Bladewire

"On the other side of the world lay the dark empire, a place of evil incarnate, profoundly committed to the destruction of American ideals."

"At 4:19 p.m. on Thursday the 12th of August, a 52-year-old school teacher named Oksana Stepanova Kasenkina hurled herself from a third-floor window of the Russian Consulate at 7 E. 61st St., preferring death over forcible return to Moscow."

Russian defector Oksana Kasenkina's leap for freedom - NY Daily News


On the other side of the world lay the dark empire, a place of evil incarnate, profoundly committed to the destruction of American ideals. In Washington in the first days of August 1948, Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley told the House Un-American Activities Committee that a top aide to President Franklin Roosevelt had been her primary contact and ex-Red Whittaker Chambers named one-time State Department official Alger Hiss as his. In New York, the top leaders of the American Communist Party were under indictment for conspiracy to overthrow the government. Pal Joey, some of us were ruefully calling old Joe Stalin these days.

The Daily News' flinty editorial page was by now customarily referring to Uncle Sam as Uncle Sap. "If ever a nation asked for treachery and betrayal, we did," growled the paper. American citizens, added John O'Donnell, The News' man in Washington, were finally about to get "a clear and shocking picture of the betrayal, the traitorous connivance with foreign agents and the selling out of the United States which was winked at by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt."

At 4:19 p.m. on Thursday the 12th of August, a 52-year-old school teacher named Oksana Stepanova Kasenkina hurled herself from a third-floor window of the Russian Consulate at 7 E. 61st St., preferring death over forcible return to Moscow. Unfortunately for Pal Joey, she lived.

The consulate had been in the headlines since Saturday the 7th, when Soviet Consul General Jacob Lomakin led a raid on Reed Farm, a Nyack-area refuge for displaced Russians operated by Leo Tolstoy's daughter Alexandra, and physically repossessed Oksana Kasenkina, who had fled there rather than be put aboard a boat back to Russia. Kasenkina had been in New York for three years, teaching chemistry to the consulate's children. She had decided she liked it here. By the time Lomakin got her back to the city, the FBI and the state police had dealt themselves into what under U.S. law plainly appeared to be a criminal abduction.

Russian claims of diplomatic immunity held authorities at bay, Kasenkina disappeared into the consulate and for five tense days, 7 E. 61st St. sat at dead center of a dangerous international firestorm.

HUAC denounced Russia as a "foreign power operating its own police force in America." Soviet Ambassador Alexander Panyushkin accused the U.S. of state terrorism. The Soviet news agency Tass railed against the "fascist gangsters" of New York. On 61st St., Lomakin met the press, trotted out a visibly drugged Kasenkina and explained that the woman was very grateful to have been rescued from Countess Alexandra's clutches.

On Wednesday the 11th, state Supreme Court Justice Samuel Dickstein, acting on a suit brought by the citizens group Common Cause, ordered Lomakin to produce Kasenkina in court. A fuming Lomakin threw down Dickstein's writ when it was served and declared that he would not comply.

The next afternoon as the Soviet government demanded that Washington punish New York authorities for their interference in a consular matter Oksana Kasenkina went out her window.

Telephone wires broke her fall, probably saved her life. She crashed into the courtyard and lay there, moaning, legs and pelvis shattered, as consular officials rushed out and tried to shoo away reporters camped outside the 7-foot fence. "Leave me alone, leave me alone," she screamed as workers began to drag her broken body inside.

At this point, two New York City policemen, Sgt. Lester Abrahamson and Patrolman Frank Candelas, took it upon themselves to decide they'd had enough of all this.


Over the fence the officers went and, over the Russians' insistence that they would attend to the critically injured woman themselves, made it plain they intended to call an ambulance and rush her to Roosevelt Hospital.

At Roosevelt, a wall of cops held back the furious diplomats who came to demand that doctors surrender their patient. A sputtering Lomakin lodged protest after protest, but New York refused to budge, particularly after Kasenkina regained consciousness and said she wished to become an American citizen.

For the American propaganda machine, Oksana Kasenkina was a prize catch. She appeared to be genuinely terrified of going home. "They call it paradise," she said in the hospital. "I call it jail."

Observed The News: "We believe this macabre case will bring home to Americans the really sinister aspects of Red rule far more than days of testimony in Washington.

"Incidentally," the paper reflected, "Consul General Lomakin had better not go back to Russia. He has blundered."

Back, however, he went. As the Kasenkina affair became the lead item on Voice of America broadcasts into the Iron Curtain countries and as HUAC announced that the defector would be a witness once she recovered from her injuries, Ambassador Panyushkin made a formal demand that she be turned over to Soviet authorities, and the State Department formally refused. Shortly after that, Lomakin got the heave-ho. President Harry Truman personally gave him three days to pack up and get out.

In the last days of August 1948, Jacob Lomakin went home to Moscow, Soviet authorities broke consular ties with the U.S. and American diplomats were expelled from Russia.

In Washington, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Carl Spaatz proudly announced a new guided missile capable of carrying an atomic warhead 5,000 miles.

At a street fair outside Grand Central Terminal, 50,000 New Yorkers cheered as nuclear scientists ceremoniously split a uranium atom in a blinding flash.

Oksana Kasenkina in 1949 published her autobiography, "Leap to Freedom," and briefly enjoyed a career as an anti-Communist heroine. Then, always fearful of Red assassins, she dropped out of sight. She died in 1960 in Miami, where she had been living in a cheap hotel under an assumed name.

Bladewire

Thankfully she escaped the Russians but almost paid with her life

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