page_title: Nikolai Skoblin
section_title: In exile
hierarchical_section_title: Nikolai Skoblin / In exile
caption_attribution_description: English: Nadezejna Plevitskaja (1882-1940), Russian singer and spy, around 1910
context_page_description: Nikolai Skoblin was a general in the White Russian army, a senior operative in the émigré expatriate Russian All-Military Union and a recruited Soviet spy, who acted as an intermediary between the NKVD and the Gestapo in the Tukhachevsky affair and was instrumental in the abduction of the ROVS chairman Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in 1937. He was married to the Russian singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya. A number of important details about his cooperation with the USSR′s intelligence agencies as well as exact circumstances of his death have remained controversial and contested.
context_section_description: When in Bulgaria, in 1923, he was relieved of the position of commander of the Kornilov regiment (formed in the Gallipoli on the basis of the Kornilov Division's evacuees). Skoblin and his wife moved to Paris, where in 1929 he was reinstated as commander of Kornilov regiment by Gen Alexander Kutepov, chairman of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).
  Nikolai Skoblin and his wife were recruited to the OGPU by his former regimental comrade in Paris in September 1930 and received code name Farmer. Skoblin was meanwhile gaining importance in the ROVS′ ranks and in 1935 he headed up the ROVS′ counter-intelligence branch, the Inner Line.
  Nikolai Skoblin has played key role in the joint operation by Germany and NKVD against Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who, along with other senior Red Army commanders, was tried and executed on orders from Joseph Stalin in 1937. Skoblin contacted Reinhard Heydrich who manufactured documents about Tukhachevsky being a German spy, which were transferred to the Soviet top leadership by Skoblin. This story was originally uncovered by Soviet intelligence defector Walter Krivitsky in his 1939 book In Stalin's Secret Service; Walter Schellenberg in his memoirs published in 1956 wrote about Germany's intentional denunciation of Tukhachevsky, with Edvard Beneš being used a channel of this disinformation passed to Stalin.
  On 22 September 1937, Skoblin, operating under the direction of deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence Sergey Spigelglas, lured the ROVS chairman Yevgeny Miller into an NKVD safe apartment for a meeting with two supposedly German officers. In reality, they were Soviet intelligence officers, Shpigelglas and NKVD Paris rezident Kislov. Miller was drugged and smuggled aboard a Soviet ship in Le Havre to Moscow, where he was tortured and finally executed on 11 May 1939. (Copies of letters written by Miller, while he was imprisoned in Moscow, are in the Dmitri Volkogonov papers at the Library of Congress.)
  However, the NKVD's plan to have Skoblin promoted to presidency of the ROVS was thwarted, as Miller had been suspicious about Skoblin and the meeting, therefore he left behind a note with details of the meeting to be opened if he failed to return.
caption: Nikolai Skoblin's wife, Nadezhda Plevitskaya
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