The Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin who opened the secret channel to the Nazi-Soviet pact
At the 26 July dinner with Schnurre he noted in his diary that he 'felt the conversation was beginning to go too far', even then holding no instructions at all from Moscow.
A Soviet diplomat who began as a writer of noble birth. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, moved between press work and diplomacy, and in 1928 concluded the USSR's first treaty with an Arab state, Yemen. He is remembered above all for serving as chargé d'affaires in Berlin in the spring of 1939, when his meetings with Weizsäcker, Schnurre, and Ribbentrop carried the early signals of a German-Soviet rapprochement; after Molotov authorized him on 29 July to signal Soviet readiness, he was recalled to Moscow on the eve of the pact, then arrested in February 1940 and died in the camp.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1918Joined the Bolshevik Party
- 1918–1920Telegraph agency correspondent in Berlin, editor of Kommunist in Vladikavkaz
- 1922–1928Press posts in the Soviet missions in Turkey, Germany, and Japan
- 1928Mission to Yemen; concluded the USSR's first treaty with an Arab state
- 1930–1935Counsellor in the missions in Turkey and Britain
- 1936–1937Head of the NKID press department
- 1937–1939Counsellor, then chargé d'affaires, of the USSR in Germany
- 1940Arrested and sentenced to 15 years; died in camp in 1942
Related historical events
From press chief to the camps: the fall of a diplomat
In May 1936 Astakhov became head of the NKID Press Department, just as the mass repressions gathered pace. Denunciations against him were filed from 1937 on, and for remarks he made at a party meeting about the trial of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev he received a reprimand for a "politically harmful" speech. According to testimony in his later criminal case, the NKID party organisation would have expelled him had he stayed in Moscow; Maxim Litvinov instead sent him to Berlin as embassy counsellor in 1937. The man who opened the channel to the German rapprochement paid for it from the autumn of 1939. Ordered to Moscow on 19 August, he arrived on the 23rd, the day the pact was signed, but was not asked to report; after unrequested leave and a transfer to the reserve, he was dismissed from the NKID on 1 December 1939 on grounds of staff cuts. He briefly headed the Caucasus sector of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR. He was arrested on 27 February 1940 on an order approved by the deputy commissar of internal affairs, Vsevolod Merkulov. Correspondence, photographs and several hundred pages of unpublished manuscripts, including the play The Key of Berlin, were seized and never recovered. The charges were participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy inside the NKID and espionage for Polish intelligence. Interrogated twenty-four times over more than a year, he admitted no guilt, named no new names, and described his disagreements with arrested colleagues as a matter of policy. The investigation closed on 7 May 1941 without a confession, and on 9 July 1941, after the German invasion, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentenced him to fifteen years in corrective labour camps with five years' loss of rights and confiscation of property. He was sent to Ust-Vymlag in the Komi ASSR and died there on 14 February 1942. In a letter to his wife from the camp he wrote that he was not broken and had nothing to repent of. In his memoirs Pavel Sudoplatov states that from November 1938 Astakhov also carried out the duties of an NKVD intelligence resident in Berlin, reporting directly to Beria, and that he was at first held without a conviction because his acquaintance with the German leadership might still be useful. This account rests on Sudoplatov's own memoirs and should be weighed with other sources. After Stalin's death his widow, Natalya Pilatskaya, who had herself spent four years in confinement, petitioned for a review; on 30 May 1957 the Military Collegium set aside the sentence and closed the case for absence of corpus delicti.