Victor Kravchenko (defector) - Defection

Defection

In 1944 he abandoned his post and requested political asylum in the United States. The Soviet authorities, however, demanded his immediate extradition, calling him a traitor. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly on behalf of Stalin to have Kravchenko returned. He was granted asylum but was forced to live under a pseudonym to avoid the danger of assassination by Soviet agents.

Kravchenko married an American woman, Cynthia Kuser-Earle, by whom he had two sons, Anthony and Andrew. Obliged to live under their mother's married name (Earle), they remained unaware of their father's identity until 1965.

When Kravchenko defected he left behind a son, Valentin, born in 1935 by his first wife, Zinaida Gorlova. In spite of changing his last name, Valentin was eventually discovered to be the son of a "traitor to the motherland" and was sent to a gulag in 1953 for five years. The brutal conditions of the gulag drove him to the point where he tried to commit suicide in his cell. Valentin applied for political asylum in America after discovering that his half-brother Andrew lived there. (Anthony died in 1969.) The two brothers were reunited in Arizona in 1992 at an emotional press conference. Valentin died in 2001 from heart failure. He received his American citizenship on the day he died.