Ignace Stanislavovich Reiss
Игнатий Станиславович Рейсс
1899–1937
✕ Assassinated by the NKVD · Lausanne
Soviet illegal who broke publicly with Stalin and was murdered by the NKVD
“Whoever remains silent today becomes an accomplice of Stalin.” — his break letter to the Soviet Central Committee, 17 July 1937
Born Nathan Markovich Poretsky into a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, he joined the Polish communist movement in 1919 and later ran Soviet military-intelligence and state-security networks in Western Europe under the names “Ludwig” and “Ignace Reiss.” He received the Order of the Red Banner in 1928 but broke with Stalinism amid the Moscow trials and Great Purge. In an open letter to the Soviet Central Committee dated 17 July 1937, he returned his decoration and declared support for the Fourth International. On 4 September 1937 he was lured out near Lausanne by his longtime acquaintance Gertrud Schildbach and shot dead by an NKVD team directed by Sergei Shpigelglas.
Career Timeline
- 1919Joined the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland
- 1921–1937Conducted clandestine Comintern and Soviet intelligence work across central and western Europe
- 1928Awarded the Order of the Red Banner for intelligence service
- 1937.07Broke publicly with Stalin, returned his decoration, and backed the Fourth International
- 1937.09Murdered by an NKVD assassination team near Lausanne
1937: The break with Stalin and the shots near Lausanne
Reiss was a veteran of sixteen years in the Soviet clandestine apparatus across Europe. The first Moscow trial in 1936 and the purges that followed led him to question the system he had served. Ordered back to Moscow in 1937, he concluded that return meant arrest and likely execution and went underground.
On 17 July 1937, Reiss sent a letter of rupture to the Central Committee. He declared that silence meant complicity with Stalin, returned the Order of the Red Banner awarded to him in 1928, rejected “socialism in one country” and the Popular Front line, and announced his support for Leninist internationalism and the Fourth International. This was more than flight: a serving Soviet intelligence officer had made his identity and political break public.
The NKVD immediately hunted him. Gertrud Schildbach, a longtime family friend and NKVD collaborator, approached him as if sympathetic and lured him to Chamblandes near Lausanne on 4 September. An assassination team forced him into a car and shot him; his body was found by the roadside the next day. French and Swiss police traced the vehicle, hotel records, and movements of the participants back to the Soviet foreign apparatus. His death showed other officers, including Walter Krivitsky, the likely cost of a public break with Stalin.