The Eitingons
A Twentieth-Century Story
by Mary-Kay Wilmers
Verso, 496 pp., $34.95
The history of Soviet communism resembles a hall of mirrors. The juxtaposition of the real horrors of the gulag and the common entertainment of the circus and funhouse may seem provocative, but it’s appropriate. You have to look into Communist history knowing that much is distorted, much is hidden. If you have a past of active involvement with communism—as I confess to have had—you will perceive personalities in its chronicles both familiar and unexpectedly strange. Yet the mirrors convey truth, even when their images are deformed and shocking. The dictators of Communist Russia and, especially, the heads of its domestic and foreign spy services, understood this convoluted reality, and exploited it to their maximum advantage. They mastered the art of disinformation.
That sense of a hall of mirrors came into full play for me when I learned that a certain Mary-Kay Wilmers had published The Eitingons.
You could say that the story of this book begins with a 1988 article I wrote for the New York Times Book Review entitled “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.” In it I described how, in the latter half of the 1930s, a gang of killers appeared in Western Europe whose accumulated crimes—considering their impact on history—are perhaps unequaled in the annals of homicide. They were agents of the Soviet secret police—then called the NKVD, later the KGB—operating in a special “mobile unit” dedicated to terrorism.
The unit’s existence became known through a series of sensational incidents almost 75 years ago, including the 1937 assassination in Switzerland of Ignacy Poretsky-Reiss, a KGB defector, and the kidnapping from the Paris streets of an anti-Communist White Russian general, Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, only weeks after Reiss’s death. In 1940, a leading member of the terror group, Soviet secret police general Naum Eitingon—known as “Leonid” Eitingon and generally as “Tom” in secret police communications—directed the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The unit’s activities involved a remarkable assortment of individuals, none of whom resemble the typical denizen of crime stories. Many of the key figures were intellectuals—poets, artists, and psychiatrists—and they were talent-spotters, agents of influence, and sleepers.
Probably the most just comment on the series of killings in which Poretsky-Reiss and Miller were victims was delivered in 1999, when Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin wrote, in the The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, that “many otherwise admirable studies of the Stalin era fail to mention the relentless secret pursuit of ‘enemies of the people’ in Western Europe.” Known agents in the hunting and slaying by the special unit included another anti-Communist White Russian general, Nikolai Skoblin, his wife Nadyezhda Plevitskaya, a famous folk singer, and Sergei Efron, husband of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.
But John J. Dziak, a historian who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, called attention to an incredible chapter in this history—largely forgotten before him, although notorious when it transpired. In Chekisty: A History of the KGB (the subject of my Times review), Dziak reported that one of the group’s key agents in the kidnapping of General Miller was a close personal associate of Sigmund Freud and pillar of the psychoanalytic movement, Dr. Max Eitingon, a relative of the aforementioned General Naum Eitingon.
Early in 1937 Ignacy Poretsky-Reiss defected from the KGB and went underground. He was tracked down near Lausanne and assassinated on September 4, 1937. An accomplice of the murderers was caught by Swiss police, and the conspiracy began to unravel. On September 22, news of the kidnapping of General Miller swept Paris. He had left a letter behind, stating that he was to meet with General Skoblin. Working with the Swiss, the French police discovered that someone named Vadim Kondratiev, complicit in the murder of Reiss, was a subordinate and friend of Skoblin. Skoblin disappeared immediately. His wife Plevitskaya was arrested and sentenced by a French court for complicity in the kidnapping of Miller. She died in a French prison during World War II, and it was through the Skoblin-Plevitskaya case that the revelations about Freud’s colleague, Max Eitingon, were made.
In his book Dziak concluded that Eitingon had recruited Skoblin and Plevitskaya into the special unit, and at her trial, Plevitskaya described Eitingon as her financial angel. You would think that the shy, retiring Eitingon, the only member of the Freud inner circle never to have written extensively for the analytical public, would have done his best to steer clear of the Plevitskaya proceeding, the most sensational trial of its time in France. But in a series of strange contretemps, Eitingon attempted to assist Plevitskaya. He did not, however, go to Paris himself; even more peculiarly, he wrote evasive letters to the dying Freud in which he sought to dismiss “the affair of the Russian singer” as an expression of petit bourgeois French stupidity.
The key to the Eitingon affair lies in the source of his income—as well as that of the psychoanalytic movement. Max Eitingon lived off the profits of a fur company, the Eitingon-Schild, which had been established in Russia long before the Bolshevik Revolution and which maintained branches throughout Europe and America. After 1917, Eitingon-Schild was granted a monopoly for the sale of Russian furs abroad, a major source of hard currency for the Soviet regime. Max Eitingon used his share of the family wealth to pay for the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and the official publishing house of the Freudian movement. Under the Soviets, this money came through Moscow’s official hands as well.
In any event, Eitingon had been under suspicion for a long time before the Miller kidnapping. Indeed, the first story published in English by the young Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, “The Assistant Producer,” was a recounting of the Skoblin-Plevitskaya affair, in which Eitingon appears (under a pseudonym) as a sinister presence. His relative Naum Eitingon was considered the KGB’s outstanding expert in operations against Russian anti-Communist exiles, as well as Trotskyists, and Moscow used the family fur business as a cover for clandestine operations.
Until Western historians are granted full and unrestricted access to Soviet biographical information on him, much about Naum Eitingon will remain unconfirmed. Even the relationship between him and Max cannot be fully documented. In 1988 I believed they were brothers, but came to perceive that they were more likely cousins, or uncle (Max) and nephew (Naum). In her account, Wilmers also avers that the family link existed but cannot be clarified. We will probably never know, in full, how Dr. Max Eitingon, the pioneering psychoanalyst, felt about his and his relative’s KGB activities.
If there is a moral to be drawn from all this, it must be something along the following lines: When Stalin’s men sought agents for their most depraved and criminal tasks, they found them among not only the brutes of the underworld but also sensitive, cultivated people in the highest levels of intellectual society who became conspirators and spies.
The publication of my article caused something of an uproar. It was described by the historians of communism Theodore Draper and Walter Laqueur (borrowing the acronym popularized by Conor Cruise O’Brien) as GUBU: “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented.” I am pleased to report that the preeminent investigator of Stalin’s criminality, Robert Conquest, sided with me, as did a number of Russian historians. The disappearance of Skoblin was turned into a feature film, Triple Agent (2004), by the French director Eric Rohmer.
Now comes Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, to disclose her membership in the Eitingon family, and her desire to redeem it. Wilmers admits that every detail in my now 22-year-old article bearing on Max and Naum Eitingon is correct—with the exception of their specific positions in the Eitingon family tree, although she notes that it would not have been unusual for a cousin to have been described as a “brother” in Russia. Otherwise, the basic facts are now stipulated by her: Skoblin and Plevitskaya were Stalinist spies, as everybody in Paris said at the time; Max Eitingon’s relationship with them was suspect, at the very least, as was also widely known; and the Eitingon clan included the Moscow assassin Naum Eitingon no less than fur merchants and colleagues of Sigmund Freud. As if carried away by the narcissism of it all—disoriented by the hall of mirrors, you might say—Mary-Kay Wilmers has added more evidence against her relatives than I presented.
All of which would be welcome, except that she still holds to the GUBU theory of my work. She writes that she began her research “reasonably certain of Max’s innocence” but “Now I’m more perplexed.” On Draper, she has mellowed to the point where she is “reasonably confident that, had Theodore Draper known as much about Max as it’s possible to know now, he would have been less sure of his ground. . . . The mystery remains and I don’t see how it can go away.” But Wilmers has also excised from her narrative the central issue of the original episodes: the recruitment of intellectuals as murderers in Stalin’s Western raids. She has also chosen to ignore the solidarity with my position expressed by Conquest. I am castigated for “paranoid invective.”
Wilmers has chosen to flatter Naum Eitingon, her KGB family elder, and draws on confidences extended to her by Zoya Zarubina, a KGB functionary and stepdaughter of the KGB general Eitingon, and the offspring of another fearsome agent, Vasily Zarubin, who served as a head of Russian espionage in the United States. Zarubin was involved in the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of Polish military officers by Stalin’s agents. Wilmers also has her share of eccentric views. She writes that a street in Leipzig had been named for one of the Eitingons but had been renamed during the Third Reich to honor Hitler. Her reaction to this development is that she is “pleased at the idea of Eitingonstrasse becoming Adolf-Hitler-Strasse—it would . . . give more oomph to my story.”
In every one of the several cases of Soviet-directed “individual terror” about which I have written, before and since the Eitingon debate, and notwithstanding the continuing impenetrability of numerous Russian archives, much information has either been newly examined or released since the end of the Soviet regime. We now know a great deal more than was ever suspected about Moscow’s interest in penetrating and manipulating intellectual circles—a habit Russian spies have not given up. So I am happy to remain in the company of those who truly understood the Skoblin-Eitingon-Tsvetaeva-Efron cases, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Conquest, and even Eric Rohmer. And I, too, have some people whose honor I will defend: the victims of the Soviet army of assassins, and especially the young Western intellectuals who were seduced and betrayed, and who in many instances paid for their naïveté with their lives.
Stephen Schwartz, a frequent contributor, is the author, most recently, of The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony.
