Ignatiy Leonovich Dzevaltovskiy

The career of Ignatiy Leonovich Dzevaltovskiy,[i] shows many similarities with Nesterovich’s (see separate entry in this database). Like Nesterovich, Dzevaltovskiy began as a junior officer in the Russian Imperial Army and was an early adherent to the Bolshevik Party, welcoming the October Revolution. They both rose quickly through a series of increasingly responsible jobs, reaching senior positions by the early 1920s, although Dzevaltovskiy was a civilian official not a military officer. Dzevaltovskiy also directed Comintern operations in the Balkans and controlled Soviet contacts with Bulgarian communist militants. Dzevaltovskiy defected later in 1925.

Dzevaltovskiy was born into a prominent family in 1888 in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire. He began his education in the Lvov Polytechnic Institute, then located within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Early in World War I he was inducted into the Russian Imperial Army and completed a shortened officer’s course at the Pavlovskiy Military Academy in St. Petersburg.[ii]

In 1907 or 1908 Dzevaltovskiy joined the Polish Socialist Party, and by 1917 he had embraced the Bolshevik political line and made his name as a Bolshevik activist. In March 1917 he established a Bolshevik Party cell in his military unit, and while serving as a company commander in the Second Guards Grenadier Division, he was elected to a regimental Party committee and named as the regimental delegate to the St. Petersburg Soviet. He traveled to St. Petersburg, became a formal member of the Bolshevik Party, and returned in April, bringing with him Bolshevik ideas of how a committee, soon to be renamed a soviet, was to be run in a Russian military unit. Upon his return he also took an active role in the regiment’s operations, applying what he called “democratic” principles to the regiment—in practice this meant that the regiment commander could make no decisions without the approval of the soviet.[iii]

This led to a situation in which, when the unit was ordered to participate in an attack on German positions in Ukraine in June 1917, Dzevaltovskiy led a revolt of over 70 unit members who refused to participate in military action, conforming with the Bolshevik line that “the war should be terminated not by an offensive but by a policy of friendship toward the German proletariat.”[iv] When Dzevaltovskiy, whom White Army General Anton Ivanovich Denikin described in 1921 as a “well-known Bolshevik,” was court martialed along with the rest of the mutinous troops, the court was filled with soldiers sympathetic to the Bolshevik line and, according to Denikin’s memoir, “Armed Reserve Battalions paraded before the Court with the band and sang the ‘International.’"[v] The soldiers were acquitted.

By October, Dzevaltovskiy was in St. Petersburg, where he participated in the storming of the Winter Palace and became its revolutionary commissar. He also became a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, and later of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the ruling body of the Bolshevik regime. In 1918 and 1919, he served in a series of high-profile positions, from the Commissar of Military Training Institutions, simultaneously serving as the Commissar of the All-Russian Main Staff, to the Commissar for Naval and Army Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. [vi],[vii]

In October 1919, Moscow sent Dzevaltovskiy to the Russian Far East as assistant the commander of the Far Eastern Front, where White Army units, under the command of Tsarist Admiral Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak, were resisting Bolshevik rule. Moscow was also preparing to establish a buffer state against Japanese encroachments into Russia and to defend against what it saw as the possibility of cooperation between Japan and White forces. The nominally independent Far Eastern Republic declared its independence on 6 April 1920, “disinterestedly supported by our mother--Russia,”[viii] and Dzevaltovskiy became its first Defense Minister.

However, just a month later, Dzevaltovskiy sent a cable to Moscow describing a political stalemate within the Dalburo, the Far Eastern extension of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, which was severely divided on the question of threat. Some Dalburo members saw the threat as being from a compromise of Bolshevik purity and opposed the concept of creating a buffer state because it would require cooperation with other parties who had power in the Far East, such as the Mensheviks and SRs. Others, among whom was Dzevaltovskiy, viewed the threat as emanating from Japan, and argued for the solidification of a buffer state to forestall a Japanese attack, which they saw as imminent. This division prompted Dzevaltovskiy to request a transfer in May 1920, possibly to the Polish Front, where he felt his knowledge of the language and customs could contribute more to the cause than in the Far East.[ix]

After four months in his position, Dzevaltovskiy was named as the Far Eastern Republic diplomatic representative to Beijing. While the Far Eastern Republic presented itself as an independent state, it was directly controlled from Moscow, and Lenin personally selected the personnel for Far Eastern Republic diplomatic assignments.[x] To maintain the façade of independence, Dzevaltovskiy took the pseudonym Ignatius L. Yurin.[xi] By his actions, however, he could hardly have fooled anyone about who was pulling the strings.

In Beijing, Dzevaltovskiy's mission was persuade China to recognize the new Bolshevik regime. Although he failed to convince China to contradict its powerful allies, particularly France and Great Britain, by establishing trade or diplomatic ties with the Far Eastern Republic, he did reach a compromise in which China would disestablish diplomatic recognition of the former Tsarist government and close the Russian embassy until a stable government took control in Russia.[xii] Simultaneous with Dzevaltovskiy’s official representation to China, he also proposed plans for Moscow to initiate covert support to Chinese communists. The Chinese government intercepted a Far Eastern Republic diplomatic pouch and discovered a document from Dzevaltovskiy advocating the establishment of a clandestine military training site in Russia to train Chinese communists, with the goal of creating a communist party that could be a force in China.[xiii] This proposal paved the way for the Comintern activities in China that began in earnest in 1921, as described by another Soviet intelligence officer defector, Yevgeniy Mikhailovich Kozhevnikov, in 1927 (see separate entry in this database). This clandestine mission probably indicates that Dzevaltovskiy was already a Comintern OMS operative.

Dzevaltovskiy’s additional mission in China was to be one of the few diplomatic contacts to represent Bolshevik interests with the United States in the absence of U.S. diplomatic recognition. Officially representing the Far Eastern Republic, not Moscow, Dzevaltovskiy made contact with the U.S. Minister in China in September 1921. Nevertheless, the U.S. diplomats with whom he interacted assessed that Dzevaltovskiy, whom they knew as Yurin, as “undoubtedly accredited from Moscow.”[xiv]

Dzevaltovskiy returned from Beijing in mid-1921, becoming the Far Eastern Republic Foreign Minister. In that position, he drafted a diplomatic demarche to the Japanese government in June 1921, demanding a cessation of Japanese interference in Vladivostok.[xv] He may have been more aggressive than was comfortable for Moscow when he took it upon himself to conduct negotiations with Japan.[xvi] He was transferred back to Moscow in August 1922.[xvii]

Upon his return to Moscow, Dzevaltovskiy was appointed plenipotentiary of the “Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate” for the south of Russia and the Caucasus, based in Rostov. He later told Polish debriefers that he found in this position communist that authorities were committing significant abuses, and he left the job after “hope in the justice of the Soviet judgments failed."[xviii] In 1923, he was assigned to work on the organization and development of the civil aviation network and employed as the administrator of the joint-stock company Volunteer Fleet Aviation "Dobrolot" (Russian: "Добролёт"). As one of its founders, Dzevaltovskiy participated in the first regular passenger flight in the Soviet Union, which took place on July 15, 1923. A Junkers F-13 aircraft, carrying up to six people with luggage, took off from the Khodynka airport near Moscow at 11:00 and about four hours later landed in Nizhny Novgorod.[xix]

In May 1924, Dzevaltovskiy was assigned to Vienna as a Razvedupr officer in the Comintern OMS, where he coordinated Razvedupr and Comintern work in the Balkans. The following year, he reportedly became an illegal Razvedupr rezident in the Baltic republics, and according to émigré press reports, on 13 November 1925 he illegally crossed the border and voluntarily gave himself up to the Polish government.[xx]

These reports indicate that Dzevaltovskiy defected because he had become disenchanted with communist ideas and could no longer live in a Soviet regime ruled by intrigues and envy, and where the Russian people are shamelessly exploited. The reports claimed that Dzevaltovskiy had become convinced of the venality and self-centeredness of Bolshevik officials.[xxi] Although these articles contained a large dose of anti-Soviet propaganda, his complaints to Moscow about bickering and inaction in the Far Eastern Republic may have sown seeds of doubt that eventually contributed to his decision to defect.

On 25 November, another brief article appeared in Vozrozhdenie, reporting that on 15 November OGPU officials in Minsk had discovered that important documents had disappeared from their office. The documents included orders about a reorganization of the border guard service, a list of all officers of the OGPU Special Section of the Western Military District, and documents about the arrest of 60 members of a secret Belorussian organization in Slutsk.[xxii] The article surmised, although did not definitively state, that Dzevaltovskiy may have taken them.

A purported OGPU memo disseminated by Karpov and Orlov as part of the “Trilisser documents,” dated 2 November 1925, claims that the Poles used information that Dzevaltovskiy revealed to them after his defection to thwart the operations of OGPU agents in Poland. It also claims that Dzevaltovskiy had taken 300,000 chervontsy[xxiii] with him when he defected, and that he intended to offer his information to the French and Germans.[xxiv] Whether there are elements of truth in these allegations is unclear; it is plausible that the Polish did in fact use Dzevaltovskiy’s information for counterintelligence purposes. However, as with Nesterovich, a large portion of the information in the “Trilisser documents” is intended more for influence than reality; the allegation that a defector stole money from the Soviet government became a well-worn theme in Soviet reactions to defectors throughout Soviet history.

Rumors circulated that near the end of 1925, Dzevaltovskiy suffered the same fate as Nesterovich—an OGPU assassin poisoned him.[xxv] That was likely Soviet disinformation. More recent research has found that he survived longer than that. After he arrived in Poland in November 1925, the Polish government debriefed him and debated for several months whether to allow him to remain in the country or to deport him as an illegal immigrant. Finally, in August 1926, he was granted residency in Poland, although Polish officials determined to monitor his movements closely.[xxvi]

That same month, an interview of Dzevaltovskiy appeared in the Vilnius newspaper Słowo (Word), in which he described his career, his connections to Aleksandr Kerensky, Lenin, and Dzerzhinskiy, and his motivations for breaking with the Bolshevik power.[xxvii]

He received a job in the Polish government in 1927 and lived and worked in Poland until 30 May 1935, when he died of an illness.[xxviii]