1. Nahum Eitingon has been described by Yevgeny Kiselyov as one of the organisers and managers of the state terrorism system under Joseph Stalin and later a victim thereof.
21 Facts About Nahum Eitingon
1. 2.
Nahum Eitingon's father, Isaak Faivelovich Eitingon, was a paper mill clerk, and his grandfather was a lawyer.
3.
Shortly before the Russian Revolution his family moved to Mogilev, where Nahum Eitingon studied at Mogilev Commercial School.
4.
Nahum Eitingon first became involved in labor during the German occupation of Mogilev, when he joined a cement worker's union and joined the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.
5.
Nahum Eitingon joined the Cheka on May 10,1920, having been recruited to a shortage of Chekists in the area.
6.
Nahum Eitingon gained prominence at the time for his work against banditry in Belarus.
7.
Nahum Eitingon was temporarily ejected from the Cheka and investigated during a 1921 purge due to his bourgeois origins he was quickly let back in.
8.
In 1930, Nahum Eitingon was appointed deputy director of the Administration for Special Tasks under Yakov Serebryansky, but due to his poor personal relations with Serebryansky, in April 1933 he was shifted to chief of section charged with coordinating the operation of "illegals" in the INO under Artur Artuzov and later Abram Slutsky.
9.
Nahum Eitingon was tasked to assess the intelligence potential of Americans involved in Communist activities.
10.
Nahum Eitingon was active in Spain in the late 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War.
11.
For example, Nahum Eitingon took with him to Spain, Aleksandra Kochergina as his mistress who played the role of his third "wife" while he ran NKVD guerrilla operations during the Spanish Civil War.
12.
However, Sudoplatov praised Nahum Eitingon for spending all of his money on his wives and children.
13.
Trotsky was living in Mexico at the time and, soon after Mercader worked his way into Trotsky's group of friends, Nahum Eitingon had arrived in Mexico.
14.
Nahum Eitingon continued his service in the NKVD during World War II.
15.
Nahum Eitingon assisted in the organization of several partisan movements in Eastern Europe.
16.
Nahum Eitingon used his extensive preexisting network in the US to conduct Atomic Espionage.
17.
Nahum Eitingon was further said to have been instrumental in the NKVD "Max" network, the Jewish-led Abwehr spy ring whose allegiances continue to befuddle historians to the present day.
18.
Nahum Eitingon was tasked with the liquidation of the OUN and other Ukrainian nationalist movements.
19.
The tortures led many of them to falsely confess but Nahum Eitingon was steadfast in his denial.
20.
Nahum Eitingon, considered a supporter of Beria, was arrested again and held in jail without trial at the Butyrka prison in Moscow for four years.
21.
Nahum Eitingon had persistently sought his official rehabilitation, but this was granted only posthumously.