Bolshevik Central Committee member and Duma leader who was the Okhrana's best-paid spy
At a Bolshevik fundraising ball in February 1913, Stalin — wearing a suit and silk cravat lent by Malinovsky — was arrested while Malinovsky was talking to him; Malinovsky shouted he would free him.
A Polish-born labour organiser who rose to the Bolshevik Central Committee and leadership of the party's Duma faction (1912), Malinovsky was simultaneously the Okhrana's highest-paid secret agent, codenamed 'Portnoi' (the Tailor). Having won Lenin's deep trust, he penetrated the party leadership and enabled the arrests of Ordzhonikidze, Sverdlov, and Stalin, while deepening the Bolshevik-Menshevik split on police instructions. Forced to resign in 1914, he returned to Soviet Russia in 1918, was convicted by the Supreme Tribunal, and executed by firing squad in the Kremlin. His exposure deepened the culture of conspiratorial mistrust within the Bolsheviks, contributing to the paranoid logic that later fuelled the Great Terror.
Career Timeline
- 1901–1905Served in Izmailovsky Guards Regiment
- 1906–1909Secretary, St. Petersburg Metalworkers Union
- 1910Recruited as Okhrana secret agent 'Portnoi'
- 1912Elected to Bolshevik Central Committee at Prague Conference
- 1912–1914Bolshevik deputy, Fourth State Duma; faction leader
- 1914.5Forced resignation; fled abroad
- 1914–1918POW in German prison camp
- 1918.11Returned; sentenced to death by Supreme Tribunal; shot
The Trial and Execution of 1918
In November 1918, Malinovsky returned to Soviet Russia of his own accord after his release from a German POW camp. He went to the Smolny Institute in Petrograd and demanded either to be arrested or taken to Lenin. On the third day, Grigory Zinoviev recognised him and ordered his arrest.
The trial before the Supreme Tribunal (Verkhovny Tribunal) in Moscow proceeded swiftly. Prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko delivered a merciless indictment, calling Malinovsky 'an adventurer playing his last card.' Former Okhrana chiefs (Beletsky, Vissarionov, Dzhunkovsky, and others) appeared as witnesses and testified in detail about his work as a secret agent. Malinovsky himself declared: 'I cannot live outside the revolution. I contradict myself, I am split in two, and I agree to be shot.'
On 5 November 1918, the tribunal sentenced him to death, and he was executed by firing squad that same night in the Kremlin gardens. Victor Serge wrote of his end that even before the revolutionary judges he remained seized by his own doubleness. The trial became an early case study of how the Soviet judiciary handled infiltrators from the old regime.