The NKVD chief in Spain who shipped the Republic's gold to Moscow and broke the POUM, then fled Stalin
In July 1938 Orlov received a telegram ordering him aboard a Soviet ship moored at Antwerp. He took his wife and daughter onto a boat for Canada instead, and left letters addressed to Yezhov and to Stalin: so long as he and his elderly mother in Moscow were left alone, he would not say what he knew. He kept silent for fifteen years.
Born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin. After the Red Army and the border troops in the civil war he joined the foreign department (INO) in 1926 and ran illegal stations in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and London; in September 1936 he arrived in Madrid as liaison to the Republic''s interior ministry and the following year became NKVD chief for Spain. Two operations carry his name: the shipment of 510 tonnes of the Republic''s gold reserve from Cartagena to the USSR, and the framing of the POUM as a traitor organization, in the course of which its general secretary Andreu Nin was abducted and killed. Reading his recall in July 1938 as a death sentence, he fled with his family to the United States, and after Stalin''s death published The Secret History of Stalin''s Crimes, an insider''s testimony on the Great Terror. His claims to general''s rank and to having recruited the Cambridge ring have, since the archives opened, been judged largely inflated; his actual rank was major of state security.
Career Timeline
- 1895Born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin into an Orthodox Jewish family in Bobruisk
- 1916–1921Left law studies at Moscow University for the imperial army, then the Red Army and civil-war intelligence and partisan work
- 1921–1924Returned to law; served in the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal under Krylenko
- 1924.05Joined the OGPU
- 1926–1930Foreign department (INO) postings to Paris and Berlin under trade-delegation cover
- 1933–1935Ran illegal stations in Vienna, Copenhagen and London, in Britain as William Goldin
- 1936.09Arrived in Madrid as NKVD liaison to the Spanish Republic's interior ministry
- 1936.10Ran the shipment of the Republic's gold reserve from Cartagena to the USSR; awarded the Order of Lenin
- 1937NKVD chief for Spain: directed the suppression of the POUM and the abduction and killing of Andreu Nin; ran a guerrilla training school
- 1938.07Refused his recall and fled with his family through Canada to the United States
- 1938–1953Lived underground in the United States as Alexander Berg
- 1953Published The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes and a series in Life magazine
- 1955–1957Testified twice before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
- 1963Published the Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare; researcher at the University of Michigan Law School
- 1973.03.25Died in Cleveland
Related historical events
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarNKVD chief for SpainCarried out the shipment of the gold reserve and directed the suppression of the POUM and the killing of Andreu Nin
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeNKVD officer who defected rather than return to the purgeRefused his recall in 1938 and fled; in 1953 he published The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes as an insider's testimony