Alexander Kazem-Bek

Alexander Kazem-Bek was a Russian-born political activist, writer and Orthodox church worker who lived and taught in the United States after escaping wartime Europe. He taught Russian at Yale and later headed Russian language and literature work at Connecticut College. Kazem-Bek applied in New Delhi in 1954 for permission to return permanently to the Soviet Union and left the United States at the end of 1956, initially without his American wife and children. In a January 1957 letter published by Pravda, he described his fifteen years in the United States as forced residence and said anti-Soviet campaigning and what he regarded as the country’s moral decline drove his return. Contemporary and later accounts also describe the move as voluntary repatriation by a Russian émigré; he was not an American-born exile. He received Soviet citizenship, worked for the Moscow Patriarchate and remained in Moscow until his death in 1977.