Marjorie Farquharson
Marjorie Milne Farquharson (11 August 1953—13 May 2016) was a political scientist and human rights worker. For over 25 years, she worked on human rights in many contexts, including the United Nations at Geneva and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. She reported on human trafficking, statelessness, sexual minorities, detention and torture. A fluent Russian speaker, Marjorie covered the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1992. After the breakup of the USSR in December 1991 she dealt with similar issues in Russia, Ukraine and all five Central Asian states. She also spent a year covering the aftermath of Yugoslavia's disintegration, monitoring human rights violations in Bosnia Herzegovina. Early life and education Marjorie Farquharson was born in Glasgow on 11 August 1953, one of Nellie Milne and Alexander Farquharson's three children. She studied from 1971 to 1976 at St Andrews University in Fife, Scotland, first visiting Moscow as a student in 1975. The following year she was awarded two prizes by the university — the Departmental Prize for Russian and the James Steuart University Prize for Economics — and graduated with a first class MA degree in Soviet Political Sciences. Life's Work Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko: Stagnation in the USSR, 1978-1984 In 1978, Marjorie started working with Amnesty International in London as a researcher on the USSR. She was responsible for building up contacts for information among unofficial and official sources and writing Amnesty International's primary research materials on the region, based on her own assessment of the reliability of the material. A key source of information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union, by reason of its "scope, detail and accuracy", was A Chronicle of Current Events, an underground bulletin "produced regularly in typewritten samizdat form inside the Soviet Union and circulated on the chain-letter principle" between April 1968 and August 1983. It appeared in English from 1971 onwards, but Amnesty had ceased to publish the translated version of the Chronicle when Marjorie joined the organisation. Over the next six years, she helped oversee the prompt translation and publication of the Chronicle, and made sure that key "missing issues" from 1976 to 1977, which documented the emergence of the Helsinki Groups, and their treatment by the Soviet authorities, also appeared in English, even if at some delay, in January 1979. As those whose fate was documented in the Chronicle and those who gathered the information it published came under increasing pressure, Marjorie's determination to make a wider circle of people aware of what was happening in the USSR — during détente, after the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, following the imposition of martial law in Poland (December 1981) — proved wholly justified. The last issue of the Chronicle appeared in Moscow in August 1983. When she returned to Moscow in 1991 she met many of the dissidents and rights activists described in the pages of the Chronicle; later still she would write their obituaries for the British and Scottish press. Gorbachev: glasnost and "perestroika", 1985-1992 Marjorie saw the opportunity provided by