Aleksandr Grigoriyevich Graff

Better known as Alexander Gregory Barmine, the name he assumed after his defection, Aleksandr Grigoryevich Graff was a controversial figure from the moment he defected. Most of what we know about his career comes from his own writings, which contained large portions of self-aggrandizement and name-dropping. He made his first public statements in December 1937,[i] expanded them into a book in 1938,[ii] and revised and updated it in 1945.[iii] His writings portrayed two primary themes: 1) that Stalin was a power-hungry killer who betrayed the ideals of the working class upon which the Bolshevik regime was founded; and 2) that Graff was a typical Red Army officer and diplomat who could no longer stand idly and accept Stalin’s betrayal. His theme about Stalin directly confronted Western leftists who subscribed to Soviet messaging about Stalin’s sapience and virtue, and about the evils of the Soviet leaders who were convicted of being terrorist, spies, and “wreckers” in the purge trials. Consequently, he was either roundly criticized by the American political left as a careerist and Nazi sympathizer, or extolled by the American political right for his forthrightness and courage.[iv]

Brook-Shepherd dismissed Graff’s first 1938 book, Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat, in a footnote, stating perfunctorily that it “contains relatively little of interest.”[v] Brook-Shepherd and others seemed to miss the fact that Graff, with all of his faults, was only the second defector after Poretskiy to articulate clearly the fear that Soviet insiders felt about Stalin’s purges and to contradict Soviet messaging about the purge trials. Graff’s December 1937 articles and 1938 book and 1939 French translation, however, received less attention than Poretskiy’s assassination and subsequent investigation, and consequently Graff had less of an impact until near the end of World War II.

In line with his second theme, Graff meticulously avoided any reference to his intelligence career in his public writings, although Graff was a senior GRU officer. Without knowing that he was a GRU officer, his career appeared random and itinerant, and reviewers of his 1945 book One Who Survived expressed surprise or disparagement about his transition through multiple diplomatic and foreign trade jobs. Orville Prescott, a New York Times book reviewer, wrote, “He served as a Soviet diplomat in Bokhara, Persia, Paris, and Athens. He also found time to run a factory and to conduct the Department of Foreign Trade that officially exported automobiles and surreptitiously exported arms.”[vi] Lewis Gannet, book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that Graff “drifted into a bewildering succession of diplomatic and foreign-trade posts…His heart seems never to have been in any of it; he was a drifter—sort of a Bolshevik careerist.”[vii] But viewing his succession of assignments in light of his GRU career offers a different conclusion. While Graff held a series of varied cover positions, the thread that ran through many of them was a specialization in foreign weapons sales, a mission typical for a senior GRU officer.

Graff was born in 16 August 1899 in Mogilev, now Belarus. His early years were spent in rural Ukraine; in Gomel, Belorussia; and at school in Kiev. Family life was unstable and his father, a schoolteacher, and his mother, a nurse, divorced when he was about 10 years old. They both eventually remarried, and Graff described his stepparents as unwelcoming of his presence. He left home at age 15 and spent most of World War I in Kiev where he worked at odd jobs and attended school. He was in Kiev when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Russia, and he began to associate with Bolshevik friends. He worked as a partisan for the Bolsheviks in 1918 and was arrested by German occupying forces briefly for Bolshevik agitation activities. He enlisted in the Red Army in early 1919 and joined Bolshevik Party soon thereafter.[viii]

As a Red Army private Graff claims to have distinguished himself for bravery under fire, and he was named a battalion commissar at age 19.[ix] Partly based on his political reliability, he was selected to attend officer’s school in Gomel after less than a year as a Red Army soldier. The normally six-month officer’s course lasted eight months because the cadets were mobilized several times to fight on the front; he states that out of his 400-man student cohort, 150 were killed during these mobilizations.[x]

It was during one of these mobilizations when Graff first encountered Trotsky. Trotsky traveled to Gomel in May 1920 to rally the troops, encouraging them by telling them that they enjoyed “moral superiority.” He declared that, whereas “Polish troops are attacking in the name of aggression and robbery…we are defending our workers’ and peasants’ country in the name of freedom and peace.”[xi] Graff described the impact of Trotsky’s presence: “The situation, catastrophic but twenty-four hours earlier, had improved as though by a miracle, though, in fact, the only miraculous thing about it was the perfectly natural effect of organization and determination.”[xii] Graff also met Trotsky’s son, Lev Lvovich Sedov, who accompanied Trotsky; they would meet again 18 years later in Paris after Graff’s defection and reminisce about their time at the front. Graff’s positive impression of Trotsky remained with him throughout his Soviet service, and Stalin’s expulsion and exile of Trotsky in 1927 became a source of dissonance for Graff, as it did form many Red Army officers.

He was active in Party affairs during his time at the officer’s school in 1919. The Party was expanding its numbers at the time, and he was an active campaigner in factories, schools, offices, and hospitals. He later wrote, “This recruiting campaign, conducted throughout Russia, resulted in the formation of a party of hundreds of thousands of fighters pledged to conquer for the Soviets or die. It was the survivors of this heroic period whom Stalin and his henchmen exterminated during the purges of 1937 and 1938.”[xiii]

Graff graduated from officer’s school in mid-1920 and was assigned to a reserve regiment to train new recruits, both militarily and politically. While in this unit, he heard news that the Red Fleet, commanded by Admiral Fedor Fedorovich Raskolnikov, had landed a detachment of men in the Persian town of Bandar Anzali on the Caspian Sea coast. A Pravda article at the time reported that the fleet was “received with popular acclaim.” This event inspired Graff to prepare for Socialist revolution in Asia, setting him on the path toward learning Persian and specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.[xiv] Raskolnikov’s show of force did in fact lead to the establishment of the short-lived Persian Soviet Socialist Republic with its capital in Gilam, which lasted from May 1920 to September 1921.

Graff also encountered Stalin for the first time during this period when Stalin was the political commissar of a cavalry army commanded by Semen Mikhailovich Budyonniy. Graff claims that his first impression of Stalin was as a second-rate leader who was jealous of more capable officers, like Trotsky and Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevskiy, who commanded the army under which Graff’s unit was subordinate. Striking a theme to which he returned throughout his writings, Graff described Stalin as being motivated by a sense of inferiority: “Overshadowed by more brilliant men, he wanted to gain a place in the limelight. He had long been resenting the secondary role he was playing in military affairs.” He laid the blame for the Soviets’ loss in the Battle of Warsaw on Stalin, whose inaction left Tukhachevskiy’s flank exposed to Polish attack because Stalin was “not disposed to take orders from Tukhachevskiy.”[xv] Graff states that the conflict that arose over this incident planted the seeds of the Red Army purge that occurred in 1937, since as long as those more capable officers were alive, Stalin “could not completely obliterate the history of his own shabby role.”[xvi]

After the Polish campaign, Graff left the front and entered the General Staff Academy in Moscow. He arrived in the fall of 1920, having been a Soviet officer for only a few months, during which he had already reached the rank of kompolka, equivalent to a colonel. He was 21 years old.

Throughout his writings, Graff drops the names of dozens of senior Soviet military and foreign affairs officials, many of whom he first met during his time at the General Staff Academy. He described these officers as a group of dedicated Communists whose lives were completely changed by the revolution; who, in the absence of the revolution would have followed in their fathers’ footsteps as tailors or shoemakers or peasants. However, the social upheaval caused by the revolution “unlocked stores of talent that no one dreamed lay hidden among the masses, enabling thousands of them to apply their gifts of leadership on the national scale.”[xvii] Few of them survived beyond 1938.

Graff enrolled in military courses at the General Staff Academy and simultaneously in Persian language courses at the Institute of Oriental Languages. Foreign language skill became his introduction into an intelligence career. General Staff Academy students in the early 1920s were often tapped to fill gaps in the ranks of the Razvedupr, and selected students were sent to temporary Razvedupr assignments either at Moscow headquarters or abroad. If they performed effectively they would be assigned to the Razvedupr permanently after graduation. The Razvedupr was particularly seeking officers with foreign language skills and knowledge of the countries to which they would be assigned, which significantly narrowed the pool of suitable officers.[xviii] Consequently, Graff spent brief tours in Bukhara in 1921, and at the Soviet legation in Riga and as a secretary for Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin in 1922, likely as a form of Razvedupr internship. His extra effort to lean Persian then made him attractive for Razvedupr duty under diplomatic cover in Persia after the General Staff Academy.

Graff graduated from the General Staff Academy in July 1923 and received an assignment as consul general in Resht, Persia, in October. Before leaving Moscow, he heard news stories about the Comintern’s involvement in the failed Communist revolution in Germany. Pravda ran articles anticipating the foreign policy of what Zinoviev predicted would be the German Soviet Republic.[xix] However, the revolution failed and the German Soviet Republic never became a reality, forcing Comintern representatives, including, as noted above, Poretskiy, to flee Germany.

Graff served in Resht in 1923 and 1924, during which time he echoed Arutyunov’s assessment that the primary adversary of Soviet interests in Persia was Great Britain. Graff’s role in Persia was to counterweigh British political and commercial interests. Graff described an incident when a British intelligence agent pitched Graff’s Persian secretary and offered money for copies of Graff’s weekly reports to Moscow. The secretary reported the approach to Graff, and Graff proceeded to run his secretary as a double agent against the British, supplying the British with fictitious reports for several months and receiving 25 tumans in return for each.[xx] Ironically, Graff used the money to support a pro-Soviet newspaper that agitated against British influence in Persia. Nevertheless, when the United Kingdom extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in February 1924, Graff and his British counterpart in Resht, Mr. Trott, probably referring to British diplomat Alan Charles Trott, developed friendly relations.

Graff mentions several times his humble salary and privileges as a Soviet diplomat. While in Persia, Graff stated that his salary was $250 per month.[xxi] Later, when he served in Paris as a trade representative, he listed his salary as $200 per month initially, later rising to $250. He wrote, “I myself lived modestly in Paris, partly because I had never lived otherwise, partly because I was sending two-thirds of my salary…to Moscow for my twin boys.” [xxii] This contrasted with other defectors, like Sipelgas and Arutyunov, who told of Soviet diplomats using their time abroad to accumulate lavish material goods not available in the Soviet Union. But it fit into the persona that Graff portrayed of himself and other old Bolsheviks as self-sacrificing, dedicated servants of a socialist ideal. Graff’s claims of being a modest public servant, however, was a thin veil over the material benefits that he gained from his Soviet employment, which included purchasing American cars during two different foreign assignments, taking at least two vacations to the palatial Maryino sanatorium south of Moscow, and taking a 6-month vacation through Turkey, Greece, and Italy in 1924 after his assignment in Persia ended.

From 1925 to 1928, Graff was assigned to the Soviet book import business Mezdunarodnaya Kniga (International Book). He provides little indication of his intelligence tasks during this assignment, but he was directly involved in negotiating import deals and developing Soviet domestic industries to compete with foreign products. These skills laid the foundation for his future assignments in the People’s Commissariat or Foreign Trade, where he directed foreign weapons sales; even as a Mezdunarodnaya Kniga executive he was involved with negotiations with the King of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, to sell weapons and automobiles during Amanullah’s visit to Moscow in 1928.[xxiii]

His tour in Moscow also gave him a front-row seat to the internal Party conflict that led to Trotsky’s expulsion in 1927. Graff portrayed himself as a young, naïve supporter of the Party line, invariably siding with the Central Committee in internal Party disagreements. Party members voted for party unity even if it meant turning away from Trotsky, whom they respected more than Stalin. The handling of Trotsky, accompanied by Stalin’s assumption of the title вождь (vozhd, equivalent to the German word führer) made Graff suspect that Stalin had duped them and wanted only to take power for himself. Nevertheless, “the threat of a party schism would have frightened us into obedience.”[xxiv]

In January 1929, Graff was posted to Paris as a trade representative, where he was responsible for purchasing material for the Soviet air force and armaments industry. He describes a constant struggle for the Soviet Union to acquire enough gold to buy goods in Western countries. His colleagues in the trade representation met each day to tally what they were buying and selling to make sure they could pay the contracts for purchases. Stalin’s industrialization program had begun, and the Soviet Union was feverishly purchasing industrial machinery to fuel the plan to “Catch up to and surpass America.”[xxv] He was promoted to kombrig, the equivalent to brigadier general, while in Paris.

In September 1930 the émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie ran a gossip-column on the goings-on at the Soviet trade representation in Paris. Graff was identified in the article as the “chekist Barmin,” not a badge of distinction for a Razvedupr officer supposedly operating clandestinely. The column claims that Barmin/Graff had little to do with trade, but was merely a party functionary—Graff himself confirmed his role in regulating party discipline at the trade representation.[xxvi] The Vozrozhdenie article further associated Graff with the kidnapping of General Kutepov, which had occurred earlier in 1930, claiming that Barmin/Graff had “accidentally” burned his desk with all of its papers just after Kutepov disappeared. The article also claims that Barmin/Graff, whom it described as looking like a seminarian, had suddenly hidden himself and secretly escaped to Moscow soon after Kutepov disappeared, but that he subsequently returned to Paris.[xxvii]

In February 1931, the French Sûreté Générale reported receiving information that Graff/Barmin was a GPU agent. Sûreté Générale requested that Paris Prefecture Police conduct an investigation to verify the information.[xxviii] The Paris Police conducted an investigation and surveilled him for the following month, reporting that he disappeared from Paris on 25 February 1931, immediately after a demonstration in Paris. He departed suddenly, leaving his wife and three children at their hotel. Before his disappearance, he reportedly went out every evening and returned at two or three in the morning, or sometimes not until the following day. The police did not have any information about what he was doing during these trips.[xxix] Then, on 15 April 1931, the Paris Police received a request to extend Graff/Barmine’s and his wife’s visa to remain in France for two years.[xxx]

Suspicions about Barmin/Graff being a Soviet clandestine operative were promoted by the anti-Soviet journalist Vladimir Burtsev, who claimed he was a Comintern representative and that he was caught in the act of buying documents on explosives manufacturing.[xxxi] The Paris Police reported similar accounts of him being a GPU agent, attributing them to White Russian émigré circles in Paris. These suspicions followed him to his next assignment.

After a year in Paris, Graff received the assignment to open a trade representation in Belgium. However, Belgium had not yet established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and withheld his visa for seven months in 1931. While awaiting his Belgian visa, Graff temporarily worked in Milan as director general of imports, where he negotiated purchases of Fiat cars, airplane engines, dockyard equipment, and ships. He also observed air force maneuvers in Italy and reported to Moscow the tactical advantages of nighttime air attacks.[xxxii] His Belgian visa eventually came through and he travelled to Brussels in late 1931. However, the lack of diplomatic recognition continued to hamper his work, as the Belgian government inhibited business deals with Soviet companies and refused to grant the Soviet Union purchase credits.

Graff was on a temporary visit back to Paris when a Russian émigré assassinated the French President Paul Doumer in May 1932. The French and Belgian governments suspected Soviet involvement and when Graff returned to Brussels he found that his office had been ransacked and searched. Then, in July 1932, miners in southern Belgium launched violent labor strikes, which press reports described as looking like a revolution.[xxxiii] Graff suspected that Arutyunov, who he claimed was working as an informant for the Belgian police, supplied false information that the Soviet Union was behind the labor unrest.[xxxiv] Although there is no conclusive evidence of a Soviet hand in the strike, Graff was forced to return to Moscow in November 1932.

His next assignment was to the Soviet industrial machinery company, Stanko-Import to purchase machine tools for the Soviet armaments and aircraft industries, which Graff wrote were “being rushed ahead at a feverish pace.”[xxxv] Stalin was reconsidering Russia’s relationship with Poland at this time, especially after the Nazi Party took control of the German government in 1933. Poland had been portrayed as an enemy for a decade, and each spring the Politburo warned of an impending Polish attack on the Soviet Union and worked the country up into a state of war fever. However, when the Nazi Party took control in Germany, Stalin considered reconciling with Poland, while still grasping onto a hope of an eventual understanding with Hitler. Graff participated in a trade delegation to Poland as a senior foreign trade official in 1933 as part of the Soviet plan to rebuild relations with Poland.[xxxvi]

In late 1933, Graff resigned form Stanko-Import and requested to attend the Air Academy, hoping for a respite from bureaucratic life. Instead, he was assigned to a newly created organization called Auto-Moto-Export. Graff provided details of Auto-Moto-Export in a 1950 interview with the FBI, explaining that Auto-Moto-Export dealt with both legal export of automobiles and clandestine export of armaments. Previously, three ministries—War, Industry, and Foreign Trade—separately handled armaments exports. At the end of 1933, the Politburo combined those efforts into one organization and place it under the Ministry of Foreign Trade, resulting in Auto-Moto-Export, over which Graff was made president in January 1934. A subordinate office called Auto-Kontora continued legal trade deals, while clandestine trade deals were handled by another office called Moto-Kontora.[xxxvii] Graff supervised arms deals with a number of countries, including Turkey, Iran, and China.

Graff told the FBI that, while at Auto-Moto-Export, he had frequent contact General Jan Karlovich Berzin, the chief of the Razvedupr from 1924 to 1935, who was Graff’s former senior officer on the General Staff, who discussed using Auto-Moto-Export facilities for Razvedupr operational purposes. Auto-Moto-Export had a representative attached to the Communist Chinese Army in Sinkiang, and Berzin asked Graff in 1935 about Auto-Moto-Export’s plans to open branches and sell trucks in Manchuria and southern China. Berzin explained that he wanted to use the branches as cover for Razvedupr officers and to use Auto-Moto-Export warehouses in China as storage locations for weapons in case of an uprising or revolt in China.[xxxviii] Berzin further explained to Graff that the Razvedupr sought American, British, or French citizens, such as those who are in China in connection with a chamber of commerce, research commission, or trade commission, as agents. The Razvedupr would initially approach potential agents and give them an overt task to write a report on economic conditions in China, and subsequently offer an all-expenses paid research trip to Mongolia. Berzin told Graff the Razvedupr already had a network of agents in an organization called the Institute of Pacific Relations in China. After defecting, Graff met fellow intelligence officer defector Ginzberg (Krivitskiy) in Paris who, in the course of conversation about Soviet intelligence operations directed at the United States, similarly indicated that the Razvedupr was successfully using the Institute of Pacific Relations as cover for intelligence operations.[xxxix]

In a 1948 FBI interview, Graff recounted a statement by Berzin that identified two Americans, Owen Lattimore and Joseph Barnes, as Razvedupr agents in China.[xl] In a subsequent FBI interview Graff further described Lattimore and Barnes, possibly hyperbolically, as the “two most promising and most brilliantmen that the Soviet Military Intelligence had in the Institute Pacific Relations in China.”[xli] Lattimore became the subject of an FBI espionage investigation and was called to testify in U.S. Senate hearings in which Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of being the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.[xlii] Graff also appeared in the hearings, repeating his accusations about Lattimore.[xliii] Lattimore vehemently denied any ties to the Razvedupr, and neither the hearings nor the FBI investigation produced hard evidence of Lattimore’s Razvedupr connections beyond Graff’s second-hand accounts. However, in the process, Graff’s accusation against Lattimore placed him clearly in McCarthy anti-Communist camp. Historian Robert P. Newman later presented a scathing, albeit frequently inaccurate, description of Graff in his apologia titled Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China, attacking Graff as an unreliable witness who contradicted himself and painting him as a McCarthy stooge.[xliv]

Graff’s final job as a Soviet official was as a diplomat in Greece. Prokhorov identifies his position in Greece as the legal rezident,[xlv] which is plausible, especially as his mission likely included continued involvement in clandestine weapons sales. Graff was serving as a Razvedupr officer under the cover of charge d’affaires in Athens when Poretskiy sent Henri Christian Pieck to Athens in July 1936 to persuade the Greek government to participate in a weapons trade deal in support of Spanish republicans in the civil war (see above under Poretskiy).[xlvi] Poretskiy possibly chose Athens as the venue for such a deal specifically because a senior officer experienced in weapons sales was there to oversee it. Graff never mentions the deal in his writings, but he was likely at least been aware of it and possibly directly supervised it.

In addition to Soviet support to Spanish republicans, Germany remained a priority for the Soviet Union, and Graff presented a plan to Moscow in January 1937 to increase Soviet economic power in Greece at the expense of Germany. His plan envisioned counterweighing German influence by using the force of the Soviet market, which the government controlled completely, to dominate Greek exports in exchange for cash or wheat. The plan was well received at the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, but was buried, Graff believes, because Stalin was focusing instead on making Germany an ally. Graff later learned that Stalin was preparing the ground for a secret agreement with Germany.[xlvii]

Graff was in Athens when the trial and executions of the Sixteen occurred in August 1936. The events sent shock waves through the embassy and added to the doubts that had been building in Graff’s mind for several years. He kept his doubts to himself—it was dangerous to even talk about events in Moscow for fear of appearing critical. But after the executions in June 1937 of Tukhachevskiy and seven other senior Red Army officers, Graff made an unguarded comment to a friend: “What on earth is happening there? This is too horrible. The best men—the flower of the Army…”.[xlviii] That, along with his past professional association with several of the executed officers, cast suspicion on him. He may have also resorted to active opposition: a brief biography compiled by the U.S. Army in 1942 indicated that he had been writing articles critical of the Soviet regime, resulting in his recall to Moscow.[xlix] On 16 July 1937, the day before Poretskiy sent his letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Graff received an invitation to a reception on a Soviet ship. He suspected the invitation to be a trap to lure him onto the ship and forcibly return him to the Soviet Union for execution. Instead, he boarded a train and traveled to Paris on 18 July 1937, the day after Poretskiy’s letter.

Graff denies any acquaintance with Poretskiy prior to September news reports of his assassination.[l] However, Prokhorov claims that Graff and Poretskiy were close friends.[li] Having both been senior Razvedupr officers prior to Poretskiy’s transfer to the OGPU, it is plausible that they would have been acquainted. In any case, Graff possibly learned a lesson from Poretskiy’s doomed fate and, writing as Alexandre Barmine, addressed an open letter to the League of the Rights of Man on 1 December 1937, in which he decried the Stalinist regime and the disappearances of numerous old Bolsheviks, and stated that by breaking with the Soviet Union he was following the dictates of his conscience. The League of the Rights of Man, a Paris-based, left-leaning nongovernmental organization that advocated for human rights, had launched, with Soviet inspiration, a “Commission of Enquiry into the Moscow Trials.” The commission concluded that the trial of the Sixteen was just and reasonable.[lii] Graff’s letter was intended to counter that conclusion publicly with the benefit of an insider’s perspective. A few weeks later Graff published a series of articles in the New York Times, presaging his first book, which was published in London the following year. The articles strongly criticized Stalin for executing those whose authority as old Bolsheviks rivaled Stalin’s.[liii]

He arrived in Paris in July 1937. He had previously arranged to meet his fiancé, a Greek architect who was on a business trip to Paris, and they set up a secret life together. Graff received a job as a factory worker in an aircraft factory, a field in which he had some considerable experience, and planned to live the rest of his life in France. However, he suspected that French communists, on NKVD orders, were continually monitoring his movements. Not wanting to live the rest of his life with French police protection, he decided to begin a new life in the United States. In the spring of 1939, he and he then wife boarded a ship for New York.[liv]

In 1942, he began working for the Office of Strategic Services translating Russian documents, including a Soviet guerilla guide. His supervisor evaluated him saying, “His specialized knowledge of Russian Army and Russian political matters is quite unique outside of Russia.”[lv] He was inducted into the U.S. Army in December 1942 as a 40-year-old private and obtained U.S. citizenship.[lvi] But he was quickly discharged due to his age and transferred to full-time duty with Office of Strategic Services Special Intelligence Branch in January 1943. He was recommended for officer training school, ironically over 20 years after he had completed officer training in the Soviet Union.[lvii] He was employed as a translator in the Foreign Broadcast Quarterly (FBQ) Corporation, an OSS cover company in Bellmore, New York, where foreign radio intercepts were translated for intelligence purposes.

His anti-Soviet writings continued into the 1940s. However, some readers began to question his reliability as a commentator on Communist politics. The October 1944 edition of Reader’s Digest article ran his article titled “The New Communist Conspiracy,” which claimed that the U.S. labor movement was controlled by Communists. He accused Sydney Hillman, a leading figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, of being “hand-in-glove with these same Communists. He thinks he is using them; but they know they are using him.”[lviii] His essay described an underground Communist conspiracy to take control of labor organizations, repudiating communism in public while clandestinely subordinating themselves to it, “weaken[ing] democratic capitalist America to such an extent that she will be no serious rival to totalitarian Communist Russia,” thereby seizing political power.[lix] While later intelligence showed that there was in fact Soviet influence in the U.S. labor movement,[lx] Graff’s conspiracy theories appeared farfetched when he wrote them.

The Reader’s Digest issue hit newsstands on 27 September 1944. Coincidentally, on the same day, his OSS sent Graff a letter terminating his employment with FBQ, citing an unsatisfactory attendance record.[lxi] Anticipating that Graff would react angrily, his OSS supervisor warned OSS Commander Brigadier General William Donovan on 30 September that “allegations may be made, improperly, that Barmine was dismissed as a result [of the Reader’s Digest article].” Their prediction was accurate; Graff gave press interviews claiming a direct tie to his article and denying that his attendance at work was at fault. The OSS released a press statement on 5 October 1944 arguing that Graff’s dismissal was predicated on a bad attendance record at work, not on the article, and that the decision to terminate his employment had actually been made on 21 September, almost a week before the article was appeared.[lxii]

If the Reader’s Digest article had any influence in the OSS decision to dismiss Graff, it was probably less because of its political rhetoric, as Graff claimed, and more because he leaked sensitive information about U.S. military intelligence collection. He wrote in the article:

In the Third Naval District, which includes New York City, headquarters of the American Communists, the Navy had built up an intelligently informed “Communist desk” which since Pearl Harbor had accumulated extensive files on subversive individuals and organizations. So authoritative had this intelligence unit become that its weekly reports of “trends” in the American Communist movement went regularly to the FBI, Army Intelligence and the highest Navy officers in Washington. The unit itself came to be recognized as one of the best in the country.[lxiii]

He claimed that pressure from Communist-leaning politicians had forced the intelligence unit to close. Revealing the existence of a military intelligence capability to which he had access by virtue of his OSS employment, which was directed both at a World War II ally and at a legal U.S. political party, may have been at least a factor in his dismissal.

Graff’s 1945 book, One Who Survived, paints a picture of him as the only surviving old Bolshevik who could tell the tale of how Soviet communism had morphed from Leninism, to Stalinism, to the Great Purge. The book’s introduction by leftist radical-turned-anti-Stalinst Max Eastman, begins with the statement

Barmine is the sole man left in the world who can relate, and dares to, with the authority of theoretic understanding, intimate and diversified experience, unbroken morale, irreproachable integrity, and scientific detachment, the inside story of that experiment from the revolution to the great purge.[lxiv]

While it is true that several of the purge-era defectors had been assassinated or died mysteriously before 1945 (Poretskiy and Ginzberg), others were still living when Graff’s second book was published, although their existence was not as well known. Even amongst the individuals covered in this study, Iosif Volfovoch Volodarsky (aka Armand Lavis Feldman) was living in Canada being debriefed by Canadian and U.S. counterintelligence officials; Leyba Lazarevich Feldbin (aka Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov) was in the United States, but did not make his presence known until 1953, at which time he became a strong public voice denouncing Stalin’s purges; Genrikh Samoilovich Lyushkov was still alive in Japan for a few months longer and had published materials about the purge; and Lev Borisovich Helfand had emigrated to the United States in 1940 and was still alive. In addition to these, many who had been in the Bolshevik Party since the time of Lenin defected or were captured during World War II, and were still living to tell the tale of the Great Purge, which many did in the early years after the war. Consequently, the claim of Graff’s uniqueness was hardly accurate.

Eastman also states in his introduction to One Who Survived that the Soviet regime never said a word about the book, implying that it contained such irrefutable evidence that there could be no response. However, Eastman was unaware that the Soviet Union was preparing both clandestine and overt responses when he wrote his introduction in March 1945. According to material made available through the declassification of the U.S. National Security Agency VENONA program, Moscow tasked the NKVD rezidency in New York in March 1945 to investigate the publication of Graff’s book clandestinely and to stop its publication. Moscow ordered the rezidency to steal the manuscript if possible.[lxv] Publicly, Graff’s publications attracted a strong reaction from the Communist press, which portrayed Graff as a Nazi sympathizer. An article in the Daily Worker, the voice of the Communist Party of the USA, dated 23 July 1945—not long after the public appearance of One Who Survived—claimed that Nazis had used Graff’s 1944 Reader’s Digest article as propaganda, dropping it as leaflets on U.S. troops in Germany “in a desperate last minute effort to confuse and demoralize American soldiers.”[lxvi] The article implied that Graff’s writings directly correlated with Nazi propaganda themes. The following day, the Daily Worker published a Stalinist-inspired retort to One Who Survived, stating that in it Graff openly confessed to being part of a Nazi fifth column in the Soviet Union by admitting association with “Nazi traitors” like Tukhachevskiy and other Soviet military figures who had been executed in the Great Purge.[lxvii] Because Graff’s book also describes Trotsky in positive, even glowing terms, it drew the wrath of those who adhered to the Stalinist line, further associating Graff with Nazis in response to Graff’s writings.

After the war, in addition to testimony in the McCarthy hearings, Graff also became known for his turbulent personal life and his U.S. government employment. He divorced his Greek wife in June 1948 “on grounds of cruelty,” and married to 20-year-old Edith Kermit Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s granddaughter, in September 1948.[lxviii] They divorced in 1952. He subsequently testified before the U.S. Senate about the sincere desire of Soviet prisoners of war and immigrants to break from their past and become Americans, lobbying Congress to loosen immigration laws to open their path the legal immigration.[lxix] He served as chief of the Russian Branch of Voice of America from 1948 and later as a senior advisor on Soviet affairs for the U.S. Information Agency. He died on 25 December 1987 at the age of 88.[lxx]

While Graff was serving at Voice of America, Leyba Lazerevich Feldbin, better known as Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov, referred U.S. authorities to him to clarify Feldbin’s role in the assassination of Andres Nin, the head of the Spanish Trotskyist organization, the Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista (POUM; United Marxist Workers’ Party. Feldbin denied any association with the assassination, and recommended that U.S. authorities talk to Graff, who had personally known Abram Slutskiy, who was also alleged to have been involved. The details of Graff’s interview are not available.