Violet Conolly (1899–1988)

Violet Conolly was born at Fernville, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland. She attended convent schools and graduated from University College Dublin with a bachelor's degree in 1921. She moved to London, where she worked as a teacher and studied Russian and Italian in the evenings at London University. Later she traveled to Spain, working there as a governess, and then to Germany.

From 1925 to 1930, she worked for the League of Nations in Paris. While working for the Institute of Current Affairs from 1930 to 1932, she was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard) and Geneva, Switzerland, where she attended the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales. In 1932, she began working as a researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London under Professor Arnold J. Toynbee. Conolly received a two-year Rockefeller scholarship to study Persian at the University of Berlin, and later toured the Middle East. She lived for a time in the Soviet Union studying economics, and returned to Chatham House in 1938. She was appointed to the Foreign Office in London, and it was her work there during World War II that led to her specialization in Soviet affairs. She was appointed head of the Soviet (Russian) section of the research department at the Foreign Office after the war, and held this position until she retired in 1965. From 1946 to 1947, and again in 1952 to 1953, she served as an economic attaché to the British embassy in Moscow. Many of her writings have become standard texts, including her 1933 book Soviet Economic Policy in the East. Encouraged to write a further volume, she wrote Soviet Trade from the Pacific to the Levant, published in 1935. For her research, she combed through Soviet files and cross-checked with published statistics, monitoring the Soviet press for inadvertent disclosures. She also wrote Soviet Tempo, a Journal of Travel in Russia (1937), Beyond the Urals (1967), and Russia Enters the 20th century, 1894–1917 (1971). Her 1975 book Siberia, Today and Tomorrow confirmed her as an authority on Siberian issues. In 1968, she was awarded the Percy Sykes Memorial Medal from the Royal Central Asian Society, of which she was a member.