Kravchenko defected to the United States during World War II, and began writing about his experiences as an official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Victor Andreevich Kravchenko was born on 11 October 1905, into a Ukrainian family in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine) with a non-party, revolutionary father.

Kravchenko became an engineer specializing in metallurgy, and while studying at the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute he became friends with future Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

They had two sons, Anthony and Andrew, who were obliged to live under their mother's arranged married name (Earle), and they remained unaware of their father's identity until 1965.

In spite of his new surname, Valentin was eventually publicized as the son of a "traitor to the motherland" and for various other reasons was sent to a Gulag in 1982 for six years, where the conditions of the camp drove him to the point where he tried to commit suicide in his cell.

Valentin applied for political asylum in America after discovering that his half-brother Andrew lived there (the other American son, Anthony, had died in 1969).

In the view of one close observer, Alexander Werth, Technically, Kravchenko won his case… which brought worldwide attention to the cause and damaged the Communist Party in France.

[7] FBI files obtained by Kern after a six-year lawsuit reveal that President Lyndon B. Johnson had very strong suspicions about Kravchenko's suicide.

[2] The FBI eventually ruled that the note was authentic, yet some details concerning Kravchenko's last days remain questionable, and his son Andrew still believes his father could have been a victim of a KGB assassination.