Though the left side of his body was permanently weakened by the truncheons and jackboots of Soviet jailers, and his mouth wrecked by authoritarian fists, Valentin still looks robust enough to wrestle Fate. At last surrounded by Americans, he gestures and enthuses, oblivious to the opaqueness of his language and the pregnant lag of translation. He prattles on as the interpreter nods and lifts his hand to beg relief. Bodrov is happy to be here, so happy that he seems animated by crazy joy-yet at night, in his room, he weeps.
Valentin is a refugee. Like his father, he has left his country and his people, and he does not plan to return. He has taken shelter in the home of his half-brother, whom he has just met and whose existence he discovered only 16 months before.
In a scene rife with made-for-TV dramatic potential, Valentin embraced his father's other son at Sky Harbor International Airport on January 3. Two long-lost men of middle years-one Slavic and burly, the other fair and slight, but recognizable products of some of the same genetic materialÏfinding each other through serendipitous circumstances always makes for a touching, telegenic moment. But there were other factors that lent this particular meeting geopolitical gravity.
These men were the sons of Victor Kravchenko, who defected from the Soviet Union during World War II and wrote a controversial best seller exposing Stalin's Great Terror. Later, Kravchenko instituted an action in a French court that placed the Soviet state on trial for what we might today call human rights abuses. That trial, forgotten by most Americans, was a significant event in the early years of the Cold War.
Now the Cold War is over, and Soviet communism has crumbled like so much crummy socialist concrete. Today, Valentin Bodrov can stand in a thoroughly bourgeois bedroom on an old Arizona dude ranch and examine the artwork.
It was his newfound brother, Andrew Kravchenko, who years ago made the painting that now holds the Russian's attention. It hangs in the room where Valentin sleeps, and consists of two figures, a man and a woman, amorphous through a green wash. Only their eyes are defined: odd, fishy sockets boring clean, flat and dead through the fog.
"These people have the eyes of wolves," Valentin says. "They are the eyes of the last man in the bread line that's five kilometers long, and he's standing in line because his family is hungry. These people, they're wondering where the rest of themselves have gone-if you were to show this painting in Moscow you should title it `The Soul of the Soviet People.'"
Of course, there are no "Soviet people" anymore. The coming apart of Soviet communism, perhaps inevitable since the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev and certainly accelerated by the abortive putsch of last August, has left a residual, volatile "Commonwealth of Independent States." While, in western minds, chaos and uncertainty have replaced trenchant authoritarianism and numb bureaucracy as the prime signifiers of the Russian Soul, Valentin insists the gates to the gulag have not been sprung.
His visa allows him 90 days in this country, but he wants to stay. He fears if he goes home, his life will be in danger. He is cynical of the new "so-called democrats" and contends the Soviet police apparatus has not been dismantled. His name, he darkly hints, is on a list of those scheduled for deadly sanction. If he goes back, he fears, he will be killed.
²ÔThis feeling in the United States now, that there is no communism, that this has all changed now-this `Boy, isn't this great'-this is nothing but your American childhood," Valentin says. "You need to grow up. I pray to God that there will not be civil war. Therefore don't go around celebrating."
Possibly Valentin is being dramatic. He is capable of overstatement; there is even a charmingly theatrical side to his bluster.
But Bodrov's six years in a Soviet prison are no fantasy. His busted limbs attest to it, as does the faint ring of scar tissue-a trophy of attempted suicideÏthat circles his neck.
VALENTIN'S FATHER, Victor Kravchenko, stepped off the edge of the known world on April 1, 1944.
That night he boarded a train in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station, bound for a seedy New York City hotel room he later described as "made to order for suicide." A few days later, he surfaced on the front page of the New York Times, declaring himself a "fugitive from injustice" in a story of international consequence:
Accusing the Soviet Government of a "double-faced" foreign policy with respect to its professed desire for collaboration with the United States and Great Britain and denouncing the Stalin regime for failure to grant political and civil liberties to the Russian people, Victor A. Kravchenko, an official of the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, announced his resignation yesterday and placed himself "under the protection of American public opinion."
Mr. Kravchenko, whose passport bears the title "Representative of the Soviet Government"...is a captain in the Red Army, and before coming to the United States last August he was director of a group of large industrial plants in Moscow. Prior to that he served as chief of the munitions section attached to the Soviet of People's Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, the largest of the affiliated Soviet republics. He has been a member of the Communist Party since 1929 and has held many important economic posts under the Soviet regime.
The story went on to quote from a statement Kravchenko had prepared, assailing the foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union. Immediately, the Soviet government repudiated Kravchenko, insisting that he was a "mere inspector of pipes," one of 3,000 Soviet citizens employed in the United States as part of the lend-lease program. The Soviet government insisted Kravchenko was trying to avoid returning to the Soviet Union and service in the Red Army-that he was deserting out of cowardice.
For several days, Victor Kravchenko remained on the front page, an instant celebrity whose motives were somewhat suspect.
For the duration of the Second World War, most Americans suspended any anti-Soviet feelings they harbored. In April 1944, Adolf Hitler occupied France and the invasion of Normandy was months away. Only the Soviets were engaging the Nazis in Europe, and with the help of British and American lend-lease material and a surfeit of Soviet blood, they had begun to turn the Germans back. Russian soldiers were our allies, heroic and hardy, and Joe Stalin was a military genius and a confidant of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The quasi-official line was that the Russians were a good but simple folk, and that while communism could never work in countries as modern and civilized as, say, the United States or Great Britain, it was a pragmatic system, given the peculiar problems of the sprawling, industrially retarded USSR. Stalin was doing what had to be done to provide a better life for his people, and to do so he had to break some eggs.
Today it may be difficult to understand why Kravchenko thought it necessary to defect to the newspapers rather than simply walking into the state department and announcing his intention. Yet there is evidence that had Kravchenko not taken his case to the press, he would have been returned to the Russians as an army deserter. Contemporary state department documents suggest Kravchenko's defection strained relations between Washington and Moscow, and that President Roosevelt himself was interested in the disposition of the case. What's more, FDR insisted that Kravchenko be deported if he were found to be, as the Russians insisted, a common deserter.
Andrew Kravchenko insists that it was only an instinct for publicity that saved his father's life.
"Whenever Victor was faced with a problem, he would try to go to the people with it," Andrew says. "He really believed that if he could present his story to the public, they would support him. He did that time and time again."
For whatever reason, Victor Kravchenko was not returned to the Soviet Union. Two years later, he published his memoirs in a bombastic book detailing Stalin's collectivization programs and purges, called I Chose Freedom. It was a huge popular success, on the best-seller lists throughout the spring and summer of 1946. Victor Kravchenko became one of the dominant voices of the nascent Cold War. Eventually, his book would be translated into 22 languages.
Also eventually, 22 Soviet citizens whose names appeared in the book would be liquidated by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, while others were swept away to labor camps. Eventually, too, the sins of the father would be visited on his sons.
AT 41, ANDREW KRAVCHENKO is a self-reconstructed man, an artist, filmmaker and capitalist. He returned to Arizona a few years ago and settled near where he grew up, in the area around the Castle Hot Springs resort. He hesitates about specifics, because he would rather people not know too much about the location of his ranch. Suffice it to say that it is remote and rustic, with no telephoneÏan ideal retreat for someone who works with his imagination.
Andrew has just given up smoking, and perhaps the lack of nicotine renders him more taut and precise than usual. Despite the reproaches of his lusty Russian houseguest, Andrew looks after his body with handfuls of vitamins, washed down with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. This weekend, a mild bout of bronchitis has occupied his chest and he tires rather easily.
His bookshelves are chocked with writers from Anthony Trollope to Colleen McCullough to M. Scott Peck. Obviously a man who is not beyond evoking the trendy "Lost Father" syllogism of the so-called "men's movement," Andrew nevertheless wears the vestments of pop psychology lightly.
He slips in and out of the vernacular and calms a vexed Valentin by fixing his hands perpendicularly and calling for a "time-out." Alternately amused and exasperated by his mercurial brother, Andrew takes counsel from his beloved Buster, a rangy, lazy hound who rouses himself only to accept affection.
In a room with a booming fire and a dog asleep beneath a blanket, Andrew explains that it was, in a sense, a longing for psychic closure that led him to delve into his father's life and death about four years ago. In that time, he has amassed file cabinets full of material, catalogued hundreds of photographs of the notoriously elusive Victor and unearthed a Russian brother. Andrew is, of course, alert to the media, and to the commercial possibilities presented by the flow of circumstances. Still, he is no coarse hustler, no publicity grabber shopping a freakish thing. Instead, he seems rather careful with the facts, a little awed by them. While his brother, a novelist and poet, is content to blow through a story, adding or subtracting details to suit the mood, Andrew, who used to make documentaries, has the names and dates recorded, and at his fingertips. When he speculates, he makes certain his audience understands that he has crossed the border into whimsy.
In November 1946, at a Manhattan dinner party hosted by the New York Herald Tribune, Victor Kravchenko met Cynthia Kuser, a stunning blond woman of formidable intellect and independent means. There was a frisson, a shudder of attraction between them, and they left the party together. Victor immediately hustled Cynthia down to Scribner's, where copies of I Chose Freedom filled the snow-glazed windows. It must have been, Andrew says, a giddy time.
Soon, Victor and Cynthia were traveling and working together. She spoke seven languages and helped him with his correspondence. Victor was in demand as a lecturer and published several magazine articles in publications like the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest. He was becoming something of a darling of the American anti-Communist right. Victor Kravchenko was a controversial celebrity, whose modern semiotic equivalent might well be Oliver North or Oliver Stone-there were critics of both his politics and his art. I Chose Freedom was a book that prefigured the negative connotations of the term "best seller." It was a "sensational" book, and it was hard to know how much of it was ghostwritten. (Victor contended he wrote the original in Russian and that it was translated into English.) It was polemical, augmenting a narrowly defined avenue of political thought, and many Americans felt slightly uneasy with it.
In late July 1947, Victor appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Newsweek described him as "trembling uncontrollably," and "in frantic fear for his life." He had good reason to worry. One of the top priorities of the Soviet secret police was to make an example of any Russian who broke with Stalin while abroad. For instance, Ignace Reiss, an NKVD official assigned to Switzerland, attempted to defect to the West in July 1937. His body was found riddled with bullets on a road near Lausanne. In bags found alongside the body was a box of poisoned chocolates-a gift Swiss police believed was intended for Reiss' children.
part 1 of 3
L'AFFAIRE FRAVCHENKO THEIR FATHER DEFECT... v2-12-92
