Expert on Soviets, VOA Broadcaster

Yuri Olkhovsky, 79, a retired Sovietologist at George Washington University and a broadcaster for the Voice of America, died of cancer June 7 at his home in Arlington.

Dr. Olkhovsky began working as a Russian language instructor at the National Security Agency in 1957 and joined the GWU faculty in 1962. He taught Russian language, literature and culture and served several terms as chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature until his retirement in 1998.

In 1968, he founded a Soviet area studies program at GWU, conducted entirely in Russian, for Defense Department linguists. He was affiliated with the program until 1992.

During the 1970s and '80s, he was actively involved in support of Soviet dissidents and often lobbied lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in support of efforts to make it easier for dissidents to leave the Soviet Union.

From 1964 to 1983, he worked part time as a broadcaster and writer for the Russian Service of Voice of America, and in 1983, he took a two-year leave from GWU to be deputy director of Radio Liberty in Munich. Radio Liberty was a government-funded station established during the Cold War to broadcast behind the Iron Curtain.

When Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974, he told reporters that he had been amazed at the amount of straight news on Voice of America. The broadcaster he often heard was Dr. Olkhovsky.

Yuri Andreyevich Olkhovsky was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, on June 22, 1930. His father, a musicologist and historian, was chairman of the musicology department at the Kiev State Conservatory until 1941, when the occupying German army banished the family to a labor camp in Germany.

Instead of returning to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, the Olkhovskys remained in a displaced-persons camp until immigrating to the United States in 1949.

The family settled in Utica, N.Y. Dr. Olkhovsky's father went to work making T-shirts in a Mohawk factory, and his mother found work in a Chinese laundry. Dr. Olkhovsky, known as George, became a farmworker, and picked strawberries.

He became a U.S. citizen in 1953 and served in the Army's 101st Airborne Division at Camp Breckinridge and Fort Knox. He became the division's senior linguist.

After his discharge, he received a bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degree in 1959, both in history from the University of Minnesota. He received his doctorate in Russian history from Georgetown University in 1968.

His book "Vladimir Stasov and Russian National Culture" (1983) was about a Russian author who wrote extensively on music.

In 1941, the invading German army destroyed an about-be-published book that Dr. Olkhovsky's father had written. In 2005, Dr. Olkhovsky was able to fulfill a death-bed promise to his father by editing and updating the manuscript and publishing the book, a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian music.

Dr. Olkhovsky's marriages to Eugenie de Smitt and Alice Luck ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 10 years, Irina Graschenko Olkhovsky of Arlington; a son from his first marriage, Paul Olkhovsky of Arlington; three children from his second marriage, Alexander Olkhovsky, Tara Olkhovsky and Gregory Olkhovsky, all of Tampa; two stepchildren, Irene Loschert of Summit, N.J., and Eugene Brodetski of Alexandria; and three grandchildren.