Maxwell, Robert

Born in 1923 in the Transcarpathian town of Solotvino , which at that time was part of Czechoslovakia , in the Orthodox Jewish family Mehla Khokh and Khana Shlomovich. The spoken language in the family was Yiddish . After the Hungarian occupation of Transcarpathia in 1939, he moved to Romania through Romania and Yugoslavia. Most of his family members (grandfather, father, mother and three sisters) and relatives who remained in Solotvyno were deported to Auschwitz and killed there by the Nazis during the Holocaust .

Since the beginning of the Second World War in March 1940, he fought in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion and the Czech division as part of the French army. In 1940 he arrived in the UK and joined the British army as a volunteer. By April 1944, he was a sergeant and commander of the battalion unit of snipers.

He participated in the landing in Normandy as part of the 3th Royal Infantry Regiment, in battle he replaced the deceased officer. For courage and skillful command January 6, 1945 received the rank of lieutenant. March 5, 1945 was awarded the Military Cross. In 1945, he married French Protestant Eliabet Maynar, with whom he had nine children.

After the war, Maxwell, naturalized as a British subject on June 19, 1946, served in the army until 1947 and retired with the rank of captain.

One of the main organizers of the operation to ensure the supply of arms from Czechoslovakia to Israel in 1948 .

Publishing Business

After the end of World War II, Maxwell served in the British information service in the British sector of occupied Berlin. This allowed him to establish contacts with German publishers and editors. After being discharged from military service in 1947, Maxwell started his own business. Springer has been distributing magazines in England.

Founder (with Paul Rosbaud in 1948) and president of Pergamon Press . He briefly lost control of him in 1969, but returned in 1974.

In 1964-1970, Labor Party member of the United Kingdom, Buckingham County. Having lost a candidate from the Conservative Party in the 1970 elections, he unsuccessfully tried to regain his seat in the two elections in 1974.

Also unsuccessfully in 1969, he tried to acquire the News of the World tabloid, but its owners, the Carrow family, did not want to allow the ownership of the “Czechoslovak immigrant”, who was considered a “socialist”, and eventually sold the newspaper to the conservative Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch , including the same year, The Sun , who also took possession, was also interested in Maxwell.

Chairman of the newspaper company Mirror Group Newspapers from 1984 to 1991.

Chairman of the publishing house Macmillan from 1988 to 1991.

His empire also included the publisher of computer games Mirrorsoft in England and the publisher of computer games Spectrum Holobyte in the USA .

In 1990, Maxwell began publishing The European . In the same 1990, he participated in the purchase by a group of Western investors of a Hungarian newspaper through affiliated persons Magyar Hírlap . ^[6]

Socialist Activities

Maxwell published a series of laudatory biographies and autobiographies of the leaders of socialist countries.

In 1985, Maxwell published the biography of Todor Zhivkov . In 1987, Zhivkov allowed Maxwell to set up joint ventures in Bulgaria. In the press, Maxwell was accused of helping Todor Zhivkov, Andrei Lukanov and Ognyan Doinov illegally withdraw large amounts of public funds to overseas accounts. ^[7]

In 1981, the publishing house Maxwell published Erich Honecker 's autobiography, “Out of My Life”. ^[eight]

In 1983, the biography of Ceausescu "Nicolae Ceausescu: the builder of modern Romania and an international statesman." ^[9]

In 1985, under the editorship of Maxwell, a book of Wojciech Jaruzelski's selected speeches was published, which included an interview taken by Maxwell from Jaruzelski.

Activities in the USSR

Since 1949, Maxwell collaborated with the Soviet publishing house The International Book .

Pergamon has published books of selected speeches and articles by Brezhnev ^[10] , Suslova ^[11] , Chernenko, Gromyko ^[12] , the English translation of Anatoly Karpov ’s book Chess Is My Life, Sport in the Soviet Union by Victor Louis , Motorist Guide across the USSR ".

Pergamon Press published an English translation of Landau and Lifshitz’s Course in Theoretical Physics .

Maxwell was the exclusive foreign partner of the All-Union Copyright Agency . ^[13]

In 1979, Maxwell proposed to VINITI to create a joint Soviet-British enterprise and organize the translation of abstracts of all or at least the most significant articles from Russian to English for distribution on a commercial basis in the West. Maxwell also wanted to organize a database of factual information in the field of chemistry that would be a competitor to the Chemical Abstracts Service databases. ^[14]

In 1981, he participated in the 3rd Moscow International Book Fair. ^[15]

I met with Brezhnev, Chernenko, Gorbachev. He knew well Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Bessmertnykh, Boris Pankin, Valentin Pavlov.

He participated in the publication of the magazine " Our Heritage ", which was published in England by Maxwell Communication Corporation. According to some information, Maxwell discussed issues of the publication of Our Heritage directly with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev.

Death

He was killed under unclear circumstances during a walk on the sea yacht. Buried in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives . Shortly after the mysterious death of Maxwell, it turned out that they had fraudulently appropriated about $ 600 million from pension funds and capital of subsidiary companies, as a result of which his two sons and several employees fell .

• Military Cross (1945)
• Order "Stara Planina" 1 class. 1983. ^[7]
• Honorary Doctor of Moscow University since 1983. ^[sixteen]
• Honorary Doctor of the New York Polytechnic Institute.
• Honorary Degree LLD, Temple University , 1988. ^[17]
• Fellow, Imperial College London , 1989. ^[18]

• Ivan Mashchenko. Media oligarch from Solotvin // Mirror of the week. - 2002. - № 34 (409) 7 - September 13 . Archived December 22, 2012.
• Leonid Sumarokov . Meet interesting people. Robert Maxwell.
• Robert Maxwell - the man who gave us the ZX Spectrum
• Steinberg M. Chapter 31. United Kingdom // Jews in the wars of millennia. - Moscow: Gesharim / Bridges of Culture, 2004. - p. 227. - 560 p. - ISBN 5932731540 .
• Robert Maxwell: an ordinary heart attack in exceptional circumstances
• Natalia Gevorkyan So was Maxwell a KGB agent?