From Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, Garden City Publishing Co. Inc. (Charles Scribner's Sons), Garden City NY, 1946; pp. 478-479.
When that day comes to pass, we shall in truth be close to the ideal of one world. As long as one-sixth of the world's surface, now greatly expanded by aggrandizement and the betrayal of small nations, remains under totalitarian slavery in an intellectual blackout, peace can be at best a precarious thing.
The next step toward world security lies not in a world organization -- though that must come -- but in the liberation of the Russian masses from their tyrants. One need only suppose that, by some miracle, Russia were suddenly democratized to realize that most of the tensions now threatening humanity's peace would be automatically relaxed and that genuine world cooperation would become possible. The liberation of Russia from its totalitarian yoke, I may be told, is a matter that concerns only the Russians. Those who think so are profoundly wrong. In many ways the safety of all civilization and the chance for enduring peace depend on that liberation.
I am not sanguine enough to expect the miracle in our generation. But this I know for a certainty: an understanding of the Russian reality by the democratic world is the pre-condition for my country's liberation from within.
Copyright © 1946 by Victor Kravchenko (1905-1966)
Victor A. Kravchenko (Oct 1905 - Feb 1966), the son of a revolutionary worker, grew up in eastern Ukraine and earned an engineering degree in Dnepropetrovsk, at the same institution attended by Leonid Brezhnev (a slight acquaintance). An enthusiastic Communist and hard-working engineer in the 1920s, Kravchenko became disillusioned by the horrors of Stalin's Collectivization (1929-33) and purges (1936-38). In April 1944 he defected from the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC and denounced Stalinist repression. His timing was dangerous; most Americans did not want to hear uncomfortable truths about their WW II ally.
Kravchenko wrote his autobiography I Chose Freedom (1947) with some editorial assistance from Eugene Lyons, a Western reporter familiar with Soviet Russia. For many years, I Chose Freedom remained the best overall account of life under Stalin, showing both the hopes of young Communist cadres in the 1920s, and the crushing oppression of the 1930s.
In America, Kravchenko's democratic socialism made him most comfortable with "liberal Democrats." After Stalin's death (1953), he sought a reconciliation with the far milder regimes of Khrushchov and Brezhnev, but was turned down. His shooting in 1966 was ruled a suicide (at a time when US officials sought "detente" with the USSR), but might have been a KGB action.
I Chose Freedom has been reprinted by
Their ordering address is
Catalog info is:
I dare to hope that one day [the Russian people] may enjoy real freedom and real democracy.
Comment-- Kravchenko was right. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 brought these immediate benefits:
the liberation of East Central Europe
Tragically, in the key years of the early 1990s, the US had a succession of weak Presidents (George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton), unwilling to commit a small portion of the USA's $100 billion annual savings in military spending to help reconstruct a friendly Russia under the sharp gaze of the Western press and Russian civil society. By the time Bill Clinton eventually started dribbling smaller amounts of money through secretive IMF deals, the hopes of friendship and open politics had withered, and the objective was simply to prop up Yeltsin's incompetent circle of oligarchs.
peace and democracy in Latin America, as Fidel Castro no longer could pass on Soviet subsidies to guerrilla/terrorists
a peaceful transfer to majority rule in South Africa
sharply reduced military requirements and spending in America and Western Europe.
Transaction Publishers, URL
http://www.transactionpub.com/.
Transaction Publishers Distribution Center
390 Campus Drive
Somerset, New Jersey 08873
Telephone 732-445-1245
fax 732-748-9801
E-mail: trans@transactionpub.com
Kravchenko, Victor A.
I CHOSE FREEDOM.
New introduction by Rett R. Ludwikowski
1988. 516 pp.
0-88738-754-3 (paper): $29.95(t)
Return to test-access page.