Viktor Andreevich Kravchenko (; 11 October 1905 – 25 February 1966) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet defector, known for writing the best-selling book I Chose Freedom, published in 1946, about the realities of life in the Soviet Union. Kravchenko defected to the United States during World War II, and began writing about his experiences as an official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Early life Victor Andreevich Kravchenko was born on 11 October 1905, into a Ukrainian family in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine) with a non-party, revolutionary father. Kravchenko became an engineer specializing in metallurgy, and while studying at the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute he became friends with future Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. An enthusiastic Communist Party of the Soviet Union member who joined the party in 1929, Kravchenko later became disillusioned by witnessing the effects of collectivization while working in the steel mills of the Donbas region in his native Ukraine, and his personal mistreatment during the Great Purge, although he ultimately managed to avoid arrest. During World War II, Kravchenko served as a captain in the Soviet Army until 1943, when he was posted to the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington, D.C. Defection On 4 April 1944, Kravchenko abandoned his post and requested political asylum in the United States. However, the Soviet authorities demanded his immediate extradition, calling him a traitor, and ambassador Joseph E. Davies appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly on behalf of Joseph Stalin to have Kravchenko extradited. He was granted asylum, but lived under a pseudonym thereafter, fearing assassination by Soviet agents. Kravchenko began a relationship with an American woman, Cynthia Kuser-Earle, daughter of Anthony R. Kuser (1862–1929) and sister of New Jersey State Senator John Dryden Kuser, who was married to Brooke Astor from 1919 to 1930. Viktor and Cynthia created a family, but never married. They had two sons, Anthony and Andrew, who were obliged to live under their mother's arranged married name (Earle), and they remained unaware of their father's identity until 1965. When Kravchenko defected, he had a wife, Zinaida Gorlova, and a son, Valentin (born 1935), who remained in the Soviet Union. Gorlova remarried and her second husband adopted Valentin, changing his last name to that of his stepfather's to remove the stigma of his father. In spite of his new surname, Valentin was eventually publicized as the son of a "traitor to the motherland" and