Margaret Butterworth Wettlin was born in Newark, New Jersey[2] in 1907, and raised in West Philadelphia.
After witnessing the collapse of the US economy in the Great Depression, and fascinated by the Soviet experiment of establishing a new economic policy, she travelled to Russia, planning to stay a year.
[7] Shortly after arriving in the USSR on a tourist visa, Wettlin took up a job teaching the children of American automobile workers in Nizhny Novgorod.
She was invited back for another tour,[7] but later that same year, Stalin decreed that foreigners living in the USSR either had to take up Soviet citizenship or leave the country for good.
[1] Wettlin joined the teaching staff at the Foreign Language Institute in Moscow before the Second World War.
The Germans besieged Moscow, and Efremoff was put to work establishing entertainment units for Soviet soldiers, often close to the front.
Again she was forced into spying for the secret service, a distasteful task she abandoned unilaterally when her report recommending treatment for a neighbour resulted in the woman being arrested.
[8] Despite her fears for herself and her family, Wettlin did not suffer any punishment from the authorities,[7] but Efremoff was declared a non-person.
Wettlin published her book on Alexander Ostrovsky, a nineteenth century Russian playwright.