Marcel Vergeat

French mechanic, and anarchist and syndicalist, born. Invited to the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in July 1920 along with fellow anarcho-syndicalist Jules Lepetit (Louis Bertho) and the socialist Raymond Lefebvre, all three were upset by what they found in Russia and said so publicly. They noted what they saw and experienced and let it be known that their report would be critical. When it was time to leave, their official escorts asked the three men for their briefcases. Fearing they would not be returned, Lefevre, Vergeat, and Lepetit refused to hand them over. They were then separated from the other delegates and put on a special train to Murmansk, a city on the Arctic coast, and told to wait there for a ship. Along the way they were mistreated. When they got there they were abandoned by their escorts and left to fend for themselves, eventually they were taken in by some fishermen. When no ship arrived to transport them, they complained in writing to Moscow but nothing came of it. They also sent letters to friends in which they expressed fears that the Bolsheviks were trying to kill them. In the end they resolved to buy a boat and try to escape on their own. The fishermen who rescued them tried to dissuade the three, but to no avail. They set sail in the last days of September (or possibly on October 1st) never to be seen again. Needless to say, the Bolsheviks told a radically different story.