Template talk:American defectors to the Soviet Union

Research

Moscowamerican (talk) 10:45, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

American Defectors to the Soviet Union

• Robert Edward Webster, a plastics technician from Cleveland who came to the USSR in 1959. Webster was supposed to be in Moscow helping prepare for the American national exhibition but wound up falling in love with a hostess at the Hotel Ukraine (he eventually abandoned his family to return home).
• Harold M. Koch, a Catholic priest who in 1966, moved from Chicago to Moscow to protest the Vietnam War (he changed his mind three months later).
• Joseph Dutkanich, an American Serviceman stationed in West Germany. Dutkanich defected in 1960 and gradually became convinced the Soviets were trying to make him crazy; in late 1963, he was found in a drunken stupor and died in a Lvov hospital.
• Glenn Souther, a Navy photographer-cum-KGB stooge. Souther, one of the last Cold War-era defectors, fled to the Soviet Union in 1986; three years later, he committed suicide.
• John Reed joined the revolution, in 1917. He died of typhus in 1920 and was buried on Red Square.
• In the 1930s, many Americans fled the great depression for communist utopia hoping to find work and a new life; most of them were eventually arrested or killed.
• George Koval provided the Soviet Union with information about the Manhattan Project in the 1940s before absconding to Moscow.
• William Hamilton Martin and Bernon Mitchell In 1960, two NSA cryptologists - defected to the Soviet Union with intelligence on U.S. monitoring of Soviet communications. Like many defectors, Martin and Mitchell built lives in the Soviet Union, marrying and receiving well-compensated jobs. But like many defectors, they also had difficulty adjusting. According to the NSA’s in-house report on the incident, both men asked to leave Russia within a year of their defection, "but no country would accept them." Mitchell died in Moscow, but in time Martinmade it as far as Tijuana, where he died in 1987.
• "He put on a good act," Igor Prelin, a former public relations official for the KGB told the New York Times after the death of defected CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, who eventually came to own a small insurance firm in Moscow, "but life was not sweet for him here."
• Bill Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies"), who, during World War I, was convicted of efforts to interfere with the U.S. war effort under provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act. While free and appealing his conviction, Haywood fled to Russia in 1921 for the last seven years of his life.
• Alexander Dolgun, an employee of the American embassy. Dolgun was arrested on the street in 1945, tortured during interrogation and was released only in the 1950s.

• Thomas Sgovio, the son of an American communist. Sgovio was arrested trying to enter the American Embassy in Moscow. He was sent to the Kolyma gulag. He survived because of his skill as an artist.

• Victor Herman, Communist’s son. Trained to become a Soviet parachutist and in 1934, at the age of 19, set the world freefall record, ‘jumping from a plane at 24,000 feet and waiting 142 seconds before opening his parachute’. Herman was expelled from his elite aviation academy in 1937 and arrested in 1938. Herman left the Soviet Union in 1976, 45 years after his arrival.

• Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin. Born in 1939 and served in the United States Marine Corps from October 1956 to September 1959. Arrived in Moscow on October 16, 1959 and renounced his United States citizenship at the American Embassy in Moscow on October 31. He was employed as a lathe operator at an electronics factory in Minsk and returned to the United States in June 1962. He moved to New Orleans in April 1963 and became active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In September 1963 he visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, requesting a visa to Cuba which was granted on October 18. He left Mexico City on October 2 and arrived in Dallas, Texas the next day. He was hired as a stock room worker at the Texas School Book Depository on October 18. On November 22nd he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy with a rifle he fired from the 6th floor of the depository. He was captured shortly after and was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8805:9800:2D20:5D5C:C819:4953:67D7 (talk) 03:31, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Defector study

• Irving Amron

• Mollie Block

• Morris Block

• Harold Citrynell

• Bruce Frederick Davis

• Shirley Dubinsky

• Richard Cyril Frank

• Susan Heligman Frank

• Robert Gold

• Martin Greendlinger

• Maurice H Halperin

• Louis Henry Jones

• John Howard Lawson

• William Hamilton Martin

• Anthony V Martinkus

• Karl Henry Meyer

• Bernon F Mitchell

• James Dudley Parker

• John Orion Pittman

• Nicholas Petrulli

• Robert Edward Webster

• Libero Ricciardelli

• Henry Winston

books/studies

• The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, by Tim Tzouliadis, traces the story of a band of amateur baseball players hoping to start anew in Russia. Within a few years, most were dead or in prison.
• After Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. government commissioned a study of U.S. defectors to the Soviet Union.

Quote

• "The lives of traitors always end badly … either from ­alcoholism or from drugs." -- Vladimir Putin , July 2010 - after he met with Anna Chapman and the other sleeper agents who returned to Moscow after a Russian turncoat snitched on them.