Gary Kern on Victor Kravchenko

“Victor Kravchenko was a dissident, a defector and an unbelievably aggressive disputer. Breaking with the Soviet Union before the end of WWII, he was the first writer to blow the whistle on Stalin’s deceptive foreign policy, warning the West about the tyrant’s postwar plans. After the defeat of the Axis powers, he was the first to criticize the Soviet war effort, to record the human cost of Soviet heavy industry, to confirm first-hand the man-made famine in Ukraine, and, above all, to publicize the Soviet slave-labor|Soviet slave-labor state. He introduced the word ‘Gulag’ to the board Western public.”

“As the world’s most prominent defector, [Kravchenko] inspired other defections, including that of the code clerk Igor Gouzenko, who exposed the Soviet atomic-bomb spy ring in Canada and, together with other exposed agents, shocked Washington to the extent that it authorized a hydrogen-bomb program… He lived up to the title that one newspaper gave him at the start of his American career—the ‘Stalin Blaster.’”