Fedor Kushnarev
Biography
Fedor Kushnarev was born 1898 in Kiev, Russia (present-day Ukraine). Worked as a student, laborer. Immigrated to the United States in 1913.
Migrated to the UW with his parents and five younger siblings; his father died less than a year later. After graduating high school in New Haven he attended New York University. Joined the Union of Russian Workers around 1917–1918, organized a URW branch in New Haven, and in 1919 became financial secretary of the URW branch in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Arrested there in March 1919 under the pen name Alexander Dalney, the case was dismissed. In New York he coedited Khlieb i Volia. Arrested several more times under different names, he was last arrested during the first Palmer Raids in November 1919. He requested permission for his companion, anarchist organizer Rose Pesotta, to accompany him if deported. Deported aboard the Buford on December 21, 1919.
In Russia, arrested in Crimea in 1920 and sentenced to five years in a prison camp for “propaganda of libertarian ideas” and allegedly taking up arms against the Soviet government, but was later released after authorities deemed his imprisonment an error. He later concluded that “to support the Revolution means to support Lenin and Trotsky.” He briefly attended the Moscow Institute of Journalism and worked for the American Relief Administration as interpreter and secretary for US Colonel Walter Bell in Ufa during the famine, where he contracted typhus. Some sources claim he died in 1925, but in 1934 his mother petitioned the US government to allow him and his family to visit the U.S.
Adapted from Kenyon Zimmer, Red Scare Deportees (kenyonzimmer.com), compiled from INS deportation case files.
