A White general turned clandestine Soviet collaborator
After luring Miller to the 1937 meeting, Skoblin vanished from Paris.
Nikolai Skoblin was a White Army officer of the First World War and Russian Civil War who became famous as the young major general commanding the Kornilov Shock Division. In exile he rose within the Russian All-Military Union, yet was recruited by Soviet intelligence and operated inside the émigré military milieu. His alleged role in passing material about a supposed Tukhachevsky conspiracy to Reinhard Heydrich places him at the centre of the dispute over whether forged German documents helped drive the purge or were shaped and used on Stalin’s initiative. After helping abduct Yevgeny Miller in 1937, Skoblin disappeared, and the circumstances of his death remain uncertain.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1914–1917Russian Army officer in the First World War
- 1917–1918Battalion commander in the Kornilov Shock Detachment
- 1918–1920Commander of the Kornilov Shock Regiment and Division, White major general
- 1920–1929Exile in Gallipoli and Bulgaria, commanding the Kornilov Regiment
- 1929–1937Commander of the Kornilov Regiment in the Paris ROVS
- 1935–1937Head of the ROVS Inner Line counter-intelligence
- 1937Disappeared after assisting the abduction of Miller
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarRussian Army officerHe served as a Russian Army officer in the First World War.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionWhite Army division commanderIn the Russian Civil War, he fought as a White officer and commanded the Kornilov Division.
- 1937–1938The Great Purgeinformant in the Tukhachevsky affairA White general and NKVD double agent, he passed conspiracy information to Heydrich.
Double role: Soviet intelligence agent 'Farmer'
When and how Skoblin turned from White general to clandestine Soviet collaborator is not settled. English-language accounts state that in September 1930 in Paris he and his wife Nadezhda Plevitskaya were recruited to the OGPU by a former regimental comrade of his and received the code name Farmer. Russian-language accounts date the recruitment to 1930 or 1931, name the recruiter as his former comrade Pyotr Kovalsky, a GPU agent, and record that this narrative rests on the writer Damaskin, who himself acknowledged that he had no documentary proof for it. In return for his service Skoblin supplied information from inside the émigré military milieu, while rising in the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) until in 1935 he headed its counter-intelligence branch, the Inner Line.
His double role shook the émigré community. Some Western accounts place him in the abduction of Alexander Kutepov, but Russian-language accounts attribute that operation to agents under Yakov Serebryansky's command and do not link Skoblin to it directly. In November 1937, after the Miller abduction, Skoblin wrote from supervised residence at Bolshevo to his NKVD supervisor that the inner division he had felt "before 22 September" was gone and that he now belonged wholly to the Soviet Union. The document indicates he remained under Soviet control after fleeing Paris. Plevitskaya was arrested by the French authorities, convicted as an accomplice to Miller's abduction, and died in Rennes prison in 1940.