Byline: Alan Cullison Associated Press

MOSCOW -- Alexander Gelver was afraid. People around him were getting arrested. He wanted to get out of the country, to go home to America, so he went to the U.S. Embassy for help.

But outside the gates, he was stopped - by the secret police.

Was it true, his interrogator demanded, that Gelver thought life was better in the United States than the Soviet Union? Had he actually said as much to his fellow workers at a local factory?

All true, said Gelver, who had been brought to Russia years earlier by his parents. An open-and-shut case of espionage, the secret police declared.

Then they made him disappear. His fate remained unknown for 60 years.

Gelver was just one of hundreds of American leftists who had moved here in the 1920s and 1930s to help Josef Stalin build the new worker's paradise, and who then vanished, one by one, from the face of the earth.

Their friends and relatives have grown old without ever knowing, for certain, what happened to them.

But now, the answer is emerging, documented in moldy secret police files obtained by The Associated Press, revealed in recent interviews with people who survived the Stalinist purges, told in old U.S. State Department documents, some declassified at the AP's request.

On New Year's Day 1938, his file shows, 24-year-old Alexander Gelver of Oshkosh, Wis., was executed. His last moments were not documented; the favored execution method was a single shot to the back of the head with a small-caliber pistol.

There is reason to believe that hundreds of Americans met a similar fate. The files of 15 missing Americans whose disappearances were investigated in detail by the AP show that two died in Soviet labor camps and that eight others were executed. The other five spent years in Soviet prisons.

They were artists, factory workers, teachers and engineers. They were arrested after engaging in such subversive activities as wearing American clothes, asking the U.S. Embassy for help or talking about life back home.

U.S. Embassy officials in Moscow chronicled the terror in a series of internal memos but were ambivilent about helping the victims, in part because American fears of communism were already in full bloom. Declassified State Department records show that some Americans who came to the embassy for help were turned away because they lacked an up-to-date photo or didn't have the few dollars in American currency required to renew their passports. Some of them were then arrested by secret police agents lurking outside the embassy gates.

In recent years, there have been scattered reports of Americans executed during the Stalinist purges. But until now, details have been few and the role of the American Embassy has remained unknown.

Sergei Zhuravlev, a historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says other governments including Germany and Austria long ago launched formal investigations into the fates of countrymen who disappeared in the purges, which also took the lives of several million Soviet...