Amy Knight

Amy Knight is an American historian and scholar of Russian and East European politics, long a fellow at the Wilson Center and professor at Carleton University. Her books — including Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, The Kremlin's Noose and Putin's Ghost — dissect the KGB after Stalin and the Putin security-adjacent network that governs Russia.

Knight's research is archival and deeply informed by the Soviet security services' own records. Her The Kremlin's Noose maps Yeltsin's reliance on the security establishment, and her later writing was among the first to explain the upward march of Russian intelligence influence — themes now vindicated by the Putin era.