Genrikh Lyushkov

After his defection Lyushkov told the Japanese in detail about the Great Terror and the methods of the NKVD. In an interview with the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun on 13 July 1938 he declared that the conspiracies alleged at the Moscow trials had never existed and had been deliberately fabricated, and published as proof a pre-death letter to the Central Committee from A. Ya. Lapin, the former Far East air corps commander who had killed himself in a Khabarovsk prison.

He was one of the highest-ranking NKVD defectors, and worked in Tokyo and Dairen (Dalian) in the intelligence organs of the Japanese General Staff, in the 'East Asia Research Bureau' and as adviser to the 2nd Department of the Kwantung Army staff. What he handed over gave Japan its first real picture of Soviet strength in the Far East. He disclosed Soviet troop dispositions and mobilization plans in the Far East, Siberia and Ukraine, the construction of defensive installations, major fortresses and fortifications, Soviet military radio codes, the identities of key NKVD agents in the Far East, and the 'Maki-Mirage' deception operation. Russian Wikipedia states that the disclosure triggered active military provocations by the Kwantung Army and 'possibly' was the main cause of the fighting at Khalkhin Gol.

According to Japanese assessments his information was 'exceptionally valuable.' Japan's 5th Department of the General Staff concluded that the USSR could deploy up to 28 rifle divisions against Japan in normal conditions and concentrate 31 to 58 if necessary; against 2,000 Soviet aircraft and 1,900 tanks Japan could field only 340 aircraft and 170 tanks. The real balance was about five to one or more rather than the three to one previously assumed, which made the existing plan of military operations against the USSR practically impossible.

The intelligence also reached Moscow through another channel. Moscow was desperate to know what he was telling the Japanese, and Berlin sent an intelligence officer to Tokyo to help debrief him. Richard Sorge obtained the German embassy's copy of the top-secret report and sent its contents to Moscow in 1938, with a hundred-page report forwarded in January 1939. Goldman states that Moscow changed its codes because Lyushkov had 'apparently disclosed' Soviet military deployments and codes. This judgement of the intelligence's effect is a secondary analysis, not an established fact.

The defection also had consequences inside the USSR. It was used as one of the reasons for the removal of NKVD chief Yezhov; according to the testimony of the former head of the GUGB security department I. Ya. Dagin, Yezhov wept on learning of the flight and said 'Now I am finished.' Marshal Blyukher, commander in the Far East, had blame for the defection assigned to him and was arrested and died, while the arrest and execution of his predecessor as Far East NKVD chief, Deribas, resulted from evidence Lyushkov had gathered.

In 1939 the USSR sentenced him to death in absentia. A 1962 ruling of the Moscow Military District (No. n-796/os) nevertheless established that no criminal case had ever been opened against him. In Japan he became a citizen under the name Yamoguchi Toshikazu, and after Japanese agents failed to find his family he was paired with a woman to keep him rooted in Japan. He made plans to travel to the United States and contacted an American publisher about a possible autobiography, going as far as negotiating a written safe-conduct guarantee out of concern that he might be prevented from leaving.

On 20 July 1945 he was sent to work for the Kwantung Army's Special Intelligence authorities in Manchukuo. When the Soviet invasion of Manchuria began on 9 August 1945 he vanished in the confusion and was reportedly last seen in a crowd at a Dalian railway station. Russian Wikipedia states that he was killed in Dairen (now Dalian) on 19 August 1945, where he had been held as an honorary prisoner on a general's salary, by Japanese officers as Soviet troops approached, and that the circumstances of his death remain unknown.

The full account of the death emerged only in 1979. Yutaka Takeoka, a young intelligence officer who had been his wartime handler, admitted publicly that he had shot Lyushkov on the evening of 19 August 1945. With Soviet forces approaching, Takeoka's superior General Genzo Yanagita judged it unacceptable that Lyushkov could reveal Japanese military secrets if captured, and when Lyushkov refused Takeoka's urging that he commit suicide, Takeoka shot him. Lyushkov was cremated and his ashes interred in a temple for the unknown dead. This was not a judicial execution but a summary killing in Japanese custody.

Shortly after his defection, Lyushkov proposed a plan to assassinate Stalin to the Kwantung Army's intelligence section. As the former NKVD chief for the Azov-Black Sea region, he had personally designed the security arrangements for Stalin's spa treatments at the Matsesta baths in Sochi. He knew the layout of the dacha, the rotation patterns of the guards, and every access point, knowledge that led the Japanese to take the plan seriously.

The Japanese Army General Staff assembled a six-man team of White Russian émigrés, with Lyushkov in command. The plan was to cross the Turkish-Soviet border, traverse the mountainous terrain near Batumi, and infiltrate Sochi. Lyushkov personally reconnoitered the border terrain and the operation was launched in early 1939.

But a Soviet intelligence agent had been planted within the group. The moment the team crossed the border, they were ambushed by Soviet guards. Most of the team was killed or fled, and Lyushkov barely escaped back to Turkish territory. The operation is regarded as the only seriously prepared attempt to assassinate Stalin. Lyushkov was thereafter relocated to Dalian (Dairen), where he devoted himself to anti-Soviet intelligence work for the Kwantung Army.