The security viceroy of the Far East
On 11 August 1937, Yezhov forwarded Lyushkov's telegram to Stalin, who scribbled in the margin: 'Deribas will have to be arrested. St.' Molotov and Voroshilov added 'For,' and Deribas was arrested the next day.
An old Bolshevik Chekist who served as OGPU-NKVD plenipotentiary for the Far East from 1929, directing the Maki-Mirage counter-intelligence operation against Japan and forced-labour construction of the BAM. After eight years as the region's 'viceroy,' he was swept up in the Great Purge and shot in 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1923–1927Chief of the Secret Department, GPU and OGPU
- 1927–1929First deputy chief of the Secret-Operational Directorate, OGPU
- 1929–1934OGPU plenipotentiary representative for the Far Eastern Territory
- 1933–1934Head of Baikal-Amur Mainline construction
- 1934–1937Chief of the NKVD Directorate for the Far Eastern Territory; head of the Special Department of the Far Eastern Army
- 1937–1938Arrested, tried and executed
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionChief of political department of divisions
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeThe Far East's viceroy, and its targetFor eight years he was the security viceroy of the Far East, running its camp economy and frontier counter-intelligence, until Yezhov moved against the regional NKVD barons: arrested in August 1937 and executed the following year.
Operation Maki-Mirage
A counter-intelligence operation against Japan waged across the Soviet Far East through the 1930s, planned and directed overall by Deribas. From the mid-1920s Japan had built an intelligence network across northern Manchuria and the Soviet border in preparation for an invasion, while the USSR, barely out of the Civil War, had dangerously few troops in the Far East. Deribas and his OGPU Far Eastern apparatus resolved to dissuade Tokyo by fabricating the illusion of overwhelming Soviet defensive strength.
The operation's lynchpin was the double agent Lazar Izrailevsky (cover name Leonid Ostrovsky, codename 'Letov'). Posing as a seedy small-time trader near the Japanese consulate in Sakhalyan (Heihe), he deliberately attracted the attention of the Japanese military police and was recruited in 1924 by Kumazawa Sadaichirō, the resident Japanese intelligence chief. For the next thirteen years Izrailevsky fed the Japanese elaborately falsified data on Soviet troop deployments.
The operation peaked in 1934 with the invention of a fictitious senior Soviet staff officer, the 'Big Correspondent,' who supplied a fabricated report titled 'On the Structure and Numerical Strength of a Rifle Battalion of the Far Eastern Army.' Extrapolating from these figures, the Japanese General Staff concluded that an attack on the Soviet Far East was infeasible. The operation ran until 1937; as a result, the Kwantung Army never launched a full-scale offensive against the Soviet Far East throughout the German-Soviet war.
The Great Purge brought the operation to a tragic close. Co-planners Boris Bogdanov, Vladimir Neyman, and Nikolai Shilov were shot in 1938 as 'Japanese spies,' and Izrailevsky was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the camps. Deribas himself, arrested on the same charge barely a year after directing the operation, was shot. The full story remained secret until the Khabarovsk FSB directorate declassified the files in the early 2000s.