Pioneering woman reporter who covered Soviet life dies at 93

Colette Shulman died peacefully in hospice care on June 20, 2026, at 93.

Born in New York City in 1932, Shulman studied at Wellesley College before beginning graduate work at Columbia University’s Russian Institute in 1953, when few women were enrolled there. She went to Moscow in 1955, two years after Joseph Stalin’s death, after the American Embassy to the USSR recruited her to teach at and direct the Anglo-American School in Moscow. She lived at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence, before joining the United Press International Moscow bureau at the invitation of correspondent Henry Shapiro.

Shulman was the only American woman registered with the Soviet Press Department as a full-time correspondent. She lived and worked in Moscow from 1955 to 1959, with three months in Poland, covering a period when Nikita Khrushchev was consolidating power and Soviet life was opening unevenly after Stalin.

After returning to the United States in 1959, Shulman became a United Press correspondent at the United Nations. In the 1960s, she researched, wrote and presented Soviet Press This Week, and she also wrote and narrated The Unfinished Revolution, a documentary filmed in Moscow on the eve of the Soviet Union’s fiftieth anniversary. Her later work included editing We the Russians: Voices from Moscow and creating the women’s magazine We/Myi, translated as You and We, in the late Gorbachev years.

Shulman also helped found and chair the advisory council of the Project for Soviet Émigré Scholars, co-founded Women’s Dialogue U.S./U.S.S.R., and backed women’s organizations and civil society in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. She was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served on the Harriman Institute advisory council.