Early life (1491) in
Moscow, where Vassiliev was born Vassiliev was born in
Moscow,
Russian SFSR on May 1, 1962. He joined the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1983 while he was a student at
Moscow State University (MGU). He graduated from MGU with a degree in
journalism in 1984. Vassiliev worked in the international department of
Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communists' Truth) from 1984 to 1985. In 1985, he became a student in the
Andropov Red Banner Institute of the KGB of the
Soviet Union (USSR), completing his studies there in 1987.
Soviet intelligence symbol Vassiliev worked as an operative of the First (American) Department of the
First Chief Directorate of the KGB from 1987 to 1990. Kobaladze asked Vassiliev to participate in a book project with
Crown Publishers, a division of
Random House, which had arranged for a five-book series based upon KGB archival documents, each edited by one Russian and one American editor. Although having misgivings, Vassiliev finally agreed to work on a book dealing with Soviet Espionage in America in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the project. Vassiliev quit his television job and in early 1994 began to work on the book project in earnest, working with archival documents provided at the press bureau of the SVR. Although locked up in a safe each night with the archival material, no one checked what he was writing and Vassiliev was allowed to take notebooks home as he filled one and brought in another. Vassiliev later recalled that he attempted to transcribe as many documents as possible verbatim and painstakingly noted archival file and document numbers for each. The writing of draft chapters for Vassiliev's first book,
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — The Stalin Era, began in 1995, with each vetted by the SVD Declassification Commission, the head of the archives department, and Kobaladze. Many cover names were already well known in the United States, and Weinstein had little difficulty understanding who was who and retained control over the final draft. A conservative nationalistic restoration seemed to be in the offing, headed by Russian Presidential candidate
Gennady Ziuganov. Adding to the difficulty, Crown Publishing found it necessary to cancel the five volume book deal for financial reasons, throwing the entire project into doubt. Copies of his draft chapters for
The Haunted Wood were transferred to computer disks and some key documents were transcribed prior to their leaving. The resulting book based upon these materials was published in the United States by Random House in 1999. The years 2001 to 2003 were filled with two legal actions related to
The Haunted Wood. After losing his cases in June 2003, Vassiliev took some time away from the bitter subject which had taken the last ten years of his life.
Wikipedia and new research In 2005, Vassiliev became interested in
Wikipedia and decided to check the article for
Alger Hiss to see how accurate it was. At the end of the article was an
external link to the
website of historian
John Earl Haynes, on which Vassiliev found a document in his own handwriting which he had introduced at his London trial, along with some comments questioning the accuracy of the document. Vassiliev wrote a letter to Haynes attempting to set the matter straight — and a book collaboration project was born. Vassiliev managed to recover his original notebooks with transcriptions and summaries of secret Soviet foreign intelligence archival documents, and these served as the core of a second publication. In May 2009,
Yale University Press published
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, co-authored by Haynes, Vassiliev, and
Harvey Klehr of
Emory University, another widely recognized scholar in the field of American communist history. Upon completion of the project, Vassiliev donated his original notebooks to the U.S.
Library of Congress. {{cite book
BBC and publishing Vassiliev worked in the
BBC Russian Service as an online producer from 2000 to 2009. He served as a co-publisher, editor, and designer of
The Hyde Park, a Russian magazine in London, from 2004 to 2006. In 2009, Vassiliev published his first novel, an espionage thriller called
Russian Sector in both Russian-language and English-language editions. In 2014, he published
Oblik (
Look) in Russian only. He continues to work in publishing as designer, editor, producer, and publisher. {{cite web ==Legal battles==