They were arrested after engaging in such subversive activities as wearing American clothes, asking the U.S. They were artists, factory workers, teachers and engineers. The other five spent years in Soviet prisons. The files of 15 missing Americans whose disappearances were investigated in detail by the AP show that two died in Soviet labor camps and eight others were executed. There is reason to believe that hundreds of Americans met a similar fate. On New Year's Day 1938, his file shows, 24-year-old Alexander Gelver of Oshkosh, Wis., was executed. State Department documents, some declassified at the AP's request. Their friends and relatives have grown old without ever knowing, for certain, what happened to them.īut now, the answer is emerging, documented in moldy secret police files obtained by The Associated Press, revealed in recent interviews with people who survived the Stalinist purges, told in old U.S.
Gelver was just one of hundreds of American leftists who had moved here in the 1920s and 1930s to help Josef Stalin build the new worker's paradise, and who then vanished, one by one, from the face of the earth. An open-and-shut case of espionage, the police declared.Īnd then they made him disappear. Was it true, his interrogator demanded, that Gelver thought life was better in the United States than the Soviet Union? Had he actually said as much to his fellow workers at a local factory?Īll true, said Gelver, who had been brought to Russia years earlier by his parents. Embassy for help.īut outside the gates, he was stopped - by the secret police. He wanted to get out of the country, to go home to America, so he went to the U.S. By Alan Cullison, For The Associated Press
0 kommentar(er)
