The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  The parallel existence of legal and illegal Soviet stations was a legacy of the harsh conditions the Bolshevik party had faced under the tsar. In tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik party’s status fluctuated between legal and illegal, so the party set up a parallel system of underground cells to take over in case tsarist police shut down the legal party cells. During World War I, this system was expanded abroad as the Bolsheviks created a parallel underground network in many European countries and in the United States.

  After the revolution, Lenin decided that the Bolshevik approach had been a success story and should be replicated. Moscow forced a two-tiered system on friendly Communist parties in Europe, which were obliged to create illegal, underground party cells in addition to their existing legal cells. According to the thinking in Moscow, this second, parallel system would serve as insurance in case the local authorities decided to ban the Communist Party. The Soviet secret police, as the party organization tasked with the most sensitive tasks, quite naturally followed suit: before long, the Soviet secret police had opened parallel illegal stations anywhere Soviet Russia had an embassy.

  In Constantinople, the illegal rezidentura was in good hands. The “bookseller” Blyumkin was a resourceful operative, famous for his survival instincts. He had first made his mark in July 1918 when, as a young chekist and a member of the Social-Revolutionary party (in the first years after the revolution, Lenin allowed some fellow revolutionaries from other parties to be part of his repressive machine), he walked into the German embassy in Moscow and shot the German ambassador dead in cold blood.1 Blyumkin, who had hoped the assassination would prevent the signing of a separate peace with Germany, pursued by Bolsheviks but opposed by his party, survived the ensuing mess and managed to flee his unhappy superiors in Moscow. Next he showed up in Ukraine, where he also survived the chekist investigation into the assassination. He won back his former bosses’ trust and went on to forge a remarkable career in the foreign branch of the Soviet secret service. Throughout the 1920s, he popped up in various locales from Iran to Mongolia and continued plotting and conspiring. In Constantinople, Blyumkin was largely on his own, running his operations at the illegal rezidentura independently, but he needed to maintain contact with the legal rezidentura. For that, he had an agent: the young Romanian operative Liza Gorskaya.

  Gorskaya had come a long way since Trilisser first spotted her in 1924. From Bucharest, she moved to Vienna, where, undercover as a translator, her career in Soviet intelligence began. She soon obtained Soviet citizenship. Her membership in the Romanian Communist Party was transferred to the Bolshevik party. Along the way, she got rid of her given name (Ester) and became Liza, and she adopted the Russian-looking surname Gorskaya. She also left behind her marriage to a Romanian Communist. Then she was sent to Moscow to receive intensive training in spy tradecraft.

  She was a promising operative, fluent in French, German, and Russian. But she was still an outsider, and it was clear to her that she needed a protector. Liza received her new assignment: Trilisser sent her to Turkey to report directly to Blyumkin. This was good for her: Blyumkin was a shining star in Soviet foreign intelligence, one of the most adventurous—and lucky—operatives. Liza always recognized an opportunity when she saw it. She was a vivid and beautiful young woman, twenty-nine years old, with big, dark eyes and glossy black hair, and before long, Blyumkin had fallen in love with her.

  In Constantinople, with Trilisser behind him and a woman he loved at his side, it looked like Blyumkin was on top of the world. But he made a mistake: he didn’t give up on his affection for Trotsky.

  On April 12, 1929, Blyumkin was wandering the Grand Rue de Péra, in the most fashionable district in the European part of Constantinople, two days after coming to the city. It was a sunny day, and spring was in full flower. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face—Blyumkin had run into Trotsky’s twenty-three-year-old son. The young man invited Blyumkin to come and see his father. The Soviet operative readily accepted the invitation. Blyumkin had once worked as Trotsky’s secretary, and he still adored him. They met four days later. At that meeting, they spoke for four hours. Blyumkin had several subsequent meetings with the exiled revolutionary’s son, in which they discussed a wide range of topics, from Trotsky’s chances of returning to Russia to how best to organize Trotsky’s personal security detail.2 It was a dangerous game for Blyumkin to play. Trotsky was Stalin’s archenemy, and Blyumkin was on Stalin’s payroll, his trusted spy.

  Soon after these meetings, Trotsky made his move.

  The vast majority of Russian refugees who fled Soviet Russia didn’t want to settle abroad forever. They had every intention of going back home as soon as they saw the chance to change the political regime. Most never gave up that hope.

  It is not surprising that by 1929, the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), the military arm of the anti-Soviet émigré organization, counted more than sixty thousand members all over the world. Now led by General Alexander Kutepov, a tough anti-Bolshevik and a veteran of the civil war, the ROVS was actively preparing for the right moment to return to Russia and retake the country by force. The organization also launched a series of attacks on Soviet officials abroad, and in Russia, a number of officials were killed.3

  While the ROVS’s rank and file busied themselves with military training, the intelligentsia-in-exile launched anti-Soviet newspapers and journals, political clubs, and theaters. But instead of thinking of the future, the intelligentsia kept talking about the past. They seemed trapped in thousands of poignant what-ifs: What if World War I hadn’t broken out, the tsar hadn’t abdicated, Lenin was refused entry into the country, the allies hadn’t betrayed the White Cause? Years, then decades, passed in conversations like these. They continued, endlessly, in kitchens and cafés, salons and meeting halls, from Harbin to Belgrade, Paris to Constantinople.

  Dwelling on the past didn’t answer any questions about the future, and it was a surefire way to lose touch with the realities of everyday life back in the Soviet Union. There, the Communists were changing the country rapidly. Indeed, the Soviet project interfered in just about every aspect of everyday life. The calendar was changed: the Bolsheviks dropped the Julian dates and adopted the Gregorian calendar and introduced new holidays while banning religious celebrations like Christmas and Easter. They reformed the Russian alphabet and got rid of some old Slavonic letters. The Communists even accelerated the pace of life as they encouraged the “overfulfillment” of plans for developing Soviet industry and promoted the cherished dream of catching up with the West. They taught their citizens to talk Soviet “newspeak,” a bureaucratic and revolutionary argot studded with acronyms. The result was, well, the “Soviet people”—a new entity, barely recognizable to outsiders who still thought of themselves as Russian.

  While Soviet Russia was undergoing these radical changes, the émigré community continued dressing their children in prerevolutionary uniforms and teaching them to sing “God Save the Tsar.” They clung desperately to the (old) Russian way of life and wanted to keep it enshrined for the next generation. These political refugees believed that this was the way to keep the Russia they knew intact and uncontaminated by Bolshevism and to prepare for the glorious day when they could return to their homeland. It was touching, sentimental, and nostalgic—but if the émigrés wanted to have a say about Russia’s future, this was not an effective way to go about it.

  By 1929, whole neighborhoods on the European side of Constantinople were populated by Russian émigrés. The sighs of Russian romances issued from Russian restaurants. Outside of bookstores, old Russian books rescued from the barbaric Bolsheviks were prominently displayed. (Some are still there. Just a few years ago, we went to Istanbul and came upon an old bookstore in the European part of the city. In the narrow lane adjoining Istiklal, a modern name for Grande Rue de Péra, the shop window caught our eye, and we went in. Browsing, we found books left behind by the White Russians—including a nice copy of Les Armes, a French illustrated book about medieval weaponry
published in Paris in 1890 with a book plate that read, “Librairie S. H. Weiss, successeur vis-à-vis le Consulat de Russie, Constantinople.”)

  Trotsky didn’t live in the neighborhoods populated by the Russian exiles. Instead, he chose a district called Bomonti, in the Sisli—a large industrial area built around the city’s first brewery—before settling in a villa on an island off the southern shore of the city in the Sea of Marmara. Unlike most émigrés, Trotsky had no interest in dwelling on the past. He was an experienced operative. When it came to underground resistance work, his know-how was extensive, and his organizational talents were truly impressive; after all, it was Trotsky who founded the Red army. Trotsky was nothing if not resourceful, and he already had a plan in mind. He had decided to launch a monthly publication, the Bulletin of the Opposition.

  It was just a few sheets of cheap paper printed in Paris, but Stalin immediately understood its importance. He remembered what happened when public debate was banned under the tsar: Lenin established a sophisticated system of smuggling the prohibited Iskra, a party newspaper, into the country. Thanks to the Iskra, the Bolsheviks soon learned an important lesson. Yes, the newspaper was a means of spreading propaganda, but it was more than that. Under the harsh conditions imposed by the tsarist secret police, the dissemination of the Iskra served to build and train an underground community of highly disciplined, determined operatives. After all, it takes a lot of trained people, well versed in all methods of konspiratsiya, to smuggle subversive literature into Russia and distribute it across the country without being caught. In the end, it was the Iskra that turned the Bolsheviks from a prosecuted and banned political party into a militant and highly efficient underground organization. Both Stalin and Trotsky understood that.

  The first issue of Trotsky’s Bulletin was printed in June 1929. The publication’s stated goal was to “serve a practical struggle in the Soviet republic.”4 This message was ominous to Stalin’s secret police: Trotsky had, in effect, just announced his plans to build an underground organization in Russia, directed from abroad.

  The Iskra’s slogan had been “From a spark a fire will flare up.” Stalin well remembered the spark that started the revolution that ultimately crushed the mighty and repressive tsarist regime. He didn’t want to see something similar happen to him.

  Blyumkin was in love, and one day he opened up to Liza about his contacts with Trotsky. All his adult life he had been a player, and now the stakes were higher than ever. He knew Liza and saw that she was a player too.

  Liza, however, was terrified. Two Soviet stations and dozens of intelligence operatives in the city were dedicated to spying on Trotsky. Agents had been recruited from among his inner circle, and Trotsky’s every move was under surveillance. Liza could not understand how Blyumkin could think his meetings with Trotsky and Trotsky’s son had gone unnoticed. She was furious and tried to convince Blyumkin to report his contacts with Trotsky to his superiors. He refused.

  In August, Blyumkin went back to Moscow. He brought several of Trotsky’s letters, along with the first issue of the Bulletin.5

  The dreaded purge was in full swing at Lubyanka, but Blyumkin, once again, got off lightly. Trilisser, although in trouble himself, was nevertheless a member of the party internal affairs commission tasked with ridding the agency of operatives that Stalin might consider insufficiently loyal, and he came to Blyumkin’s aid: the commission found Blyumkin an “inspected and approved comrade.”6 Blyumkin’s luck hadn’t run out yet. Trilisser tried to send him abroad, but Blyumkin delayed his departure.

  In the fall, Liza was suddenly recalled to Moscow. The official pretext was that her Austrian passport was reported to have been compromised by a careless Soviet intelligence officer in Vienna. But it was rumored that Eitingon, the chief of the legal rezidentura in Constantinople, was behind her recall. Liza was deeply worried.

  In Moscow, Liza tried once again to speak with her lover about Trotsky. Once again, he could not be persuaded. When this effort failed, she didn’t hesitate. She went straight to Trilisser and reported Blyumkin’s contacts with Trotsky. She also went to Trilisser’s deputy to make sure Trilisser would not flip and protect his protégé.

  Blyumkin was expected to present himself to the chief, but his survival instinct told him it would be better not to. He failed to come to Lubyanka. Instead, he decided to flee the country. He was an experienced operative and knew how to outsmart the secret police. But he made one final call to Liza. Together, they went to the Kazansky railroad station in Moscow in the middle of the night; he wanted to get on the train to Rostov. That train wasn’t leaving until the morning, so they returned to the apartment. There, he was met by agents from Lubyanka. He got into their car and, as his last act of bravado, ordered the driver to take him to Lubyanka himself. “You have betrayed me, Liza,” were his only words to her.7

  Blyumkin was interrogated over and over again. Two weeks later, he was executed. Trilisser lost his job and was transferred out of Lubyanka.

  Liza, however, survived. She even managed to get a new assignment—in Denmark. There, she went to work under a Soviet intelligence officer. His name was Vasily Zarubin.

  Once again, Liza was in need of a defender. In fact, she needed one now more than ever, following the Central Committee’s special request to the Soviet secret police to “establish the exact nature of Gorskaya’s behavior.”8 After all, it was not entirely clear when exactly Gorskaya had learned of Blyumkin’s involvement with Trotsky and how long she had kept the information to herself. Zarubin was a perfect candidate. And given his emotional, sentimental nature, her task was easy. Soon, Zarubin proposed to her.

  Liza’s fate was secure. The Moscow Center was happy; Liza Gorskaya was international, talented, easygoing, and fluent in three languages, while Vasily Zarubin was Russian, loyal, and disciplined. The two made a good pair of Soviet spies.

  January 26, 1930. La rue Rousselet, a narrow street in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, was empty this Sunday morning, with the exception of two cars parked where the street met the rue Oudinot. The first—a large Alfa Romeo limousine with chrome headlights—was grayish green, the other a red Renault taxi.9 A lonely French policeman stood on the corner.10 Several men were in the cars, agents of Soviet intelligence, and they were nervous. Cadets from the École-Militaire next door could show up any minute and complicate things.

  At 10:00 a.m., the street was still empty. The plan was still working.

  Thirty minutes passed, and then the door at number 26—a shabby, four-story building cramped between similarly dilapidated buildings—finally opened. A tall, middle-aged man with a black beard and a long, black overcoat stepped outside. The man was well known to the men in the two cars. By now, in fact, Soviet intelligence knew almost everything about him. They knew that he lived with his wife and their five-year-old son in the small apartment on the third floor. They knew this man was powerful enough to always travel around the city in one of a dozen Parisian taxis that his organization had assigned to him. They knew that all of these taxis were driven by White Russian officers—thirty-three in all—and that these officers were experienced, well trained, and armed with revolvers.11

  Every morning a taxi awaited the man’s arrival. That was the routine. And routine was an important part of life for Alexander Kutepov, the forty-seven-year-old Russian general who was the leader of the ROVS, the military wing of the White Guard émigré community.

  But this Sunday, there was no taxi waiting for Kutepov, and he’d emerged at 10:30 a.m. rather than 11:00 a.m. That meant he’d taken the bait, and the men in the two cars were still in the game.

  The day before, Kutepov had received a letter from a friend. This friend had asked for a discreet meeting and promised that, although the meeting was important, it would not take much of Kutepov’s time. They could meet at a tram stop on the corner of the Boulevard des Invalides, the friend suggested, right on Kutepov’s route to the 11:30 a.m. memorial service for a mutual comrade-in-arms to be he
ld at the Russian Church. But the “friend” had been recruited as a Soviet agent, and the men in the cars would be waiting. The plan was to “arrest” Kutepov and then take him somewhere far, far away from the French legal system. The agents held their breath.

  The general headed to the meeting place. At the tram stop, he waited for his friend, in vain. Several minutes passed, and Kutepov, perplexed, started along the Boulevard des Invalides and then turned right, heading home. He was making a full circle. Luckily for Soviet intelligence, Kutepov had decided not to head to the church after his failed meeting but to return home by the tiny rue Oudinot, where the two cars were waiting for him.

  The general walked in a brisk, military manner. As he neared the corner, two people suddenly emerged from the gray-green Alfa Romeo, turned to him, and one of them said something in French. Kutepov frowned, then stopped. Despite all his years in Paris, he didn’t speak French. The plan to pretend to arrest Kutepov was falling apart because the stubborn general didn’t understand commands in a foreign language.

  The agents had to act, and fast. The two men twisted Kutepov and pushed him into the car. The general tried to fight back, but one of his assailants pacified him with chloroform. Now he was safely packed away. The policeman, a French Communist, jumped into the same vehicle.

  The Alfa Romeo started off immediately, followed by the red taxi. An astonished cleaner at the hospital on the rue Oudinot caught a glance of the general in the car, and that was the last time anyone, apart from the Soviet secret police, saw Kutepov alive.12

  His disappearance was part of a larger Soviet effort—a series of sophisticated deception operations with the goal of decapitating the White émigré movement either by luring its leaders into Russia or by abducting and assassinating them.