Helen Silvermaster
Soviet spy in the United States
Helen P. Silvermaster (July 19, 1899 — December 22, 1991) was an accused Soviet spy.
Biography
Elena Witte was born in 1899 in the Russian Empire. Her father, Baron Peter Witte, was a counselor to Tsar Nikolai II and acted as an advisor to the Mongolian government. After the October Revolution he was arrested by Bolsheviks, but later released. After her father's arrest, she moved to China and married a Russian, becoming known as Elena Volkov, around 1923.
The couple emigrated to San Francisco, California, in 1924 where their son, Anatole Boris Volkov was born the same year. (There is no known link between Volkov and "Pop Folkoff" or Volkov or Isaac Folkoff, another communist based in San Francisco.) Shortly after their son's birth the couple separated. Helen began a relationship with Nathan Gregory Silvermaster; the couple wed in 1930 and remained married until Nathan's death in 1964.
The couple came to Washington, D.C., in 1939. In Washington, she was one of the leaders of the Washington Bookshop, the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Washington Committee for Aid to China, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties.
“Helen Silvermaster” enters the record as soviet spy in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Helen, Silvermaster and Soviet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5703158. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1991, 1923 and 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Helen Silvermaster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.