Marjorie Farquharson
Marjorie Milne Farquharson (11 August 1953—13 May 2016) was a political scientist and human rights worker. For over 25 years, she worked on human rights in many contexts, including the United Nations at Geneva and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. She reported on human trafficking, statelessness, sexual minorities, detention and torture. A fluent Russian speaker, Marjorie covered the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1992. After the breakup of the USSR in December 1991 she dealt with similar issues in Russia, Ukraine and all five Central Asian states. She also spent a year covering the aftermath of Yugoslavia's disintegration, monitoring human rights violations in Bosnia Herzegovina. Early life and education Marjorie Farquharson was born in Glasgow on 11 August 1953, one of Nellie Milne and Alexander Farquharson's three children. She studied from 1971 to 1976 at St Andrews University in Fife, Scotland, first visiting Moscow as a student in 1975. The following year she was awarded two prizes by the university — the Departmental Prize for Russian and the James Steuart University Prize for Economics — and graduated with a first class MA degree in Soviet Political Sciences. Life's Work Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko: Stagnation in the USSR, 1978-1984 In 1978,