Margaret Wettlin

Early life

Margaret Butterworth Wettlin was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1907, and raised in West Philadelphia. She grew up in a Methodist family. Her father was a pharmaceutical salesman. She had a sister, Helen, and a brother Daniel.

Wettlin attended the West Philadelphia High School, where she was class president. Following high school, she joined the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1924 and graduated in 1928.

Wettlin's first job after university was as an English teacher at Lehighton High School. She then worked as a high-school teacher in Media, Pennsylvania till 1932.

After witnessing the collapse of the US economy in the Great Depression, and fascinated by the Soviet experiment of establishing a new economic policy, she travelled to Russia, planning to stay a year.

Soviet period

Shortly after arriving in the USSR on a tourist visa, Wettlin took up a job teaching the children of American automobile workers in Nizhny Novgorod. To change to an employment visa, she had to leave the country temporarily. Before her departure for Helsinki, she met Andrei Efremoff, a stage director, who would become her husband in 1934. Their first child, Andrei Efremoff Jr. was born in 1935.

Efremoff was a close friend of Stanislavsky, and closely associated with the burgeoning theatre scene in Soviet Union. The government despatched him to various parts of the country to establish new theatres. Wettlin travelled extensively with him to Mongolia and Siberia.

In 1936, Wettlin was able to travel to the US. She held a successful lecture tour organised by her friends at the University of Pennsylvania. She was invited back for another tour, but later that same year, Stalin decreed that foreigners living in the USSR either had to take up Soviet citizenship or leave the country for good. Unwilling to abandon her family, Wettlin became a Soviet citizen.

Wettlin joined the teaching staff at the Foreign Language Institute in Moscow before the Second World War.

The Russian secret service forced her to become an informer for them. She was to keep tabs on her neighbours and friends, and report on their conversations to the agency. Efremoff never knew of her work. She grew disillusioned with it when some of her acquaintances were 'disappeared' following her reports.

When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941, Wettlin became a reporter for Radio Moscow. The Germans besieged Moscow, and Efremoff was put to work establishing entertainment units for Soviet soldiers, often close to the front. Wettlin and her family accompanied him on his duties. Thereafter they managed to escape to Nalchik, in the Caucasus.

Wettlin wrote her first book, Russian Road, describing her experiences and observations on civilian Russian life during the war. This was translated and published in Denmark, Norway and France to some acclaim.

After the war, Wettlin began her career of translating Russian books to English. She specialised in Maxim Gorky's works. Again she was forced into spying for the secret service, a distasteful task she abandoned unilaterally when her report recommending treatment for a neighbour resulted in the woman being arrested. Despite her fears for herself and her family, Wettlin did not suffer any punishment from the authorities, but Efremoff was declared a non-person.

Later life

Efremoff died in 1968. Wettlin published her book on Alexander Ostrovsky, a nineteenth century Russian playwright. In 1953, she visited the US for the first time in over thirty years. Her family and old friends encouraged her to consider emigrating back to America.

In 1980, Wettlin returned to the US. The State Department's decision that she had become a Soviet citizen under duress meant that her US citizenship was reinstated. Her daughter and grandson moved to Philadelphia with her, while her son remained in the USSR. He and his family joined her seven years later.

Margaret Wettlin died on 1 September 2003 in West Philadelphia.

Translations

Listing based on Zubovsky Boulevard.