Orville Prescott reviewed the controversial expose of the Soviet state, I CHOSE FREEDOM, by defector Victor Kravchenko in the April 15 issue of The New York Times. This was one of several books by former Soviet agents laying bare the brutality of the Stalinist state. The book would become a bestseller. Testimony from Party operatives over the next couple of years would reveal the spy network lurking behind the various front organizations run by the Communist Party in the United States. The reaction on the left to these exposes would be vehement denunciation and character assassination, this from these self-declared “civil libertarians” who complained about their opponents’ “red baiting.”
Prescott accurately predicted that this "appalling indictment of the Soviet state" was certain to be "not only the subject of controversy, but the object of scurrilous abuse." Unlike the testimony of exiles from Nazi tyranny, Russian defectors were "sure to be attacked in many quarters, their motives questioned, their character maligned." When Kravchenko defected in 1944, leftists in the United States insisted that he be immediately turned over to the Soviets to be tried as a traitor. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, pleaded with FDR on behalf of Stalin for extradition.
It was not only Communists who joined in the attack on Kravchenko. During the war years, some believed it was imperative to maintain an amicable relationship with the Soviet Union. A number of American tycoons, such as the Koch family, had made huge fortunes aiding Stalin’s industrialization of Russia and, although they vehemently opposed any “Socialist” policies in the US they also opposed anything that might jeopardize their profit opportunities in the USSR. But Prescott also blamed the "confused idealists" who were "so blinded by their desire to regard Russia as a socialist utopia that they have let their critical faculties atrophy for years." In One Who Survived, a similar book published in 1945, another defector, Alexander Gregory Barmine, wrote that many of his colleagues in the Soviet secret service had been astounded at how completely many American intellectuals accepted the official party line in the 1930s at a time when many Soviet operatives, subsequently purged, assassinated or imprisoned, had become disillusioned with Stalin and the Soviet state.
Kravchenko’s book was written as an autobiography. Prescott wrote that it was more a personal diatribe than an impartial assessment, but he found that Kravchenko spoke with more authority on the Soviet state than the American correspondents in Moscow who were carefully insulated from reality by the Soviet government. It made, he wrote, "distressing, sickening reading."
In his book, Kravchenko also came down on those in the United States who accepted "Soviet window dressing as fact," naming as among them the darling of the left, former vice president Henry A. Wallace; former Republican presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie and former ambassador Joseph Davies. He blasted the notion that the Soviet-German pact was simply a ploy by Stalin to buy time to arm Russia. No preparation for war had been made, he insisted and the subsequent Nazi invasion had taken Stalin completely by surprise. The purges were not, he wrote, an effort to eliminate a dangerous fifth column working for Hitler as Communist propaganda insisted and Davies reiterated in his bestseller Mission to Moscow and in the Hollywood movie adapted from the book, but a massive attack on anyone suspected of not being an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin. It was meant not only to eliminate Stalin's critics but to terrorize Soviet citizens into silence. Th author also revealed the existence of gulags, which he compared with German concentration camps, to silence political opposition.
Kravchenko concluded that the most important step that the world needed to take, even more than a world organization, was "the liberation of the Russian masses from their tyrants." The right wing welcomed Kravchenko's revelations and analyses but he was not at home in their company, being a social democrat rather than a fan of unadulterated capitalism. This book, along with Barmine’s, played a role in hardening American attitudes toward Stalin and the Soviet Union in the immediate postwar years.
The depths to which the Soviets and their supporters could sink was revealed in their subsequent treatment of Kravchenko and his family. He had to assume a new identity while the Soviet secret service monitored his movement. Members of his Russian family were harassed and some were killed. His son was sent to a gulag. During a famous libel trial in France in 1949, the Soviets brought in his former wife to testify that he was physically abusive and impotent and a a KGB officer to testify that he was mentally defective. He was accused of being an embezzler and a draft dodger. Kravchenko won the libel case, in large part because of the testimony of former Gulag prisoners verifying his assertions, most famously the widow of an assassinated German Communist leader, who had herself been imprisoned both in a Nazi concentration camp and a Soviet gulag and testified to their similarity. Although Kravchenko won the case, he was awarded only symbolic damages. Still US Communists denied the truth of of his accusations, or so they said, until the Kremlin itself revealed in the 1950s that much of what he had written was true, sending the heads of the True Believers spinning. They had spent years defending Stalin, portraying the Soviet Union as a Utopia and maligning anyone who told the truth. And now the Party was admitting to the world that the whole thing was a lie? WTF? Many left the Party as a result of this betrayal.
Kravchenko died in 1966 in his New York apartment from a gunshot wound to his head, officially ruled a suicide. Some members of his American family suspected it was an assassination. Assassination by “suicide” was the fate meted out to many Communists here and abroad who had defected or been purged.