Nikolai Skoblin
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Nikolai Skoblin (Russian: Скоблин Николай Владимирович) (1892-1938?) was a general in the counterrevolutionary White Russian army, a member of the expatriate Russian All-Military Union (ROVS)p, a Soviet double agent, and husband to the gypsy folk-singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya (1882-1940).
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[edit] Early Life and Russian Civil War
Skoblin was a cavalry officer in the Kornilov Division of the White Russian Army during the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920. He was known for both his bravery and cruelty. Red soldiers captured by Skoblin's men were hanged or shot on the spot. It is said he met his wife, Plevitskaya during the war. The romantic version is that Skoblin captured his wife during a raid against the Red Army. Plevitskaya, a committed Bolshevik who had been traveling the front singing and entertaining Red Army troops, used her considerable charms to seduce Skoblin and escape the gallows. Through her influence, Skoblin became a Bolshevik agent.
[edit] Life as Soviet Agent
Skoblin and his wife moved to Paris at the end of the Civil War. He became a leader in the ROVS. This ineffective organization of former Tsarist officers dreamed about the fall of Joseph Stalin's government and the unlikely restoration of the Russian monarchy while they concocted plots and engaged in petty rivalries. Skoblin penetrated the highest level in this group, becoming the intimate of General Evgenii Miller, its leader. It is a testament to Skoblin's skill as an intriguer that he would remain Miller's confidant despite repeated warnings that he was a double-agent.
Skoblin was accused of being a Soviet agent in a series of articles published in the emigre newspaper The Latest News (Posledniye Novosti) in February 1935. The source of this information was a former member of the Kornilov Division, Lieutenant Colonel Magdenko, who had been recruited to work for Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) in Berlin. Skoblin insisted upon having his case reviewed by a court of honor. Lacking any evidence other than hearsay, the court of honor exonerated Skoblin.
In the labyrinthine affair which preceded the arrest and execution of the Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Skoblin is alleged to have played the role of a triple-agent, working for the ROVS, Stalin's secret police, and the Gestapo. The broad outline of this affair is as follows. At the behest of the NKVD, Skoblin began a whisper campaign to slander Tukhachevsky. He informed the chief of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, that Stalin believed Tuckhachevsky was planning a coup d'tat with the help of the Wehrmacht; and Skoblin's deputy, Nikolai Alekseyev, simultaneously revealed this information to French intelligence, the Deuxième Bureau. From personal as well as political motives, Heydrich rose to the bait and he seized the opportunity to strike a blow at both the Abwehr and the Soviet army. He determined to create a fake dossier which would prove that Tukhachevsky was plotting with the Wehrmacht. He knew that the Abwehr retained in their files numerous documents written by Tukhachevsky in the 1920s. When Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, refused Heyrich's request for the Tukhachevsky file, Heydrich staged a burglary of Abwehr headquarters and stole the documents. The Gestapo used the old documents to create new forgeries. The dossier thus produced was then "planted" with several sources and passed to Stalin through a third party, possibly Edvard Beneš. The dossier, it should be noted, was not introduced at Tukhachevsky's trial on June 11, 1937, known as the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization. Confessions had already been beaten out of the defendants and Stalin knew the value of faked evidence.
Judging by events which followed, it is possible that Skoblin's reward from the NKVD for his role in Tukhachevsky affair was the leadership of the ROVS. On September 22, 1937 Skoblin led General Miller to a meeting with two German agents to discuss the beginning of a secret collaboration between the ROVS and the Nazi Government. The agents were not Germans, they were in fact members of the NKVD disguised as Germans. They drugged Miller, placed him in a steamer trunk, smuggled him aboard a Soviet ship in Le Havre, and carried him back to Moscow where he was tortured and finally executed nineteen months later on May 11, 1939. (Copies of letters written by Miller while he was imprisoned in Moscow are in the Dimitri Volkogonov papers at the Library of Congress.) However, Skoblin's ambition to become the leader of the ROVS was thwarted. Miller left behind a note to be opened if he failed to return from the meeting. Skoblin had not counted upon Miller's foresight and, with his cover blown, he escaped and hid in the Soviet embassy in Paris. The French police launched a manhunt but Skoblin had vanished.
[edit] Death
There are several accounts of Skoblin's death, all of them second hand. Pavel Sudoplatov writes in his memoirs, Special Tasks (1994), that Skoblin escaped to Spain and died in Barcelona during a German bombing raid. In Deadly Illusions (1993) by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, the authors suggest that an NKVD agent, Alexander Orlov, smuggled Skoblin into Spain by airplane and disposed of him, keeping his ring to use in a later blackmail scheme. Victor Alexandrov speculates in The Tuchachevsky Affair (1963) that Skoblin was poisoned aboard a Soviet vessel, the Kuban, bound from Spain to Odessa, and his skeleton ultimately ended up in a Soviet anatomical laboratory. Alexander Orlov in his own memoir, The March of Time (2004), writes that the NKVD compelled Skoblin to write undated love letters to Plevitskaya, which were used to buy her silence, and then smuggled him aboard a Soviet cargo vessel bound for Leningrad. Orlov ends his story in the Baltic Sea, leaving it to the reader to guess Skoblin's fate.
Plevitskaya's fate is well-known. Arrested by the French police, she was put on trial as an accomplice in the disappearance of Miller. In her own defence, she claimed Skoblin too had been abducted by the NKVD. But evidence found at her apartment proved that she had been a secret agent. She was convicted, on December 15, 1938, and sentenced to the unusually harsh penalty of twenty years hard labor. She died in a French prison of a heart ailment on October 1, 1940.
[edit] In Media
Skoblin's and Plevitskaya's story was fictionalized by Vladimir Nabokov, who had known Plevitskaya in Berlin, in his first English language story, "The Assistant Producer", in January 1943. It was also the basis of the French movie Triple Agent (2004) directed by Éric Rohmer. The Miller abduction and the relationship between the Skoblins and Max Eitingon was the subject of a rancorous squabble between Stephen Schwartz and Theodore Draper in the pages of the New York Review of Books in April 1988.
Part of the story can be traced in articles in The Times of September on 1937.
[edit] Sources
- Victor Alexandrov, The Tukhachevsky Affair, Prentice-Hall, 1963. ASIN B0006D5JSY
- Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story, Harper Collins, 1990. ISBN 0-06-016605-3
- Brian Boyd. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-691-02471-5
- John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, Crown, 1993 ISBN 0-517-58850-1
- Wilhelm Hoettl, The Secret Front, Frederick A. Praeger, 1954 ASIN B0007EFR8Y ; Enigma Books (September 1, 2003) ISBN 1-929631-07-3
- Igor Lukes, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-19-510267-3
- Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service, Enigma Books, 2000 ISBN 1-929631-03-0
- Alexander Orlov, The March of Time, St. Ermins Press, 2004. ISBN 1-903608-05-8
- Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, Little, Brown and Company, 1994. ISBN 0-316-82115-2
- Ally Hauptmann-Gurski, La Plevitskaya, Author's Publication, 2006 ISBN 978-0-9757372-4-8
