Communists: A Short Trip to Liberty

The big tourist bus rolling through the green fields and hedgerows of Normandy looked like any other. But there was a difference: Tourist Vsevolod Kravchenko, 45, and his 25 fellow passengers were all Russian citizens who had served the Soviet state so well that they were permitted to take a pleasure trip abroad.

One evening last week, the bus pulled into the river port of Caen, famed for its

Calvados apple brandy, and stopped before the comfortable Hôtel Moderne on the Boulevard du Général-Leclerc. Kravchenko. a moderately well-known author of Russian children’s books, ate dinner with his companions in the hotel restaurant and then, like the others, went soberly up to his room.

An hour later, passers-by were startled to see a man leap to his death from a window on the hotel’s fourth floor. French police mounted quickly to Kravchenko’s room and found on the floor the note he had left behind him. It read: “On this voyage I have discovered the meaning of the word liberty. I can no longer be a Communist. But neither can I betray my country. I cannot bring myself to ask asylum of foreigners. Death is the only way out.”