Nesterovich, Vladimir Stepanovich
Vladimir Stepanovich Nesterovich[i] was born in November 1894 in Wilna (Vilnius) and began a career as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army from the time he was 20 years old, serving in World War I. He enthusiastically supported both the February and October revolutions, and from January 1918 he held a succession of military commands in the Civil War, rising to the rank of kombrig, equivalent to brigadier general, commanding a cavalry division by 1921.[ii] He received the Order of the Red Banner and was awarded an honorary revolutionary weapon, a special recognition given to senior Bolshevik military officers for acts of courage.[iii]
In 1921, Nesterovich was placed in command of a special corps of troops assigned to defeat a particularly elusive anti-Bolshevik insurgent commander, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, whose Ukrainian nationalism placed him in conflict with both the White and Red armies in Ukraine. Makhno’s troops were known for conducting lightening raids on Red Army positions in southern Ukraine and then outrunning them to escape retaliation. Nesterovich led a mounted “flying corps” of nearly 3,000 troops over 24 days chasing Makhno. While the expedition did not destroy Makhno’s unit, Nesterovich was credited with inflicting significant damage.[iv]
It was in this position where Nesterovich may have crossed paths with Karpov (see above). According to Semen Semenovich Dukelskiy, a Ukrainian ChK officer who wrote a book about ChK Civil War operations in Ukraine, the pursuit of Makhno was a ChK priority, and ChK Chief Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskiy personally commanded the operation from May 1920.[v] If Karpov’s story about his direct involvement in ChK Civil War operations in Ukraine is true, it is likely that he and Nesterovich met during that time.
After the Civil War, Nesterovich studied at the Red Army Military Academy and was subsequently assigned as a brigade commander until August 1924, when his career when in a new direction. He was transferred to the Razvedupr and assigned as the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Vienna, Austria, under the name Mieczyslaw Jaroslavsky.[vi] This assignment was probably a reward for his honorable military service, since, as Sipelgas (see separate entry in this database) noted, embassy assignments were often accompanied by luxuries not available inside the Soviet Union. A job in intelligence may have also derived from ChK connections he made pursuing Makhno in Ukraine in 1921. It was during this assignment in Vienna, however, that Nesterovich, the decorated civil war soldier, became disenchanted with Soviet covert methods and decided to break from the Soviet Union.
As military attaché in Vienna, Nesterovich was responsible for Razvedupr and Comintern operations in the Balkans. Among these operations was a Soviet-sponsored terrorist attack on St. Nedelya Church in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 16 April 1925. Planning for the attack dated back to June 1923, when a right-wing government seized power in Bulgaria under the leadership of Prime Minister Alexander Tsankov, supporting monarchist policies and repressing the Communist Party of Bulgaria. The government outlawed the Communist Party in 1924, and in March 1925 the small number of Communist legislators who had been seated in 1923 were expelled from Parliament. This left no moderate voice for communism in Bulgaria, and prompted Razvedupr and Comintern covert support for underground, militant Communist Party cells. With Soviet supplied explosives, these cells detonated a bomb in the roof of the St. Nedelya church during the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been killed in another Communist attack two days earlier. The bombing killed 120 and injured nearly 500 people, although neither the primary target of the attack, King Boris III, nor Tsankov or any of his senior ministers was hurt.[vii] The Bulgarian Communist Party and Comintern OMS had launched the attack assuming that it would spark a Communist revolution in Bulgaria, inspiring repressed communists to rise up against the right-wing government. The opposite, however, occurred: Tsankov declared martial law and commenced an all-out pursuit to destroy Bulgarian communists.[viii]
The operation irreparably shook Nesterovich’s faith in his own mission. Grigoriy Zinovyevich Besedovskiy, a Soviet diplomat who defected in Paris in 1929, wrote about Nesterovich’s mindset after the attack in his 1931 book, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat. Besedovskiy, who was a consul at the Soviet Embassy in Vienna at the same time Nesterovich served as military attaché, indicated that Nesterovich had begun to have doubts about the tasks assigned to him even before the Sofia operation. Speaking of his pursuit of Makhno, Nesterovich reportedly told Besedovsky, “Sometimes it seemed to me that I was in command of Mikhelson’s hussars who were pacifying the Pugachev peasant uprising. The only difference was that now the senseless revolt was on both sides.”[ix] The Sofia operation left Nesterovich a sullen, changed man. A few weeks after the bombing, he wrote a letter to his colleagues explaining that his conscience would not allow him to continue in his career, and he disappeared from the embassy.[x ]
Unlike Petr Karpov and Aleksandr Sipelgas (see separate entries in this database), who expressed doubts about the Bolshevik course and even actively confronted it before being compelled to affiliate with a Soviet intelligence organization, Nesterovich joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was fully involved and fighting for the Bolsheviks from the beginning of the revolution. His introduction into Russian military intelligence came after a decorated military career. He was the first of many of defectors who began as true believers in the Bolshevik/Communist cause, but who became disenchanted after witnessing firsthand the methods and targets of a Soviet intelligence organization that reflected the true nature of a regime with which they no longer wanted to be associated.
When he disappeared from the embassy, Nesterovich traveled to Berlin, and then to the French occupied city of Mainz. According to Prokhorov, he approached the French consul in Berlin asking for permission to travel to France and the French supposedly transported him to Mainz, where he was housed in a French military barracks awaiting a determination of his permanent status.[xi] According to a later French investigation, however, he did not initially identify himself to the French, but used a false Austrian passport in the name Wilhelm Gross and applied to join the French Foreign Legion. His application was denied because he was reported to have a sexualy transmitted disease.[xii] There is no indication that the French knew who he was when he defected or what value he might have had as a source. French archives do not contain any debriefing of him.
In addition to being the first Soviet intelligence officer to defect after losing his true belief in the Bolshevik cause, Nesterovich was also the first to experience Soviet revenge. Immediately after his disappearance, the Soviet embassy in Vienna approached the Austrian government stating that Nesterovich had embezzled money from the embassy and was thus wanted as a criminal, a routine accusation that the Soviet government made without grounds about many defectors. When Meier (Mikhail) Abramovich Trilisser, the chief of GPU/OGPU foreign operations from 1922 to 1929, learned of Nesterovich’s defection, he reportedly ordered the OGPU to assassinate him, which was done in August 1925 by slipping poison into his drink.[xiii]
It is unclear why the OGPU did not similarly target Karpov and Sipelgas, unless either they were viewed as minor characters not worth the effort, or their continued activities presented some benefit to the Soviet Union. Nesterovich, on the other hand, was an elite not only in the sense of being affiliated with an intelligence organization, but among the members of the intelligence organization itself. His defection was more of a shock to the Soviet system than that of Karpov and Sipelgas, who had not hidden their opposition before their intelligence career. Nesterovich’s higher rank and level of trust made his defection a greater embarrassment to the Soviet System.
Several sources, all of which probably derive their information from Soviet disinformation devised to discredit Nesterovich, portray an alternate narrative of Nesterovich’s motivation, connecting him with British intelligence. Within a few months of Nesterovich’s assassination his name appeared in a group of purported OGPU memos, called the “Trilisser documents,” made pubic by Vladimir Orlov and Petr Karpov. One of the documents, dated 1 October 1925, claimed that Nesterovich had maintained a secret relationship with the famous British adventurist Sidney Reilly for several years, and that Nesterovich was communicating information through Reilly to British and American intelligence. The document also conveyed a false Soviet version of the circumstances around Reilly’s capture in September 1925, indicating that Reilly was heavily wounded in a shootout while secretly crossing the Finnish-Russian border, and that he had traveled to Leningrad to retrieve valuables belonging to Nesterovich.[xiv] Kolpakidi and Prokhorov similarly assert that Trilisser’s order to assassinate Nesterovich was based on his contacts with British intelligence.[xv] However, in 1927, MI5 received what turned out to be a more factual account of Reilly’s travel to Russia, indicating that Reilly traveled to Russia with the assistance of the OGPU-sponsored front organization, “The Trust,” and that he was arrested after successfully arriving in Moscow.[xvi] This account makes no reference to Nesterovich’s valuables or a shootout at the border. Like the documents about Senators Borah and Norris that Orlov and Karpov supplied, the account in the “Trilisser documents” was likely a fabrication that the OGPU engineered into Orlov’s possession, via Karpov, expecting that Orlov would communicate it to White émigré organizations and foreign intelligence services, as he typically did.
Arsen Martirosyan, a former KGB officer, presented another variation on the theme of Nesterovich as a British intelligence agent, claiming that Nesterovich himself had submitted a proposal to bomb St. Nedelya church in Sofia to Soviet leadership in February 1925, titled “The Path of Revolution in the Balkans.” The proposal recommends exploiting Pan-Slavic fervor and military-revolutionary organizations in the countries of the Little Entente. Martirosyan insinuates that Nesterovich was acting a British agent when he made the proposal and that it fit into a series of British international “intrigues.”[xvii]
Soviet narratives directly contradict Besedovsky’s report of Nesterovich’s motivation, painting Nesterovich as a British intelligence agent instead of a conscience-driven defector. The likely false Soviet narratives were intended to deter other intelligence officers from considering betrayal and to counteract the sense that defection was an honorable course of action, as well to show the futility of trying to escape Soviet power. The veracity of Martirosyan’s assertion about Nesterovich forwarding the idea of revolutionary actions in the Balkans based upon British prompting cannot be verified without more complete access to Soviet and British intelligence archives. Keith Jeffery’s history of the Secret Intelligence Service makes no mention of a British connection to Nesterovich.[xviii]
Nesterovich never publicly revealed any Soviet intelligence information in the short time between his defection and assassination. It is unclear whether the French debriefed him, as the investigation into his murder revealed that the French learned about his former service in Vienna and the secret documents that he brought with him only after he died. No record of his documents is available in French archives. However, his participation in the Sofia operation, as well as his reported remorse afterward, provide insights into the moral struggles that some members of the Soviet may have encountered in the early years of the Soviet Union.
[i] Photo from https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Нестерович,_Владимир_Степанович.
[ii] Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Lurye and Valeriy Yakovlevich Kochik, ГРУ: дела и люди (GRU: Cases and People) (Moscow: Olma Media Group, 2002), p. 442.
[iii] Сборник лиц, награжденных орденом Красного Знамени и почетным революционным оружием (Directory of Individuals Awarded the Order of the Red Banner and Honorary Revolutionary Weapon) (Moscow: Gosvoenizdat, 1926), p. 172, 295; Vladimir Alekseyevich Evlanov and Sergey Dmitriyevich Petrov, Почетным оружием награжденные (Awardees of an Honorary Weapon) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie 1988).
[iv] Vasiliy Yaroslavovich Golovanov, Нестор Махно (Nestor Makhno) (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 2008) (available in full text at http://www.e-reading.link/book.php?book=86841); see also Prokhorov, What is the Cost of Betraying One's Homeland?, p. 18.
[v] Semen Semenovich Dukelskiy, ЧК - ГПУ (ChK - GPU), (Kharkov: Ukraine State Publishing House, 1923). A copy of this book is contained in Hoover Institution Archive, Boris Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 143, folder 4 (Microfilm number 121). This copy is transcribed in Yuriy Georgiyevich Felshtinskiy, ВЧК/ГПУ: Документы и материалы (VChK/GPU: Documents and Materials) (Moscow: Humanitarian Materials Publishing House, 1995). Felshtinskiy explains that Dukelskiy’s book was published in 1923, but that the Bolshevik government confiscated most of the copies and destroyed them before it was widely distributed. Only a few examples survived, and the material obtained by Nikolaevsky was copied from one of them.
[vi] Lurye and Kochik, p. 442.
[vii] Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1987), pp. 101-102.
[viii] Aleksandr Ivanovich Kolpakidi and Dmitriy Petrovich Prokhorov, Империя ГРУ (Empire of the GRU) (Moscow: Olma Press, 1999), p. 63.
[ix] Gregory Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (London: Williams & Norgate, 1931), p. 54. Nesterovch was referring to the 1773-1775 peasant uprising lead by Emelyan Ivanovich Pugachev against Catherine the Great. General Ivan Ivanovich Mikhelson, a Russian imperial cavalry commander, was tasked with leading the campaign to quell the revolt.
[x] Ibid, p. 55.
[xi] Prokhorov, What is the Cost of Betraying One's Homeland?, p. 20.
[xii] Jaroslawski, Metscheslav file, Paris Prefecture Police Archive, file number 1W386/4079. See also French National Archive, Jaroslawski, file number AJ/9/3876, file J75
[xiii] Jaroslawski, Metscheslav file, Paris Prefecture Police Archive, file number 1W386/4079; Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, Empire of the GRU, p. 63.
[xiv] Hoover Institution Archive, Boris Nicolaevsky Collection, Box 217, Folder 6 (Microfilm 187).
[xv] Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, Empire of the GRU, p. 63
[xvi] Special Branch informant report dated 9 March 1927, in the Security Service file of Sidney Reilly, TNA, KV 2/827.
[xvii] Arsen Benikovich Martirosyan, Заговор Маршалов: Британская разведка против СССР (The Marshals’ Conspiracy: British Intelligence Against the USSR) (Moscow: Veche, 2003), http://www.e-reading.link/chapter.php/99200/4/Martirosyan_-_Zagovor_marshalov._Britanskaya_razvedka_protiv_SSSR.html.
[xviii] Keith Jeffery, The Secret History of MI6 (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). Jeffery does, however, draw a connection with SIS to both Reilly and Orlov, whose operations were sanctioned by the SIS in the early 1920s until both became liabilities. See pp. 178-184 for discussion of Reilly, and pp. 185-197 and 220 for discussion of Orlov.