General Skoblin is a well-known Russian military leader who took part in the First World and Civil Wars. After that, he was a Soviet agent working in exile. At the same time, he initially participated in the White movement, led the Kornilov division. He became the youngest division chief among all the White Guards, having received this title in 1919 at the age of 26. This article describes the main stages of the officer’s biography, his life path and versions of his death.
Childhood and youth
General Skoblin was born in 1893. He was born in the city of Nizhyn. He was a nobleman by birth. He was a graduate of the Chuguev Military School. This is an educational institution that trained officers for the infantry of the Russian Imperial Army.
As an officer of the tsarist army, he took part in the First World War. In the war he was appointed ensign in the 126th Rylsky Infantry Regiment. Then he served in the rank of second lieutenant. He proved himself as a brave and courageous officer, having received the Order of St. George of the fourth degree in December 1915.
The award went to Nikolai Vladimirovich Skoblin for the courage shown in the battle against the Austrians in June 1915 near the villages of Kosmerzhin and Svidova. Being under strong artillery and machine gun fire, he encouraged the lower ranks, dragging him along on the offensive. As a result, his company hit the Austrian battalion, capturing two machine guns and a large number of prisoners.
In 1917, already in the rank of staff captain, he joined the First shock detachment, which later became known as Kornilovsky.
Participation in the civil war
He joined the Volunteer Army from the very beginning of its foundation, in fact, was a pioneer. He received the rank of captain in the Kornilov shock regiment, being under the patronage of General Kornilov himself. At that time, the General Staff was commanded by General Mitrofan Nezhentsev.
During the Civil War he repeatedly proved himself at the front, for which he regularly received promotions. He became a company commander, then a battalion, and soon an assistant regiment commander. At the end of 1918, the Kornilovsky regiment headed the colonel.
In 1919 he already headed the Kornilov division. He served in the Russian army of Baron Wrangel. At the age of 26, he was promoted to major general.
Departure to emigration
After the defeat of the White movement in the Civil War, General Skoblin Nikolai Vladimirovich left for emigration. At the end of the confrontation of white officers to the Soviet authorities, he commanded the Kornilov regiment in the Gallipoli camp, which was formed from the remnants of the eponymous division.
When the defeat in Russia became apparent, he left with the regiment in Bulgaria, where he was excommunicated by order of Wrangel in 1923. After another six years, he was reinstated in the leadership of the Kornilovsky association on the orders of General Alexander Kutepov. White officers were forced to make such a decision, while already in Paris.
Tukhachevsky case
According to some reports, General Nikolai Skoblin became one of the key defendants in the so-called Tukhachevsky case. According to Walter Schellenberg, the chief of the SS’s foreign intelligence service, it was Skoblin who handed over to the head of the German Secret State Police Reinhard Heydrich and German intelligence Kurt Janke materials about a possible conspiracy against Stalin and a possible union of the generals of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.
Later, according to the statements of the same Schellenberg, it was these documents that formed the basis of the Tukhachevsky case. This was a trumped-up charge against a group of senior Soviet officers who were accused of conspiring to seize power. This was the first process, followed by further repression against the leadership of the Red Army.
By decision of the Supreme Court, the defendants were sentenced to be shot, including Tukhachevsky was killed. Only in 1957, the accused were rehabilitated due to the lack of corpus delicti. As it became known, a double agent of the NKVD General Skoblin announced the plot of Tukhachevsky against Stalin, without providing any evidence. Then Heydrich, along with Müller and Himmler, began to fabricate them.
In particular, Muller provided several criminals who were serving time in a concentration camp for forging documents. They fabricated a dossier with notes and signatures of Tukhachevsky. At the same time, the signatures themselves were genuine, only the dates on the documents were changed. One of these files was sent to Moscow, and the second to the Czechoslovak president, Edward Benes. Directly to Stalin, Benesh handed over these documents as a gesture of goodwill, as he himself later admitted in his memoirs.
Double agent
Once in exile, General Skoblin began to work as a double agent. In 1930 (according to other sources in 1931) he was recruited by former fellow soldier Pyotr Kovalsky, who was nicknamed Farmer. At that time he was an agent of the GPU.
The recruitment of white officers by the Soviet government was carried out according to a well-established model. They were convinced that Russia was in danger, foreigners were trying to divide it among themselves. Kowalski insisted that the White Army ultimately fought in favor of France and England. Now, 70 percent of the General Staff created the Red Army, which expelled the interventionists. Skoblin is well known as a capable officer, his homeland needs him.
Work on the NKVD
General Skoblin worked at the NKVD until his death. It is known that in February 1935 he was in a car accident near Paris. The hero of our article survived, but received injuries of the scapula and collarbone of moderate severity.
In September 1937, by decree of the NKVD, he took part in organizing the abduction of the chairman of the Russian military alliance, Yevgeny Miller. This organization was created in 1924 in exile by Wrangel.
The main purpose of this abduction was to promote Skoblin himself to the post of head of the EMRO. He lured Miller to a meeting with agents of the NKVD, who acted under the guise of German diplomats. Going to this meeting, Miller anticipated something was wrong, even left a note to his subordinates, in which he indicated where he was going and with whom, suggesting that this could be a trap. And so it turned out.
Thanks to this note, Soviet intelligence plans were foiled, the white general Skoblin himself was forced to flee. Miller himself was brought to the USSR on the ship "Maria Ulyanova". He was put in the Lubyanka under the name of Peter Ivanov. He was shot in 1939.
Flight from Paris
After the failure of this operation, Skoblin fled from Paris. According to one version, he was hiding in a state dacha in Bolshevo in the Moscow region, where he was assigned to a supervised residence.
According to another version, representatives of the white movement tried to hand him over to the French police. However, he managed to take refuge in the Soviet embassy in Paris or at one of the NKVD appearances in the French capital. There he remained until his death. Allegedly, he was killed by NKVD agents during transportation to Spain.
Book of the White General
The details of the hero’s biography of our article remain unknown for certain. Versions of what happened are given in Gasparyan’s book “General Skoblin: Legend of Soviet Intelligence”.
In the book, the author tells the fate of this character, trying to figure out his bright and ambiguous personality. He notes that Soviet intelligence managed to recruit him only by playing on the general’s patriotic feelings. At the same time, some still consider him a traitor, while others are a patriot. While working on a biography entitled “General Skoblin: The Legend of Soviet Intelligence,” Armen Gasparyan studied many dozens of documents and memoirs of eyewitnesses who were directly acquainted with Nikolai Vladimirovich, even met in person with his relatives.
All the photos that are in the book are taken from the family archive of the hero of our article, most of them are published for the first time.
Extinction versions
Soviet officials up until 1991 denied responsibility for the killing of Skoblin. After the collapse of the USSR, several contradictory versions of his death appeared in the media. According to one of them, Skoblin fled to Spain, where he died during the bombing by the French air force of Barcelona in 1937 or 1938.
According to another version, he was killed by the NKVD officers a few days after the abduction of General Miller. For this, Skoblin was allegedly specially taken out of France on a light-engine plane bound for Spain. In the air he was stabbed to death right on board the aircraft, and his body was thrown into the sea. It is alleged that this plan to eliminate the hero of our article was agreed by the NKVD leadership in the Soviet capital and personally by Stalin.
Treason Skoblin was a serious shock to the whole white emigration.
Memory
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, fragments of Skoblin's biography began to appear not only in documentary studies, but also in fiction.
In particular, in the series of Igor Vasiliev "The Charm of Evil", as well as the trilogy of Anatoly Rybakov "Children of the Arbat".
Personal life
The hero of our article was married. His wife was the performer of Russian folk songs and romances Nadezhda Plevitskaya. Glory came to her even under tsarist Russia; Emperor Nicholas II called her the “Kursk nightingale”.
Decisive in her fate was 1909, when she was heard at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair by the famous opera singer Leonid Sobinov. He organized her performance at the Moscow Conservatory, introduced Chaliapin. Hope began to speak frequently at court. Once the Dowager Empress Alexandra Fedorovna even gave her a diamond in the form of a beetle.
She performed several roles in the movie. The main roles she got in the films "Power of Darkness" and "Cry of Life", shot by Vladimir Gardin. In 1918, the tapes were remounted in one film, which was released under the name "Agafia".
During the First World War, she went to the front, where she worked in a hospital as a nurse. She married Skoblin in 1921, he became her last husband. Plevitskaya was 9 years older than her husband.
Arrest after the death of a general
When it became known that the hero fled to the USSR, the wife of General Skoblin, Adezhda Plevitskaya, was arrested by French counterintelligence. She was accused of collaborating with the NKVD.
As the investigation managed to find out, she was an agent of Soviet intelligence since 1930. The court sentenced her to 20 years of hard labor, convicted of involvement in the abduction of Miller. She asked for a pardon, but French President Albert Lebrun refused her.
In 1940, Plevitskaya died in a women's prison in the city of Rennes. By that time, the country was already occupied by fascist Germany. At that time she was 56 years old.