Juliet Poyntz

Juliet Stuart Poyntz (November 25, 1886–1937?) was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). After resigning from active work with the Party, she disappeared in 1937, never to be seen again, and is believed by several sources to have been abducted and murdered by a Soviet NKVD assassination squad.

Biography

Poyntz was born in Omaha, Nebraska and moved to New York City as a young adult, where she earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia University. She subsequently studied at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics before lecturing in the History Department at Columbia. She joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and began working in the labor reform movement after leaving Columbia in 1913. She was instrumental in labor-Left reform organisations such as U.S Immigration Commission, The American Association for Labor Legislation and the Rand School of Social Science. She was employed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union as director of the union's Worker's University. Poyntz continued to work within the Socialist-oriented ILGWU after siding with the fledgling CPUSA. During the 1920s Poyntz was on the staff of the Friends of the Soviet Union and International Labor Defense. She quit her outside work in favor of internal party activities during the "Third Period".

According to a book by Benjamin Gitlow, a prominent American Communist, Poyntz was a delegate to several consecutive American Communist Party conventions, and was a member of the Party’s Central Executive Committee, besides being on New York’s District Executive Committee. She had even gone to China on a Comintern (Communist International) mission, dropping out of the CPUSA in 1934 in order to work for the OGPU (Soviet military secret police) in gathering scientific information for the Soviet Union. She went to Moscow in 1936, in order to receive further instructions from the Soviet authorities. While there, Poyntz witnessed the purges instigated by Stalin, in which people she had known and worked with were killed. She returned to the U.S. disillusioned and unwilling to continue spying for the OGPU (later the NKVD).

Disappearance

Poyntz disappeared after leaving the Women's Club in New York City on the evening of June 3, 1937 [Kern, Gary, "A Death in Washington", p. 163] . A police investigation turned up no clues to her fate, and her belongings, all of her clothing, and hand luggage in her room appeared to be untouched. [Gitlow, Benjamin, "The Whole of Their Lives; Communism in America--a Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of its Leaders", New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1948)] In early 1938 Carlo Tresca, a leading Italian-American anarchist, publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Poyntz in order to prevent her defection. He said that before she disappeared, she had come to him to talk over her disgust at what she had seen in Moscow in 1936 in the early stages of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Testimony by former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers tied Poyntz' disapperance to the shadowy Soviet Comintern agent Josef Peters. [ [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/8-3testimony.html Whittaker Chambers Testimony before HUAC 3 August 1948] ] As an inside member of the Soviet Comintern and OGPU espionage network, Peters is believed to have participated in the planning of the kidnapping and alleged murder of fellow CPUSA member Juliet Poyntz by a Soviet assassination squad. [John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America", (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)]

Chambers later stated that he heard Poyntz had been killed for attempted desertion, and this rumor contributed to his caution when he defected in 1938. Elizabeth Bentley stated she was told by Jacob Golos in the late 1930s, and later by KGB officer Anatoli Gromov in 1945 that Poyntz had been a traitor and was now dead. Both Chambers's and Bentley's defection were probably in part motivated by fear of the example set in the Juliet Poyntz case.

It is known that Poyntz told some acquaintances about plans to write a book in which she would expose the Communist movement. Author Benjamin Gitlow wrote that Poyntz was disillusioned by Stalin's purges and was unwilling to continue as an espionage agent for the USSR. Gitlow relates that the OGPU/NKVD used Poyntz’s former lover, a man named Shachno Epstein, the associate editor of the Yiddish daily newspaper Freiheit (and an OGPU/NKVD agent himself), to lure Poyntz out for a walk in Central Park. "They met at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk through Central Park...Shachno took her by the arm and led her up a side path, where a large black limousine hugged the edge of the walk. [...] Two men jumped out, grabbed Miss Poyntz, shoved her into the car and sped away.” Gitlow relates that the assassins took Poyntz to the woods near the Roosevelt estate in Dutchess County, and killed and buried her there. “The body was covered with lime and dirt. On top were placed dead leaves and branches which the three killers trampled down with their feet.” [Gitlow, Benjamin, "The Whole of Their Lives; Communism in America--a Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of its Leaders", New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1948)]

ources

* cite encyclopedia
last = McKillen
first = Elizabeth
title = Poyntz, Juliet Stuart
encyclopedia =Encyclopedia of the American Left
volume =
pages = 631 - 632
publisher = Oxford University Press
edition= 2nd edition
date = 1998
id = ISBN 0-19-512088-4
accessdate =
* cite journal
last = McKillen
first = Elizabeth
title = The Culture of Resistance: Female Institution Building in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 1905 - 1925
journal = Michigan Occasional Papers in Women's Studies
number = 21
pages =
date = Winter 1982
publisher =
url =
format =
id =
accessdate =
* cite journal
last = Tresca
first = Carlo
authorlink = Carlo Tresca
title = Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?
journal = Modern Monthly
volume = 10
pages =
date = March 1938
publisher =
url =
format =
id =
accessdate =
*cite book
author = Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey
year = 2000
title = Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
publisher = Yale University Press
location =
id = ISBN 0-300-08462-5
*cite book
last = Olmsted
first = Kathryn S.
title = Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley
publisher = The University of North Carolina Press
date = 2002
id = ISBN 0-8078-2739-8

References

*Gitlow, Benjamin, "The Whole of Their Lives; Communism in America--a Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of its Leaders", New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1948)
*John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America", (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
* [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hiss/8-3testimony.html Whittaker Chambers Testimony before HUAC 3 August 1948]
*Weinstein, Allen and Vassiliev, Alexander, "The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era", Modern Library(1999) ISBN 0-375-75536-5.
*Weinstein, Allen, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case", Random House (1997) ISBN 0-679-77338-X.