Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman
Grossman visiting Buchenwald, 2013
Born
Stephen Wechsler

(1928-03-11)March 11, 1928
New York City, U.S.
DiedDecember 17, 2025(2025-12-17) (aged 97)
Berlin, Germany
EducationHarvard University
Karl Marx University
OccupationAuthor
Spouse
Renate Kschiner
​
(m. 1955)​
Websitewww.victorgrossman.com

Victor Grossman (born Stephen Wechsler; March 11, 1928 – December 17, 2025) was an American publicist and author who defected to the Soviet Union in 1952. He studied journalism in East Germany, and remained there working as a journalist and writer.

Early life

When I was eight [I was asked who was the best candidate in the upcoming 1936 Presidential election]. Maybe Roosevelt, I answered. [The adults at Free Acres retorted:] "You mean back a man who helped big business weather the Depression and who pushed through the AAA, so hogs are slaughtered, wheat burned, and milk poured into the river to raise prices high while people go hungry?" "But wouldn't Landon be worse?" "If people always choose the lesser of two evils, evil will always be with us"

— Victor Grossman. Crossing the River, p.14
Grossman speaking at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, D.C. in 2019, shortly after the release A Socialist Defector

Grossman was born Stephen Wechsler in New York City on March 11, 1928. His parents were an art dealer and librarian who had fled antisemitic pogroms in the Russian Empire. Growing up, his family moved often due to the Great Depression. He joined the Young Communist League in 1942, while in high school. As a youth, his family often summered in Free Acres, New Jersey, a community using economic philosopher Henry George's concept of single taxation. He spent two years each at the Dalton and Fieldston Schools. Grossman joined the Communist Party USA in 1945 while studying at Harvard University. Over the course of his education, he joined a variety of other leftist groups, including the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Appeal and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. He graduated from the university with a degree in economics in 1949. After receiving his degree, he worked in an factory in Buffalo, New York in order to spread communism to other workers. However, in 1950, Grossman was drafted into the United States Army and stationed in Bavaria, West Germany.

Defection and life in East Germany

In 1952, while serving in Austria, Grossman swam across the Danube into the Soviet-occupied zone of Austria, and became one of a handful of soldiers from the NATO nations who defected to the Eastern Bloc. Grossman later stated he defected because he feared prosecution by U.S. authorities under the McCarran Act for not declaring his membership in left-wing political organizations prior to his entering the army; shortly before his defection, he had been ordered to report to a military judge.

Grossman was initially held for two weeks for assessment by Soviet authorities in Baden bei Wien. He was then sent to Potsdam, East Germany (GDR), where he reluctantly adopted the name "Victor Grossman" in order to protect his family at home. After two months, he was transferred to Bautzen, where western defectors were being held by the Soviet authorities. In Bautzen, he was assigned a job at a train car building firm.

In 1954, he received an offer to continue his studies in journalism at Karl Marx University. After graduating, he worked as an editor at the Berlin book publisher Seven Seas for four months. From 1959 to 1963, Grossman worked for the German Democratic Report, an English digest of GDR press which paid particular attention to ex-Nazis working in the West German government. He then worked as the North America editor at Radio Berlin International until 1965. He worked as the director of the Paul Robeson Archive at the Academy of Arts for the next three years. Following 1968, he began working as a freelance journalist. While in East Germany, Grossman was a good friend of his fellow US exile, the singer and actor Dean Reed. In 1954, Grossman was recruited as an informant by the East German Ministry of State Security (MfS, or "Stasi"), codename TAUCHER ("Diver").

Grossman never renounced his U.S. citizenship or became an East German citizen, and returned to the U.S. for the first time in 1994. He was discharged from the Army, but received no jail time and was able to reclaim his U.S. passport. He would return to America several times, including on book tour to promote his memoirs Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany, (2003) and A Socialist Defector: from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee (2019). Grossman was a frequent contributor to the Marxist magazine Monthly Review. A critic of reunification, he later joined the German Party of Democratic Socialism and Die Linke and maintained an email newsletter, Berlin Dispatches, from 2017 until his death.

Death

Grossman died in Berlin on December 17, 2025, at the age of 97.

Personal life

Grossman met Renate Kschiner while staying in Bautzen, and the pair moved to Leipzig together after Grossman was accepted to Karl Marx University. The two married in 1955 and raised two sons, Thomas and Timothy.

Selected works

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Kessler, Mario (December 22, 2025). "An American Communist Like No Other". Jacobin. Retrieved December 24, 2025.
  2. ↑ Gould, Rebecca Kneale (2005). At home in nature: modern homesteading and spiritual practice in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 173–176. ISBN 978-0-520-24140-4.
  3. 1 2 3 Grossman 2019, p. 8.
  4. ↑ Weinberg, Micki (September 27, 2014). "Jewish Communist expats in East Germany recall heady 1950s". Times of Israel.
  5. ↑ Weinberg, Micki (September 27, 2014). "Jewish Communist expats in East Germany recall heady 1950s". The Times of Israel. ISSN 0040-7909. Retrieved August 27, 2026.
  6. ↑ Burian, Al (May 13, 2013). "Crossing the Danube". Vice.
  7. ↑ Neely, Brett (November 3, 2009). "The lonely American: speaking with a US defector to East Germany". The Local.
  8. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 12.
  9. ↑ Cowell, Alan (November 29, 1996). "Thanksgiving for Odd Sort of Harvard Expatriate". The New York Times.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  10. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 40.
  11. ↑ BStU, MfS, BV Leipzig, AIM 321/56
  12. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 192.
  13. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 193.
  14. ↑ Wolff, Richard. "Economic Update: Living in a Socialist Economy". Democracy at Work (d@w). Retrieved May 21, 2019.
  15. ↑ "Article Author: Victor Grossman". Monthly Review. Retrieved May 21, 2019.
  16. ↑ "Berlin Bulletin". Victor Grossman's Berlin Bulletin. July 13, 2025. Retrieved August 27, 2026.
  17. ↑ "Victor Grossman gestorben" [Victor Grossman has passed away] (in German). Junge Welt. December 17, 2025. Retrieved December 17, 2025.
  18. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 16.
  19. ↑ Grossman 2019, p. 21.