Peter Vronsky is an investigative historian, author, filmmaker and new media artist. He holds a Ph.d. in the history of espionage in international relations and criminal justice history from the University of Toronto. He was born in Canada and has been shooting and producing investigative documentaries and independent films since 1975.
Peter Vronsky is the author of a true-crime history bestseller, Serial Killers: The Method and Mandness of Monsters (Berkley Books – Penguin Group, 2004.) The sequel Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters was published by Berkley Penguin in 2007. His current book based on his doctoral dissertation is Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada (Allen Lane – Penguin Random House Canada, 2011) a controversial study of the hidden history of Canada’s first modern battle.
He worked extensively in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Middle-East, South Africa and in Canada and USA producing and directing numerous cutting edge investigative
documentary television specials on subjects ranging from early punk rock and flashback syndrome in Vietnam war veterans to organized crime and nuclear materials smuggling in the break-away regions of the former Soviet Union.
Peter Vronsky is the creator of a body of formal video art works exhibited in the 1980s internationally, a former Sony Corporation Artist-in-Residence, and a cited historian of Lee Harvey Oswald’s journey to the USSR in 1959-1962.
Vronsky earned a Ph.D. in the History Department of the University of Toronto in the fields of criminal justice history and intelligence in international relations. His doctoral thesis, “Combat, Memory and Remembrance in Confederation Era Canada: The Hidden History of the Battle of Ridgeway, June 2, 1866” on the origins of the Canadian secret services during the Civil War era and the Fenian Crisis in Canada focuses on the 1866 battle near Fort Erie, Ontario fought by Canadian volunteers to stop a 1000 strong invasion force of heavily armed Fenian Irish-American insurgents. The dissertation was published in 2011 by Penguin Books as Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the Forgotten 1866 Battle That Made Canada, a volume in their Canadian History series, edited by Robert Bothwell and Margaret Macmillan.
Vronsky currently lectures in international relations history, the American Civil War, terrorism and the history of the Third Reich at Ryerson University.
Vronsky is the producer-writer-director of the acclaimed feature documentary about underground Stalinism in the last days of Soviet Russia: Mondo Moscow: The Art & Magic of Not Being There (1992), produced for TV Ontario and broadcast in City-TV’s primetime movie slot for four years running. He was the director of Crash’n’Burn (1977)–an early look at Punk Rock in Toronto and on the road in New York.
He was the co-writer of the National Film Board of Canada feature documentary The Un-Canadians (1996). Vronsky is also the director of a dramatic feature film: Bad Company (1978).
In between his own independent productions, Peter Vronsky has worked as a production manager, line producer, director of photography and new media artist. He field-produced Venice and Adriatic Region coverage for CNN and shot undercover and hidden camera sequences for CTV’s W5 and CBC’s The Fifth Estate, investigative TV programs.
Vronsky’s last undercover shoot took him to the troubled breakaway republic of Chechnya, where his hidden cameras documented the secret market for nuclear weapons materials for a CTV-Discovery Channel USA-FujiTv-ORF Stornoway Productions co-production of The Hunt For Red Mercury (1993).
Vronsky was the Director of Photography on I’ll Fly Away Home (2004) and Life Could Be A Dream (2002), feature documentaries for Bravo Canada/Bravo USA.
In 2000 Vronsky was the founding Bureau Chief of the Queens Park/Toronto Bureau of Epress.ca, Canada’s first officially accredited internet streaming video news portal. Later that year he joined GlobalNetFinancial.com, a Los Angeles-based global investment streaming video news and online trading platform with sites in Europe and North America, where he was their Broadband Content Specialist. GlobalNetFinancial perished in the 2001 dot-com stock market collapse. Vronsky is highly experienced in convergence of television and video with the Internet, non-linear interactive scripting and online streaming content design.
In 1997-2000 Vronsky was the Head of Documentary and English Language Production in Italy for Panavideo, a service producer for RAI, the Italian national television broadcasting network. Vronsky produced live and taped television broadcasts in the Venice region and is an expert on the logistics of film and video production management in the water-bound city.
Vronsky has extensive international production experience as a producer, director and/or director of photography on locations in Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, UK, Austria, former Yugoslavia, Jamaica, South Africa, and in North America.
Peter Vronsky’s 1991-1992 research and journey to the USSR to locate a series of never-before-interviewed witnesses to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s life there is a subject in professor John Newman’s academic study of Oswald’s alleged CIA connections (Oswald and the CIA.) The results of Vronsky’s research and interviews have been featured in numerous books and television programs, including Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, Vincent Bugliosi’s 2007 Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, best-selling author David Lifton’s upcoming biography of Oswald, and PBS’s definitive 1993 television biography of Oswald produced by Frontline. Vronsky maintains an often cited website focusing on Oswald’s life in the USSR and is a recognized authority on Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the USSR.
(See: Lee Harvey Oswald In Russia Website )
Vronsky has more than twenty years of experience in the field of digital new media, starting with his role as Artist-in-Residence at the Sony Corporation in 1983-85 where he experimented with Sony’s then state-of-the-art digital graphics and interactive laser optical systems. He created a number of formal experimental video art works and new media installations, exhibited internationally and in Canada, including a group showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at Canada House in London, England.
Peter Vronsky is fluent in English, Russian and Italian, and currently resides in Toronto Canada and Venice Italy.
His main website is www.petervronsky.org
Pavel Golovachev, took this photograph some time in the early summer of 1961, two or three months after Marina and Lee Oswald were married.
The individual referred is must be Dr. Alexis Davison, whose mother’s, (Natalia Alekseevna Belimisheva Davison) address in Atlanta was discovered in Oswald’s address book. [CE 18] Natalia Alekseevana arrived in the USA with her father after the Russian Civil War but she returned to the Soviet Union in 1924. There she met and married the father of Alexis Davison, a US Red Cross official. 
On the morning of October 28, 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald was released from the Botkinskaya Hospital. Instead of being returned to his previous lodgings at the Hotel Berlin, he was booked into the nearby Metropole Hotel. The art-deco era Metropole is arguably one of Moscow’s most luxurious old-style hotels. Oswald was given Room 233 (the numbering system had been changed since then) a second floor luxury suite with a balcony overlooking the Bolshoi Ballet and Sverdlov Square. ( In his diary, written much later than the events taking place, Oswald wrote that he was in “Room 214.” He was mistaken.) KGB headquarters, where Oswald’s fate was being discussed was three blocks away within view of the hotel. Oswald was charged 30 rubles a day for his room, which he paid out of a fund of 800 rubles he had remaining.
The US Embassy was then and is still today located on Tchaikovsky Street, a section of the multi-lane “Ring Road” which encircles the inner zone of Moscow. It is a nine story building occupied by the US since 1953. It would come to house roughly one hundred American embassy staff and almost the same number of Soviet employees — all without exception, KGB agents or full-time KGB officers. 
Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions inside the US embassy on October 31, are outside the scope of my research. I found no Russian witnesses who could enlighten me as to what transpired inside. According to the official history, Oswald presented himself to Consul Richard Snyder and declared his intention to renounce his citizenship. Snyder, according to his testimony, stalled Oswald by saying he did not have the necessary papers on hand to accept Oswald’s renunciation. Snyder interviewed Oswald for approximately an hour, extracting from him his mother’s address back in the USA, the motives for his defection and information on his arrival route. At some point in the interview, Snyder asked Oswald if he was willing to serve the Soviet state. Oswald’s unfortunate reply was cabled back to the State Department that weekend : 
In the end, Oswald was told by Snyder to return to the embassy on Monday if he wanted to follow through in renouncing his citizenship. The frustrated Oswald abandoned his passport with Snyder and departed. Oswald would not return to the embassy until two years later, after he began the process of returning home to the USA. Overall, Oswald’s appearance at the embassy remains a strange event with multiple layers of possible explanations.