Joyce Lasky Reed, author who championed Faberge legacy, dies

WASHINGTON - Joyce Lasky Reed, a well-traveled author and editor who became a foreign policy adviser in Washington and spent two decades guiding a cultural foundation focused on the legacy of the czarist-era goldsmith and jeweler Peter Carl Faberge, died Sunday at Georgetown University Hospital. She was 76 and had cancer.

Lasky Reed was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. She graduated in 1952 from Barnard College and married Anatole Shub, who edited the New Leader, a liberal anti-Communist magazine.

Her husband became an editor at The New York Times and then a Washington Post correspondent in Bonn, Germany, and Moscow. They eventually divorced. She later wrote that they were expelled from the Soviet Union in 1969 after her husband had written articles that "had given displeasure" to the foreign ministry. Her husband had been given 24 hours' notice to leave. "The authorities," she wrote, "gave me a fortnight's grace to give notice to my own Moscow-based job, gather up (my) children and pack."

Within a few years, they had settled in Washington, where she wrote a novel, "Moscow by Nightmare" (1973), which was critical of Russian life and featured the wife of a foreign correspondent as its protagonist. She based the plot on her knowledge of cultural dissidents, mostly artists she had known.

Around this time, she began working as a foreign policy assistant on Capitol Hill, eventually joining the staff of then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.). She spent most of the 1980s as a State Department special adviser.

The last two decades of Lasky Reed's life were dedicated to the Faberge Arts Foundation, a nonprofit foundation she and a Washington friend started in 1990. Now called the St. Petersburg Conservancy, the group works to preserve the cultural heritage of that Russian city and in particular the works of one of its most famous artists, Faberge.