focus closely on Russian affairs, seemingly as much as he did on politics inside America.
In 2006, for example, Weyrich wrote a glowing review of Russian politician Dmitri Rogozin’s highly Semitic Rodina (“Motherland”) party, claiming that they were ready to lead, and also that Putin’s crackdowns on NGOs would allow groups that disagreed with the government to continue operating.
Just the year prior, Rogozin made international headlines for starring in an anti-Semetic political ad for Rodina, saying that Russia needed to “clean out all the trash” referring to Jewish people.
Dmitri Rogozin is better known in today for attending a December 2015 meeting with the National Rifle Association, while held the title of Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Military-Industrial complex.
Since then, Putin’s government has successively tightened the noose on NGO political activities that aren’t pro-government, while simultaneously expanding his own use of so-called “soft power” organizations.
The year before Paul Weyrich died, he gave a passionate speech about his goals for conservative American politics in this video, saying “that not everyone should vote.”
By then, Weyrich was ailing under the weight of multiple health conditions resulting from a 1996 fall on black ice, which left him in a wheelchair with a life of chronic pain.
In 2005, he became a double amputee.
Paul Weyrich died in late 2008 at age 66.
After Weyrich’s death, World Russia Forum attendee Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) eulogized the conservative institution builder thusly, according to Heritage’s Daily Signal:
“Due to his vision of promoting democracy, Paul was recognized by the KGB as an ‘agent of influence’, which he proudly acknowledged.”
After his death, Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation was eventually taken over by former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016.
Relationship chart of the main people in Story 3:
The Grand Old Putin Party is a series of investigative reports co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.
