Early Life
Vladimir Pozner was born on April 1, 1934 in Paris to a Russian-Jewish father, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Pozner and 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 Marseilles in the Free Zone, Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon, before sailing back to America. 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 McCarthyism, Pozner Sr. began to have serious problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because of his pro-Soviet views and correctly suspected cooperation with the Soviet intelligence services. The documents which conclusively proved the secret service connections of his father were published in 1996 in the USA. As a result, the Pozners intended to return to France, but Pozner Sr., was refused a French visa after being denounced to the French Foreign Ministry as a "subversive element" and a "spy". So, the Pozners moved in 1948 to the Soviet sector of Berlin where Pozner Sr. was offered a position with "SovExportFilm", an international distributor of Soviet films. At some point Pozner Jr. claimed to have stayed behind in New York, attending Columbia College between 1950 and December 1953, however there appears to be no record of him at Columbia; currently he tells of attending a Russian military-style high school in Berlin run by the Soviet Military Administration during that time.
Later, in 1952, the family moved to Moscow.
In 1953 Pozner enrolled at Moscow State University, Faculty of Biology and Soil Science, majoring in human physiology. He graduated in 1958.
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