On April 3rd 1945.Condemning the oppression of the Stalin regime, Viktor Kravchenko, a member of the Soviet Lend-Lease Purchasing Commission, announced his defection to the.

On April 3rd 1945.Condemning the oppression of the Stalin regime, Viktor Kravchenko, a member of the Soviet Lend-Lease Purchasing Commission, announced his defection to the.

To understand Victor Kravchenko and his role in history, we need to go back to 1932, when he was among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks dispatched to the nation’s countryside to seize the land belonging to peasants, so that the agrarian sector could be nationalized.

A Soviet apparatchik, Mendel Hatayevich, told him and 80 other young Communists, “Throw out your bourgeois humanism and act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin. … The last weak remnants of the capitalist peasant must be uprooted at all costs.

When the uprooting work took Kravchenko to tiny Podgorodnoye, Ukraine, he observed the cruelty of one fellow Communist.

This beast drags the peasants out of their houses in the middle of the night, cursing and threatening them with his Mauser,” Kravchenko would later write, referencing a semiautomatic rifle.

But Kravchenko stifled his outrage. He rose in the Communist ranks, and in 1943, as the Soviet Union and the United States allied in the war against Hitler, he came to Washington to serve as a Red Army captain.

When he first arrived in Washington, he did not make an impression. His fellow residents at a Park Road NW boardinghouse would remember him as a quiet non-English speaker awaiting the stateside arrival of his wife.

But on April 3rd, 1944, without authorisation from his Soviet bosses, he stole off to Washington’s Union Station clutching two suitcases.

On the lookout for “dangers and omens,” he would later write, he took the train north to Manhattan. Amid a freak April snowstorm, he hosted a news conference at which he resigned from his job and lambasted the Soviet government for its failure to “grant political and civil liberties.

The U.S.S.R., he said, was subjecting citizens to “unspeakable oppression and cruelties, while the NKVD” — the Soviet secret police — “acting through its thousands of spies, continues to wield its unbridled domination over the people of Russia.

Kravchenko’s story ran on the front page of the New York Times and in myriad other newspapers. It shocked America. At the time, bad-mouthing the Soviet Union was almost verboten.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted Americans to regard Stalin warmly, as “Uncle Joe,” and while it was clear that Kravchenko needed amnesty — returning to the Soviet Union would have been suicide — it wasn’t clear that the president would grant it.

So Kravchenko brought into the American lexicon a new phrase. He told reporters that he was placing himself under “the protection of American public opinion.”

A man without a country, pursued by NKVD operatives, Kravchenko spent several months hiding out in a succession of friends’ New York apartments, writing all the while. In 1946, the publishing house Scribner released “I Chose Freedom.

The book is a gripping narrative of Soviet treachery that the defector shaped in collaboration with the American writer Eugene Lyons, and it is perhaps best remembered for its discussion of Stalin’s gulags.

 “Prisons and concentration camps were filled with ‘enemies of the people,’ ” Kravchenko writes before describing one camp: “Behind the barbed wire, I could see a long row of barracks with tiny barred windows.

Guardians paced before them, accompanied by huge, fierce-looking dogs.” The prisoners are gaunt. “Never,” he recalled, “have I seen such degraded human beings.”

Stalin was an early reader of “I Chose Freedom,” and after the book was published he made sure that kravchenko’s family suffered.