In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror
  • Verne W. Newton
Gary Kern , A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror. New York: Enigma Books, 2003. 491 pp. $29.00.

Walter Krivitsky may have been one of the few heroes, a tragic one to be sure, of that low, dishonest decade of the 1930s. His leftist revolutionary career ended when he openly denounced Josif Stalin for killing off the Old Bolsheviks in the Great Purges. In November 1938, after surviving two attempts on his life, Krivitsky fled to the United States. From then on, things got difficult. Hounded by U.S. immigration officials and stalked by Soviet assassins, he secretly provided invaluable intelligence to U.S. and British authorities in the hope of saving his wife and child.

In February 1940, Krivitsky visited Margarita and Eitel Dobert (who, like him, were European political refugees) at their secluded chicken farm in rural Virginia with the idea that he might eventually move there. At the end of the weekend, Margarita drove him to Washington, DC to catch the train bound for New York City. The next morning he was found in a hotel near Union Station with much of his head blown away. The Metropolitan police, in an investigation worthy of the Marx brothers, immediately ruled it a suicide.

Was it murder, suicide, or a "forced suicide"? Most of those who knew Krivitsky insisted that he never would have handed Stalin a propaganda victory by taking his own life, and they recalled how he had repeatedly warned that Soviet hit-men could arrange an assassination to look like a suicide. Sympathizers of Moscow asserted that Krivitsky's despair from betraying the Soviet Union and living in a capitalistic wasteland had driven him to self-destruction.

In A Death in Washington Gary Kern comes down on both sides, arguing that Krivitsky voluntarily pulled the trigger but in doing so had "outfoxed" Stalin (p. 378). The book can be divided into two parts. The first 345 pages are largely "spy vs. spy round and round" (p. 278). Kern combines a fluid writing style with some new sources to make this oft-told story more interesting, describing with moving insight the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks in Stalin's atavistic world.

But that empathy turns to melancholia when Kern shifts from the blood-stained [End Page 109] cellars of the Lubyanka to the New Deal milieu in Washington. The meticulous research that characterizes much of the book is abandoned for the canards that have suffused anti-Roosevelt diatribes from Charles Beard to Ann Coulter, including Whittaker Chambers's assertion that Franklin Roosevelt took umbrage at his warning that Alger Hiss was a Communist, (p. 230); that Roosevelt blurted out to Congressman Martin Dies (here an almost heroic figure), that Communism and Stalin were a good thing for Russia, (pp. 217–218); and that the "determined ignoramuses" Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace were the equivalent of Soviet spies in an administration that essentially allowed the Soviet Union to steal documents "by the truckload, by the ton" (pp. 180, 230).

The second part of the book, roughly fifty pages long, seeks to solve the mystery of Krivitsky's death. To do so Kern, a translator of Russian literature, crosses from non-fiction to fiction. He accepts the suicide verdict, as did the police, based largely on the Doberts' assurances that Krivitsky wrote the suicide notes at their cabin the night before his death. Even if one were to put aside all the other reasons to doubt the Doberts' often contradictory, inconsistent, and self-serving story, they had no earthly way of knowing what Krivitsky did in one room while they were asleep in another. They never claimed that he showed them the notes or mentioned them. If the Doberts are to be believed at all, the most that can be said is that they provided Krivitsky with the paper on which the notes were written. Whether he actually wrote them—and, if so, when and under what circumstances—remains, in spite of Kern's efforts to smother all doubt, purely a matter of speculation.

Kern acknowledges that the Doberts...

pdf

Share