Title: Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium speaker series

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In early June 1937, Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a Soviet spy engaged in anti-Nazi work, left the room she rented at the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse in New York City; she would never be seen again. Rumors immediately circulated that she was abducted by the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) and murdered or spirited back to the USSR and held in a Gulag. Upon her disappearance, anti-Stalinist radicals, including Carlo Tresca, insisted that Poyntz claimed she was disillusioned with the Soviet Union and wanted to discontinue her work with it. The disappearance also coincided with Stalin’s Show Trials in which a number of Soviet leaders “confessed” and were executed for crimes against the state. Juliet Stuart Poyntz’s disappearance is an important addition to understand the internecine battles within the left in the 1930s that would feed the anti-communism of the Cold War period.