Suicide or Assassination
Kravchenko's decision to abandon the Soviet Union condemned family members he left behind to harassment, imprisonment and worse. It was alleged that some of his family were killed. It is known that Kravchenko's whereabouts, was discovered in 1944 by NKVD agents, notably Mark Zborowski, and subsequently monitored very closely by the NKVD and later, the KGB special operations.
Kravchenko's 1966 death from a gunshot wound to his head at his desk in his apartment in Manhattan was officially ruled a suicide. This view is widely accepted, including by author Gary Kern. FBI files obtained by Kern after a six-year lawsuit show that President Lyndon B. Johnson had taken a strong interest in Kravchenko's suicide and had demanded that the FBI determine if his suicide note was authentic or a Soviet fabrication. The FBI ruled that it was authentic. Yet some details concerning Kravchenko's last days remain questionable, and his son Andrew believes he was the victim of a KGB assassination. Andrew Kravchenko produced a documentary film in 2008, The Defector, about his father.
Read more about this topic: Victor Kravchenko (defector)
Famous quotes containing the word suicide:
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)