Abraham Markoff

Abraham Markoff (1887–1939), AKA "A. Markoff" and "Professor A. Markoff" in Marxist publications, was a Russian-born American and Communist Party member who founded and served as the first director of the New York Workers School.

Background Abraham Markoff was born on May 11, 1887, in the Russian Empire.

Career Marxist Markoff took part in the failed 1905 Russian Revolution and soon after immigrated to the USA. In 1938, Earl Browder topped the bill to celebrate 15 years of the New York Workers School on a program that featured Markoff, Tim Holmes, the Deep River Boys, Marc Blitzstein, Anna Sokolow & Group, and the Chernishevsky Folk Dance Group at the Mecca Temple in Manhattan.

Among those teachers recruited directed by Markoff were Leonard Emil Mins (latter a research analyst in the Office of Strategic Services or "OSS") and Seymour A. Copstein (who testified before the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1941).

Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black from Famine in USSR by A. Markoff (1933)

Markoff was "organizer, builder, and leader of the various workers' school" as well as "special-training courses" for "Party functionaries." at one of many May Day rallies in the New York City area (April 28, 1927), and on "Whither Russia?" (January 9, 1927)

Markoff also served as a member of the New York State committee of the CPUSA.

Dentist In 1932, Max Shachtman mentioned "Dr. A. Markoff, who has been equally successful in the professions of dental surgery and Stalinist officialdom."

Markoff ran a drugstore at 119 Street at Second Avenue. (Addresses for the drugstore and dental office lie five minutes apart on foot.) A similar advertisement appears in a 1928 issue.

Personal life and death

Markoff may have been married to Nancy Markoff, listed at "business manager" of The Liberator magazine in 1924.

Abraham Markoff died age 52 on August 29, 1939, (Goff was also 1944 national chairman of Gerald L. K. Smith's Christian Youth for America. In publishing this memoir in the 2010s, Christian Heritage Tours included a footnote that reads: "Editor’s Note: Shortly after Kenneth Goff published his book, Confessions of Stalin’s Agent in 1948, he was assassinated" – but Goff died in 1971. "The Training of New Cadres and Our School System," The Communist (August 1932) "Lenin on Agitation and Propaganda, and the Tasks of the Communist Party," The Communist (January 1934) "Marxist-Leninist Education in the U.S.A.," Inprecor (June 22, 1934)

Booklets Famine in USSR (1933) (written by Alexander Prokofievich Markov, secretary of Cossack Union in France) "Fifteen Years of the Workers School," The Fifteen Anniversary Celebration Journal of the Workers School (1938)