The United States has made no effort to find its victims of the Stalin era. Sergei Zhuravlev, a historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says other governments including Germany and Austria long ago launched formal investigations into the fates of countrymen who disappeared in the purges, which also took the lives of several million Soviet citizens. In recent years, there have been scattered reports of Americans executed during the Stalinist purges but until now, details have been few and the role of the American embassy has remained unknown. Some of them were then arrested by secret police agents lurking outside the embassy gates. Declassified State Department records show that some Americans who came to the embassy for help were turned away because they lacked an up-to-date photo or didn’t have the few dollars in American currency required to renew their passports. Embassy officials in Moscow chronicled the terror in a series of internal memos but were ambivalent about helping the victims, in part because American fears of communism were already in full bloom. Embassy for help or talking about life back home. 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. His last moments were not documented the favored method was a single shot to the back of the head with a small-caliber pistol. 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.

But 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.

Dear America by Thomas Sgovio