Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller

This is the story of a son's search for a lost father. As such, it is a detective story. It is also a spy story. And it has elements of a memoir.

The story has currency in light of the widespread interest in Alexei Navalny’s fate. He died in a Russian \"special regime\" camp, or modern-day gulag, north of the Arctic Circle, as did the author's father. He went on a hunger strike, as did his father. Navalny's memoir, Patriot, was recently excerpted in the October 21, 2024 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

There is also a ubiquitous public interest in books about spies and the whole world of espionage. The author's father's short-lived career as a spy for Soviet Military Intelligence speaks to that.

The author's mother's dramatic escape from Moscow, following a German bombing raid, brings to mind the plight of all refugees from war zones around the world, particularly in Ukraine and the Middle East which have been the subject of so much press attention.

Contributes to the curious readers’ understanding of Soviet espionage in the historical,
pre-WWII context, including original research into a particular member of the Sorge
spy ring.

Illustrates the suffering of Stalin's victims in the Gulag Archipelago, particularly in the
Vorkuta camps north of the Arctic Circle.

Presents the human story of a son's torturous adventure in tracking a father he never
knew and the shocking results of his quest.<\/p>","Peter Buck Feller<\/b> is an independent historian with a particular interest in Soviet-German conflicts and espionage during the Second World War. He has written articles for Foreign Policy, and for The Pennsylvania Gazette.","

Peter Buck Feller's father disappeared in Moscow in 1938, when Feller was just six months old. As a young boy he asked his mother about him, but his questions went <\/b>invariably <\/b>unanswered. <\/b>Decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Feller embarked on a detailed search to reclaim his father. <\/b>

His journey took him and his adult daughters to Moscow, Siberia, and Germany. He gained access to a now-declassified espionage FBI file, which contained an anonymous letter from a man who had been imprisoned in one of Stalin's gulags: \"I plan to write a book about all what occurred to me during these dreadful ten years. The title of this book, I would like it to be ‘The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller.’\"<\/i>

Feller was stunned. William Schwarzfeller was his lost father, for whom he searched, in one way or another, all of his life. He learned that his father had been an agent for Red Army Intelligence. He was arrested in 1938 and starved to death in a gulag in 1943. This new information led him to a host of discoveries, his mother's vast FBI file, and a story about his father on the front page of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker<\/i>.<\/p>","On a cold March morning in 2014, the author found himself in front of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, the dreaded home of the KGB, where thousands of political prisoners had been jailed, interrogated, and tortured. He had come to find the file of his father, a man he did not know — a man whose story was mostly unknown to him.","

Chapter 1 The Anonymous Letter
Chapter 2 Escape from Moscow
Chapter 3 FBI Alert
Chapter 4 Finding My German Family
Chapter 5 Recalled and Arrested
Chapter 6 The Brody Connection
Chapter 7 The Kremenets Massacre
Chapter 8 The Episcopalian Mafia
Chapter 9 Vorkuta
Chapter 10 Mission Manchuria
Chapter 11 The Last Gasp
Postscript The Mystery of F.P.D.<\/p>","The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller<\/i> is a remarkable book. Peter Buck Feller narrates his quest to reconstruct the story of his father, who disappeared in Moscow in 1938 when Feller was only six months old. In the process, he tells important stories about the interwar Left in the United States, international espionage, Stalinist terror, and the Gulag. The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller<\/i> is a gripping family saga that is as moving as it is profound in its depiction of some of the most important episodes of twentieth-century history.","On a cold March morning in 2014, the author found himself in front of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, the dreaded home of the KGB, where thousands of political prisoners had been jailed, interrogated, and tortured. He had come to find the file of his father, a man he did not know — a man whose story was mostly unknown to him."]