Bloomsbury Home
- Home
- ACADEMIC
- History
- Russian History
- The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller
The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller
Soviet Espionage and the Cruelties of Stalin's Gulags
The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller
Soviet Espionage and the Cruelties of Stalin's Gulags
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
You must sign in to add this item to your wishlist. Please sign in or create an account
Description
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 invariably unanswered. Decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Feller embarked on a detailed search to reclaim his father.
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.'"
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.
Table of Contents
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.
Product details

Published | 30 Oct 2025 |
---|---|
Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 224 |
ISBN | 9798881807580 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
Illustrations | 16 B&W |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
-
The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller 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 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.
Alan Barenberg, author of The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction