Abram Slutsky

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Abram Aronovich Slutsky Абрам Аронович Слуцкий (July 1898, Parafievka, Chernigov region - 17 February 1938, Moscow) headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service (GUGB), then part of the NKVD, from May 1935 to February 1938.

Slutsky was born 1898 into the family of a Jewish railroad worker in a Ukrainian village. As a youth he worked as an apprentice to a metal craftsman, then as clerk at a cotton plant. In the First World War he served in the Tsarist army as a volunteer in the 7th Siberian rifle regiment. In 1917 he joined the Bolshevik party. During the Civil War he fought for the Red Army and afterward, in 1920, moved to the organs of the Cheka, where he rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1929 he was appointed as the assistant to Artur Artuzov, chief of Foreign Department. He replaced Artuzov in May 1935.

During Slutsky's tenure, the Foreign Department was principally engaged in tracking down and eliminating the opponents of Stalin's regime, essentially White Russians and Trotskyists. Major operations included the kidnapping of General Evgenii Miller, the burglary of the Trotsky archive in Paris, the assassination of Ignace Reiss, and the liquidation of numerous Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists in Spain during the Civil War. Slutsky's illegals in Great Britain, Arnold Deutsch and Theodore Maly, were responsible for recruiting and developing the infamous Cambridge Five. In 1936 he participated in concocting the evidence used in the first Moscow Trial, the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre." The task of extracting false confessions from Sergei Mrachkovsky and Ivan Smirnov fell to him. The voluble Slutsky related his experience of "breaking-down" these Old Bolsheviks to his subordinates, Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky. They subsequently recounted these episodes in their memoirs.

In character, the defector Orlov, who worked directly under him and knew him well, thought Slutsky was "distinguished by laziness, a propensity for window dressing and by subservience to his chiefs. He was gentle by nature, cowardly and double-faced." Elizabeth Poretsky, who met with him frequently in 1936, thought he "was a person of many contradictions...he would weep while telling of the interrogation of some of the defendants at the trials and bemoan the fates of their families; in the same breath he would denounce them as 'Trotskyite facists.'" But, as she noted, he might have been stage-acting, hoping that others "would betray themselves when he feigned sympathy for the victims of the trials." Poretsky adds that he courageously interceded with his superiors to save lives.

Slutsky's end came on February 17, 1938 when he was invited to a meeting in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky in the Lubyanka. Shortly afterward his deputy, Sergei Shpigelglas, was called into the office and observed his boss slumped in a chair with tea and cakes at the table beside him. Frinovsky said Slutsky had died suddenly of a heart attack. The chief of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, ordered Slutsky's body put in the main hall of the NKVD club and surrounded by an honor guard of NKVD officers. But the embalmers neglected to cover the tell-tale spots on Slutsky's face which indicated to the mourners that he had been poisoned with hydrocyanic acid. Two months later he was posthumously stripped of his CPSU membership and declared an "enemy of the people."

[edit] Sources

• Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Our own people: A memoir of 'Ignace Reiss' and his friends, University of Michigan Press, 1969. 278 pages ISBN 0472735004
• Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. Random House, 1953.
• Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service, Enigma Books, 2000 ISBN 1-929631-03-0