Mark Zborowski

Zborowski was born in 1908 to a Jewish family in Uman. By the story he told friends, he moved with his parents to Poland in 1921 to escape the revolution, joined the Polish Communist Party as a student and, after jail, reached France by way of Germany. From 1928 he worked as a waiter in Grenoble while studying, was recruited by communists there, and in 1933 became an NKVD agent in Paris. In the background he gave the NKVD he stated that his sister and two brothers lived in the Soviet Union.

His task was to enter the Paris organization of Trotsky's son Lev Sedov. As 'Etienne' he befriended Sedov's wife and was soon recommended as Sedov's secretary, being diligent and obliging, and a Russian speaker in a mostly French group. He became a member of the group's central committee, read and answered Sedov's mail, edited the Russian edition of the Bulletin of the Opposition and stored part of the Trotsky archive at home. All of it went to the NKVD. As for the murder of Ignace Reiss, Reiss's widow was convinced that he had passed on the letter that gave Reiss away.

When Sedov collapsed with acute appendicitis on 8 February 1938, Zborowski persuaded him to have the operation secretly at a small private clinic run by Russian émigrés, and at once told the NKVD where it was. Sedov seemed to recover for a few days, then suddenly grew worse and died on the 16th at the age of 31. Historians still disagree over whether the NKVD killed him.

Trotsky entrusted an investigation of Etienne to Rudolf Klement, but Klement was abducted and killed that year, and his body was found in the Seine without head or legs. Zborowski then ran the Bulletin of the Opposition with Lilia Estrin Dallin and sowed division among the Paris Trotskyists.

A warning came from within as well. The defector Orlov sent Trotsky an anonymous letter about an NKVD agent called 'Mark'. Some studies date the letter to August 1938 and others to 1939. Persuaded by Dallin, Trotsky took it for an NKVD trick.

Escaping the German invasion of France, he reached the United States in 1941 and got work with the help of the Dallins, then went on spying on émigrés under the code names Tulip and Kant. The Venona decrypts record this work, and he was also assigned to help find the defector Viktor Kravchenko.

Around 1945, with his usefulness as a spy at an end, he moved into academia. Margaret Mead helped him to a research post at Harvard, and in 1952 Life Is with People, written with Elizabeth Herzog, became a widely read and groundbreaking study of Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe.

In September 1955 Orlov named him before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. That spring he had gone to Reiss's widow Elisabeth Poretsky and told her: "I have been an N.K.V.D. agent for more than twenty years." At his hearing he admitted only the Paris years and denied working in America, which the Venona decrypts show to be false. His perjury conviction was overturned on appeal, and after a retrial he was sentenced in 1962 to four years in prison. After his release he went on working in San Francisco, published People in Pain (1969), a comparison of responses to pain across cultures, and died in 1990.