"I Outlived the Bastards"

Born in Russia in 1901 as Abram Paretsky, Albert Parry came of age in a world on the brink of immense change. As a teenager, he went from dating Joseph Stalin’s future wife to escaping a firing squad under a hail of bullets during the Russian Civil War. Fleeing Russia in 1920, he arrived in America the following year with little more than his wits.

Reinventing himself as Albert Parry, he built a successful career as a freelance writer in the 1920s and 1930s before earning a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1938. Opposing isolationism before Pearl Harbor, he went on to work with the American and British intelligence agencies during World War II. After the war, at Colgate University, he founded the first undergraduate Russian Studies program in the United States.

Over the course of his life, he moved through a world of revolution, exile, and cultural upheaval—crossing paths with John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Richard Wright, and Vladimir Nabokov—and even being thrown off a Hollywood set by Greta Garbo.Part adventure, part intellectual journey, this memoir captures a life lived along the fault lines of the 20th century—from war and ideology to art, literature, and espionage. With the insight of a historian and the voice of a born storyteller, Parry reflects on identity, freedom, and the value of courageous political belief. 

He died just four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, having the last word: “I outlived the bastards.” A fitting epitaph for a remarkable man.