Interview with Jaroslaw Martyniuk, author of “Monte Rosa: Memoir of an Accidental Spy”

Jaroslaw (Slavko) Martyniuk is a retired energy economist and sociologist. He was born in Ukraine at the start of World War II. His family made a narrow escape from Communism and settled in Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany. Eventually, the family emigrated to Chicago in the U.S. Some members of his extended family who remained in Ukraine ended up in the Gulag in the Soviet Union. Martyniuk worked for Amoco Oil in Chicago, and in 1979, his oil industry experience led him to a diplomatic post with the International Energy Agency in Paris. In the mid-eighties, in a career switch, he joined the Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research team coordinating a network of fifty interviewers conducting specialized research with Soviet visitors on behalf of Radio Liberty. In 1991 he relocated to Munich, and in 1995 moved to Washington, where he was responsible for opinion polling in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union until he retired in 2011. He speaks five languages and traveled to fifty countries in Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 2018 Martyniuk published his memoir “Monte Rosa: Memoir of an Accidental Spy.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaroslaw-roman-martyniuk-60217846/