Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick, also known under her pen name and virtual worlds pseudonym "Prokofy Neva", is a former human rights activist, Russian–English translator, former journalist, and a blogger and commentator. She has worked for several human rights NGOs, and is a former research director at Human Rights Watch, the former editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's radio magazine "(Un)Civil Societies," and the former Executive Director and Chief Representative to the United Nations of the International League for Human Rights. She has written on psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. She has translated 30 Russian books by authors such as Joseph Stalin, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and several USSR Politburo members.

Education

She studied Slavic studies at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto from 1974 to 1978, and area studies at Leningrad State University from 1978 to 1979.

Professional career

She has worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where she was the editor of the weekly radio magazine "(Un)Civil Societies" from 2003 She has been the Executive Director of the International League for Human Rights, the program director for the former Soviet countries, as well as the UN representative of the International League for Human Rights.

She was research director for Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch' European and Central Asian Division from 1981 to 1990. She was a member of the advisory board of Civil Society International.

Fitzpatrick is currently a blogger and translator specializing in human rights issues in the former Soviet Union.

Involvement in Second Life Catherine Fitzpatrick has also been involved with virtual worlds for several years. She was a resident of the city of Alphaville in The Sims Online, under the avatar name "Dyerbrook". Since 2004, she has been a controversial resident of Second Life, under the avatar name "Prokofy Neva". Her endeavours in Second Life have been mentioned in The New York Times She later updated her blog to note that the developers in question had not worked on the ORCA project, but on other digital media-related areas of the campaign. Fitzpatrick is a registered member of the Democratic Party.

Selected publications Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Moscow's independent peace movement, U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1982 Mary Jane Camejo & Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Violations of the Helsinki accords, Yugoslavia, Helsinki Watch report, Human Rights Watch, 1986, , Ludmila Alekseeva & Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Nyeformaly: Civil society in the USSR, Helsinki Watch report, 1990, , Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, USSR: human rights under glasnost, Human Rights Watch, 1989 Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Psychiatric Abuse in the Soviet Union, Human Rights Watch, 1990, ,

Selected translations Tatiana Mamonova (ed.), Women and Russia : feminist writings from the Soviet Union, Beacon Press, 1984, trans. by Rebecca Park and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, , Leo Timofeyev, Russia's Secret Rulers, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Alexander Yakovlev, translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, Yale University Press (1993), hardcover, ; trade paperback, Lightning Source, UK, Ltd. (17 November 2004) Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present, and Future, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia, Random House, 1994, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Michael Scammell (ed.), The Solzhenitsyn Files, IL Edition Q, 1995, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Zhirinovsky: The Paradoxes of Russian Fascism, London : Viking, 1995, Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Michele A. Berdy, Dobrochna Dyrcz-Freeman, and Marian Schwartz (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996) The unknown Lenin, Yale University Press, 1996, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, , First person: an astonishingly frank self-portrait by Russia's president, PublicAffairs, 2000, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, ,