The Defector

a documentary film

The Defector is a feature documentary about one of the greatest whistleblowers in history, Victor Kravchenko, the “Stalin Blaster,” a high-ranking Communist official who wrote two best-selling books exposing the crimes of Josef Stalin, put the Soviet dictator on trial in Paris in “The Trial of the Century,” and was discovered dead in his Manhattan apartment with a bullet in his head.  A love story, murder mystery, historical epic and father-son story, the film follows Kravchenko’s son Andrew as he journeys back in time and travels to Paris, Russia and Ukraine to fulfill his father’s last request and uncover the truth about his father’s life and death. 

The Defector has completed principal photography in four countries and fourteen cities.  The Defector creative team includes 3-time Oscar-winning writer/director/producer Mark Jonathan Harris (Into the Arms of Strangers, The Long Way Home, Redwoods), Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Don Lenzer, editor Victor Livingston  (Crumb, Bukowski: Born Into This), producer Andrew Kravchenko, executive producer James Egan, line producer Rebecca Hartzell and co-writer/co-producer Paul Wolansky.  The Defector is a co-production of American Sterling Productions and Wild At Heart Films.

DIRECTOR’S VISION
The Defector is a modern-day myth: the story of Andrew Kravchenko’s quest to understand his heroic but very complicated father and discover what led him to sacrifice family, friends, and the Communist Party he had dedicated his life to, for freedom in the U.S.  It is also the son’s (Andrew’s) attempt to grasp the personal and collective impact of his father’s (Victor’s) actions and to fulfill the legacy the father began but could not finish. 

The film interweaves photographs, newsreel footage, and movies of the era (including both Communist and American propaganda films); interviews with witnesses of the past and important contemporary figures; present day scenes with Andrew and artful reenactment of both Andrew’s memories and key scenes from Victor’s life as he described it in I Chose Freedom.

RELEVANCE FOR TODAY
In a time when totalitarianism is resurgent in Russia and countries all around the world, and when even in America dissent is increasingly being suppressed, it is more important than ever to tell the stories of men like Victor Kravchenko who risked everything to defend every individual’s right to freedom.   As he himself said,  “The mouths of citizens can be stopped from criticizing the regime for a few years…Millions of free people can be herded into concentration camps.  But it is impossible to stifle the spirit of freedom, It is immortal as life itself.”

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The Defector is the extraordinary story of one man’s struggle, sacrifice, and triumph to bring truth to the world.   It is also the chronicle of a son’s search for the father he barely knew and his lifelong quest to come to terms with the legacy his father bequeathed him.

Almost forgotten in the United States today, and written out of history in Russia, Victor Kravchenko was the Oscar Schindler of the Soviet Union, a man willing to risk his life, his family, and all his financial resources to expose the ruthless tyranny of Josef Stalin.  One of the greatest whistleblowers in modern history, Kravchenko has inspired two generations of men and women who have battled against Soviet communism, from the gulags of Siberia to the streets of Budapest and Prague, and Kiev.   The Defector is the epic story of this struggle as seen through the eyes of his son Andrew, who only discovered at the age of 13 that he was Victor’s son.

A blend of past and present, personal and political, the documentary is a My Architect of the Cold War—a moving personal story of father and son, a detective story of murder and intrigue, and a historical epic that details the horrors of the collectivization and Ukrainian famine-genocide, the Soviet slave labor camps, and purges which left 30 million dead. 

This groundbreaking documentary is being co-written and directed by three-time Oscar winning filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris, whose recent documentaries Into the Arms of Strangers and The Long Way Home powerfully explored the Holocaust.  Although a documentary, The Defector can be likened to Judgment at Nuremberg, Hotel Rwanda, and The Killing Fields in revealing to the world historical events that have been suppressed from the collective memory.

Victor Kravchenko, a high-ranking Soviet official, arrived in Washington in 1943 and went to work for the Soviet Purchasing Commission, charged with obtaining materials for the Soviet war effort. On April 1, 1944, at the height of the US-USSR alliance, he defected, risking everything: his family, his very life to expose the horrifying truth of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship to the world.  The son of a revolutionary who fought to overthrow the Russian Czar, Kravchenko became a Communist in hopes of bettering the life of his fellow countrymen.   But his bitter experiences during the engineered famine, collectivization, purges and gulags of the 1930s convinced him that the Soviet police state was far more repressive and tyrannical than life under the czars. For years he waited for his chance to defect to the West.

The American press dubbed him the “Stalin-Blaster”.  Infuriated, Stalin demanded that President Roosevelt return Kravchenko to Russia as a traitor – an automatic death sentence. Kravchenko was an embarrassment not only to the Soviets but to those in the U.S. government who did not want the image of a major American military ally sullied. Concerned that Kravchenko’s extradition could become a political issue, President Roosevelt agreed to take the matter up after the 1944 election. J. Edgar Hoover and the State Department supported Kravchenko’s case and on the day that Roosevelt died Kravchenko was granted asylum. Under intense surveillance by the KGB and FBI, Kravchenko was forced underground, where he began to write his book and survived two assassination attempts. In 1946, Kravchenko published I Chose Freedom, which became the most powerful expose of the Stalinist regime of its time.

          Cynthia Kuser                           Victor Kravchenko
At a publishing party Kravchenko met Cynthia Kuser, a rebellious daughter of capitalism, a rich, beautiful heiress to a vast New Jersey fortune. A woman of uncommon beauty, intelligence and recklessness, she spoke eight languages and was said to have seduced men in most of them. Among her lovers were the mobster Lucky Luciano, the Spanish matador Manolete, and Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors. Despite the risk to her life, Victor and Cynthia fell madly in love and she became an invaluable supporter of his cause.

I Chose Freedom was translated into twenty-two languages and became an international bestseller and a major force in the emerging Cold War. It proved to be such a powerful condemnation of the atrocities and brutality of the Soviet system that Communists tried to smear its author. Les Lettres Francaises, a French Communist newspaper, claimed that the book was a fraud manufactured by American intelligence agencies and contained nothing but anti-Soviet propaganda.  Kravchenko seized the opportunity and sued for libel in a French court. This gave him the opportunity he most desired, a chance to publicly indict Stalin and the Soviet system in front of the world’s press. He told reporters: “I am going to make more hell for the Communists than they ever dreamed possible.”  The resulting conflict was celebrated in its time as the “Trial of the Century.”  A world audience followed every detail of its stormy sessions daily. 

To counter the coached witnesses and false documentation provided by the Soviet government, Kravchenko produced his witnesses: twenty-seven “displaced persons” who had suffered from Stalin’s purges, slave labor camps, collectivization, and man-made famine. Cynthia became his indispensable partner, utilizing her State Department connections, which enabled the DP witnesses to travel from Germany to Paris to appear in court. The testimony of the witnesses exceeded the horrors described in I Chose Freedom.  In the end, Kravchenko won the case, which remains to this day the only Nuremberg-style judgment ever brought against Stalin and the Soviet system.

But the consequences were great. Fifteen family members in Russia and Ukraine, including his wife, were imprisoned or executed. Cynthia’s relationship with Kravchenko made her and their young son targets of the KGB. In 1966, Kravchenko was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, shot once in the head. He left two teenage sons in America as survivors—Tony and Andrew—who had only learned as teens that he was their father.

          Andrew Kravchenko
Both Tony and Cynthia are now dead, but Andrew is still alive, and it is through his eyes that the film unfolds.  For Andrew, too, has suffered the repercussions of his father’s courageous defiance of Stalin.  He grew up without a father only to learn at 15 that the mysterious man he thought of as a close family friend and saw only once a year was in reality his father.  Before Andrew could embrace him as a father, Victor was found dead.

The film follows Andrew on his pilgrimage to Ukraine and Russia, as he returns to the Arizona desert where he grew up, and to the mansions of northern New Jersey where his mother was raised. Then on to the glittering avenues of Manhattan where his parents fell in love and his father lived and died, then to Paris, the arena his father chose for his epic battle against Stalin, and finally to the impoverished villages and coal mines of Ukraine, which shaped Victor’s life and values. Through his son’s journey to these places—many of which remain just as they were 50 years ago—we rediscover Victor Kravchenko’s life and that which molded him into the man who would strike such a powerful blow against Stalin and the Soviet regime. The film ends with Andrew scattering his father’s ashes in the great Dnipro (Dnieper) river, the heart and soul of Ukraine.

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Mark Jonathan Harris

Writer/Director/Producer Mark Jonathan Harris is one of the world’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers, director of three Academy-Award winning films.  He is also a journalist, novelist, and film professor.  Among the many documentaries he has written, produced and/or directed are The Redwoods, a documentary made for the Sierra Club to help establish a redwood national park that won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary (1968); The Long Way Home, a film made for the Simon Wiesenthal Center about the period immediately following the Holocaust that won the Oscar for Best Feature Length Documentary (1997); and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, produced for Warner Bros., that also won an Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary (2000). His most recent films include Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2003), an HBO documentary that he wrote on slavery in America that was nominated for an Emmy for Nonfiction Special and The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004), a co-production of BBC-TV, NHK, and STARZ, featuring Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas, Jodie Foster, Walter Murch, Dede Allen and many others that premiered at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In addition to filmmaking, Harris also writes journalism, and has published short stories and five novels for children. Since 1983, he has taught filmmaking at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. From 1990-96 he was the Chair of Film and TV Production.

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American Sterling Productions – Producer, Financer

Led by CEO Larry Dodge and President and COO Janet Yang, under a new initiative ASP now also finances and produces independent feature films, documentaries, and television. ASP is a division of the American Sterling Group, a privately held enterprise with operating divisions in banking, insurance, real estate, entertainment and technology. The American Sterling Group supports ASP in arranging financing, joint partnerships and revenue sharing arrangements. Consistent with the American Sterling values, ASP is interested in material that contributes to the enrichment of the global community. 

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Wild At Heart Films - Producer, Financer

James Egan founded Wild at Heart Films with partner Marlise Karlin to create a screenwriter friendly company that provides professional support for the development process.  Wild at Heart Films has succeeded in attracting many top writers who value this commitment to creating high quality work.  James developed with Laurence Dworet (Outbreak) the Western Epic Hold Back the Sun for Twentieth Century Fox.

Wild at Heart Films is developing Max Hi, a futuristic high school movie with major video game creator, Chris Roberts, (Wing Commander) .   Ascendant Pictures and Wild at Heart Films will co-produce this visionary thriller, which is being written by WAH founding partner, James Egan.  James is also currently developing a comedy series FU  with hot English TV comedy director, Tristram Shapeero.  Tristram has recently received tremendous praise and press for the hit comedy series PeeP Show which was picked up by the Fox Network to be adapted for the American market.

Most recently, James sold a tent pole Christmas movie to Revolution Studios currently entitled The New York Christmas Movie, based on an idea he developed with Jan Eliasberg (Mi Corazon, Heart of the Atom). James Egan’s business background and successful writing career has contributed to the rapid growth of Wild at Heart Films.    James has just recently started principal photography as Producer on The Defector  directed by three time Oscar winner Mark Harris while in post-production as Producer on Angels in the Dust  for Participant Productions. 

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