Nikolai Skoblin - Death

Death

There are several accounts of Skoblin's death, all of them secondhand. Pavel Sudoplatov alleges that Skoblin escaped to Spain and died in republican-held Barcelona during a German bombing raid. In Deadly Illusions (1993) by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, the authors suggest that an NKVD General Alexander Orlov, smuggled Skoblin into civil war-ridden Spain by airplane and disposed of him in a Republican front area, keeping his ring to use in a later blackmail scheme. Victor Alexandrov speculates in The Tuchachevsky Affair (1963) that Skoblin was poisoned aboard a Soviet vessel, the Kuban, bound from Spain to Odessa (Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union), and his skeleton ultimately ended up in a Soviet anatomical laboratory. Alexander Orlov in his own memoir, The March of Time (2004), writes that the NKVD compelled Skoblin to write undated love letters to Plevitskaya, which were used to buy her silence, and then smuggled him aboard a Soviet cargo vessel bound for Leningrad. Orlov ends his story in the Baltic Sea, leaving it to the reader to guess Skoblin's fate.

Nadezhda Plevitskaya's fate is well-known. She was put on trial as an accomplice to the kidnapping and murder of White émigré General Miller. At the time, the French government had been sheltering both Red and White refugees from the Soviet Union. The French Government had become enraged by near-daily NKVD attempts to kidnap and murder Russian political refugees in France. At her trial, Plevitskaya insisted that the couple was an unwitting accomplice to Miller's kidnapping, and that Skoblin had been murdered by the NKVD as well. However, ample evidence found at her apartment proved her involvement and work as an operative for the NKVD. Convicted on December 15, 1938, Plevitskaya was sentenced to the unusually harsh penalty of twenty years' hard labor. She died, aged fifty-six, in Rennes prison of a heart ailment on October 1, 1940, three months after the German Wehrmacht captured the city.