Violet Conolly

Dr Violet Marie Rose Conolly OBE (11 May 1899 – 11 January 1988) was an Irish authority on Soviet Russia and a traveller.

Early life and family Violet Conolly was born at Fernville, Glasnevin on 11 May 1899. She was the eldest of the six children of Thomas Conolly, a master builder, and Teresa (née McQuaid). She had four sisters and one brother. She attended the Holy Faith Convent, Glasnevin, and the Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham. She graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in 1921. She moved to London working as a teacher, learning Russian and Italian in the evenings at London University. Later she traveled to Spain, working there as a governess, and then to Germany.

Conolly continued her research in economic matters after her retirement in 1965. The Foreign Office frequently consulted her on affairs relating to Soviet policy. Many of her publications became standard texts, including her 1933 Soviet economic policy in the East: Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Tana Tuva, Sin Kiang. 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 the disclosures of the special correspondent who almost invariably let the cat out of the bag of fiction". She went on to write Soviet tempo, a journal of travel in Russia (1937), Beyond the Urals (1967), and Russia enters the twentieth century 1894–1917 (1971). Theodore Shabad praised her "perceptive sifting of Soviet data" and her use of Soviet periodicals and regional papers. Her 1975 Siberia, today and tomorrow confirmed her as an authority on Siberian issues, leading her to be one of the 12 scholars invited to University of Lancaster for the founding conference of the British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar.

She received an honorary D.Econ.Sc. in 1936 from the National University of Ireland. She was awarded the Percy Sykes memorial medal from the Royal Central Asian Society in 1968, of which she was a member.