1. Abram Aronovich Slutsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service, then part of the NKVD, from May 1935 to 17 February 1938, when he was allegedly poisoned.
11 Facts About Abram Slutsky
1. 2.
Originally, Abram Slutsky worked in the OGPU's Economic Department engaged in industrial espionage.
3.
Abram Slutsky received the first of two Orders of the Red Banner for his role in directing the apparatus which stole the process for making ball-bearings from the Swedes.
4.
The voluble Abram Slutsky described his methods for "breaking-down" these Old Bolsheviks to his subordinates, Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky, who subsequently recounted these episodes in their memoirs.
5.
Abram Slutsky was spared, even though he was implicated in confessions as a "participant in Yagoda's conspiracy," because Yezhov feared that Slutky's arrest would cause Soviet agents who were operating abroad to defect.
6.
Nevertheless, Abram Slutsky's days were numbered, and his end came on 17 February 1938.
7.
In Orlov's version, Abram Slutsky was invited to a meeting in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, head of the GUGB, in the Lubyanka.
8.
Shortly afterward, his deputy, Sergei Shpigelglas, was called into the office and he observed Abram Slutsky slumped in a chair with tea and cakes at the table beside him.
9.
Frinovsky said Abram Slutsky had died suddenly of a heart attack.
10.
The chief of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, ordered Abram Slutsky's body put in the main hall of the NKVD club and surrounded by an honor guard of NKVD officers.
11.
Two months after his death, Abram Slutsky was posthumously stripped of his All-Union Communist Party membership and declared an enemy of the people.