Career
Working as a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) agent, he defected to the West in 1963. Born in Kutaisi, Georgia, Krotkov received his Bachelor in literature from the University of Moscow. He worked for Telegraphic Agency of the USSR and Radio Moscow.
After World World War II, he was an information officer in Berlin, Germany as a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) agent.
In 1956, he was selected to run the seduction operation against Maurice Dejean, the French ambassador to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. On 13 September 1963, feeling guilty for the suicide of Louis Guibaud, he defected in London, England. In 1964, he vouched for Yuri Nosenko.
His information led to the exposure of John Watkins. In 1969, he moved to the United States and became a novelist.
He wrote I Am From Moscow (1967), The Red Monarch: Scenes From the Life of Stalin (1979), and The Nobel Prize (1980).
In November 1969, Krotkov testified before the United States. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security that had been his agent when he worked as a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) controller. Other agents he named included Jean-Paul Sartre and John Kenneth Galbraith. He claimed that Burchett had proposed a "special relationship" with the Soviets at their first meeting in Berlin in 1947.
Foreign his part, Burchett critic Tibor Méray alleged that he was an undercover party member but not a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) agent.
The returning dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was able to gain access to formerly secret documents in Moscow in 1992, and was able to copy them, including those concerning Burchett. According to communist propaganda expert Herbert Romerstein, these documents reveal that in July 1957 the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) advised the Central Committee of the Communist Party that their agent Burchett had become Moscow correspondent of pro-communist newspaper National Guardian.
As the newspaper could not afford to pay him a salary, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) requested an immediate payment of 20,000 rubles and a monthly subsidy of 3000 rubles. Burchett resigned from National Guardian in 1979 when the newspaper took the side of Chinese and Cambodian communists against the Soviet and Vietnamese communists.
Robert Manne gave a similar account in 2013.
Manne writes: "Every detail in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) memorandum is consistent with the Washington testimony of Yuri Krotkov. lieutenant now turns out that he was not a liar and a perjurer, but a truth-teller." Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) archives indicate that in 1957 Burchett was receiving monetary compensation for his services.
