"The First Soviet Defector"

One of my farcebook friends had posted this, and I shamelessly cribbed it from her.   And I did look into the book mentioned..."I Choose Freedom"  I would have bought the book, but too rich for my blood, but I do check out used book stores...maybe I will get lucky.

"Viktor Kravchenko walked out of the Soviet embassy in Washington and never came back.

April 1944. He took a train to New York. Disappeared into the city.

A few days later, he held a press conference at the New York Times. Told American reporters Stalin was a tyrant. The Soviet system was a lie.

He was 38. An engineer. A captain in the Red Army. A senior Soviet bureaucrat.

The first Soviet official to publicly defect.

He had a wife and a son back in Moscow. He would never see them again.

Stalin would spend the next 22 years trying to have him killed.

Here's how he got there.

Kravchenko was born in 1905 in Ukraine. His father was a railway worker and a revolutionary socialist.

He grew up believing in the revolution. Joined the Communist Party in 1929. Trained as a metallurgical engineer.

At engineering school he was friends with a young man named Leonid Brezhnev. The same Brezhnev who would later rule the Soviet Union.

Kravchenko rose fast. Ran steel mills. Got promoted to senior official in the war industry.

Then he saw what the system actually was.

1932-33. The Holodomor. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians starved to death.

Kravchenko was sent to villages to enforce grain seizures. Watched peasants die in their houses. Watched mothers go mad from hunger.

""People dying in solitude by slow degrees,"" he wrote later. ""Dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause.""

Then came the purges. Stalin's terror. Millions arrested. Shot. Sent to gulags.

Kravchenko's own friends started disappearing. Colleagues vanished overnight. He waited for his turn.

It never came. Instead, in 1943, he was sent to Washington with the Soviet Purchasing Commission. Job was to acquire American industrial equipment for the Soviet war effort.

He saw his chance.

For months he prepared. Studied English. Memorized the city. Planned his escape.

In April 1944, he slipped out of his Washington apartment. Took a train to New York. Held a press conference. Defected publicly.

The Soviets demanded he be returned immediately. Called him a traitor.

Ambassador Joseph Davies took Stalin's request directly to FDR.

FDR refused. Granted Kravchenko asylum.

He lived under a pseudonym for the next 22 years.

He started writing. A memoir about life inside Stalin's system. A first-person account of the famine, the purges, the gulags.

Published in 1946 as I Chose Freedom.

It became one of the most important books of the Cold War. Bestseller in over 20 countries. Translated into 22 languages. Republished 73 times in English alone.

The first major Western account of Stalin's crimes from a senior insider.

Stalin's response was immediate. The NKVD tracked Kravchenko's family in Ukraine. More than 30 of his relatives were arrested, harassed, or killed.

His Russian wife was forced to denounce him publicly. His son Valentin grew up branded ""son of a traitor to the motherland.""

But the most public attack came from France.

On November 13, 1947, the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises published an article titled ""How Kravchenko Was Manufactured.""

The piece claimed he was an alcoholic. A liar. A CIA stooge. That American intelligence had written the book, not him.

Les Lettres Françaises was a prestigious publication. Sartre had written for it. Paul Éluard. François Mauriac. The literary heart of the French left.

Kravchenko sued them for libel.

The trial opened in Paris on January 24, 1949. Lasted two months. Eighteen sessions. Over 100 witnesses.

Newspapers called it ""The Trial of the Century.""

The Soviet Union flew in his former colleagues. His ex-wife. His old bosses. They all accused him of being a traitor, a draft dodger, an embezzler.

A KGB officer testified that Kravchenko was mentally deficient. Kravchenko jumped to his feet.

""We are not in Moscow,"" he screamed. ""If you were not a witness, I'd tear your head off.""

Then his lawyers brought their witnesses.

Survivors of the gulag. Ukrainian refugees who had seen the famine.

The most devastating testimony came from Margarete Buber-Neumann. Widow of a German communist leader killed in Stalin's purges. Sent to a Soviet gulag in 1937. Then handed over to the Nazis under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

She had survived both Soviet and Nazi camps. She testified about both.

Simone de Beauvoir was in the courtroom. After hearing her, de Beauvoir said: ""Since I heard this German woman, I believe. I believe that Kravchenko is telling the truth about everything.""

On April 4, 1949, the court ruled in Kravchenko's favor. Les Lettres Françaises was fined 500,000 francs. Ordered to pay 150,000 francs in damages.

The French Communist Party was humiliated.

But they appealed. A higher court upheld the verdict. Then reduced the damages to 3 francs. Less than one dollar.

The court said the publicity had helped him sell more books.

He won. And was awarded one dollar.

After the trial, Kravchenko's life unraveled.

He moved to Peru. Tried to start mining ventures. Wanted to use the profits to help poor farmers.

The businesses failed one after another. His biographer later suspected the KGB was orchestrating the failures.

He moved back to New York. Lived alone. Wrote less. Drank more.

His American partner Cynthia raised their two sons under a fake name. Anthony and Andrew didn't know their father's real identity until 1965.

Andrew met his father once. He was 15.

On February 25, 1966, Viktor Kravchenko was found dead at his desk in his Manhattan apartment. Gunshot wound to the head. A note beside him.

Officially ruled suicide.

President Lyndon B. Johnson didn't believe it. Ordered the FBI to determine if the suicide note was authentic or a Soviet forgery.

The FBI eventually said the note was real.

But the details never added up. His son Andrew has spent his life arguing the KGB killed him.

Either way, he was dead. 60 years old. The man who had told the West about Stalin.

Here's what makes his story matter.

Kravchenko was the first major Soviet defector. The first senior insider to tell the world what the Soviet system actually was.

He wrote about the Holodomor when no one else would. Exposed the gulags when Western intellectuals still defended Stalin. Compared Soviet and Nazi camps when that comparison was banned in polite company.

For this, the Soviets killed his relatives. The French left called him a fraud. Sartre's friends called him a CIA stooge.

He won his case. Got vindicated in court. And destroyed in the process.

Thirty years after the trial, the editor of Les Lettres Françaises who had run the attack articles wrote in his memoir: ""Kravchenko was right.""

Three words. Decades too late.

Solzhenitsyn read about the trial verdict in a Soviet prison camp. He said it gave him a glimmer of hope. That maybe the West wouldn't stay fooled forever.

The book is still in print. Almost nobody outside Ukraine and Cold War historians remembers Kravchenko's name.

He told the truth about Stalin's crimes. The truth got him hunted for 22 years.

He died alone in a Manhattan apartment with a bullet in his head. Maybe his own. Maybe not.

Viktor Kravchenko. Engineer. Defector. Author. The man who showed the West what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.

His crime? Telling the truth too early. Too loudly. Too publicly.

His legacy? A book the Soviets couldn't kill. 30 dead relatives in Ukraine he never got to mourn.

He died vindicated. He died destroyed.

The two often go together when you tell the truth about an empire.