Soviet athletes, traitors and defectors. The most famous people who escaped from the USSR (13 photos)

The question “About workers of state farms abroad who refused to return to the USSR” was first included on the agenda of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in the summer of 1928, when the number of so-called defectors reached 123 people, of whom 18 were party members, a third of them with pre-revolutionary experience. In this regard, on August 24, it was decided to “instruct the Organizational Distribution Committee of the Central Committee to make a report to the Secretariat within a month, having studied the materials of the People’s Commissariat of Trade and the OGPU.”

In a resolution adopted on October 5, the secretariat stated “insufficiently careful and unsystematic selection of workers by departments for permanent job abroad” and ordered the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to bring to justice all those who gave recommendations to defectors, and “the administrative representatives of the People's Commissariat of Trade, the Supreme Economic Council, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and the Travel Commissions to maximally strengthen the verification of those sent to work abroad, not allowing there persons who have been compromised in any way or whose past is unclear.” It was also supposed to strengthen the inspectorate apparatus of trade missions and prepare for them within a year personnel loyal to the CPSU (b) - “mainly from promoted workers ... and employees of local bodies of the People's Commissariat of Trade, who had not previously lived abroad and had no family ties there.”

Later, on January 25, 1929, the party board of the Central Control Commission adopted the instruction “On checking the cells of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in joint establishments abroad” with the aim, as stated in the document, “of clearing them of socially alien persons, clingy, bureaucratic, decayed and maintaining connections with anti-Soviet elements " All communists and candidates for party membership were subject to verification, and to carry it out, “verification troikas” were established, headed by representatives of the Central Control Commission. Having approved the said instruction on February 1, the Secretariat of the Central Committee accepted “the proposal of the Central Control Commission to instruct commissions sent to inspect the foreign cells of the CPSU (b) to inspect all personnel of USSR institutions abroad.”

However, despite the political purge that had begun, over the next year and a half the number of defectors more than doubled and amounted, according to a certificate sent on June 5, 1930. in the Central Control Commission as a senior authorized representative of the INO OGPU X . J. Reif, 277 people, of whom 34 were communists. Moreover, if in 1921 only 3 defectors were registered (including 1 communist), in 1922 - 5 (2), in 1923 -3 (1) and in 1924 - 2 (0), then as the NEP collapsedand restrictions on democratic freedoms in the country, there is a sharp increase in the number of co-workers who decided not to return to the USSR: in 1925 - 24 people (including 4 communists), in 1926 - 42 (4), in 1927 - 32 (6) , in 1928 - 36 (4), in 1929 - 75 (10) and in the first five months of 1930 - already 45 people. From October 1928 to August 1930 alone, 190 employees of Soviet trade missions remained abroad, of which at least 24 were members of the CPSU (b), including: in Germany - 90 people, France - 31, Persia - 21, England – 14, Turkey and China – 6 each, Latvia – 5, Italy – 4, America and Finland – 3 each, Poland – 2, Estonia, Czechoslovakia and Sweden – 1 each.

“Some of these employees,” noted the aforementioned OGPU certificate, “somehow bribe takers, anti-Soviet minded, informants for foreign companies, etc., refused to leave after they were asked to go on a business trip to the USSR. Another part refused to leave after leaving work due to staff reductions or for other reasons... Some of the employees fled due to discovered embezzlement, forgery, etc. The list also included those employees who were hired and fired on the spot. This part went abroad for various purposes: to study, to receive treatment, to visit relatives, etc.” According to the OGPU, 113 defectors (including 10 communists) were “exposed bribe-takers,” 35 (5) were “spies,” and 75 (14) were “connected with whites, Mensheviks, embezzlers, etc.” (1)

The self-interest and lack of ideology of the majority of defectors was also pointed out by the Menshevik leader F.I. Dan, who wrote that among those dozens of “employees and business travelers, high dignitaries and small fry who shake off Soviet dust from their feet” at the very moment when they respond from abroad to the “socialist fatherland”, quite a few “predators, grabbers, bribe-takers, careerists” or even “slicksters who, despite the decree declaring them “outlaws”, manage to rip off a hefty sum from the Bolshevik government upon leaving Soviet service and lifelong pensions for “silence.” Recognizing the existence among defectors “and honest people who are bitterly convinced of the impossibility of fruitful work in that atmosphere of not only physical, but also spiritual and moral terror, which is an integral part of the “general line,” Dan’ stipulated that “most of all, of course, and here are ordinary people who, after years of living abroad, are terrified by the environment of all kinds of deprivations and stunning cultural squalor in which they would have to find themselves in their homeland.”

A different point of view was held by the editor of the Parisian “Last News” P. N. Milyukov, who believed that considering all defectors as “people who, both before and now, were and are guided exclusively by the calculation of their own benefit” and “an elementary sense of animal self-preservation,” would be too much simply and unfairly towards them. Obviously, he noted, “responsible officials, specialists and ordinary Soviet citizens leaving communist power” had previously come to the notice of their superiors as politically unreliable and unfaithful servants of the regime, and “for someone who has fallen into disgrace, the break is only the last link of some mental process that led him to category of unreliable.” And the very fact of leaving one’s “ship” for someone else’s is accompanied by “the risk of not only material losses, poverty and hunger in an unknown and hostile environment,” but also a real threat to one’s own life from the almighty OGPU. “The personal tragedy of “non-return,” one of the newspaper’s authors, A. Baikalov, echoed Miliukov, “is often very great for the defectors themselves. Many years of dedicated work have been put to rest; an entire strip is considered erroneous, often the most best years life; a leap into the unknown has been made” (2).

IN information material“Characteristics of workers of state farms abroad who refused to return to the USSR,” prepared in July 1928 by the administrative department of the People's Commissariat of Trade together with the OGPU,and the certificate “Several examples of defectors - former members of the CPSU (b)”, sent on June 6, 1930 to the Central Control Commission by the assistant head of the INO OGPU M.S. Gorb, as well as in two lists (far from complete!) of party employees of trade institutions of the USSR abroad, who refused to leave for their homeland before January 1, 1931, the following persons are listed (in parentheses the author indicates the years of their entry into the Bolshevik Party, assignment to foreign work and transition to the position of defector): in Austria - member of the board of the Rusavstorg society I P. Samoilov (1918,1927,1930); in Great Britain - head of the licensing department of the trade mission E.V. Naglovskaya (1916, 1921, 1925) and director of Arcos (“ All Russian Cooperative Society Limited “) G. A. Solomon (Isetsky) (1917,1920, 1927); in Germany - head of the fur warehouse in Leipzig S. A. Bragin (Bryantsev) (1918, 1926, 1929), deputy representative of Mosvneshtorg E. I. Gedalke (1919, 1923, 1925), head of the department of “bread samples” of the trade mission of I. K. Koplevsky (1905,1920,1925), representative of the “Hleboproduct” society A.M. Miller-Malis (1906, 1925, 1926), editor of the trade representative bulletin P.M. Petrov (1901, 1921, 1925) and his wife of I. V. Petrov-Gelrich (1915, 1921, 1925), broker of the Hamburg branch of the trade mission of E. O. Ranke (1903, ?, 1927), assistant of the photo and film department of the trade mission in Cologne M. I. Ronin (1921, 1926, 1929) , head of the photo and film department E. Ya. Tserer (1918,1926, 1929), director of the Berlin film society “Prometheus” G. E. Shpilman (1917, ?, 1929), member of the board of the transport society “Derutra” Etwein (F. Y. Etwen? ) (?, 1926, 1929) and a certain A. A. Torgonsky (?, 1921,1921); for Italy - specialist in export goods of the trade mission M.A. Atlas (?, 1928,1930); for China - director of the joint-stock company “Wool” 3. A. Raskin (?) and authorized representative of “Exportles” M. M. Epport (1920, 1927, 1930); for Latvia - Commissioner of “Selkhozimport” V.I. Azarov (1917, 1928, 1930); for Persia - head of the department of the mixed export-import company “Sharq” (“East”) Sh. A. Abdulin (1918,1924, 1929), head of the Barfrush office “Sharq” M. Azizkhanov (1918, 1927, 1927); head of the Mohammer department of “Sharq” Z. L. Ter-Asaturov (1916, 1929, 1930) and chairman of the board of the “Avtoiran” society A. V. Bezrukov (1924, candidate member,?, 1928); in Poland - head of the transport point A. A. Kiryushov (1918, 1919, 1929) and head of the trade mission warehouse F. P. Shkudlyarek (1920, J 928, 1929); in the USA - engineer for military orders of Amtorg Makhnitovsky (T. Ya. Makhnikovsky?) (?, 1926, 1927); for Turkey - Deputy Trade Representative of the USSR I.M. Ibragimov (1920,1925, 1928) and accountant of the Petroleum Syndicate branch Budantsev (1918,1925,1929); for Finland - trade representative of the USSR S. E. Erzinkyan (1918,1927,1930); in France - head of the transport department of the trade mission and the department of Sovtorgflot B. G. Zul (1903, 1924, 1926), general secretary of the board of the mixed “ Banque Commerciale pour Europe du Nord ”H . P. Kryukov-Angarsky (1918, 1929, 1930), head of the fur warehouse M. V. Naumov (1918, 1926, 1930), head of the cork group of the trade mission K. A. Sosenko (1925, 1926, 1930) and a certain A. L Kapler (?, 1926, 1929); for Estonia - naval agent of the trade mission B. M. Jenson (1918, 1925, 1929) (3).

Paradoxical as it may seem, among the first defectors who broke with the Soviet regime back in the days of NEP were many honored underground revolutionaries, active participants in the October Revolution and the Civil War. For example, the hereditary nobleman G. A. Solomon, famous for his memoirs “Among the Red Leaders” and “Lenin and His Family (Ulyanovs),” was also a member of populist circles and the St. Petersburg “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.” After the Bolshevik victory, Solomon worked as first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Berlin and consul in Hamburg, deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Trade of the RSFSR and its representative in Estonia, director of Arkos, but in the summer of 1923 he left Soviet service and settled in Belgium, where, according to the OGPU, bought a farm and began to make “exposures in the white press,” finally refusing to return to Moscow in 1927.

Following Solomon, one of the prominent political workers of the Red Army, 34-year-old A. Ya. Semashko, also joined the ranks of defectors. The son of an official, he graduated from the Libau Gymnasium and studied at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, but in 1907 he joined the RSDLP, was imprisoned and later, after graduating from the ensign school, he worked in the Military Organization under the PC of the RSDLP(b). After the October Revolution, Semashko commanded the troops of the Oryol and Ural districts, was a member of the revolutionary military councils of the Northern and Western Fronts and the 12th Army, the commander of the Special Brigade on the Caucasus Front and a senior official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Far Eastern Republic. In 1923, Semashko was the charge d'affaires of the USSR and then the secretary of the plenipotentiary mission in Latvia, from where, as stated in the resolution of the party board of the Central Control Commission of September 28, 1926, “he escaped and went over to the camp of the bourgeoisie.” (By the way, even earlier, in 1922, the secretary of the embassy in Lithuania, a party member since 1919, I.M. Mirsky, also refused to return to Moscow.) In his farewell message, Semashko explained that although since the autumn of 1918. “began to have a negative attitude towards the course taken in food policy, the activities of the Cheka”, etc., he decided to leave Soviet service and go to America “solely due to insurmountable fatigue from constant intrigue, eternal squabbles, lies and hypocrisy, in the atmosphere of which he had to work”(4).

A very colorful figure among the early defectors was N. A. Orlov, a 35-year-old graduate of the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, an old Social Democrat, co-operator and economist, who edited the magazine “Izvestia of the People’s Commissariat for Food” in 1918 and wrote “wonderful”, according to the assessment V.I. Lenin, book “Food Work of the Soviet Power”. Nevertheless, another book by Orlov, “The System of Food Procurement” (Tambov. 1920), which, according to its author, was a “harbinger of a new economic policy,” did not receive approval from the authorities and was only partially published (one chapter out of five), although , as Orlov emphasized in his statement to the Central Committee of the RCP (b), “everything I proposed in the “dangerous” prohibited manuscript was implemented a few months later.” Recalling that he was only allowed to “privately take part in the work to open the NEP era,” Orlov noted bitterly: “This did not prevent the fact that the historic April decree [on consumer cooperation] was half written in all the “liberation” points by me , not a single word from my draft was thrown out either in the Politburo or in the Council of People’s Commissars” (5).

Since the summer of 1921, Orlov headed the economic department of the magazine “ New world”, but in a secret diary he wrote about his desire to “expose” the Bolsheviks, who ruined a great country, “for all their meanness, deception, sycophancy, for the death of our generation, for the outrage against everything we believed in.” As plenipotentiary representative N.N. Krestinsky reported to Moscow, in 1923 Orlov “not only ideologically, but also formally left the RCP,” refused to return to the USSR and, in connection with this, was dismissed from the plenipotentiary “for gross violation official discipline" Having settled near Berlin, Orlov worked on the science fiction novel “The Dictator,” but died suddenly before reaching the age of 37 (6).

One of the organizers of the October Revolution, 37-year-old I. L. Dzyavaltovsky (Yurin, Gintovt), also enjoyed considerable fame in the USSR. A Vilna nobleman, he had been a member of the Polish Socialist Party since 1907, and in April 1917, as a staff captain of the Life Guards Grenadier Regiment, he joined the RSDLP(b) and headed the regimental committee. “The Guard, this most reliable core of the tsarist army, was won for our party by Comrade. Dzyavaltovsky,” N.I. Podvoisky later admitted. Arrested in June 1917 for Bolshevik agitation, Dzyavaltovsky was acquitted by the court and then led the creation of cells of the Military Organization of the RSDLP (b) in all garrisons defending Petrograd from the Northern Front.,“During the uprising on October 25,” recalled Podvoisky, “comrade. Dzyavaltovsky is appointed by the Military Revolutionary Committee as chief of staff of the main sector of the troops operating against the Winter Palace and conducts operations coolly, calmly, and prudently. At the same time, he is in charge of the field revolutionary investigation of the generals, bourgeois aces, etc. captured during the uprising. After the victory that same night, from October 25th to 26th, Comrade. Dzyawaltowski moves from the Headquarters of the uprising to the Winter Headquarters. The Military Revolutionary Committee appoints him commandant and commissar of the former royal palace. Here he withstands the first onslaught of the crowds attacking the wine cellars of the Winter Palace and rushing to take possession of his treasures. On the night of October 27, the Council of People's Commissars for Military Affairs orders Comrade. Dzyavaltovsky to organize the Field Headquarters of our defense against Krasnov on the Pulkovo Heights.”

Elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the second to sixth convocations, Dzyavaltovsky was the first commissar of the All-Russian General Headquarters of the Red Army and its Main Directorate of Military Educational Institutions, then he was the Deputy People's Commissar of Military Affairs of Ukraine, assistant commander of the Eastern Front, Minister of War and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Far Eastern Republic, and head of its mission in Beijing. Recalled to Moscow at the request of G.V. Chicherin, who complained to the Central Committee that Dzyavaltovsky “arbitrarily negotiated with Japan,” he was sent in January 1922 “at the disposal of the NK RKI to work in hungry regions,” and in April he was approved as a member Economic Council of South-East Russia. “Comrade Dzyawaltowski,” wrote Podvoisky, “is one of the most active and best members of our party.” In May 1924 Dzyavaltovsky, then deputy chairman of the board of Dobrolet, was seconded to the disposal of the Comintern secretariat. And in November 1925, the world press reported with amazement that the “hero of October” voluntarily surrendered into the hands of the Polish authorities, explaining his decision by the “corruption of the majority of communists” (7).

Another “defector”, 30-year-old V. S. Nesterovich (M. Yaroslavsky), also a former staff captain and member of the RSDLP (b) since 1917, commanding the 42nd Infantry and 9th Cavalry Divisions during the Civil War, became a Knight of the honorary revolutionary weapon (and only 20 people were awarded this honor!) and the Order of the Red Banner. Appointed in April 1925 Military attache of the USSR embassy in Vienna, Nesterovich already in the summer decided to leave his post and live abroad, but was... poisoned by an OGPU agent.

Another defector, a member of the RSDLP since 1901, editor of the German bulletin of the Berlin trade mission, 41-year-old P. M. Petrov came from the family of a roofing worker and, being illiterate until the age of 15, educated himself in tsarist prisons, and after his escape in 1907. abroad - in the library of the British Museum. Elected to the London Committee and the Scottish Council of the British Socialist Party, Petrov in January 1916. was arrested for anti-war propaganda and imprisoned in Brixton prison, from where he was released only two years later together with G.V. Chicherin at the request of the authorities of the RSFSR. Petrov’s wife, Irma, who had been a member of the German Social Democratic Party since 1911, was also imprisoned. Returning to his homeland, Petrov headed the political section of the Higher Military Inspectorate, and at the beginning of 1919. was the People's Commissar and a member of the presidium of the Central Executive Committee of Belarus, but did not work well with local party members led by A.F. Myasnikov.

Since 1921, the couple served in the information department of the Berlin trade mission. In February 1925, the commission for checking members of the party cell of USSR institutions in Germany severely reprimanded Petrov “for involving the Social Democrat Lebe in his dispute with another party comrade, thereby compromising the party.” “Verification” petitioned for the immediate recall of Petrov to the USSR, but he appealed to the central verification commission at the party board of the Central Control Commission, which on April 3 decided: “Taking into account the statement of comrade.Petrov P.M., who openedhis complete hostility towards the RCP(b), expel him from the ranks of the party.” On July 1, the couple were dismissed from the trade mission, but several years later, due to their poor financial situation, trade representative M. K. Begge unsuccessfully petitioned for the Petrovs to be given some kind of work in Soviet institutions in Berlin.

In 1926, the ranks of defectors were joined by another old Bolshevik - a graduate of the Leipzig Commercial Academy, 38-year-old B. G. Suhl, who during the October Revolution was an emissary of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee for the release of political prisoners, and then headed the Main Directorate of Water Transport of the Supreme Economic Council, representing the RSFSR at negotiations with Finland and actively participated in the civil war as head of the political department of the Southern Group of Forces Eastern Front, member of the revolutionary military councils of the 4th and 13th armies. Later, Suhl was the chairman of the food meeting in the Labor Commune of the Volga Germans, specially authorized by the People's Commissariat of Railways for maritime transport, authorized by Dobroflot in London and, since February 1925, general agent of Sovtorgflot and head of the transport department of the USSR trade mission in France.

According to information from the INO OGPU, in Paris Suhl “concluded an unfavorable trade agreement with the Duberzak company, from which he received bribes,” and responded to an offer to go to Moscow by demanding that he be given a month’s leave, after which he did not even appear at the trade mission. “With Zul,” the OGPU reported, “all contact on the part of the Plenipotentiary and Trade Representatives in Paris has been lost. According to Paris workers, Suhl will not return to the USSR. Currently, according to intelligence information we have received, he is farming on land he purchased near Paris.” Attempts to talk to Suhl led nowhere: he did not want to see anyone, and only occasionally was he seen driving around Paris in his own car. By the decision of the party troika of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on December 14, 1926, Suhl was expelled from its ranks as “who had betrayed the trust of the party” (8).

How radically the assessments of the work of Soviet employees abroad changed after their refusal to return to their homeland is shown by the case of the USSR Deputy Trade Director in Angora, 40-year-old I. M. Ibragimov (Ibraimov). He received his pedagogical education in Turkey and before the revolution he served as a teacher in private firms in Crimea and Moscow, and collaborated in Tatar newspapers. Having joined the RCP(b) in 1920. “as part of the Crimean organization of Tatar youth,” Ibragimov was a member of the Yalta Revolutionary Committee and the Bureau of the Party Committee, People’s Commissar of Education of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Chairman of the Board of the Crimean Agricultural Bank and Crimean Industrial Cooperation, a member of the Crimean Central Executive Committee, and in October 1925 he was sent to Turkey for the post of deputy trade representative. Two years later, at one of the meetings in the organizational bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the review of foreign personnel of the People's Commissariat of Trade of the USSR, Ibragimov was spoken of extremely flatteringly: “This is a very impressive person in Turkish circles and very much our person. He has been in the party recently, since 20, and they say that there was a very wealthy man who personally handed over his entire fortune to us in due time, without waiting for them to take it away, without hiding it, and went to work for us [...]. Even Roizenman (member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission - V.G.), a very picky person in relation to people from the bourgeoisie, and he speaks very well about Ibragimov, that in no case should he be removed, that he is a valuable, useful worker "

However, as soon as Ibragimov became a defector, it turned out that he had not set up work in Angora, and by concluding suspicious transactions, he allegedly “frantically amassed” capital for himself. “Lately,” said his profile dated July 5, 1928, “Ibraimov was connected through his partner Zvure with the Turkish and French intelligence officer Adian Bey, lived beyond his means, bought himself a car for 3,200 lire. Having received orders to leave for the USSR, he fled to France. According to data obtained during the investigation into the case of the Crimean Central Executive Committee Veli Ibraimov, Deputy Trade Representative Ibraimov has close ties with nationalistanti-Soviet circles in Crimea and Crimean counter-revolutionary emigration in Turkey. It also turned out that these elements take advantage of his official position to maintain communication, mutual information, etc. According to additional information received, Ibraimov passed on to the Turkish authorities some information related to the special work of the embassy and consulate. According to the Turkish police, Ibraimov, having learned about the arrest of Veli Ibraimov, moved to another camp.”

Having learned about the appearance of another defector, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a secret resolution on April 21, recorded in a special protocol: “In view of Ibragimov’s failure to leave for the USSR and the discovery that he had entered into unfavorable deals for us with selfish goals, to immediately deprive him of all powers. The question of prosecuting him criminally and demanding his extradition as a criminal, as well as other measures to neutralize him, should be postponed until all the materials have been thoroughly clarified, meaning to avoid any noise that could be used against us” (9).

However, not all defectors decided to openly break with the regime, and the most “high-ranking” of them, 43-year-old A.L. Sheinman, considered it best to offer Moscow to enter into a deal with him. A Bolshevik since 1903 and chairman of the executive committee of the Helsingfors Council of Deputies of the Army, Navy and Workers of Finland in 1917, Sheinman, while still in the Leninist Council of People's Commissars, held the posts of deputy people's commissar of finance, food and foreign trade of the RSFSR. In 1921-1924. he was the chairman of the board of the State Bank and a member of the board of Narkomfin, in 1925 - People's Commissar of Internal Trade and Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign and Domestic Trade of the USSR, from January 1926 - again the head of the State Bank and Deputy People's Commissar of Finance of the USSR.

At the end of July 1928 The Politburo granted Sheinman a two-month leave, which was then extended until October 20, for treatment - with permission to spend it with his wife abroad, and on November 1 it ordered “to send, in addition to the commission that is currently working in the USA, vol. Sheinman, Osinsky, Mezhlauk,” proposing that the People’s Commissariat of Trade, the People’s Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank of the USSR “use Comrade Sheinman’s trip to America to work on a number of issues related to the USA.” However, Sheinman was seriously ill, and on November 26 from Berlin he notified I.V. Stalin and the Pre-People's Commissar A.I. Rykov about this. Nevertheless, Sheinman, formally remaining the head of the State Bank, went to New York, where he actually headed the board of Amtorg and began negotiations with American banks about long-term loans and the lifting of the ban on the import of Soviet gold.

“As for National City Bank,” Sheinman notified Rykov on March 1, 1929, “I have the conviction (and not just the impression) that now we could come to an agreement with him. But in view of the instructions received, I am now no longer touching on this issue in the hope that I will be allowed to return to it after my arrival in Moscow.” On March 31, Sheinman arrived in Berlin with the clear intention of returning to the Union. “I didn’t see anyone here,” he wrote to Rykov on April 2, “since upon arrival I immediately fell ill... While still in New York, Wise from London arranged a meeting with me at the end of this week. I believe that the conversation will be about the long-discussed cooperative loan [...]. In my conversation with Wise I will limit myself to questions, and upon my arrival in Moscow I will report his proposals.” “But he never had the chance to return to his homeland, and on April 20, 1929. The Politburo ordered “the immediate publication of the resolution of the SNKom on the release of Sheinman from his duties as chairman of the State Bank.”

According to the version of the then adviser to the Paris embassy, ​​the future defector, G. Z. Besedovsky, Sheinman’s agreement with the American Citibank on a loan caused Stalin’s sharp displeasure. Absorbed in the fight against the “right opposition,” with which Sheinman certainly sympathized. Back in March, the Politburo ordered him to interrupt negotiations, and then completely disavowed him. Rykov was instructed to officially declare to the head of Citibank Shvetman that since the main preliminarya condition for business negotiations is the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA, “responsibility for the misunderstanding that occurred falls entirely on Sheinman, who, without the knowledge of the USSR government, made a statement that exceeded his rights and powers, and that he did this not only in in this case, but also in a number of others, in connection with which he was, by the way, removed from the post of chairman of the State Bank” (10).

At the same time, Sheinman himself, having learned in Berlin about the details of the campaign against the “right” (at the April plenum of the Central Committee, N.I. Bukharin and M.P. Tomsky lost their posts, respectively, editor-in-chief of Pravda and chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions), decided to file resign, stay abroad and go into private life. However, realizing the dangers such a step could entail for his family on the part of the almighty OGPU, Sheinman turned to the prominent German Social Democrat P. Levi (less than a year later he would die after falling from the window of his apartment) with a request to speak his mediator in negotiations with Plenipotentiary Krestinsky.

The decision of a long-term member of the Council of People's Commissars, STO and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR to remain in the West caused a shock in Moscow (especially since his bank account abroad allegedly contained large sums from certain “secret funds”), and on April 24 the Politburo formed a commission “on the Sheinman case” consisting of Deputy Chairman of the People's Commissar Ya. E. Rudzutak, Chairman of the State Bank G. L. Pyatakov, People's Commissar of Trade A. I. Mikoyan and Chairman of the OGPU M. A. Trilis-ser. After a six-day pause, on April 30 the Politburo telegraphed to Krestinsky: “Being busy in connection with [the party conference, we were unable to respond in a timely manner. Sheinman's statement that he does not want to harm the Soviet Power, and the fact that he did not try to harm it during this time, deserves attention. It is possible that he will be retained in service abroad. Leaves the other day special person to talk with him and resolve issues related to the Sheinman case. Provide him with assistance, arrange a meeting with Sheinman." At the same time, the Politburo ordered the OGPU to "immediately establish thorough, but carefully organized surveillance of Sheinman" (11).

Tomsky urgently flew to Berlin, who unsuccessfully tried to convince Sheinman to return to his homeland, promising him forgiveness and the opportunity to work in peace, but he firmly stood his ground, agreeing to fulfill any demands of Moscow, as long as he was left alone. After heated debates, the Politburo, according to G. Z. Besedovsky, allowed Sheinman to stay in Germany, but demanded that he settle in solitude and not meet with anyone except the first secretary of the embassy, ​​I. S. Yakubovich, promising a monthly payment as a “price for silence.” a pension of 1 thousand marks and the right to work in Soviet foreign institutions in the future. These conditions were accepted, and on June 10, the Politburo suggested that Mikoyan “give an appointment to Sheinman within a week,” and the latter, together with Yakubovich, develop a form of refutation in the press of rumors about his employment in one of the Berlin banks. In addition, the Central Control Commission was instructed to “investigate the sources of the spread of various rumors about Sheinman among employees of co-institutions in Germany.”

At the same time, the “weekly period” established for Mikoyan was somewhat extended, and only...November 1, 1932. The Politburo, returning to the fate of the high-ranking defector, decided: “a) Predetermine the possibility of using Sheinman in one of the small posts abroad. b) Instruct comrades Rosengoltz and Krestinsky (respectively, the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade and the Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. - V.G.) to determine the nature of Sheinman's future work .c) Allow Comrade Khinchuk (the new USSR plenipotentiary representative in Germany - V.G.) to invite Sheinman to a reception at the embassy on November 7." Soon he was entrusted with managing the London branch of Intourist, but, as his deputy A. Gorchakov slandered in May 1933, Sheinman was afraid to even board a Soviet ship and was extremely suspicious and hostile towards his colleagues.He, Gorchakov reported, continues to consider himself “a great manand leader”, looking everywhere for “Moscow’s mistakes” and in general his moods are “extremely unhealthy, hostile, anti-Soviet, some of his judgments are downright White Guard.”

However, on August 7, the Politburo decided not to object to the proposal of the USSR trade representative in Great Britain A.V. Ozersky “to give Sheinman more work, as well as an increase in his salary by 10-15 pounds sterling monthly - with the condition that Comrade Rosengoltz should offer Sheinman not conduct anti-Soviet conversations" (12). According to Sheinman's son Yuri (Georg), his father headed the London branch of Intourist until 1939, when it closed due to the outbreak of World War II. “As I understood,” writes Yuri, “he not so much left the Soviet service as the service itself ceased to exist. That same year we accepted British citizenship, and my father sent me and my mother to Australia; he feared Hitler more than Stalin.” Left alone in London, Sheinman “found work in a factory,” but already in 1944. died.

Usually Moscow was in a hurry to declare defectors embezzlers and bribe-takers, and, for example, the adviser to the Parisian embassy, ​​34-year-old G. Z. Besedovsky, the author of the sensationally revealing memoirs “On the Road to Thermidor” (Paris. 1930-1931), was accused of embezzling government money in in the amount of $15,270, for which in January 1930. was sentenced in absentia by the Supreme Court of the USSR to imprisonment for 10 years with confiscation of all property and defeat in all political and civil rights for five years. Anarcho-communist since 1910, left Social Revolutionary since 1917, member of the Ukrainian Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Fighters) since 1919. and, finally, a Bolshevik from August 1920, Besedovsky headed the provincial economic council and the provincial trade union council in Poltava and was a member of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. Transferred to diplomatic work in 1922, he served in Austria, Poland, Japan, and from 1927 in France, but was at odds with Plenipotentiary V. S. Dovgalevsky and Second Advisor J. L. Arens. As a result, on September 28, 1929, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks instructed the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR to “recall Comrade Besedovsky, according to his request, from France and invite him to go to Moscow with all his things on the day he receives the code.” The next day, the Politburo approves the text of a telegram addressed directly to Besedovsky: “There is still no response from you to the Central Committee’s proposal to hand over your affairs and immediately leave for Moscow. Today we received a message that you threatened the embassy with a scandal, which we cannot believe. Your misunderstandings "We'll sort things out with the employees of the embassy in Moscow. You shouldn't wait for Dovgalevsky. Hand over your affairs to Arens and immediately leave for Moscow."

At the same time, the Politburo telegraphed to Berlin: “The Central Committee proposes that Roizenman or Moroz immediately go to Paris to sort out Besedovsky’s misunderstandings with the embassy. The matter in the Paris embassy threatens a big scandal. It is necessary to achieve at all costs Besedovsky’s immediate departure to Moscow for the final resolution of the conflict that has arisen. Besedovsky should not be intimidated and show maximum tact." But the matter takes a turn that is most undesirable for Moscow, because the disobedient actually does not hide his intention to break with the Soviet regime, and on October 2, the Politburo warns B. A. Roizenman, who arrived in Paris: “For political reasons and in order not to completely alienate Besedovsky, we consider conducting a search undesirable without the most extreme necessity" (13).

However, Besedovsky never succumbed to Roizenman’s persuasion and, seeing that he would not stop at using violent measures to send him to the USSR, he fled from the embassy, ​​jumping over the fence of his garden. “An hour and a half later,” he later recalled, “I returned, accompanied by M. Benoit, the director of the judicial police, took my wife and child and left the embassy forever” (14). Since the French government rejected Moscow’s demand to extradite the former adviser as an alleged criminal, already on October 10, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks recognized the need to organize a trial in the Besedovsky case, butOn January 7, 1930, it decided to limit itself to accusing him only of “fraud and embezzlement.” This was done in order to discredit Besedovsky as a possible witness in the trial that was opening in Paris in the case of S. M. Litvinov (the younger brother of the then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR), who was accused of fabricating bills of exchange from the Berlin trade mission.

In a letter dated November 8, 1929, Mikoyan alarmed the Politburo: “A particularly dangerous signal is the increasing frequency of betrayals and betrayals in recent times..], and not only among communists who have clung to them, but also among those who were previously considered good communists in our country. On the issue of betrayal and treason, a year ago, the People's Commissariat of Trade presented a special report and drew the attention of the Central Committee to this circumstance. Now this issue is more acute, because the examples of Sheinman and Besedovsky are contagious for wavering or completely collapsed communists abroad. For the last one "In the year (from October 1, 1928 to October 1, 1929), 44 people from the foreign apparatus betrayed us - a huge figure. Of these, seven were party members."

The eighth was the popular journalist, party member since 1917, V. A. Selsky (Pansky), who in 1921-1924. worked as a correspondent for Izvestia in Berlin, and then was invited by L. B. Krasin to Paris for the post of second secretary of the USSR embassy. Selsky later edited a daily Polish newspaper in Minsk, and then was a member of the boards of the Association of Proletarian Writers and Revolutionary Cinematographers in Moscow. He was known as the author of the novel “Wheels” (M.-L. 1928), the story “Glass of Water” (M. 1928) and a number of collections of stories and essays, in particular “Modern France” (Minsk. 1926), “Ping- Pong” (M. 1929) and “Sounding Cinema” (M. 1929). “I belonged to that small party and literary elite in Moscow,” Solsky admitted, “ financial situation which any Western European bourgeois can envy!” And yet, in November 1929, while undergoing treatment in Germany, Solsky decided to “leave the Communist Party, as well as all Soviet organizations,” which he did not hesitate to inform the Berlin embassy about” (15).

The sensational flight of Besedovsky forced the Politburo to instruct the People's Justice of the RSFSR N.M. Yanson on November 19 to “submit for approval by the Central Committee a draft law on traitors from among our civil servants abroad who refused to return to the USSR and report to the Soviet government.” Just two days later, the Politburo approved the “draft law on defectors with amendments by Comrade Stalin” and ordered “to publish it on behalf of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR with the signatures of Comrade Stalin.” Kalinin and Enukidze.” Formalized as a resolution of the Central Election Commission on November 21, the latter read: “1. Refusal of a USSR citizen-official government agency or an enterprise of the USSR operating abroad, the proposal of government authorities to return to the USSR is considered as a defection to the camp of the enemies of the working class and peasantry and qualified as treason. 2. Persons who refuse to return to the USSR are declared outlaws. 3. Declaration of outlawry entails: a) confiscation of all property of the convicted person; b) execution of the convicted person 24 hours after identification. 4. All such cases are considered by the Supreme Court of the USSR.”

In addition to determining punitive sanctions against defectors, on December 15, 1929. the party Areopagus adopted a resolution “On the reorganization of the foreign trade apparatus in Europe,” which provided for a reduction in its number by at least 50% (at the end of November, 2,290 Soviet employees worked in Great Britain, Germany, the USA and France, including 301 communists and 449 members of foreign communist parties) , and formed a “commission consisting of vol. Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Litvinov, Ordzhonikidze and Messing to study the reasons causing the disintegration of our workers abroad and refusal to return to the USSR.”

In the draft prepared by the Politburo on January 5The commission’s resolution stated that “the main and most important reason for the betrayal of a significant part of the employees of Soviet institutions abroad is their political instability, disbelief and, sometimes, hostility to the policy of attacking capitalist elements and the hostility often born in connection with this towards the successes of socialist construction in our country, as well as easy susceptibility to bourgeois ideological influence and material temptations of the environment.” Based on this, the Politburo demanded to ensure a careful selection of employees of foreign institutions in terms of their “political stability and devotion to the party and Soviet power” and to maximize “ideological Bolshevik work,” and on January 3, the Presidium of the Central Control Commission decided to carry out “inspection and purge of foreign cells of the CPSU ( b) in Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, London, Paris and Italy” (16).

However, less than three months after the trial in the Besedovsky case, as an adviser to the USSR embassy in Sweden, 37-year-old S. V. Dmitrievsky openly announced his decision to remain in the West. The son of a gymnasium teacher, Dmitrievsky graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University and before the revolution served as assistant secretary of the Central Military-Industrial Committee and deputy head of the statistical reference bureau of the Council of Congresses of Industry and Trade. Having joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party back in 1911, after the overthrow of the monarchy, he was elected to the Petrograd Soviet and was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper “Narodnoye Slovo”, the organ of the Labor People’s Socialist Party (“Enesov”). “I was a populist, a defencist and a nationalist,” recalled Dmitrievsky. “I actively, more actively than many, opposed the Bolsheviks.” Arrested after the October Revolution, Dmitrievsky was escorted to Smolny, and after his release he went to the South, where he stayed until the fall of Rostov and Novocherkassk, publishing anti-Bolshevik articles in local newspapers under the pseudonym “D. Sergievsky,” and then, having made his way to Moscow, participated in the underground “Union for the Revival of Russia.” But in August 1918, he broke with his former comrades in the struggle, explaining this decision solely by his patriotism: “I left those ranks after the Czechoslovak uprising took place, when foreign bayonets sparkled on the country’s borders, foreign gold rang, and “faces familiar from the old regime appeared behind the screen of the “institution” and in the villages occupied by the “whites” they began to flog the peasants into submission.”

Having entered the Soviet service, Dmitrievsky worked as an assistant editor of the “Library of Scientific Socialism”, head of the department of universities and the section of people's universities in Petrograd; in October 1919 he became a member of the RCP (b). In 1920-1921 he served as commissioner of the Higher Aerial Photogrammetric School and assistant chief of the Republic Air Fleet, chief Administrative department and managers of the People's Commissariat of Railways of the RSFSR. Having left for Europe in February 1922 as an authorized board of the NKPS at the Russian Railway Mission, Dmitrievsky was soon appointed manager and secretary of the Berlin trade mission, and later was secretary of the embassy in Germany and Greece, from November 1924 - manager of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and, finally, from June 1927 - adviser to the embassy in Stockholm, where he worked until April 2, 1930. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks did not propose to the NKID “to report the dismissal of Dmitrievsky and publish tomorrow […] a note in the newspaper chronicle about his dismissal” (17).

In the statement “How and why I broke with the Bolsheviks,” published on April 15 by the Parisian Latest News, Dmitrievsky wrote: “I learned about my recall from the newspapers. The reasons, of course, are well known to me. The purely formal reason is the provocation of unscrupulous individuals who took advantage of my private conversation with them about the desire to leave the diplomatic and civil service and remain in scientific work abroad.

[...]Until my last day, I honestly served the Soviet state. Doubts, hesitations - there were many of them - were my internal matter. I never took them outside the circle of my closest friends. None of those who know me here can cite a single example where I did not defend the interests of my state. Now, as I leave, I consider it necessary to say: no one will hear from me sensational revelations of state secrets.” (In 1930-1932, Dmitrievsky published three books - “The Fate of Russia: Letters to Friends”, “Stalin” and “Soviet Portraits” (Stockholm, Berlin).

Following Dmitrievsky, the USSR naval attache in Sweden, 40-year-old Muscovite A. A. Sobolev, also refused to go home, saying that although he perfectly understands that he will be sentenced to death, he asks not to be considered a Soviet citizen anymore. “That official information,” Sobolev echoed Dmitrievsky, “that was entrusted to me, belongs to my homeland, Russia, and for her sake I will keep it as sacred as before, until the day of my death. I will not enter into any controversy; only threats and slander can force me to say anything. If my wife or I are destined to become victims, then public opinion it will be known whose victims we were” (18).

Former senior gunner of the battleship “Emperor Pavel” I “, lieutenant of the fleet, Sobolev during the civil war headed the operational department of the headquarters of the Volga-Caspian Flotilla and the Naval Forces of the Black and Azov Seas, served as commander and was chief of staff of the Naval Forces of the Caspian Sea and the Red Fleet of Azerbaijan, and subsequently held the position of scientific secretary of the Operational Directorate of the Headquarters Red Army, from January 1925 he served as the naval attaché of the USSR in Turkey and from March 1928 in Sweden. According to his colleagues, Sobolev “behaved impeccably both in his service and in his way of life,” but his secretary (later recognized as mentally ill!) suspected the attaché of treason, spread false rumors about him and thus, apparently, accelerated his break with the Soviet regime. Although suspicions were expressed in the press (which, however, did not escape any of the defectors) that the entire incident with Sobolev was inspired by the Bolsheviks themselves and that he was a “Soviet spy,” nevertheless, as A. M. Kollontai testified, a certain “Sh " urgently rushing with a special mission from Helsingfors, he developed plans “to kidnap Sobolev,” promising to deliver him to the USSR “dead or alive.” But, fearing an international scandal, Moscow limited itself to a demand for the extradition of the former attaché as a military deserter, which, naturally, was rejected by the Swedish Foreign Ministry.

Then, September 25, 1930, Military Collegium Supreme Court The USSR, chaired by V.V. Ulrich, found Sobolev guilty not only of “treason and defection to the camp of the enemies of the working class and peasantry,” but also of embezzling state funds in the amount of 1,191 American dollars. Having examined on October 13, 1930. question “About the case of S.”, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks proposed to the Stockholm embassy “to begin the process in court and seize S[obolev’s] money in the bank in the amount established by the verdict of the Supreme Court,” instructing the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR to “submit everything to the NKID documentary data, including reports from S[obolev himself], establishing the fact of embezzlement mentioned in the verdict.” Having satisfied the request of the embassy, ​​the Swedish authorities sequestered the attaché’s monetary deposit in one of the banks in Stockholm, and on March 31, 1931, a satisfied A.M. Kollontai wrote in her diary: “The Sobolev case ended in court in our favor[...]. The main good thing is that all this did not cause any fuss in the press. Sobolev is going to leave for Belgium. I didn’t perform anywhere, I didn’t write anything” (19).

Back on April 23, 1930, the Politburo adopted a resolution “On the state of party organizations and Soviet apparatuses in Western Europe”, which states their significant contamination with “alien and treacherous elements”, which “was particularly pronounced in the refusalreturn to the Union by a number of responsible non-party workers during reorganization in foreign institutions,” as well as “the presence of significant elements of decay and everyday decay among party members and even individual facts of direct betrayal on the part of some communists.” In this regard, the foreign inspection of the NK RKI USSR was asked to “carry out a secret check of the entire non-party staff of trade missions and organizations controlled by them and remove from the apparatus all dubious and unreliable persons,” as well as all communists who “did not live up to the trust of the party in their work abroad, the basis of the conclusions and decisions of the inspection commission.”

However, the purge of foreign institutions only increased the number of defectors many times over, and already at the beginning of June 1930, their ranks were joined by one of the leaders of the Soviet bank in Paris, 42-year-old N.P. Kryukov-Angarsky, a former Socialist Revolutionary, who in 1908-1916. was in hard labor, then was exiled to a settlement on the Angara River and after the October Revolution joined the RCP(b). During the Civil War, he held the positions of military commissar of the division and headquarters of the Southern Front, infantry inspector of the headquarters of the Caspian-Caucasian Front and the 11th Army, head of the command staff department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, and later, having graduated from the Military Academy of the Red Army, where he was elected secretary of the party control commission, and was demobilized due to illness, served as manager of Severoles and Vneshtorgbank, from January 1929 - general secretary board of the Parisian Eirobank. Since the protocol of the “verification commission of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the cleansing of the trade mission and the plenipotentiary mission in Paris” dated March 27, 1930, noted that Kryukov-Angarsky “is passive in party life, politically underdeveloped, does not work on himself,” and material was received, as if before the revolution he “participated in a criminal robbery and betrayed the Socialist Revolutionaries during interrogation,” a decision was made to remove him from foreign work, followed by party cleaning in the Central Control Commission (20).

Having received an order on May 21 to leave for the USSR within two weeks, Kryukov-Angarsky said, “for the sake of appearances, I agreed and began submitting all my affairs and reports, since I knew that I would not go to Moscow anyway. It was necessary to provide care so that I could not later be accused of embezzlement.” On the day of his intended departure, Kryukov-Angarsky’s nerves gave way, and he called Besedovsky from the street, who, with several comrades, drove up to the bank. “It was decided that […] they would remain at the door and be ready: at the slightest alarm they would take the necessary measures.” Only after handing over the keys to the safes and leaving the building, Kryukov-Angarsky sighed calmly, and on June 5, Parisian newspapers published his “Declaration,” in which he, in particular, stated: “Over the past years, I have repeatedly wondered whether I was doing the right thing, remaining in the ranks of the CPSU? All around I saw bureaucracy and oppression of the working masses instead of the freedom they were promised, and evidence from the future did not convince me. At first I thought that the evil was in people, in the criminal leaders of the party, but then I came to the conclusion that it was in the system and that the system of suppressing the working masses could not help but produce the terrible results to which the current dictatorship has led the country [...]. In the face of my conscience, I made a firm decision to leave the CPSU and fight as best I could for my political ideals hand in hand with all those who seek to democratize the Soviet system.” In the appeal “To the Workers and Peasants”, published in the magazine “Struggle” published by Besedovsky in Paris ( N 4 of June 20, 1930), Kryukov-Angarsky called for the “political and economic emancipation” of the USSR and, branding the Stalinist regime as a “gravedigger of revolutionary conquests,” which only oppresses the working people, ruins the countryside and imposes bureaucracy everywhere, indignantly asked: “Where is at least signs of freedom of thought, press or primitive respect for human dignity? This is nothing not only for the workers and peasants, whose government the dictators dare to call themselves, it is also absent for the members of the government party, whicha bunch of rapists have long been turned into a soulless apparatus, kept from final disintegration by the most vile methods of espionage and provocation of the GPU.”

“Fight” (22 issues of the magazine were published from April 15, 1930 to March 1, 1932) published declarations of other political defectors, in particular, documents of the executive committee of the “Will of the People” party, a Belgian group of former members of the CPSU (b), headed by a certain A I. Boldyrev, who introduced himself as a former secretary of the Smolensk Provincial Committee, and E. V. Dumbadze, the author of the book “In the Service of the Cheka and the Comintern; Personal Memoirs,” published with an introductory article by V. L. Burtsev and a foreword by G. A. Solomon in 1930 in Paris.

Among the opponents of the Stalinist regime, whose statements, articles or chapters from books were published on the pages of Besedovsky’s magazine, it is worth mentioning the former security officer G.S. Agabekov, military pilot J. Voitek, S.V. Dmitrievsky, F.P. Drugov (formerly - an anarchist, member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and the board of the Cheka, who claimed that he fled from the USSR “under machine-gun fire from Soviet border guards”), famous pre-revolutionary and Soviet writer A. P. Kamensky (like Drugov, having returned to the USSR, he was repressed), responsible employees of foreign trade institutions V.V. Delgas, R.B. Dovgalevsky, S.M. Zheleznyak, M.V. Naumov, I.P. Samoilov, G.A. Solomon and K.A. Sosenko, “Kraskom” V.K. Svechnikov (who escaped from the Solovetsky camp) and others, as well as some emigrant authors, in particular V.P. Boggovut-Kolomiytsev, N.I. Makhno, S.M. Rafalsky and V. N. Speransky.

Besedovsky’s example turned out to be so “infectious” that, despite the threat of the death penalty, the flow of defectors increased, and, for example, on June 7, 1930. The party troika of the Party Collegium of the Central Control Commission confirmed the resolution of the cell bureau on the expulsion from the ranks of the CPSU (b) for refusing to return to the USSR “the secretary of the [party] collective in Persia” (!) 29-year-old G. N. Apannikov, a former worker-shoemaker, graduate of the Institute oriental studies, who joined the party in 1921 and from 1924. who was working abroad.

At the same time, the former trade representative of the USSR in Finland, 49-year-old S.E. Erzinkyan, whom the emigrant press called “Mikoyan’s intimate friend,” also refused to return to Moscow. Coming from a fairly wealthy family (his father served as a priest in Tiflis), Erzinkyan lived in France and Switzerland from 1901, where he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva and received a position as a privat-docent. Although Erzinkyan was a member of student Bolshevik organizations abroad, he officially joined the party only in May 1918. in Tiflis. Erzinkyan worked as secretary of the editorial and publishing commission of the underground Caucasian regional committee of the RCP (b), pre-executive committee and secretary of the Lori provincial committee of the party, editor of the newspaper “Voice of the Lori Peasants”, and then headed “Kavrosta” and “Tsentropechat” in Baku, was editor of the newspaper “Karmir Asth” ” (“Red Star”) and plenipotentiary representative of the Armenian SSR in Tiflis. In 1925-1927 Erzinkyan headed the Armenian edition of the Baku official “Communist”, but, having received a party reprimand for publishing an article “based on unverified rumors,” he was appointed trade representative of the USSR in Helsingfors.

However, at the beginning of February 1930. Chairman of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G.K. Ordzhonikidze is delivered an illiterately written anonymous letter stating that Erzinkyan is “selling the party for the sake of a dubious Finnish woman. He stays with her all the time, spends the night there, and arrives in the morning in her own car. Onag visits his office.” Since the denunciation ended with a warning: “Sleep through the second Besedovsky!”, Ordzhonikidze imposes a resolution: “Comrade Mikoyan was told today to send a telegram to Yerz[inkyan] about his immediate departure to Moscow.” Although he obediently arrived and on March 29, by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, was relieved of his duties as a trade representative, already on April 11, the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided that “nothere are grounds to bring charges against Comrade Erzinkyan that are compromising him and that he can work on behalf of the party at any job both in the USSR and abroad,” and on April 29, the party troika of the party board of the Central Control Commission issued a final verdict: “Consider verified.”

But, having returned to Finland “to settle personal affairs” and receiving there on June 8 a new encrypted telegram with an order to immediately leave for Moscow, Erzinkyan switched to the position of a defector, and therefore on August 10, by decision of the Party Collegium of the Central Control Commission, he was expelled from the party “as a traitor to the cause of the working class " A charge is also brought against him of issuing a false bill of exchange in the amount of over 5 million Finnish marks, and at the request of Plenipotentiary Representative I.M. Maisky, the former trade representative ends up behind bars in the Helsingfors prison.

But if the majority of employees of foreign trade institutions did not pose a particular danger to the Kremlin rulers, then the escape of the former head of the Eastern Sector of the INO OGPU and an active illegal resident in Turkey and the Middle East, a party member since 1918, 35 years old, truly had the effect of a bomb exploding for Moscow. G. S. Agabekova. Arriving in France on June 26, 1930, four days later he announced his break with the regime “creating unbearable life to the huge 150 million people of the USSR and ruling by force of bayonets” due to the lack of consciousness of the army and the disorganization of workers and peasants. “I have hundreds of honest communist friends, employees of the GPU,” Agabekov emphasized in a statement published on July 1 in Latest News, “who think the same way as me, but, fearing revenge abroad of the USSR, do not risk doing what I do. I am the first of them, and let me serve as an example to all my other honest comrades, whose thoughts have not yet been completely eaten away by the official demagoguery of the current Central Committee. I call you to fight for genuine, real, real freedom.” After the release of Agabekov’s sensational book “GPU. Notes of a Chekist” (Berlin, 1930) a formal hunt began for the “traitor”, which was crowned with success only in 1937.

The next “ideological” defector was the former deputy chairman of the board of Amtorg, 38-year-old V.V. Delgas, a talented engineer who, during the Civil War, was specially authorized by the Defense Council for fuel, and then served in the Supreme Economic Council, where he was close to F.E. Dzerzhinsky. Since 1924, Delgas worked in London as the manager of the representative office of the Oil Syndicate, from 1926 as its representative in New York and later headed the technical bureau of the Khim-Stroy company there, was a representative of Vsekhimprom and the NKPS of the USSR, and director of the export department. Amtorg." Announcing July 23, 1930 to its head P.A. Bogdanov about his refusal to work in Soviet institutions, Delgas, explaining the motives for this decision, wrote bitterly about the USSR: “Instead of emancipation of free creativity and thought suppressed by war communism, there is a new enslavement. Instead of establishing normal relations with the rest of the world and strengthening the economic capabilities of the country, its accumulated wealth is wasted on the crazy ideas of communism around the world. Not emancipation, but slavery in the name of the crazy ideas of pathological cowards - the Stalinist clique!”

Fearing for his life, Delgas left for a neighboring state, but soon a representative of Amtorg came to him, who offered a deal - a return to Soviet service in exchange for permission to live in America. Since Delgas, as he indicated in his “Declaration,” “categorically refused to meet with Bogdanov and generally conduct any further negotiations on this topic,” on September 5, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided “to consider it necessary to pronounce a court verdict in the case of D. immediately” and instructed “the commission consisting of comrade. Khloplyankin, Khinchuk, Yanson, Stomonyakov to submit proposals on the form of carrying out this decision.” Having examined the question “About case D” for the second time. On September 10, the Politburo ordered the commission to “preliminarily edit the indictment and the draft sentence” (!) and recognized the need to “publish the verdict immediately after its delivery, but no later than September 13.”

In accordance with this, the criminal-judicial panel of the Supreme Court of the USSR, chaired by N. N. Ovsyannikov, found Delgas “guilty of treason against the USSR and defecting to the camp of the enemies of the working class and peasantry.” But it was the publication of the verdict, which Delgas learned about from the newspapers, that made him decide to “openly oppose the Stalinist regime,” and he testified before a congressional commission, declaring that secret Soviet agents not only directed communist propaganda in America, but also engaged in espionage (21).

And on October 2, the criminal-judicial panel of the Supreme Court of the USSR, chaired by V.P. Antonov-Saratovsky, declared “outlaw” another defector - a senior engineer at the Berlin trade mission, 45-year-old A.D. Naglovsky. The son of a general close to the royal court, who played with the children of the grand dukes, Naglovsky joined the RSDLP back in 1902 and, arrested and brought to trial in Odessa for propaganda in the army, was exiled to the Kazan province. In 1905, he traveled to Geneva, where he met with Lenin, who sent him to St. Petersburg as a responsible propagandist for the Narva region. Elected to the St. Petersburg Council, Naglovsky joined the Mensheviks and, later graduating from the Institute of Railway Engineers, served on Northwestern railways.

Returning to 1917 into the ranks of the RSDLP (b), he held high positions as the Petrograd commissar of railways and a member of the board of the NKPS of the RSFSR, being a special representative of the Defense Council on the railways of the Northern Front and the Petrograd junction and the head of military communications of the 7th Army. In a letter to Lenin dated April 23, 1920, Deputy People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR P.I. Stuchka characterized Naglovsky as “a persistent, modest, honest, worthy member of the party and a serious, capable, energetic, sober, in a word, an outstanding Soviet worker.” After the Civil War, Naglovsky served as a trade representative in Rome and manager of the railway mission of the RSFSR in Berlin, director and member of the board of the Norwegian-Russian Shipping Society in Bergen and London, and from 1924. - in the Berlin trade mission, but dropped out of the ranks of the RCP (b).

“Due to the fact,” the Supreme Court verdict said, “that Naglovsky became close to the White Guard emigration and the speculator environment, he was asked to return to the USSR.” Naglovsky refused, because, as trade representative Begge assured, he allegedly became “a drug addict and completely lost his willpower, doing everything that the enemy camp dictated to him.” In Paris, Naglovsky lived in the same house as B.I. Nikolaevsky and other Mensheviks. “He was already getting old,” recalled R.B. Gul, “very thin, frail, and in poor health. When I first met him, he seemed to me like a complete man in the sense of vital energy. I think complete disappointment “in the matter of life” (revolution), ... declaring him “outlaw” by the Bolsheviks, all together somehow broke his energy. He didn’t work anywhere, didn’t do anything.” Naglovsky died during the Second World War, but his memoirs about Vorovsky, Zinoviev, Krasin, Lenin and Trotsky, recorded by Gul back in 1936, were published in “New Journal” (22).

“Non-return,” the emigrant press gloated, “is taking on the character of an epidemic. Hardly a day goes by without the ranks of the “third emigration” being swelled with new arrivals. Not only those suspected of “deviations” and “decay” are fleeing, but also... one hundred percent communists!” Referring to the political gap of an ever-increasing part of the communists “with the ideas of social utopianism and terrorist dictatorship.” Dan noted that the “return” of Russian emigrants to NEP Russia “dissipated like smoke,” and, conversely, non-return became a real “sign of the times,” when hundreds of thousands of residents of the USSR, these peculiar “Smenovekhites inside out,” would gladly and immediately rush to now abroad, “if they had at least some physical, material and police opportunity!”

Meanwhile, the “cruel reduction and even more brutal purge” of Soviet foreign institutions, the number of employees of which, according toOrdzhonikidze’s statement, already by XVI Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) decreased by almost half (by 41.6%), actually leading to the disorganization of the foreign trade apparatus. Moreover, the decision to send abroad only “absolutely persistent, proven, seasoned workers” - communists, who, in the opinion of the Central Control Commission, were the only ones who could resist the pernicious “influence of bourgeois temptations”, was the reason why, for example, in the Paris trade mission only two owners remained French leading employees, and the majority of employees, as acting trade representative B.A. Breslav complained to his superiors, were incapable newcomers who did not have any “commercial and trading experience.”

Although, thanks to the “draconian” measures taken by Moscow, the flow of defectors gradually decreased, in 1931 their ranks were joined by the following communists (the years of their entry into the party and assignments to work abroad are indicated in brackets): statistician of the Sovtortflot in Latvia A.K. Astapov ( 1921, 1928), security courier of the Vienna embassy P. I. Eliseev (1925, 1926), head of the Bread Department of the Hamburg branch of the trade mission R. B. Dovgalevsky (1917, 1928), director of the financial department of the Paris trade mission S. M. Zheleznyak (1919, 1928), head of the transport department of Amtorg S. L. Kosov (1917, 1927), representative of Dalugol in China V. V. Puchenko (1917, 1930); head of the metals department of the Berlin trade mission E. L. Raik (1917, 1928), former receiver of cars of the Paris trade mission I. M. Raskin-Mstislavsky (1903, 1926), etc.

For example, on November 6, 1931, the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks expelled from the party “as a traitor to Soviet power and refusing to return to the USSR” J. M. Duret, who had been a member of the Polish Socialist Party since 1914, joined the ranks in 1916 Bolsheviks and until 1919 was at underground work in Poland, and then until 1923 he was the “leader of the French Komsomol” and at the 4th Congress of the Comintern he was elected as a candidate member of its Executive Committee. Since 1924 Duret lived in the USSR and taught at a college, but in 1928. returned to France, and in March 1930. The Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided: “Due to the fact that Comrade Duret is completely cut off from the cell, does not work anywhere, and refused to work at TASS because of the small fee, it is considered necessary to send him to the USSR to undergo purge.” Duret categorically refused to return to Moscow, in which, apparently, he was supported by his wife Ivet, who had been a member of the PCF since 1921, and of the CPSU (b) since 1925, and was also expelled from the party “as a traitor to Soviet power” (24 ).

According to incomplete data from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade of the USSR, in 1932. 11 defectors were registered, including 3 communists, and in 1933 - 5, including 3 communists. So, in 1932 switched to the position of defectors: chief accountant of “Fransovfrekht” G.N. Bolonkin (1926, 1931), head of the Belgian branch of the USSR trade mission in France and former manager of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade of the USSR A.I. Lekikh (1903, 1927?), representative of the “Agricultural Union” in Berlin N. S. Shakhnovsky (1919, 1929), accountant of the Berlin trade mission O. V. Stark (1920, 1928), head of the Soviet boarding house in Germany G. A. Shletser (Schlesser) (1906, 1928). In 1933, the head of the accounting and statistical department of the London trade mission, I. I. Litvinov (1916, 1931), and his wife, an employee of the fur department, R. A. Rabinovich (1920, 1931), deputy director of the Berlin Manganexport, former chairman, became defectors State Planning Committee and Deputy Chairman of the People's Commissar of Georgia K. D. Kakabadze (1917, 1931). 22. GUL R. B. I took away Russia. T. 2. Russia in France. NY. 1984, p. 233; Izvestia, 5.X.1930.

23. Last news, 3. VII .1930; Socialist Bulletin, 26. VII .1930, N 14 (228), p. 10; RGA SPI, f. 71, op. 37, d. 147, l. 560, 605; f. 17, op. 120, d. 42, l. 5.

24. RGA SPI, f. 613, op. 2, d. 62, l. 181-182

Questions of history. – 2000. – No. 1. – P. 46-63.

Genis Vladimir Leonidovich– publicist.

On June 30, 1974, Soviet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov accepted the offer of the famous ballet critic Clive Barnes and decided not to return from a foreign tour to the USSR. Immediately after the last performance in Toronto, he asked to say goodbye to his friends who were waiting for him on the street, and, getting into their car, drove away.

The term "defector", which existed only in the USSR, means a person who refused to return back from a trip abroad and remained to live in one of the Western countries. The Soviet government faced the problem of defectors at the beginning of its existence. Life remembered the most prominent people who became defectors for one reason or another.

Right after October revolution The Soviet government made it much more difficult for citizens to travel abroad. Formally, it was open until the mid-20s, but to do this you had to get a foreign passport, and in order to be issued, you had to get a certificate from the GPU stating that it does not object to leaving. In addition, a reason was required - in most cases it was a reunion with relatives. Most often, representatives of national minorities, in particular Russian Germans, who were allowed to leave the country almost unhindered, could take advantage of this.

In addition, for some time in the Criminal Code there was such a measure as deportation abroad as a punishment. However, in the conditions of total devastation after military communism and the civil war, this punishment was more like a reward, and therefore was almost never used (one can only recall the “philosophical ship” on which a group of scientists disloyal to the new government were exiled).

At the end of the 20s, with the collapse of the NEP, leaving the country was actually closed. Permission to travel abroad not related to a work trip was issued only in exceptional cases. In 1935, the death penalty was introduced for escaping abroad, since attempting to escape from the country was equated with treason. The law also provided for the confiscation of all the fugitive's property and exile to Siberia for five years for all his relatives. With this measure, the authorities hoped to intimidate Soviet employees, who often refused to return from abroad, where they were on work. Moreover, among the fugitives there were many party members, including those with pre-revolutionary experience. Despite Taken measures, the flow of defectors did not dry up.

Alexander Alekhine

A great chess player who became one of the first Soviet defectors. Alekhine came from a noble family, his father was a deputy of the last imperial State Duma. Alekhine was fond of chess from childhood. When he was 10 years old, the famous American chess player Harry Pillsbury came to St. Petersburg and gave a session of simultaneous play on several boards. Ten-year-old Alekhine then played a draw with him. By the age of 18, Alekhine had already taken high places in major international tournaments. At the St. Petersburg International Masters Tournament in 1914, which brought together all the best chess players in the world, Alekhine took third place, losing only to chess legends Lasker and Capablanca.

Alekhine was not fit for combat service due to health reasons, but in 1916 he went to the front as part of a Red Cross detachment that provided assistance to the wounded. Alekhine had the opportunity to carry the wounded from the battlefield, he was shell-shocked twice and had awards. After the revolution, the chess player was left without money and without the opportunity to play, and the punishing sword of the proletariat hung over his head. Alekhine almost died in Odessa after its capture by the Bolsheviks. As a bourgeois and a nobleman, he was arrested, sat in the basement of the Cheka, and they were about to shoot him, but one of the high-ranking Bolsheviks found out about the misadventures of the chess player (different sources mention: Manuilsky, Rakovsky or Trotsky), and the chess player was released.

Alekhine finally decided to leave. This was achieved by marrying a Swiss citizen. After this, Alekhine was given permission to leave. However, the permission did not talk about leaving forever; Alekhine asked permission to leave to visit his wife’s relatives, as well as to participate in chess tournaments in Europe. And at first, Alekhine was considered a Soviet chess player in the USSR, and Soviet newspapers reported about his victories.

In 1927, Alekhine became a worldwide celebrity by defeating the indestructible Cuban Capablanca in the match for the world title. Moreover, the latter gave up in advance, not showing up for the last game. The Russian emigration honored Alekhine, materials appeared in the press about the ideological closeness of the chess king with the anti-Soviet emigration. After this, in the USSR they began to view him as a convinced counter-revolutionary. The head of the USSR chess organization, Nikolai Krylenko (also deputy people's commissar of justice of the RSFSR), made a statement calling for Alekhine to be viewed as an enemy of the state of workers and peasants.

In the mid-30s, Alekhine lost the championship match to Euwe, but soon took revenge and again became the world champion. However, his further career was interrupted by the outbreak of war. One can only guess what heights the chess player could have achieved if his best years had not been marked by two world wars and one civil war. Alekhine to this day remains one of two undefeated world champions (the second, Fischer, was stripped of the title due to refusal of a rematch), since he died in 1946, before he could fight the new contender for the chess crown. According to the calculations of the chessbase.com portal, Alekhine is the absolute leader in the percentage of total registered victories among all world champions.

Alice Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand)

When Soviet officials gave an unknown 20-year-old girl permission to leave in 1926, they could hardly have imagined that she would become one of the most significant authors in American literature of the twentieth century and a cult figure in the United States and a number of other countries.

Shortly before the revolution, Alice Rosenbaum's father became the owner of a pharmacy in Petrograd, but in 1918 it was nationalized, which, of course, had a great influence on the future views of the writer.

She entered film school, hoping to later find a way out and move to the United States to work in the film industry there. Soon a loophole was found - one of the few legal ways to leave the country was to go to study. True, students were released only if they were sent by the highest decree from above or if they had relatives there who could support them. Luckily for Alice, her aunt lived in the USA, who emigrated before the revolution, and she agreed to shelter her niece. The girl applied for permission to go to America to study for several months, so that she could then make films in the USSR exposing the class enemy and promoting new gains for the proletariat. Permission was received, and the girl left, not planning to return back and leaving all her relatives in the USSR. Until recently, Alice’s relatives did not believe that she would be released.

In the USA she changed her name to Ayn ​​Rand, but did not achieve much success in Hollywood. An attempt to write a novel about the horrors of a totalitarian system using the example of the USSR (“We are the Living”) also did not bring success. And only the subsequent “The Source” and “Atlas Shrugged” turned her into one of the main writers of the century. These books - a passionate hymn to freedom, individuality and rational selfishness - reflected the philosophy Rand created, called "objectivism." This philosophy had a huge influence on the libertarian movement, although Rand herself always distanced herself from it. Rand's books are still published in millions of copies around the world; According to opinion polls, approximately every tenth American adult has read her main novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Almost all of Rand's relatives who remained in the USSR died: her father and mother died in besieged Leningrad, and her lover was shot in 1937. Only one of her sisters survived, who later moved to America with her, but then returned to the USSR.

Fyodor Chaliapin

The son of a Vyatka peasant became famous for his powerful voice back in pre-revolutionary times and became an opera star not only of Russian, but also of world fame, performing at the most famous stages in the world. After the revolution, Chaliapin, who had previously sympathized with the socialists, was appointed artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater, and was also one of the first to be awarded the title of People's Artist. However, Chaliapin, accustomed to luxury and universal respect, could not come to terms with a half-starved existence and constant searches carried out by revolutionary soldiers, sailors or security officers.

In 1921, with the help of Lunacharsky, he obtained permission to tour abroad - with the condition that he would give half of his foreign currency fees to the state.

After the first tour, he returned, so no one suspected him of intending to leave the country. Chaliapin even managed to get permission to go on tour with his family. He never returned to Russia. However, partly through no fault of my own.

After one of the concerts, he donated part of the fee to the children of Russian emigrants. This became known in the Kremlin, and Chaliapin was declared a counter-revolutionary, financing White Guard organizations, and was deprived of the title of People's Artist. After this, returning was not only pointless, but also dangerous.

In exile, Chaliapin toured around the world and acted in films until his death. However, the heyday of his work is considered to be the pre-revolutionary period.

Alexander Barmin (Graff)

He comes from a family of Russian Germans. Soon after the revolution he joined the Bolsheviks and served in the Red Army. Thanks to the education and knowledge acquired before the revolution foreign languages was transferred to diplomatic work. Served as consul in Iran, Afghanistan, Greece and France.

In 1937, purges began in the diplomatic apparatus, which frightened Barmin. He decided to run away. Taking leave, he managed to get to France, where he applied for political asylum. At first, Barmin took socialist positions close to Trotskyism, and argued that he remained a devoted supporter of the Leninist idea, perverted by Stalin. However, as repression in the USSR expanded, his revolutionary enthusiasm faded, and he came to America already a convinced democrat.

After moving to the United States, he took part in World War II as a private in the American Army. He wrote several books about Stalin's repressions. After the war, he was the head of the Soviet branch of the Voice of America.

Barmin married the granddaughter of American President Theodore Roosevelt. Their daughter is the famous American journalist Margot Roosevelt.

Georgy Gamov

Born into a noble family. On the paternal side, almost all ancestors were military men (the father was a teacher), and on the maternal side, they were priests. Gamov's grandfather was a colonel and served as commandant of the city of Chisinau. Since childhood, he was interested in exact sciences and already in the 20s he received an education at Petrograd University. The talented student was invited to graduate school, where he quickly stood out and received the right to an internship in Germany.

At the end of the 20s, he traveled to Europe several times, where he collaborated with the best physicists of that time. At the age of 28, he was already a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences - the youngest in its history. Gamow always returned from trips abroad and did not plan to leave the country, but in the early 30s significant changes began to occur in the USSR: the NEP was curtailed, the standard of living decreased, collectivization began, suspicion increased, borders began to close. In 1931, Gamow, who already had the status of a European star, was not allowed to attend the International Congress of Nuclear Physics, where he was supposed to give a presentation.

It took Gamow enormous efforts to obtain permission to travel to Brussels for the Solvay Congress. To do this, he had to turn first to Bukharin, and then to Molotov, and only then was he allowed to go on a business trip with his wife.

He refused to return from this business trip, for which he was deprived of the title of academician of the USSR. In exile, he worked as a teacher at the University of Washington, studied the evolution of stars, clarified the Big Bang theory, was the first to propose the genetic coding hypothesis, and popularized science. In exile, Gamow became one of the most famous theoretical physicists of the twentieth century.

Vladimir Ipatiev

Coming from a noble family and one of the most prominent chemists of the Russian Empire. During the First World War, he created the chemical industry in the country practically from scratch. as soon as possible. Lieutenant General of the Imperial Army. After the revolution, most of the general’s relatives emigrated from the country (including his brother Nikolai, in whose house in Yekaterinburg the last Russian emperor and his family were shot), but Vladimir, at the insistence of Lenin, was engaged in the development of the now Soviet chemical industry.

Ipatiev decided to flee the country after uncovering a conspiracy of “saboteurs” in the chemical industry, as a result of which several prominent specialists were shot. Having learned about this, Ipatiev, who was on a business trip abroad, refused to return to the USSR.

The scientist moved to the USA, where he became a teacher. organic chemistry. At first, Ipatiev did not want to break ties with the country and even regularly sent the results of his research to Soviet laboratories. However, he was persistently demanded to return as soon as possible. When it became clear that Ipatiev did not want to return, he was expelled from the Academy of Sciences and deprived of Soviet citizenship. His son, who remained in the USSR, was arrested.

In the USA, Ipatiev made a significant contribution to the development of catalytic cracking technology, which makes it possible to obtain significantly larger amounts of gasoline from oil during processing. His work also contributed to the emergence of high-octane gasoline, which was used in aviation. In the USSR, the production of high-octane gasoline was never established on a significant scale and was received from the USA as part of Lend-Lease deliveries. Until the end of his life, Ipatiev was acutely worried about the fact that he had to leave his country.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

The daughter of the all-powerful leader of the peoples, Comrade Stalin, unexpectedly preferred a hostile capitalist environment to the Soviet one to the workforce. In 1966, she went to India to see off her common-law husband on his last journey, after which she decided not to return to the USSR and asked for political asylum in the USA, leaving her son and daughter in the USSR.

Of course, the Americans could not help but take advantage of such an amazing opportunity to pin their opponent on the field of propaganda and provided her with asylum, and soon, hot on their heels, published her book “Twenty Letters to a Friend.” She received good fees for the book. In the USA she became Lana Peters and got married, although she soon divorced.

She traveled around the world for several years, but then her money began to run out.

In 1984, she suddenly returned to the USSR with her daughter, who was already born in the USA. Now the Soviet side could not help but take advantage of the situation and turn it to its advantage. Her citizenship was immediately restored, she was provided with a three-room apartment, a car with a driver and a monthly allowance.

However, after living for a year and a half, she again demanded to be released abroad, after which she renounced Soviet citizenship and left for the United States, never to return.

Artists and athletes

In the 60s and especially the 70s, the majority of defectors began to be athletes and artists. If in the 20-40s defectors were mainly intelligence officers and diplomatic workers (who were later hunted by the NKVD) or scientists who feared for their lives, then after Stalin’s death it was mainly Soviet celebrities who began to remain in the West. They already had not only all-Union, but often worldwide fame, and they were regularly offered to stay on tour, which would significantly increase their material wealth, because they were forced to give a significant part of their foreign currency fees to the state.

The first sign was an outstanding dancer Rudolf Nureyev. In those days, on foreign tours, Soviet citizens were always accompanied by KGB agents who monitored their behavior. Nuriev, who communicated too often and freely with foreigners, caused their discontent, and they decided to take him off the tour in London, but he refused to return. From old memory, he was also convicted in absentia for treason for seven years; later, defectors (if they were not high-ranking people from the KGB system) were simply deprived of citizenship.

His example was followed by many outstanding ballet dancers and musicians. In 1974 he remained in Canada Mikhail Baryshnikov, in 1979 his classmate at the choreographic school followed his example Alexander Godunov, the skaters also did not return Protopopov and Belousova, hockey players Mogilny and Fedorov, director Tarkovsky.

Their fates turned out differently. Nureyev continued to be one of the best dancers in the world and headed the ballet troupe of the Paris Opera. Baryshnikov became the main star of the American Ballet Theatre, acted in films (including the acclaimed film Sex and the City), was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role, and took up photography. He is one of the few defectors who have never visited Russia after the collapse of the USSR.

Godunov, considered one of the main stars of Soviet ballet, was forced to leave the American troupe due to a conflict with Baryshnikov. He decided to focus on film roles, the most famous of which was the role of one of the terrorists in Die Hard. He also appeared in a small role in the Oscar-winning Witness.

Hockey players Mogilny and Fedorov became NHL superstars. Both are among three Russian players with over 1,000 points in their NHL careers. Both were able to win the Stanley Cup and are considered one of the most outstanding hockey players of their time. Fedorov, among other things, became the first European in history to receive the individual Hart Trophy, which is awarded to the most valuable player of the season.

Director Tarkovsky, who had the status of the main Soviet film star, while on a working trip to Italy, asked for an extension for another three years, but Soviet film officials refused his request. Then the director called a press conference and announced his refusal to return to the USSR. But in exile, he managed to make only one film (which received the Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival - the second most important award after the Palme d'Or) and very soon died of cancer.

With the opening of Soviet borders, the bizarre phenomenon of defectors immediately disappeared.

Victor Korchnoi

The four-time champion of the USSR, Honored Master of Sports in chess, escaped to the West in July 1976 during a tournament in Amsterdam. At that time he was 45 years old.

The wayward and quarrelsome Korchnoi was in unspoken disgrace among his colleagues and the Soviet sports leadership. In the mid-70s, large-scale persecution was launched against him because of an unflattering review of Anatoly Karpov, to whom Korchnoi lost, but “did not feel his superiority.” As a result, the grandmaster was excommunicated from international tournaments for two years. When the chess player finally received permission to travel to Amsterdam, he asked for political asylum on the advice of his friends.

Since he was not given asylum in Holland, but only a residence permit, he moved to Switzerland, where he met his future second wife Petra Heini-Leeverik, a native of Austria who served time in a Soviet labor camp for espionage. Korchnoi's first wife Bella and son Igor remained in the USSR .

Korchnoi hoped that in “freedom” he could become a world champion, but it didn’t work out. He was given Swiss citizenship only in 1992, 15 years after his escape. By that time, his Soviet citizenship had already been returned to him - this happened in 1990. He rejected the offer to return, saying that he did not want to step into the same river twice. However, he began to attend tournaments in Russia regularly.

Korchnoi died in June 2016 in his Swiss apartment at the age of 85.

Sergey Nemtsanov

USSR champion in diving, master of sports international class stayed abroad in July 1976 during the Montreal Olympics. At that time he was 17 years old.

Western media spread a version that the young man fell in love with the American jumper Carol Lindner, the daughter of a millionaire from Cincinnati.

According to the version of the representative of the Soviet delegation, Sergei did not live up to the hopes of the team, taking only 9th place, and received a rough crackdown from his mentors, who, as punishment, did not allow him to participate in the planned competitions in the USA. As a result, he decided to stay in Canada.

In the hope of returning the fugitive, the Soviet embassy gave him an audio recording in which the grandmother begged her grandson not to leave her alone. The Canadians also wanted to return Sergei, because the USSR threatened to sever sports ties, including hockey.

As a result, Nemtsanov returned to his homeland, having been a “defector” for only 21 days.

Since then, he was banned from traveling to foreign competitions, and Soviet fans did not forgive him for his “betrayal.” His last appearance was at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where he took 7th place. Soon Nemtsanov quit the sport.

Due to problems with alcohol, he ended up in a labor treatment center, managed to recover and opened a car repair shop in Almaty. Later, following his son, who also became a diver, Nemtsanov emigrated to America, where he currently lives with his second wife in Atlanta and repairs cars.

Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov

Two-time Olympic champions in pairs figure skating, the spouses Belousova and Protopopov eloped in September 1979 while touring in Switzerland with the Leningrad Ice Ballet. At that time, Oleg was 47, and Lyudmila was 43.

“Our telephone conversations with relatives were tapped and interrupted... But there was no way back. In the Soviet Union, at home, we were strangers. And no one needs it" - Protopopov later recalled.

“When we announced that we would not return to Russia, the police were immediately invited to us, who took away our Soviet passports. We never saw them again." - Belousova recalled in turn.

The already middle-aged skaters were offended that they were not allowed to perform in the USSR, and hoped that in the West they would be more in demand, appreciated and would receive better conditions for training.

In the West they were welcomed with open arms, but they waited 16 years for Swiss passports and received them only after the collapse of the USSR, in 1995.

In 1996, they were invited to Russia for a tournament in honor of the 100th anniversary of the first World Figure Skating Championships in St. Petersburg, but they demanded that their expenses be paid and did not agree with the organizers on the price.

In 2003, the couple nevertheless visited their homeland for the first time in 24 years.

They attended the Olympic Games in Sochi as guests, and in September 2017 Lyudmila Belousova died of cancer at the age of 81.

Alexander Mogilny

Olympic champion hockey in 1988, the three-time champion of the USSR became a “defector” in May 1989 after the victory of the USSR national team at the World Championships in Sweden. At that time he was 20 years old.

“I’m scared to imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t done this,”- he once admitted.

Mogilny was the first Soviet hockey player to escape abroad. Agents of the New York club Buffalo Sabers helped him with this.

As a result, the athlete was recognized as a deserter, since he played for CSKA and formally held the rank of junior lieutenant. At the same time, as luck would have it, he asked for asylum in the United States on Victory Day.

In the NHL, Mogilny became the most productive forward of the 1992/93 season and received the nickname Alexander the Great.

He was allowed entry into Russia in 1994. Two years later, he played for the Russian national team for the first and only time at the World Cup. Currently lives between Florida and Far East, where he heads the Khabarovsk hockey club “Amur”. He is also on the board of the Night Hockey League, created on the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

However, CSKA fans did not forgive the “betrayal”: in 2015, they booed Mogilny in Moscow, when they raised his personal pennant under the arches of the army palace before the CSKA-Amur match.

Sergey Fedorov

The three-time USSR hockey champion and two-time (at the time of his escape) world champion chose not to return to his homeland in July 1990 during the Goodwill Games in Seattle. At that time he was 20 years old.

He became the second CSKA player to flee abroad after Mogilny. He was lured to the NHL in the summer of 1989, but he did not want to be branded as a “deserter” and decided to finish the season with his club.

Fedorov’s escape was organized by the Detroit Red Wings, with which he later won three Stanley Cups.

Unlike other defector athletes, Fedorov did not seek asylum in the United States, but only a temporary work permit.

Fedorov became the most productive Russian player in the history of the NHL, scoring 483 goals. During his career in the North American League, he earned more than $80 million, writes Anews.

The hockey player became a US citizen only in 2000, and in 2009 he returned to Russia and played in the KHL as part of Metallurg Magnitogorsk.

From 2012 to 2016 he was the general manager of CSKA.

based on materials from ridus.ru

P.S. They are traitors in Africa too, they are not loved anywhere, they are not trusted anywhere, they have no future, no matter what noble motives they use to cover up their betrayal, they will face oblivion in their homeland and a sad end in a foreign land.

The term “defector” appeared in the Soviet Union with the light hand of one of the State Security officers and came into use as a sarcastic stigma for people who forever left the country of the heyday of socialism for life in decaying capitalism. In those days, this word was akin to anathema, and the relatives of “defectors” who remained in a happy socialist society were also persecuted. The reasons that pushed people to break through the Iron Curtain were different, and their destinies also turned out differently.

VICTOR BELENKO

This name is hardly known to many today. He was a Soviet pilot, an officer who conscientiously treated his military duties. Colleagues remember him kind words, as a person who did not tolerate injustice. Once, when in his regiment he spoke at a meeting criticizing the conditions in which the families of officers lived, he began to be persecuted by his superiors. The political officer threatened with expulsion from the party.

Fighting the system is like banging your head against a wall. And when the confrontation reached its boiling point, Victor’s nerves could not stand it. During the next flights, his board disappeared from the tracking screens. Having overcome the air defenses of the two countries, Belenko landed at a Japanese airport on September 6, 1976, stepped out of the MIG-25 with his hands raised and was soon transported to the United States, receiving the status of a political refugee.

The West glorified the Soviet pilot - an ace who risked his life to overcome the Iron Curtain. And for his compatriots he forever remained a defector and a traitor.

VICTOR SUVOROV

Vladimir Rezun (pen name - Viktor Suvorov) in Soviet times He graduated from the Military Diplomatic Academy in Moscow and served as a GRU officer. In the summer of 1978, he and his family disappeared from their apartment in Geneva. Breaking his oath, he surrendered to British intelligence. As the reader later learned from his books, this happened because they wanted to blame the failure of the Swiss residency on him. The former Soviet intelligence officer was sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal.

Currently, Viktor Suvorov is a British citizen, an Honorary Member of the International Union of Writers. His books “Aquarium”, “Icebreaker”, “Choice” and many others have been translated into twenty languages ​​of the world and are extremely popular.

These days, Suvorov teaches at the British Military Academy.

BELOUSOV and PROTOPOPOV

This legendary pair of skaters came to “high sport” at a fairly mature age. They immediately captivated the audience with their artistry and synchronicity. Not only on the ice, but also in life, Lyudmila and Oleg showed themselves as a single whole, going through moments of glory and persecution.

They walked to their peak slowly but surely. They were their own choreographers and coaches. First they won the Union Championship, then the European Championship. And soon they made a real splash at the Innsbruck Olympics in 1964, and then, in 1968, at the World Championships, where, to the jubilant approval of the audience, the referees unanimously gave them a 6.0.

Young people came to replace the star couple, and Belousova and Protopopov began to openly force them out of the ice arena, deliberately lowering the scores. But the couple was full of strength and creative plans that were no longer destined to come true in their homeland.

During the next European tour, the stars decided not to return to the Union. They remained in Switzerland, where they continued to do what they loved, although they did not receive citizenship for a long time. But they say that your place is where you can breathe freely, and not where the stamp in your passport indicates.

ANDREY TARKOVSKY

He is called one of the most talented screenwriters and directors of all time. Many of Tarkovsky's colleagues openly admire his talent, considering him their teacher. Even the great Bergman said that Andrei Tarkovsky created a special film language in which life is a mirror. This is the name of one of his most popular films. “Mirror”, “Stalker”, “Solaris” and many other cinema masterpieces created by the brilliant Soviet director are still on screens in all corners of the world.

In 1980, Tarkovsky went to Italy, where he began work on his next film. From there, he sent a request to the Union so that his family would be allowed to travel to him for the duration of filming for a period of three years, after which he undertakes to return to his homeland. The CPSU Central Committee refused the director's request. And in the summer of 1984, Andrei announced his non-return to the USSR.

Tarkovsky was not deprived of Soviet citizenship, but a ban was imposed on showing his films in the country and mentioning the name of the exile in the press.

The master of cinema made his last film in Sweden, and soon died of lung cancer. At the same time, the Union lifted the ban on showing his films. Andrei Tarkovsky was awarded the Lenin Prize posthumously.

RUDOLF NURIEV

One of the most famous soloists of world ballet, Nureyev in 1961, during a tour in Paris, asked for political asylum, but the French authorities refused him this. Rudolf went to Copenhagen, where he successfully danced at the Royal Theater. In addition, his homosexual inclinations were not condemned in this country.

Then the artist moved to London and for fifteen long years became the star of the English ballet and the idol of British fans of Terpsichore. He soon received Austrian citizenship, and his popularity reached its peak: Nureyev gave up to three hundred performances annually.

In the 80s, Rudolph headed the ballet troupe of the theater in Paris, where he actively promoted young and attractive artists.

In the USSR, the dancer was allowed entry only for three days to attend his mother’s funeral, while limiting his circle of communication and movement. For the last ten years, Nureyev lived with the HIV virus in his blood, died from complications of an incurable disease, and was buried in a Russian cemetery in France.

ALICE ROSENBAUM

Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, is little known in Russia. The talented writer lived most of her life in the USA, although she spent her childhood and youth in St. Petersburg.

The revolution of 1917 took almost everything from the Rosenbaum family. And later, Alice herself lost her loved one in Stalin’s dungeons and her parents during the siege of Leningrad.

At the beginning of 1926, Alice went to study in the States, where she remained to live permanently. At first she worked as an extra at the Dream Factory, and then, after marrying an actor, she received American citizenship and became seriously involved in creativity. Already under the pseudonym Ayn Rand, she created scripts, stories and novels.

Although they tried to attribute her work to a certain political movement, Ain said that she was not interested in politics, because it was a cheap way to become popular. Perhaps that is why the sales volume of her books was tens of times higher than the sales of works by famous creators of history, such as Karl Marx.

ALEXANDER ALEKHIN

The famous chess player, world champion, Alekhine left for France for permanent residence back in 1921. He was the first to win the world champion title from the invincible Capablanca in 1927.

Throughout his entire chess career, Alekhine lost only once to his opponent, but soon took revenge over Max Euwe, and remained the world champion until the end of his life.

During the war, he took part in tournaments in Nazi Germany in order to somehow feed his family. Later, the chess players were going to boycott Alexander, accusing him of publishing anti-Semitic articles. Once “beaten” by him, Euwe even proposed to deprive Alekhine of his well-deserved titles. But Max’s selfish plans were not destined to come true.

In March 1946, on the eve of the match with Botvinnik, Alekhine was found dead. He was sitting in a chair in front of a chessboard with pieces arranged. It has not yet been established which country’s intelligence services organized his asphyxia.

Fyodor Chaliapin also left his homeland at one time, about whose novel Iola Tornaghi was told - love with an Italian accent.

At the time of escape - thin. hands Mariinsky Theater. The first earned the title of People's Artist of the Republic.

When: in June 1922 he remained in the USA after a tour (his impresario there was the famous Sol Hurok). In the USSR, his non-return was taken very painfully. V. Mayakovsky even composed poetry: “Now such an artist should return back to Russian rubles - I will be the first to shout: - Roll back, People's Artist of the Republic!” In 1927, F. Chaliapin was deprived of USSR citizenship and his title was taken away.

What have you achieved?: He toured a lot, donated money, including to funds to help Russian emigrants. In 1937, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died in 1938 in Paris. His ashes returned to his homeland only in 1984.

Rudolf Nureyev, ballet dancer, choreographer

One of the brightest stars of the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Theater. CM. Kirov (now the Mariinsky Theater).

When: in 1961, during a tour of the Kirov Theater in Paris, he refused to return to the USSR.

What have you achieved?: was immediately accepted into the Royal Ballet of London, where he was a star for 15 years. Later he worked as director of the ballet troupe of the Paris Grand Opera. IN last years was a conductor. He collected a luxurious collection of works of art. Died in 1993 from AIDS in Paris. His grave is still a cult place for his fans.

, ballet dancer

At the Bolshoi Theater, this dancer was predicted to have a great career.

When: in 1979, during a tour of the Bolshoi Theater in New York, he asked for political asylum. US President J. Carter and Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee L. Brezhnev were involved in the incident. Based on those events, the film “Flight 222” was made.

What have you achieved?: danced with M. Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theater. After a scandal with M. Baryshnikov in 1982, he left the troupe. I tried to make a solo career.

Having married the Hollywood actress J. Bisset, he tried his hand at cinema. His body was found a few days after his death in 1995. A. Godunov’s ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

, film director

When: in 1984, during a business trip to Stockholm, where he was supposed to discuss the filming of the film “Sacrifice,” he announced right at a press conference that he would not return to his homeland.

What have you achieved?: spent a year in Berlin and Sweden, began filming the film “Sacrifice”. At the end of 1985, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1986. His third son was born after his death.

Natalia Makarova, ballerina

She was the leading soloist of the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Theater. CM. Kirov (now the Mariinsky Theater).

When: in 1970 during a tour of the theater. CM. Kirova asked for political asylum in the UK.

What to achievegla: since December 1970 - prima of the American Ballet Theater, danced in the best ballet companies in Europe. In 1989 she again stepped on the stage of the Leningrad Theater. She currently works as a dramatic actress and lives in the USA.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, ballet dancer

Soloist of the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Theater named after. CM. Kirov (now the Mariinsky Theater).

When: in February 1974, during a tour of the ballet of two capitals (Bolshoi and Kirov theaters) in Canada and the USA, at the end of the tour he asked for political asylum in the United States.

What have you achieved?: I immediately received an invitation from George Balanchine to become a soloist with the American Ballet Theater. Soon he became a theater director, and a little later (and to this day) a millionaire. Now he works as a dramatic artist. Lives in the USA. He is a co-owner of the famous Russian Samovar restaurant in New York.

Victoria Mullova, violinist

Winner of international competitions (including the Tchaikovsky competition).

When: in 1983, during a tour in Finland, together with her common-law husband, conductor Vakhtang Zhordania, she fled by taxi from Finland to Sweden, where she sat for two days, locked in a hotel room, waiting for the American embassy to open. In her room in Finland, V. Mullova left a “hostage” - a precious Stradivarius violin. She hoped that the KGB officers, having discovered the violin, would not look for it themselves.

What have you achieved?la: made a brilliant career in the West, for some time she was married to the famous conductor Claudio Abbado.

, philologist

Daughter of I. Stalin. Philologist, worked at the Institute of World Literature.

When: in December 1966, S. Alliluyeva flew to India with the ashes of her common-law husband Brajesh Singh. A few months later, in March 1967, she turned to the USSR Ambassador to India with a request not to return to the country. Having been refused, she went to the US Embassy in Delhi and asked for political asylum.

What have you achieved?la: published in the USA the book “Twenty Letters to a Friend” - about her father and the Kremlin environment. The book became a bestseller and brought S. Alliluyeva more than $2.5 million. In 1984, she made an attempt to return to the USSR, but was unsuccessful - her daughter, who was born in America, did not speak Russian, and the children from her previous marriage who remained in the USSR greeted her coolly . In Georgia, S. Alliluyeva received the same cold reception, and she returned to America. Traveled all over the world. Died in 2011