- A brilliant economist, he joined the White House staff of Pres-
ident Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. Soviet intelligence messages
from the 1940s show that Currie met on several occasions with two
NKVD rezidents, Vasily Zarubin and Anatoli Gorskiy. In the in-
telligence messages, he is referred to by the cover name “Page.” Eliz-
abeth Bentley informed American counterintelligencein 1945 that
Currie was an important agent of the Silvermaster Group.
Currie became the focus of a series of investigations in the late
1940s. He admitted that he had met with Gorskiy “to discuss Soviet
culture,” but he denied all charges that he was a Soviet agent. He left
the United States in the early 1950s, moved to South America, and
took Colombian citizenship. For years Currie was portrayed as a vic-
tim of a witch hunt who had been forced to flee his adopted country.
The opening of the Venonadocuments, however, indicated that the
NKVD considered Currie an important agent. As in the case of
Harry Dexter White, scholars still argue over how seriously to take
the information from Cold War “witnesses” like Bentley and the
Venona material.
- D –DALSTROI.Dalstroiis the Russian acronym for Far Northern Con-
struction Trust. Dalstroiran the Kolyma River complex of forced la-
bor camps in the gulagsystem.DECEMBRISTS’ REVOLT. In 1825, following the death of Tsar
Aleksandr I, a group of Imperial Army officers moved to rebel
against Aleksandr’s brother Nicholas, heir to the throne. The plotters,
all drawn from the nobility and veterans of the Napoleonic Wars,
sought a confrontation in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on 14 De-
cember, when the troops were to take the oath of allegiance to the
new autocrat. A second confrontation between rebels and imperial
troops took place in southern Russia. The confrontation ended with
troops loyal to the new tsar firing on the rebels, many of whom were
peasant soldiers who did not even know the cause of the confronta-
tion. For example, rebel troops chanted “Konstantin i Konstatutsiya”
[Constantine and constitution] but when asked what this meant, the62 •DALSTROI06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 62