Vladimir Vladimirovich Pozner (; born 1 April 1934) is a French-born Russian-American journalist and presenter. He is best known in the West for his television appearances representing and explaining the views of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He was memorable as a spokesman for the Soviets in part because he grew up in the United States and speaks fluent English, Russian and French. Pozner later described his role as propaganda. After the Cold War, Pozner moved to the United States to work with Phil Donahue, before returning to Moscow to continue working as a television journalist. From 2008 until 2022, he hosted the eponymous show Pozner on Russia's Channel One where he interviewed public figures. Early life and education Vladimir Pozner was born in Paris on 1 April 1934, to a Russian Jewish father, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Pozner, and a French Catholic mother, Géraldine Lutten. The couple separated shortly after his birth. When Vladimir was 3 months old, he and his mother moved to New York City, where Géraldine's mother and younger sister lived. In the spring of 1939 Pozner's parents reunited and the family returned to Paris, France. After the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of France the Pozners fled Paris in the fall of 1940, traveling via Marseille in the Free Zone, Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon, before sailing back to the US. The escape was partially financed by a Jewish family whose adult daughter traveled with the Pozners disguised as Vladimir's nanny. Back in New York, Vladimir attended Caroline Pratt's City and Country School and later Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Robert Hollander, an elementary school friend of Pozner, remembered him most vividly for "his capacities for, one, having extraordinarily attractive fantasies and, two, for getting the rest of us to believe them." In 1946, with the advent of what later came to be called McCarthyism, Pozner senior began to have serious problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because of his pro-Soviet views and alleged cooperation with the Soviet intelligence services. The documents that conclusively proved the secret service connections of his father were published in 1996 in the United States, as part of the Venona project files. As a result, the Pozners intended to return to France, but Pozner senior was refused a French visa after being denounced to the French Foreign Ministry as a "subversive element" and a spy. The family