Risky diplomacy conducted behind an intelligence officer’s cover
In April 1938, he warned the Finnish side that Germany might attack Leningrad through Finland.
Boris Arkadyevich Rybkin was a Soviet intelligence officer and diplomat who operated in Finland under the name Yartsev. In 1938 he opened secret negotiations, framed as an effort to prevent a German threat to Finland, but Soviet demands for territorial concessions produced no agreement. The failed contact marked the first step in a Soviet-Finnish sequence shaped by negotiation, security fears and mistrust that led to the Winter War.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1921Joined the Yekaterinoslav Cheka
- 1924–1929Officer in the OGPU counterintelligence section
- 1931–1935INO OGPU operations in Central Asia and abroad
- 1935–1938Consul at Helsinki, operating under the name Yartsev
- 1938–1939Handled secret negotiations with Finland
- 1941–1943Ran the intelligence station at the Soviet mission in Stockholm
- 1944–1945Headed the section inserting agents and sabotage groups into Eastern Europe
- 1947Died during an MGB foreign special operation
Related historical events
The Yartsev Secret Negotiations (1938)
In the spring of 1938, shortly after the annexation of Austria, the Soviet leadership sought to secure its north-western approaches against the threat of German aggression. The task fell to Boris Rybkin, the man working under cover as 'Yartsev', second secretary of the Soviet mission in Helsinki. On 7 April 1938 Stalin summoned him to Moscow and gave him his instructions in person, and the talks proceeded, in Stalin's own phrase, 'strictly secret'; the historiography therefore knows this sequence as the '7 April affair'. Beginning on 14 April 1938 with Foreign Minister Rudolf Holsti, Yartsev approached a narrow circle of senior Finnish figures, including the prime minister and finance minister Väinö Tanner. Warning that Germany might strike at Leningrad through Finland, he hinted that Moscow was willing to sacrifice larger tracts of its own territory in exchange for moving the Karelian Isthmus border away from Leningrad, and asked Finland to commit to resisting any German attempt to use its soil as a staging ground. The Finnish side, invoking its neutrality, accepted no territorial exchange, and the talks failed. The contacts passed to Boris Shtein in March 1939 and likewise came to nothing, after which the Soviet Union moved to the official autumn negotiations and then the Winter War. As a sondage Yartsev's mission succeeded in reading the other side, but its aim went unmet; his abortive secret diplomacy stands as the prelude in which accumulated mistrust between the two countries turned into armed conflict.