To the Editors:
It will clarify the issues raised in Theodore Draper’s article, “The Mystery of Max Eitingon,” in The New York Review of Books of April 14, 1988, for me to summarize the purpose of my article, titled “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati,” in The New York Times Book Review for January 24, 1988. My article was not exclusively about Dr. Max Eitingon, the collaborator of Sigmund Freud, as one might think by reading Mr. Draper’s critique. Rather, it was a fairly brief survey covering a number of intellectuals, ranging from Dr. Eitingon to the medical anthropologist Dr. Mark Zborowski, to the Mexican mural painter David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lent themselves to the enterprises of the Soviet secret police, then known as the GPU and NKVD, now the KGB, during the 1930s, and culminating in the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. That one of the figures I discussed was a psychoanalyst and close associate of Sigmund Freud was in no way intended as an indictment of Freud, of his circle, or of psychoanalysis.
The subject under debate is, briefly, that Mr. Draper questions whether there is any reason to believe Dr. Max Eitingon served the Soviet secret police apparatus in any role whatever. The essential disagreement between us consists in that I do believe this to have been the case. What is the basis for that belief? That comes down to a mass of evidence, involving certain historical matters. These are: the role of Nikolai Skoblin and Nadyezhda Plevitskaya in KGB activities and their relationship with Dr. Eitingon; the relationship between Dr. Eitingon and Leonid (Naum) Eitingon, the overall commander of the mobile terror squad operating in Western Europe and the Americas against enemies of Stalin, and the relations between the Eitingon family fur business and the Soviet regime.
Nikolai Skoblin and Nadyezhda Plevitskaya, regardless of the latter’s fame as a singer, are generally known to historians today only because of their involvement in the abduction of the White Russian general Yevgeny K. Miller and in the joint project of the Soviet secret police and the German Gestapo in the fabrication of evidence against the Red Generals who were purged and murdered in 1937. Their complicity in the Miller disappearance is confirmed by the verdict of the French court which sentenced Plevitskaya, after Skoblin’s own disappearance, to a long prison term, as well as by recent Soviet historiography. Their complicity in the forging of evidence against the Red Generals is doubted by nobody; although various historians, including Vitaly Rapoport and Natalie Grant, argue the final importance of the forged documents in the purge process, they do not challenge their existence or the participation of the Skoblin/Plevitskaya circle in their production. It is well established that the White Russian circles around Skoblin held strong sympathies in favor of Nazi Germany at the same time as the Skoblin couple maintained covert relations with Soviet Russia. In addition, the Russian exile historian Burtsev, famous for having exposed the Tsarist agent-provocateur Evno Azev in the leadership of the Social Revolutionary Party’s terrorist Combat Organization, published a pamphlet in 1939, titled Bolshevik Gangsters in Paris, in which he outlined Plevitskaya’s extensive anti-Semitic associations, including involvement with leading figures in the Union of the Russian People, a component of the notorious and fearful “Black Hundreds,” a kind of Russian Ku Klux Klan. Burtsev wrote in the same period to expose the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as, in his words, a “demonstrable forgery,” and his expertise in this area seems unchallengeable. Trotsky himself, the chief target of the mobile terror squad, wrote on the corruption of its White Russian mercenaries in an article titled “Stalin, Skoblin, and Co.,” in 1939. Other contemporary commentary on this relationship comes to us from the outstanding Soviet military and diplomatic figure F.F. Raskolnikov, who defected from the Stalinist regime and died in mysterious circumstances in 1939, and whose rehabilitation, under “glasnost,” has lately involved great pomp.
Mr. Draper has not questioned the existence of a relationship between Dr. Max Eitingon, Plevitskaya, and Skoblin. He has questioned my analysis of the character of the relationship, and has sought to minimize the possibility that Dr. Eitingon functioned, as I and other historians have maintained, as a “financial angel” for Plevitskaya. I will deal with this further on. But he has also ignored the issue, which I raised in my response to letters in The New York Times Book Review of March 6, 1988, of the anti-Semitic bigotry of the environment in which Skoblin and Plevitskaya moved. Given that biographers of Freud and historians of psychoanalysis have commented on the acute sensitivity of Dr. Eitingon to anti-Semitism, this is not a minor matter.
Mr. Draper has assailed the description by Vitaly Rapoport and Yury Alexeev, Dr. John J. Dziak, and myself, as well as Pierre Broue, whom I also cited and whom Mr. Draper ignores, of Dr. Max Eitingon as the brother of Leonid (Naum) Eitingon, the high KGB official. The issue of the Eitingons and their relationships is further complicated by the debate over the use by Naum Eitingon of the name Leonid. However, when Naum Eitingon is described as the organizer of the murder of Trotsky, it is clear this is the same person as Leonid Eitingon, named in this role in numerous books. Mr. Draper admits in his article that the eminent historian Robert Conquest, who is in a better position than either Mr. Draper or myself to judge these matters, considers Naum Eitingon and Leonid Eitingon to be the same person. But Mr. Draper failed to describe on what data Mr. Conquest bases this opinion. Mr. Conquest has informed me of an official decree of the Soviet secret police announcing the promotion to major general of Naum Isakyeyevich Eitingon, dated July 11, 1945, and of his own belief that this man was either the brother or cousin of Dr. Max Eitingon. This individual would match, in name and patronymic, the cousin and brother-in-law of Dr. Eitingon, as placed on the family tree Mr. Draper furnished to The New York Review of Books. This relationship would exist because of the marriage of Motty Eitingon to his own cousin Fanny, which, as Mr. Draper, drawing on Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud, admits, made Motty and his brothers the brothers-in-law of Dr. Max. It is also of some interest, I think, that the first printed source in the West on the activities of the KGB officer Eitingon, Georgi Agabekov’s OGPU (New York, 1931), states that Leonid Eitingon used the pseudonym “Naumov.” Such would not be the first instance of a cover name providing inadvertent means for exposure.
However, the mysteries of the Eitingon family and its relationships have yet to be fully resolved. To begin with, the Eitingon “family tree” as supplied by Mr. Draper is incomplete. The National Archives in Washington show that in 1939 a family head named Michail Eitingon applied with his dependents for a visa; Natalie Grant has found a Salomon Eitingon of London on the board of one of the Eitingon firms. Earlier visa records show even more Eitingons connected with the fur company. We now know there were two Maxes in the family; while a Naum Eitingon was certainly engaged in the textile business in Poland, how can we be sure there were not, as well, two Naums? The point here is that Mr. Draper must decide whether he is serving, in this instance, as a historian or as an advocate for the Eitingon family. In my work, I cited sources that can be checked, as did Dziak, Rapoport/Alexeev, and others. Mr. Draper has yet to produce any information on the Eitingon family that is open to independent confirmation.
In addition, although Mr. Draper has argued as if I utilized only the books of Dziak and Rapoport/Alexeev in writing my article, I also cited Natalie Grant and Pierre Broue, the latter working in complete independence from the others. There are other sources as well, including one unknown to Mr. Draper, namely, the Russian émigré writer Kirill Henkin. Henkin is described at some length (although incompletely) in Simon Karlinsky’s Marina Tsvetaeva (Cambridge, 1985); his mother was a close friend of the wife of L.I. Raigorodsky, the brother of Dr. Max Eitingon’s wife. Further, Henkin served in the NKVD in Spain under Leonid Eitingon. He has published two books in French, one on Andropov and the other, titled L’Espionnage Sovietique (Paris, 1981), on the subjects dealt with in my article. In a recent manuscript, “La Penetration Sovietique et la Troisieme Emigration,” he has described Leonid Eitingon as the “brother or cousin” of the psychoanalyst.
Finally, there is the matter of the Eitingon fur business, its relations with the Soviet Union, and the funds derived from it by Dr. Max Eitingon. It is this company that furnished Dr. Eitingon his income, as admitted by Mr. Draper. Indeed, Mr. Draper’s challenge to me rests significantly on the statement, enunciated eight times, and drawn from Jones’s biography of Freud, that after 1931, “the family business from which Eitingon drew his income was in America, and the disastrous economic situation there had proved catastrophic for it. Before long, Eitingon was for the first time in his life a poor man.”
The Eitingon fur companies appear, for some years, to have enjoyed a monopoly on the export of Soviet furs to the West. The firm reported a loss at the end of 1931, but the effect of this was neither “catastrophic,” as Jones said, nor did it bring on a “decline” of the company, as Mr. Draper claims. It seems that even with the help of a small army of researchers, Mr. Draper was unable to go beyond the work of Ernest Jones, whose own reliability I have found to be frequently questioned, in addressing this issue. We can say, for example, that the company maintained a stable business position at least up to the end of 1934. On November 20 of that year, Motty Eitingon, head of the New York office of the firm, appeared as a sworn witness before the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee. Regarding his company, Eitingon-Schild, Inc., Motty Eitingon said, “We have all told about $85,000,000 of contracts” for the import of Soviet furs; further, that the company was strictly an importer and did not hire fur workers (therefore avoiding the overhead costs of production and inventory); that the New York office employed 70 people, and that its operations, with branches “all over the world,” involved thousands of employees.
Activities of Motty Eitingon are also covered in rather surprising detail in a volume titled The Fur and Leather Workers’ Union, by Philip S. Foner (Newark, 1950). In this work, we find that in 1937, the year in which Dr. Max Eitingon made his final visit to the Skoblin couple, the Eitingon firm was still doing a multimillion dollar business annually. But, more importantly, Foner reports that charges were made by the American Federation of Labor in 1926 that Motty Eitingon was a Soviet agent, with $8,000,000 in Soviet fur contracts. Further, a source cited by Foner as an authority on fur industry labor affairs but misidentified by him as “O’Leary,” namely John G. Leary, Jr., labor editor of the old New York World, testified in 1930 before the Fish congressional committee that he believed the Eitingon firm, then with $30,000,000 in Soviet contracts, according to him, was involved in the illegal entry of Soviet monies for subversive activities. Motty Eitingon seems to have sought an opportunity to answer this charge but not to have actually done so at the time.
