Natalie Grant Wraga


Natalie Grant Wraga, née Natalya Konstantinovna Mark was a Russian-born American Sovietologist.

Early life

Grant was born in Revel in the family of a Tsarist Circuit Court judge. In 1917, when Grant was 16, her family fled the Russian Revolution, moving to the United States. In the early 1920s she acquired American citizenship after marrying American citizen Malcolm Grant, although the couple divorced shortly thereafter.

Career

She worked for the American Relief Administration in 1923, moving later to Riga, Latvia, to work at the American legation there as a translator and analyst, where he stayed from 1928 to 1939. Throughout the 1950s she was employed as a Sovietologist for the U.S. Department of State. where Grant became "an expert in unmasking Soviet deception methods". In 1959 Grant married former Polish intelligence chief Jerzy Niezbrzycki, with whom she collaborated in her work. During the 1960s Grant moved to Menlo Park, California, and worked for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During her life Grant was considered an authority on one of the most important Soviet deception operations of the interwar period, Operation Trust, a phony opposition group established by the GPU in the 1920s which fed false information to Russian émigrés and foreign opponents of the new Soviet régime. Grant's work has, however, been criticised more recently, with Stanford professor Lazar Fleishman describing her articles on Trust as "teeming with false claims" and some of her conclusions "extravagant".

Disinformation studies

Grant and her husband studied cases of Soviet deception operations for decades, calling attention to what is now referred as information warfare or fake news, but which can be considered a practice dating back to well before the emergence of the Soviet Union. Grant's book Disinformation: Soviet Political Warfare, 1917-1992 was published in 2020.

Essays and other works