A Spy for Stalin

Mark Zborowski stands indicted of one count of perjury. The law, in its picayune majesty, accuses him of lying when he denied some fifty meetings with Jack Soble, convicted member of an atomic spy ring, and of association with Vassili Zaroubin, Soviet master of espionage in the United States. But whether or not the courts decide that the grand jury spoke true in its charge, they will not consider Zborowski’s admitted apprenticeship as Stalin’s spy in the 1930’s among those prisoners of frustration, the Trotskyists. Nor will any human judge pass sentence for Zborowski’s betrayal of his closest friends—or for the brutal deaths which resulted from that betrayal.

He was a struggling student at Grenoble when the NKVD approached him with an offer of money and future academic kudos in the Soviet Union, from which his parents had fled. The year was 1933, the cellars of the Lubianka had begun to fill with those who would figure in the Great Purge trials, and Stalin dreamed that every footfall on the Kremlin’s pavement white was a Trotskyist with serpentine and syenite. He wanted his personal agents to penetrate the Trotskyist movement, to report the names of those still in Russia who maintained a relationship with Communism’s Fallen Angel.

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Ralph de Toledano

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Mark Zborowski stands indicted of one count of perjury. The law, in its picayune majesty, accuses him of lying when he denied some fifty meetings with Jack Soble, convicted member of an atomic spy ring, and of association with Vassili Zaroubin, Soviet master of espionage in the United States. But whether or not the courts decide that the grand jury spoke true in its charge, they will not consider Zborowski’s admitted apprenticeship as Stalin’s spy in the 1930’s among those prisoners of frustration, the Trotskyists. Nor will any human judge pass sentence for Zborowski’s betrayal of his closest friends—or for the brutal deaths which resulted from that betrayal.

He was a struggling student at Grenoble when the NKVD approached him with an offer of money and future academic kudos in the Soviet Union, from which his parents had fled. The year was 1933, the cellars of the Lubianka had begun to fill with those who would figure in the Great Purge trials, and Stalin dreamed that every footfall on the Kremlin’s pavement white was a Trotskyist with serpentine and syenite. He wanted his personal agents to penetrate the Trotskyist movement, to report the names of those still in Russia who maintained a relationship with Communism’s Fallen Angel.