20 February 2026
Martin Dewhirst reviews The Last Gasp of William Schwarzfeller: Soviet Espionage and the Cruelties of Stalin’s Gulags by Peter Buck Feller, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, London, etc., 2025, x + 186 pp. ISBN: HB 979-8-8818-0757-3, £25.
This short and fascinating book (I read it unputdownably in much less than a day) will, I think, be of particular interest to readers (like this reviewer) who, for whatever reason(s), lack information about their parents and wish, perhaps only at a mature age, to discover or uncover as much about one or both of them as is now possible. Maybe it’s never too late to start and continue the search?
Peter Feller, a lawyer, is one such person. He was conceived in Shanghai in 1937, spent his earliest years in and near Moscow and was allowed to leave the USSR with his Jewish mother, returning to the USA in 1942. She lived to be 97 (p. 34), but for some reason(s) was always very reluctant to tell her son anything substantial about her husband, even after the USSR had collapsed. Feller’s parents had emigrated to America from Europe and, inter alia, worked for the U.S. Communist Party before moving to Moscow in 1934 and being sent on to the Far East (p. 154), notably to Manchuria and China to gather intelligence, not least about the aggressive plans of Japan. They may well have been on the fringes of the network of the great Richard Sorge (pp. 135, 137-40). It looks as though the author’s parents moved briefly back to America in December 1936, where the author was born in August 1937, but shortly thereafter his parents returned to Moscow, taking their son with them. Schwarzfeller (who often used the name of Herbert Olheiser, which added to the difficulty of tracking him) was soon arrested in the famous Metropol Hotel, taken to the nearby Lubyanka, sentenced to eight years in a correctional labour facility and moved via Kotlas (p. 72) to the huge camp in and around Vorkuta, where he died in 1943 of malnutrition (p. 116) at the age of 37.
It took Peter Feller decades to discover all this information, beginning with a letter from one F.P.D. in Sweden dated 27 September, 1947 (p. 2) and ending some 77 years later in 2024, long after F.P.D., who turned out to be one Frank Dickler, born in Brazil in 1906, had died in Sao Paulo in 2000 at the age of 93 (p. 172). Any long life is likely to contain a lot of unhappiness as well, one hopes, of a fair amount of happiness. One can only be glad that Peter Feller has lasted so long and set a good example to others who want to learn more about their parents. The lesson is: Never Give Up Trying!
