Anastasy Vonsyatsky

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Anastasy Vonsyatsky : biography

June 12, 1898 – February 5, 1965

Activity after 1917

After the revolutionary events of October 1917, when the Leninist Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d’etat and which climaxed in the protracted Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, Vonsyatsky, newly-admitted to St. Petersburg as a military cadet, took part in the anti-Bolshevik opposition and served in the counter-revolutionary White movement, first seeing action against the Red Army at Rostov. Leaving the White Army’s stronghold in the Crimean Peninsula with the departing forces of General Wrangel, he was evacuated to western Europe in 1920. Traveling through Constantinople and France, Vonsyatsky arrived in the United States in 1922, having married a wealthy American woman he had met in Paris (Marion B. Ream).

Vonsyatsky became a naturalized citizen of the United States in the Superior Court of Windham County, Putnam, Connecticut, on September 30, 1927. In March 1930, Vonsyatsky was given an American reserve officer’s commission and appointed a first lieutenant of the United States Army Reserve; the military commission would eventually expire in 1935.

Fascist activities

Forming political connections within the émigré circles after establishing himself outside Russia, Vonsyatsky was, at one point in the interwar period, a leader of the Russian Fascist Organization, an initially independent movement that later became closely associated with the Manchuria-based Russian Fascist Party (RFP). In 1933, Vonsyatsky split from the RFP and founded the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists (also referred to as the All Russian National Revolutionary Party), another anti-Soviet and anti-communist organization. The group’s headquarters were established at the Vonsyatsky estate in Thompson, Connecticut.

He became a subject of FBI investigation and was indicted in 1942 for connections with proxies for German interests, including key participants in the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, whose leader, Fritz Kuhn, had previously been assisted by Vonsyatsky’s bail money in 1939. Among other reputed contacts made with pro-Axis agents, the FBI noted a 1941 trip to San Francisco, California, allegedly to contact a Madam Takita, an alleged Japanese agent, who was to arrive aboard the ship Tatuta Maru; evidence confirming some relation to the American Hitler admirer and anti-semite William Dudley Pelley was also found. Indicted for conspiring to assist Hitler’s Germany in violation of the Espionage Act alongside fellow conspirators Wilhelm Kunze, Dr. Otto Willumeit, Dr. Wolfgang Ebell, and Reverend Kurt E. B. Molzahn, Vonsyatsky submitted a guilty plea after first protestations of innocence, and was convicted in Hartford, Connecticut on June 22, 1942. Despite the official prison sentence of five years and a fine of $5000, he was released on February 26, 1946, his sentence effectively having been cut short to the three and a half years in prison already served.