Early Life
Born into a Ukrainian family with a non-party, revolutionary father, Kravchenko became an engineer and worked in the Don basin region. He joined the Communist Party in 1929. He witnessed the mass starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry as part of Joseph Stalin's agricultural collectivization. His disgust at the massive human cost of the policy increasingly alienated him from the Soviet regime. During the Second World War he served as a Captain in the Soviet Army before being posted to the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, D.C.
Read more about this topic: Victor Kravchenko (defector)
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)