Victor Louis; Reporter Gave Soviet News to West

Victor Louis, a Soviet journalist responsible for disclosing several important stories on Soviet developments to the West, has died in London, it was reported Monday.

Louis was 64 and died Saturday of a heart attack after surgery in a London hospital, his family told Reuters news agency.

In 1964, he was the first to report the ouster of Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. He also sold a West German newspaper videotapes of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, made while Sakharov was in forced exile in the closed city of Gorky.

Louis’ ability to provide information on what went on inside the Kremlin led some to accuse him of being a Soviet agent. He always denied it.

In recent years, he lived in considerable style with his English-born wife, Jennifer, at a dacha outside Moscow. He came to Britain for medical treatment, and had a liver transplant several years ago.

Louis was born in Moscow in 1928 and was educated at the university there. He fell afoul of the Stalinist government, and was sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan for alleged spying for the West and dealing in the black market.

His parents reportedly died in Soviet labor camps during World War II.

Louis survived his exile, and his fluent English won him free-lance work with German and British newspapers.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Louis was the only Soviet citizen accredited in Moscow as correspondent for a Western, non-Communist newspaper, the Evening News of London.

He became an expert on stories about dissidents and is credited with bringing the manuscript of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Cancer Ward” to Western attention.