Hoover Archives has acquired the papers of Payson Dennis Carter. Carter was an American who worked in the USSR as a communications (telegraph and telephone) engineer between 1933 and 1937, helping lay lines between Moscow and Leningrad. As a member of the Friends of the Soviet Union after his return, “Comrade Carter” was active in speaking to church groups in “the heart of southern reaction” in the U.S. This caused him some difficulties during the McCarthy era.
Carter was married while in the Soviet Union, and divorced after leaving (the collection contains a letter from his ex-wife to him written in 1940). After returning to the United States, he continued to work as an engineer, spending several years with the FCC and a Washington, DC area firm. Carter served in the Second World War, was a member of the President’s Soviet Protocol Committee, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The collection contains one audio tape, presumably of reminiscences by Carter, clippings, including an interview with him, identity papers, and numerous photographs and postcards, as well as an address book and a notebook kept by Carter while in the USSR.
