Prague conference: No proof of Americans kept in Soviet prisons

Prague, Nov 20 (CTK) - Historians have no direct proof that American prisoners of World War Two and the post-war conflicts were transferred to Soviet labour camps and prisons, U.S. historian Svetlana Shevchenko said at a conference on Soviet secret services activities in Prague Thursday.

According to certain estimates, there were several thousands of such prisoners.

Shevchenko, an American citizen of Ukrainian origin, is a member of a group of military and civilian experts who are probing into the fate of POWs and missing soldiers from the period of WWII and also the conflicts in Korea in the 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the 1990s.

Shevchenko said the question of the missing soldiers was a tragedy that influences the life of their families who live in uncertainty.

She said more than 70,000 people went missing during WWII, 2000 soldiers during the Korea war and almost the same number of people during the Vietnam conflict.

Americans do not know where the war prisoners from southeastern Asia are and they do not know whether they were transferred to the Gulag in the former evil empire, she said.

That is why the U.S. Senate established a commission which is dealing with the fate of missing soldiers and POWs, Shevchenko said.

There is a chance that after the opening of the Russian archives information could be found that will help look for the missing soldiers directly in the former Soviet Union countries. Rich Americans who are interested in the question could help finance the research, she said.

Apart from the archives, people who served in these wars are also a source of information. However, many of them had signed agreements on the non-provision of any information and they thus still cannot communicate with historians, she said.

According to U.S. historian of Czech origin Zbysek Brezina, almost all regional representatives of the Communist Party of the USA that was established in 1919 knowingly helped the Soviet intelligence service.

The U.S. Communist Party sought to create a Soviet America. It called for a violent coup and was behind wild strikes. It was to supply agents to the KGB, to provide commercial cover for agents, the courier services, and to photograph objects, Brezina said.

Brezina said the party had about 100,000 members before WWII. After the war, the U.S. FBI managed to arrest 12 of its leaders and paralyse it.

The KGB decided in the 1950s to end contracts with the American Communists - "Stalin's soldiers," because the party was teaming with FBI informers.

The criticism of Stalin's cult of personality and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 were deadly blows to the American Communists, Brezina said.