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Soviet and American physicist and political figure Edward Lozansky dies in Moscow, on April 30, 2025.
Edward Dmitrievich Lozansky was born in Kiev on February 10, 1941. He graduated from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy with a degree in theoretical nuclear physics. He was a researcher at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. At the same time, he taught at the Malinovsky Armored Forces Academy.
In 1976, he moved to the United States, became a US citizen, and lived in Washington, DC. In 1990, he founded the American University in Moscow (now Moscow International University).
In recent years, he actively participated in the work of the Assembly of the Peoples of Eurasia and Africa and was the US moderator of the international public forum “The Spirit of the Elbe: A Bridge of Trust, Friendship, and Cooperation,” which was held with great success on April 15, 2025.
A word of remembrance from Martin Sieff, joined by the entire editorial staff of the Pluralia project.
All too often the genuinely good and great of this world are only revealed in their true stature after they die, and it is only then that the huge gaps left by their passing, are glaringly revealed.
Such appears to be the case with my dear friend of nearly 40 years, Professor Edward Lozansky, President of the American University in Moscow and founder of (among much else) of Russia House in Washington, who died in Moscow, Russia, on April 30 at the age 84.
It was indeed an extraordinarily fitting and monumental departure from such an extraordinary life that had been so passionately dedicated to the rescuing and survival of the human race from the supreme threat of thermonuclear world war, under which the entire globe still trembles.
For Ed was in Moscow organizing and leading manifold ceremonies commemorating the Spirit of the Elbe – the 80th anniversary on the very day of his death, of the meeting of the Soviet and US armies at Torgau on the banks of the River Elbe in Germany that sounded the death knell of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Third Reich on April 30, 1945.
For well over a quarter century, Ed was a major figure in both Washington and Moscow – in both of which cities he set up great institutions and educated generations of leaders on the need for Russian and American mutual understanding, coexistence, partnership and friendship to lead and renew the world.
He founded and ran the American University in Moscow. He also served as a Professor at National Research Nuclear University in Moscow. He founded and was the editor-in-chief of the online magazine “New Kontinent” (Kontinent USA). It became a platform for US dissidents who questioned the Republican-Democratic consensus on the waging of endless, bloody, costly wars around the world smashing societies in Africa, Europe and across the Middle East and Eurasia.
He was also a great admirer of Pluralia and when he died was working with his usual vision, generosity and limitless energy to set up cooperative programs between Pluralia and his recently founded Academy for International Cooperation.
He was a deeply happy private man with his beautiful wife Tatiana, their two daughters and grandchildren. He had close, admiring friends on every continent. And he was the warmest and most loyal of friends himself.
Ed had been a Soviet nuclear physicist. He had defied the KGB. He became a prominent anticommunist columnist for the Washington Times and deeply impressed American leaders including President Ronald Reagan and Vice President Dan Quayle (an intelligent, highly responsible and admirable man, as I can personally testify – and vastly different from the cartoon dolt depicted by the braying asses of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the other so-called mainstream US media.)
He published at least 13 books and more than a thousand articles. He was a polymath. He made major contributions in physics, mathematics, biophysics, and political science.
Ed was principled and fearless. He worked at Moscow State University and Military Tank Academy. But in 1975, he lost all of his research and teaching positions because of his outspoken public criticism of Soviet foreign and domestic policies. He was able to move to the United States the following year where he did important research at the Laser Fusion lab at the University of Rochester, New York, and taught at the American University in Washington, DC. His work on fusion power was literally half a century ahead of its time.
He embraced the end of the Cold War and worked tirelessly for 35 years for understanding and fruitful cooperation between the American and Russian peoples. Right up to his death he was tireless and exceptionally successful in organizing conferences and seminars, promoting US- Russia science, education, and cultural exchanges. In 1986 he co-edited a series of essays on nuclear dangers and coexistence with the legendary Soviet physicist and peace activist Andrei Sakharov. They were close friends as well as collaborators.
Edward Lozansky: “The Americans are busy turning their country into the Soviet Union. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
I first met Ed that same year. He was an eminent columnist also for The Washington Times and I had been brought on board to lead their coverage of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. He was always wonderful company and also, for all his achievements and towering physical presence right up to his death, the most gentlemanly and unassuming of men. In Imperial Washington, which is filled with ludicrous pygmies prancing around as imagined “geniuses” in their own imagination, it was no wonder that he stood out so much, or that he was so consistently underestimated and sneered at by repulsive little backstabbers not fit to flush his toilet.
Just as Ed defied the Soviet state and the KGB, he was through the last quarter century of his life a prophet in the American political wilderness, warning warmongering, cowardly, armchair warrior Republicans and Democrats alike of the dangers of the out-of-control rampaging Deep State. He recognized and spoke out tirelessly against the pandemic of endless, hypocritical moralistic wars without strategic or human purpose, and without end, that Geroge W. Bush and his Praetorian Guard of neocon ideologists bequeathed to the American Republic.
In May 2015, while I was sipping a morning coffee with Ed in the apartment that he and Tatiana then maintained near American University on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue Northwest, he made an offhand comment that chilled me to the bone. And it still does.
“The Americans are busy turning their country into the Soviet Union,” Ed said. “And they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
From Brezhnev’s Soviet Union to the careening, pathetic Washington policymakers and analysts of Bush, Jr. and Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Ed Lozansky always stood out and stood tall. He was a great American as well as Russian patriot in the best and truest senses of the word. He embodied the truest and deepest of Christian and humane values. It was an agony to him that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples had been embroiled in such a horrific, appalling war by sinister outside forces.
Ed Lozansky was a big man and the best of men. And he cannot be replaced. But we were blessed to have him among us for so long.
