First Son of Kravchenko

No doubt you are swamped with news items about Russia, as always.  But I really would appreciate it if the hard life of Valentin Kravchenko could be honored with an obituary in JRL.  The notice I have written up contains facts about both the father and son  that have never appeared in print, and the fate of the children of Soviet defectors is a subject not often explored.  I think readers of JRL will find the piece illuminating. Thanks.

FIRST SON OF KRAVCHENKO

On Wednesday, August 1, 2001, after a Russian Orthodox ceremony, Valentin Kravchenko, son of the famous Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko, was buried in Prescott, Arizona, where he had lived for the last nine years.  He died on Sunday, July 29, after another in a series of progressively debilitating heart attacks.

Valentin himself was not famous, but his life was instructive in that it was lived under the cloud of his father's act of defiance against the Soviet state.  Born 1934 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, seven months after his parents had separated, Valentin grew up with his mother, Zinaida Gorlova, and his step-father, Aleksandr Svet, who legally adopted him.  He was a baby beauty whose photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines.  A doting grandmother had him baptised and secretly taught him Christian prayers.  No one told him about his true father, and he was too little to understand the terrible events of the time. In 1938 his mother's father, Sergei Gorlov, was arrested as a counter-revolutionary and executed by being placed on a barge with other prisoners and sunk.  In 1941 the Nazis invaded Ukraine and the family was evacuated to Krivoi Rog.  Three years later, when  the Nazis were broken, Valentin Svet was a bright boy of ten.  But he was completely ignorant of the misfortune that befell him on April 4, 1944, when Viktor Kravchenko, a Soviet
official working in wartime Washington DC, renounced his citizenship and published criticisms of Stalin in the New York Times.

At first the Svet family escaped attention, since Viktor (who spelled his name "Victor" in America) had remarried before going to Washington.  The war ended and five years passed.  Then Valentin began to hear his mother crying and rehearsing a script in the next room.  As he later told Moscow's Literaturnaya gazeta (Jan. 30, 1991), he had no idea that she was preparing to testify against her first husband in the libel trial--the so-called "trial of the century"--that Victor had mounted against the French Communists.  When Gorlova went to Paris in the spring of 1949, she had to leave Valentin behind as a hostage to the state.  Unsuspecting, he went out on the street and was accosted by people in the know (probably watchdogs) as the son of "a traitor to the motherland."  In the Paris courtroom, Gorlova, though shaken at times, made a credible impression, and so the family survived.  Kravchenko's second wife, Irina Tillo, did not appear in court and was shot.

Three years later, Valentin, still oblivious, graduated from high school with a gold medal.  He wanted to study at the Institute of International Relations in Moscow, but his mother warned him against it and finally told him the details of his background.  He went to Moscow anyway, but received the same advice from the admissions director.  Therefore, like his father, he entered the Metallurgical Institute in Dnepropetrovsk, from which he graduated in 1957.  As a master of iron casting, he found work and made good money.  In 1964, one factory wanted to promote him to deputy director, but on condition that he join the Communist Party and publicly denounce his father.  Valentin consented, since he had always been a good Stalinist, but the public denunciation backfired.  Fellow workers now shunned him, and he became an pariah.  He quit the Party in 1979 and sought other friends.

More serious problems began in 1982 when, together with a group of citizens building a heating plant for the city of Zaporozhe, he was arrested on charges of financial malfeasance (i.e., unauthorized labor).  All his property, including a car and grand piano, were confiscated.  During the "investigation," which established his true parentage, his interrogator, Ivan Ivanovich Tkachenko, trying to extract a confession, trained a 150-watt light bulb on his face, forced him to swallow large quantities of salt and beat him about the head.  As a result, Valentin went blind in the left eye and suffered a stroke.  In court the judge singled him out as the son of the traitorous Kravchenko, pronounced him the ringleader of the "shabashka" and sentenced him to 14 years of hard labor.

The chronology of his years in the Gulag is hard to establish, but it appears that he went first to a special isolator prison in his home city.  One evening a guard shouted:  "Your whore mother just croaked!"  Overcome with grief, Valentin waited for nightfall and attempted suicide by hanging.  Cut down by the night guard, who by chance had come back looking for his dropped matches, he went into convulsions and was revived by an injection straight in the heart.  After recovery in the infirmary, he was thrown in the cooler, where his lungs were badly damaged.  Interrogations and beatings followed.  Halfblind, unable to speak, dragging one leg, he was transferred to an invalid ward, which contained its own special horrors.

But Valentin was tough and began the long, slow process of recovering strength, speech and mobility.  At the same time he experienced a political and spiritual conversion, cursing Stalin and idolizing Kravchenko.  At some point he was strong enough to be sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where he worked in a galvanizing process and where vaporized acids ravaged his lungs and prepared them for his later asthma and emphysema.  Along with other prisoners he coaxed stray dogs past the barbed wire, tore them apart and ate them; they also ate human flesh on occasion.  In better times, he gave lectures to inmates, played the piano at camp "parties" and tutored the administration for exams in order to cut down harsh treatment.  He was at prison VL 315/40 in the Lvov district when he learned that his sentence had been reduced.  A lean, muscular, black-haired man of dramatic good looks upon entry into the Gulag, he emerged in November 1988 haggard, hunched and grim, 54 years old with the clothes on his back and his gold fillings in his hand.  (His teeth had been knocked out.)  At the nearest bar he gambled with the gold fillings and won; at the train station he sold his shoes, bought a ticket with the accumulated money and made it home to Zaporozhe in his sock feet.  A few months later an appeals court overturned his sentence and granted him a paltry invalid pension (class II), which he was able to supplement by organizing brigades and doing construction work.

It was now the period of Glasnost, and Valentin successfully petitioned the government to rehabilitate Victor Kravchenko's parents, who had spent the last years of their life (1947-1952) in the Gulag.  His appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev on behalf of the defector himself, however, was not successful.  Nor was his appeal on behalf of his adoptive father, who had been arrested on charges almost identical to his own.  Valentin also wrote a book about his experiences in the invalid ward, Noev kovcheg (Noah's Ark), still unpublished, containing some of the most graphic and shocking scenes in all of the vast and appalling Russian prison-camp literature.

Valentin came to America to meet his half-brother Andrew, born in New York in 1951, the son of a relationship that Victor kept well hidden from public view.  The press conference of the two sons of Kravchenko in Phoenix on January 3, 1992, was covered by the national media.  Valentin was delighted by the temperate climate, material abundance and freedom he found in America, and also by a warm letter received from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but his health could not hold up.  Obtaining a green card as a political exile and legally changing his name, he was lovingly cared for by Judy Raessler, a professional nurse in Prescott. When well, he cooked inventive stews, watched NTV television from Moscow and sent out more appeals to the Russian and Ukrainian governments for the rehabilitation of his father, whose books he was able to read for the first time outside of Ukraine.  He put together a decorative corner with a poster and portraits of Victor, who died in 1966.  He attended the Russian Orthodox Church in Phoenix and the Eastern Orthodox Church in Prescott.  On the day of his final heart attack, Valentin Viktorovich Kravchenko enjoyed his happiest moment in America: receiving his American citizenship at a ceremony in Phoenix.  He considered himself a seasoned zek (Soviet political prisoner) who had lived to see the day.  His big booming voice, shouting in complaint, shouting for justice, whether on the telephone or from three feet away, still resounds in our ears.