I also provide information in this chapter about two more people who worked closely with Mairanovsky: Pavel Sudoplatov and Naum Eitingon. Sudoplatov, one of the most ruthless people in Stalin’s NKVD/MGB, began working at the GPU in 1921. In the 1930s, he worked at the OGPU/NKVD Foreign Department and was in charge of organizing political assassinations, including the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940. During World War II, he headed the NKVD/NKGB Fourth Department, which was in charge of sabotage and terrorist activity behind enemy lines. In 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1946, he was appointed head of the MGB DR Service (sabotage and terror). From 1950–1953, Sudoplatov headed Bureau No. 1, in charge of terrorist activity abroad.
Naum Eitingon (alias “Colonel Naum Kotov” during the Spanish Civil War, “Comrade Pablo,” “Pierre,” “Leont’ev,” “Rabinovich,” “Sakhov,” “Valery,” and “Lyova”), Sudoplatov’s longtime deputy, joined the CheKa Foreign Department in 1921.3 He spoke many languages fluently and throughout the 1930s worked all over Western Europe and the United States. He was in charge of terrorist acts in Paris and organized the kidnappings of White generals Aleksandr Kutepov and Yevgenii Miller, as well as the killing of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov. In 1939, he was appointed deputy head of the NKVD Second Department under Sudoplatov. In 1940, Eitingon worked with Sudoplatov on the Trotsky assassination. In the United States, the activity of Sudoplatov’s Bureau No. 1 and Eitingon’s role in the assassination of Trotsky were described by the defector and former MGB/KGB officer Peter Deriabin in testimony before a Senate committee in March 1965.4 A recently published 1939 NKVD document described a detailed plan to assassinate Trotsky (referred to as “a Duck”) and included the code names of the main participants, including Sudoplatov and Eitingon.5 An unpublished secret decree of the Presidium of the USSR Highest Council mentioned awarding the following persons for their execution of the organization of Trotsky’s murder: Caridad Mercader (mother of Ramon, the killer), Naum Eitingon, Lev Vasilevsky (NKVD rezident, i.e., an undercover Foreign Intelligence chief, who served as first secretary of the Soviet Embassy under the alias “Tarasov”), Pavel Sudoplatov, Iosif Grigulevich, and Pavel Pastelnyak (acting rezident in 1940).6 Later, under Eitingon’s supervision from Moscow, Vasilevsky-Tarasov tried to organize an escape of the killer Ramon Mercader from a Mexican prison.7 From 1946 to 1950, the team of Sudoplatov, Eitingon, and Maironovsky carried out executions of victims on the order of Stalin and Politburo members. I will present the details of these assassinations below.
In 1994, the publication of Sudoplatov’s memoirs, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, written with one of his sons, Anatolii, and two American historians,8 caused a furor in both American and Russian historical and scientific communities. The book presents a mixture of real information and false statements. Misinformation that the leading American and European physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Niels Bohr acted as Soviet spies by transferring secrets to the Soviets was criticized by both American and Russian physicists and historians,9 as well as by Russian and U.S. government officials,10 and former secret service colleagues. For instance, Zoya Zarubina, a former MGB officer who worked as a translator at Sudoplatov’s “S” Department in charge of the Atomic Bomb Papers, refuted Sudoplatov’s claims about Oppenheimer.11 The historian David Holloway responded: “Sudoplatov’s motives [to make money or to magnify the role of the KGB] may be understandable, but his American coauthors are very much to blame for not making the effort to check out his serious, but unsustained, charges [against the American and European physicists].”12
Sudoplatov does provide some real information on the role of Eitingon and Mairanovsky in numerous killings,13 but many details about Mairanovsky’s work and Sudoplatov’s characterization of him as a high-level scientist are fictitious.14 I can add to this that the memoirs of Sudoplatov’s former cell mates in Vladimir Prison do not support his version of events regarding the period after his arrest.15 Their descriptions of Sudoplatov’s simulation of a psychiatric illness contradict the details given in the book. The last version of Sudoplatov’s memoirs, Special Operations: Lubyanka and the Kremlin, the 1930s–1950s published only in 1998 in Russian, contains a more truthful version of these events.16 Also, the recently released documents show that the MVD doctors took part in the falsification of Sudoplatov’s disease.17 Sudoplatov’s transfer from Moscow’s Butyrka Prison to the MVD Leningrad Psychiatric Prison Hospital during the investigation of Beria’s case saved Sudoplatov’s life. Otherwise, there was a high probability that he would have been condemned to death along with Beria, Merkulov, and their close associates.
There is a further problem with Sudoplatov’s book. In 1990, my colleague in an investigation of the Raoul Wallenberg case, the Moscow journalist Vladimir Abarinov, called Sudoplatov and asked him what he knew about Wallenberg. Sudoplatov answered that he had never heard the name Wallenberg before. Surprisingly, a whole chapter about Raoul Wallenberg appeared in his memoirs four years later, in 1994.18 For all these reasons, in this chapter I will use Sudoplatov’s memoirs only if they agree with other sources.
THE FIRST SECRET LABORATORIES
There is no exact information about the early history of poison laboratories within the Soviet secret services. The data are scarce and secondary, basically scattered in memoirs. Sudoplatov claimed the first laboratory was established in 1921 under the name “Special Office” and that Professor Ignatii Kazakov headed it.19 Possibly, when Lenin asked Stalin to give him poison, he meant this “office” as the source. Later, at Bukharin’s show trial in 1938, Professor Kazakov was among three doctors accused of being “killers”; however, no connection with the OGPU laboratory was ever mentioned. Bobryonev and Ryzentsev wrote that Professor Boris Zbarsky, a biochemist (at the time deputy director of the Institute of Biochemistry), was a consultant for the narcotics experiments done at this lab.20 This coincides with a note in a book by Sudoplatov’s son Andrei stating that scientific research at the laboratory “was conducted by specialists from the Institute of Biochemistry headed by Academician Bach.”21 Zbarsky’s son, Professor Iliya Zbarsky, also recalled that in the 1920s his father had a close relationship with Dzerzhinsky and then, after Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926, “maintained excellent relationships with his deputy, Genrikh Yagoda.”22 He remembered that in 1927 Yagoda gave Boris Zbarsky a box with explosives for analysis. Later, Zbarsky headed a small laboratory in charge of the mummification and maintenance of Vladimir Lenin’s body.23 However, Academician Ipatieff, who knew Zbarsky personally very well, wrote in his memoirs: