The last of Yagoda's department heads, and chief of foreign intelligence
Under interrogation in 1939, Frinovsky testified: "Seizing the moment, Zakovsky threw a mask with chloroform over Slutsky's face. He fell asleep within a couple of minutes, and then Alekhin, who had been waiting for us in the next room, injected poison into the muscle of his right arm, from which Slutsky died immediately. A few minutes later I summoned the duty doctor from the medical section, who certified Slutsky's sudden death." Yezhov's instruction, he said, had been not to arrest him but to remove him "without noise": if word reached the illegals abroad that the chief of foreign intelligence had been arrested, they might refuse to come home. It was a killing designed to keep the purge invisible to his own agents.
Chief of Soviet foreign intelligence, 1935–1938. The last surviving GUGB department head from the Yagoda era, he directed overseas operations while the Cambridge spy network was taking shape. Poisoned on Yezhov's orders in February 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1922Chairman of the Andijan revolutionary tribunal; Cheka service in Turkestan
- 1922–1925Deputy chairman of the Turkestan Supreme Tribunal, then chairman of a military tribunal
- 1926–1930Section head, then assistant chief, of the OGPU Economic Directorate
- 1930–1934Deputy chief of INO OGPU, European operations, partly under cover in Berlin
- 1934–1935Deputy chief of the Foreign Department, GUGB NKVD
- 1935–1936Chief of the Foreign Department, GUGB NKVD
- 1936–1938Chief of the 7th Department, GUGB NKVD
- 1938Died in Frinovsky's office
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCheka activity
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationHead of Foreign Intelligence
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeChief of foreign intelligenceHe headed the NKVD's Foreign Department from 1935, directing operations against émigrés and Trotskyists abroad, and died suddenly in Frinovsky's office in February 1938.
Foreign Operations and Political Eliminations
The central mission of the Foreign Department (INO) under Slutsky was tracking down and eliminating Stalin's opponents abroad. On 22 September 1937, his agents kidnapped White Russian general Yevgeny Miller, chairman of the Russian All-Military Union, in Paris. That same year, a special group led by Sergei Shpigelglas assassinated the defector and former INO officer Ignace Reiss in Lausanne. Slutsky's operatives also burglarized Trotsky's archive in Paris and systematically liquidated Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War. In August 1936, Slutsky participated in concocting evidence for the first Moscow show trial and personally extracted confessions from Old Bolsheviks Sergei Mrachkovsky and Ivan Smirnov. Under his direction, Arnold Deutsch and Theodore Maly recruited the Cambridge Five in Britain, and he helped devise Operation Tarantella, a disinformation campaign aimed at British intelligence.