attention to the cause and damaged the Communist Party in France. Although he did not receive the cost he had asked for, he did cover his trial expenses and beyond. Les Lettres Françaises appealed the verdict. A higher French court upheld the verdict but reduced the fine from 50,000 francs to 3 francs, or less than US$1, on the grounds that trial publicity had helped Kravchenko sell books. Later years A social democrat since the 1940s, Kravchenko felt increasingly alienated from American politics, both from the anti-socialist right-wing and a decreasingly anti-communist left-wing. He later lived in Peru and New York City. His South American business ventures failed. A sympathetic biographer, Gary Kern, has suggested that the KGB played a role in the failure. Death On 25 February 1966, Kravchenko was found dead from a gunshot wound to his head at his desk in his apartment in Manhattan. Kravchenko's death was officially ruled a suicide, and this view is widely accepted, including by biographer Gary Kern. FBI files obtained by Kern after a six-year lawsuit show that President Lyndon B. Johnson had taken a strong interest in Kravchenko's suicide and had demanded that the FBI determine if his suicide note was authentic or a Soviet fabrication. The FBI ruled that it was authentic, yet some details concerning Kravchenko's last days remain questionable, and his son Andrew believes he could have been a victim of a KGB assassination. Andrew Kravchenko produced a documentary film in 2008, The Defector, about his father. Kravchenko's decision to defect from the Soviet Union resulted in family members he left behind facing harassment, imprisonment and even death, with more than 30 relatives of Kravchenko being killed in the Soviet Union as a reprisal for his defection. It is known that Kravchenko's location was discovered by NKVD agents in 1944, notably Mark Zborowski, and subsequently closely monitored by the NKVD and later by KGB special operations. Books I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946) Charles Scribner's Sons, New York I Chose Justice (1950) Charles Scribner, New York Kravchenko Versus Moscow: The Report of the Famous Paris Case (1950) London and New York, Wingate Kern, Gary (2007) The Kravchenko Case: One Man's War On Stalin, Enigma Books, See also List of Eastern Bloc defectors Soviet-German cooperation during World War II Notes and references External links . 1905 births 1966 deaths Writers from