Victor Kravchenko
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Victor Andreevich Kravchenko, (Russian: Виктор Андреевич Кравченко) (11 October 1905 Yekaterinoslav - 25 February 1966) was a Soviet defector who wrote up his experiences of life in the Soviet Union and as a Soviet official, especially in his 1946 book I Chose Freedom.
Born into a family of revolutionaries, Kravchenko became an engineer and worked in the Don basin region. He joined the Communist Party in 1929. He witnessed the large scale starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry as part of the Soviet Union's transition to collectivization (Holodomor). This view of the large scale death toll through planned starvation and executions under Stalin alienated him from the Soviet regime.
During the Second World War he was a Red Army captain before being posted to the Soviet Trade Mission in Washington DC. In 1943 he abandoned his post and asked for political asylum from the United States authorities while the Soviet authorities demanded his extradition as a traitor. He was granted asylum and living under a pseudonym to escape the fate of prior defectors married Cynthia Kusher and had two sons Andrew and Anthony who remained unaware of the identity of their father.
Kravchenko became most famous for his memoir I Chose Freedom containing extensive revelations on collectivization, Soviet prison camps and the use of slave labor came at a time of growing tension between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West. Its publication was met with vocal attacks by the Soviet Union and by international Communist parties. One such attack by the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises which accused him of being a liar and a Western spy resulted in a suit for libel. The extended 1949 trial featuring hundreds of witnesses was dubbed 'The Trial of the Century.' While the Soviet Union flew in former colleagues and Kravchenko's ex-wife to denounce him, Kravchenko's lawyers presented survivors of the Soviet prison camps. Among them was Margrete Buber-Neumann, the widow of the purged German Communist leader, Heinz Neumann. She herself had been sent to the gulag. At the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 she was returned to Germany and incarcerated at Ravensbrück. Her experience supported the anti-Communist claims concerning the essential similarities between the Soviet and Nazi regimes. The trial ended in a victory for Kravchenko who, though awarded only symbolic monetary redress, struck a palpable blow against international Communism.
His death from bullet wounds in his apartment remains unclarified, though it was officially ruled a suicide. His son Andrew continues to believe he was the victim of a KGB execution.
