Edmund Stevens, born July 22, 1910, was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered the Soviet Union from the time of Stalin's purges to the reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Edmund Stevens was an outspoken critic of Soviet censorship and had a vast network of connections throughout the Soviet Union, where he lived for over 40 years. Journalism historians have acknowledged Stevens as the longest-serving American-born correspondent working from the Soviet Union.

After graduating from Columbia University in 1934, Stevens traveled to the Soviet Union in hopes of contributing to the Bolshevik cause as a translator and writer for the Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers in the Soviet Union. He began his journalism career with the Christian Science Monitor in 1939, where he was the publication's first journalist to cover fighting in World War II, reporting in Latvia, Finland, and Greece, as well as Russia.

In 1950, Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for "Russia Uncensored," a 34-part series in the Christian Science Monitor about life under Stalin. After a stint as a war reporter in North Africa, and as the head of the Christian Science Monitor's Mediterranean Bureau in Rome, Stevens returned to Russia (now under the control of Khruschev) in 1956, as a reporter for Look magazine. Stevens wrote in great detail about the process of de-Stalinization, as well as about the growth of the Russian arts and literature scene, led by authors such as Boris Pasternak.

In 1957, Stevens opened the Moscow Bureau for Time, Inc., where his work focused on the fall of Khruschev, with particular attention to the 1961 shooting down of a U-2 spy plane incident and the decline of censorship known as the "Khrushchev thaw." The collection contains a letter written by Stevens to Khrushchev, encouraging him to dismantle the Soviet censorship system, suggesting that it hindered Russia's relationships with other nations. Stevens' had a contentious relationship with the editors at Time, and resigned in 1963.

During the later years of his career, Stevens continued his relationships with the Christian Science Monitor and Manchester Guardian. His work was syndicated in eight other papers in the U.S. and Canada through Newsday until 1982. He wrote sporadically for the Times of London and Sunday Times until his death in 1992.