Goodbye to All That

I CHOSE FREEDOM (496 pp.)--Victor Kravchenko--Scribner ($3.50).

In 1944 Victor Kravchenko suddenly quit his job with the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, went into hiding, and began work on the most sensational of all recent books about the Soviet Union. In eight weeks it climbed to fifth on the non-fiction best-seller list. Reader's Digest condensed it; the Hearst papers have run it as a daily serial.

Expiation for Horrors. "Every minute of the taxi ride," Kravchenko begins, "seemed loaded with danger and with destiny . . . I was running away. . . . For months I had planned the flight. . . . It was to be my expiation for horrors about which, as a member of the ruling class of my country, I felt a sense of guilt. . . . My decision to break with the Soviet regime--amounting to a personal declaration of war against that and all police-states--was not accidental. It was implicit in all I had been and thought and experienced. . . . To explain it I must rehearse my whole life and the life of Russia as it touched mine."

I Chose Freedom is the rehearsal, some 250,000 words long. The curtain rises in 1905, when Kravchenko was born in the Ukraine, son of a railroad worker. After the 1917 revolution, he says, his father exclaimed joyfully: "Now people will be free. It was worth fighting for." But Father soon changed his mind, having "no stomach for dictatorship and terror . . . even under a red flag." Victor, however, joined the Communist Party in 1929. "It seemed to me the greatest event in my life. . . . I was dedicated forever to an ideal and a cause."

First Doubts. Soon he too began to feel queasy. As a young state-supported engineering student, he declares, he fell in love with the wife of "one of the most important officials in the Ukrainian government." People in general were suffering and starving. But Julia Mikhailovna and her husband were as rich and well-fed as the Romanovs: "oriental rugs on the floor, tapestries and paintings, crystal chandeliers." Julia herself deplored the contrast. "You may not believe me," she said, "but I am opposed to all this gluttony of the leaders." Kravchenko begged her to reform, to flee with, him and live for her "ideals." "Don't be cruel, Vitya," she cried; "I can't do it."

Some time later, Kravchenko got a glimpse of the "horrors of collectivization." In one village, "guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants. . . . A few of them were weeping. The others stood there sullen, resigned, hopeless. So this was 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class'! A lot of simple peasants being torn from their native soil, stripped of all their worldly belongings."

Eliena's Secret. Nevertheless, Kravchenko kept on with his work. After returning to town, he denounced as "anti-Soviet rumors" those very matters he knew to be "towering fact." He kept on with his work even when the GPU (later NKVD) tried to have him thrown out of the Party. GPU spies were everywhere. He fell in love with Eliena Petrovna, took her home and introduced her to his parents. His mother whispered: "She's a sweet woman . . . but there's something in her life that weighs heavily on her spirits." Kravchenko secretly riffled through the papers in Eliena's handbag, lurked in doorways to watch her goings & comings, soon decided that she too was a spy. Taxed with this, Eliena broke down and wept. "My God! What shall I do? . . . I am only one of an army of thousands who are thus forced to do the bidding of the GPU. . . . Oh, Vitya, I'm so tired and despairing. I shall love you tenderly even if you cast me off."

As a graduate engineer in charge of 1,500 workers at the Nikopol metallurgical combinat, Kravchenko continually wrestled with snoopers and spies. "One night," he says, "I was awakened by the telephone. One of the machines had suddenly broken down. . . . By the time I reached the factory . . . the Nikopol NKVD chief himself, Dorogan, was there, with Gershgorn and other assistants. . . . What had happened was instantly clear to me. Several Stakhanovite enthusiasts and an engineer had decided to increase the rotary speed of a roller. As the pipe had not been imbued with Stalinist faith, a large segment of it burst on the main belt and one of the machines was put out of commission.

"The police-minded swarm of officials, however, was less concerned with restoring operations than with finding culprits. Private interrogations went on at NKVD headquarters to the tunes of threats and curses. . . . Simple and obvious explanations made no appeal to Gershgorn's devious and incompetent mind. He shouted, fumed, demanded 'evidence' against this or that person. . . . 'Kravchenko, you're not cooperating with us,' Gershgorn screamed; 'you may pay for this, believe me!' . . . The investigation continued for weeks longer. Having failed to find a scapegoat for the breakdown, the police remained surly and frustrated. . . . Neither were my relations with the trade-unionists and Party 'activists' improved by time. There was rarely a week when their political zeal and my production common sense did not clash."

Down the Drain. There were further experiences of this kind, more run-ins with the "power-drunk sadists" of the NKVD. One day Gershgorn "sprang up in sudden fury and rushed at me, screaming 'Saboteur, wrecker, rascal! Take this--and this!' His huge fists were crashing into my face like a couple of pistons." At last Kravchenko decided that he had had all he could stand. When no one was watching, he ripped a portrait of Stalin from the wall, tore it into shreds, flushed it down a toilet. "I listened to the gurgling of the water, and I knew that never, never again would I feel the same about the Party, the Leader, the Cause. . . . I would work for the government, I would accept Party assignments, I would make speeches. But it would be all playacting, strategy, while waiting patiently for a chance to escape."

Kravchenko says that he reached this decision in January 1938. During the next five years he hung on, "a confirmed enemy of the regime," rising higher & higher in the scale, until he was established on the "highest, fattest" Soviet level, with an automobile and a private Moscow apartment. U.S. entry into World War II gave him the chance he was waiting for. Talking over Lend-Lease with a foreign-trade official, he "carefully, skillfully . . . guided the conversation" until the official asked whether he would like to go to the U.S. to inspect Soviet Lend-Lease supplies. Finally he received his passport.

"Comrade Kravchenko," a Party bigwig warned him, "you are going to the country of the most highly developed and rapacious capitalism. The counter-espionage of the FBI is subtle and inescapable. . . . The counter-revolutionary and capitalist press, especially of Hearst and McCormick, will try to destroy your faith. . . . Do you realize the full meaning of the confidence placed in you?"

Kravchenko said he did.

"Don't trust those who pretend to be friends of our country. Many of them are more dangerous than out-and-out enemies. Recently it has become the fashion among certain emigres, not only the Left but among actual monarchists, to lick our boots. Don't trust them. Once a turncoat, always a turncoat."

Kravchenko indicated "understanding and approval." Some days later he was on his way to the U.S. Some months later he repacked his bags, stole out of his Washington boardinghouse. Now he all but calls for a world crusade against "the political regime into which I poured a lifetime of toil and faith." He lives secretly, ducks photographers. Intense, pale-faced, he nervously fiddles with his neat black tie, dismisses unfavorable reviews of his book as the work of charlatans or Communist henchmen.

U.S. readers can hardly check on Freedom's accuracy or candor, except by the internal evidence of names and places. Kravchenko, who writes in Russian, says the English version is an unembroidered rendering of the original (he refuses to name his translator and collaborators because disclosure might be "embarrassing" for Kravchenko). The Republican New York Herald Tribune brushed Kravchenko off as an ex-Communist, out to justify his disaffection. The Herald Tribune, snipped Kravchenko, is a "Park Avenue version of the Daily Worker."

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