Slutsky, Abram Aronovich (1898-1938)
A Soviet Cheka-OGPU official who headed Cheka-OGPU foreign intelligence from May 21, 1935 to February 17, 1938.
Slutsky was born in 1898 to the family of a railway conductor in the village of Parafievka, in the Chernigovskaya gubernia of the Russian Empire. After graduating from a gymnasium (Russian high school) in the city of Andizhan (now in Uzbekistan), he worked first as a locksmith’s apprentice and later as a clerk in a cotton mill before he was drafted into the army in 1916. In 1916 and1917, he fought in World War I as a volunteer with the 7th Siberian Rifle Regiment of the Russian Army. In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik party. That August, he returned to Andizhan and took part in establishing Soviet power in Central Asia. During 1918 and 1919, he was a member and then chairman of the Andizhan committee of RCP (b) and chairman of the district court-martial. From October 1919 to June 1920, he served as a member of the Revolutionary and Military Council of the Andizhan fortified region.
In September 1920, Slutsky began his service at the Cheka in the city of Tashkent. Later he served as chairman or head of district and regional Cheka offices in the Central Asian part of Soviet Russia and then the USSR. In June 1922, Slutsky was appointed assistant chairman of the Supreme Court Martial of Turkestan and then the chairman of its Judiciary Board. A year later, he was transferred to Moscow to work as chairman of a court martial in the Moscow military region. In 1925, Slutsky was shifted again – this time to the position of chairman of the revisory commission of the State Fish Syndicate, which was part of the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy (VSNH) – the highest agency managing the Soviet economy in that period.
In June of 1926, Slutsky shifted to the Economic Directorate of the OGPU to be an assistant section head and then section head. In December 1927, he was promoted to head of the OGPU’s 2nd section; a year later, he was appointed to serve simultaneously as head of its 2nd division. In July 1929, Slutsky became assistant head of the entire Economic Directorate. In 1928, he took part in the investigation of the ill-famed Shahtinsky case – the trial from May to July of 1928 of a group of engineers and technicians who were falsely charged with creating a counterrevolutionary sabotage organization in the coal-mining Donbass area (now part of Ukraine).
In January 1930, Slutsky shifted to the OGPU Foreign Intelligence Department (INO) as an assistant to its head, Arthur Artuzov. From 1931 to 1933, Slutsky was reportedly the chief resident of the INO in Western Europe. Using the cover of an employee of the Soviet trade mission in Berlin, he traveled with special missions to Germany, Spain, France, Sweden and, allegedly, the United States. Among other things, Slutsky is credited with directing an operation which procured the process of ball bearing production from the Swedes.
In July 1934, Slutsky became deputy head of the INO, where he supervised the work in the field of scientific-technical intelligence (later known as the XY.) On May 21, 1935, he succeeded Arthur Artuzov as the head of the INO (then part of the GUGB NKVD), with the rank of the Commissar of the GB. After December 1936, when the divisions of the GUGB were assigned numbers for security reasons, Slutsky signed on as head of the 7th department, which stood for the INO at that time. Slutsky’s tenure was the heyday of the INO’s “illegal” operations, which were launched by his predecessor, Artuzov. For his service, he was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and two “Honorary Chekist” breastplates.
The last year of Slutsky’s tenure saw the mass purges that struck a heavy blow to the service: all Slutsky’s predecessors in the INO leadership were executed, one after another; among the INO staff of 450 (including its foreign field operatives), 276 were purged. On February 17, 1938, Slutsky died in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, the first deputy to the Commissar, or Narcom, of the NKVD. At the time, the cause of Slutsky’s death was reported as heart failure, and he was buried with honors in the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. In his final years, Slutsky did have heart troubles and often received visitors lying on a couch in his office, hence the explanation was quite plausible. But two months after his death he was posthumously expelled from the Communist party ranks as “an enemy of the people.” After his arrest, the former head of the NKVD department of technical services admitted in the course of interrogations that he himself had given Slutsky an injection of cyanic acid – on the orders of the NKVD head, Nickolai Ezhov. After his arrest in April 1939, Ezhov confirmed this accusation during interrogations. Slutsky’s official biography indicates poisoning as the cause of his death, but the evidence is ambiguous, since not a single witness to his death survived the great purges. Moreover, Slutsky’s younger brother suffered from the same heart ailment and died in 1946 – at the same age Slutsky was when he died in 1938.
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Abram Slutsky
Abram Aronovich Slutsky (Russian: Абра́м Аро́нович Слу́цкий) (July 1898 - 17 February 1938, Moscow) headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service (INO), then part of the NKVD, from May 1935 to February 1938.
Biography
Slutsky was born in 1898 into the family of a Jewish railroad worker in a Ukrainian village, Parafievka, in the Chernigov region. 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 GPU/OGPU, where by dint of his affable personality he rose rapidly through the ranks,
Originally, Slutsky worked in the OGPU's Economic Department engaged in industrial espionage. He received the first of two Orders of the Red Banner for his role in directing the apparatus which stole the process for making ball-bearings from the Swedes. In another clandestine operation he extorted $300,000 from Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish Match King, by threatening to flood world markets with cheap matches made in the Soviet Union. In 1929 he was appointed as the assistant to Artur Artuzov, head of the Foreign Department. In May 1935, Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the secret police, replaced Artuzov with Slutsky.
During Slutsky's tenure, the Foreign Department was principally engaged in tracking down and eliminating the opponents of Stalin's regime, essentially emigre 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 August 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 described his methods for "breaking-down" these Old Bolsheviks to his subordinates, Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky, who 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 fascists.'" 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 the families of condemned bolsheviks.
When Nikolai Yezhov assumed control of the NKVD in 1937, he began to arrest and liquidate the department heads whom he knew were close to his deposed predecessor, Yagoda. Slutsky was spared, even though he was implicated in confessions as a "participant in Yagoda's conspiracy," because Yezhov feared that Slutky's arrest would cause Soviet agents who were operating abroad to defect. Nevertheless, Slutsky's days were numbered, and his end came on February 17, 1938.
Death
There are two unofficial accounts of Slutsky's death. The first appeared in Orlov's Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (1953) and presumably is based on gossip Orlov heard in France or Spain in 1938. In Orlov's version, Slutsky was invited to a meeting in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, head of the GUGB, in the Lubyanka. Shortly afterward his deputy, Sergei Shpigelglas, was called into the office and he observed Slutsky 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.
The second account comes from Frinovsky's confession, obtained before his execution, in which he claims Yezhov ordered him to "remove Slutsky without noise." Accordingly, Frinovsky invited Slutsky to his office for a conference, and while they were talking another deputy slipped into the room and covered Slutsky's nose with a chloroform mask. Once Slutsky passed out, a second deputy, who was hiding in an adjacent office, entered the room and "injected poison into the muscle of his right arm." Frinovsky summoned a doctor who confirmed that Slutsky had died of a heart attack. None of the witnesses to this crime survived the Great Purge.
Two months after his death, Slutsky was posthumously stripped of his CPSU membership and declared an enemy of the people. Although he has been rehabilitated, the Russian government's official position is that Slutsky died while working in his office.