E.W. Stevens; Eminent Moscow Reporter

Edmund W. Stevens, the Pulitzer-Prize winning dean of the Moscow press corps who covered the Soviet Union for half a century, died Sunday in Moscow after a stroke.

Stevens, 81, worked for a variety of British and American publications starting in the late 1930s, battling Soviet censors under dictator Josef Stalin and building a formidable network of contacts.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1950 for “Russia Uncensored,” a series on life under Stalin. Stevens first went to the Soviet Union in 1934 after graduating from Columbia University. In 1935, he married a Russian woman and lived in a communal apartment with three other families during the terror of Stalin’s purges.