Skvirsky, Boris Evseevich (1887-1941)

A Russian revolutionary and diplomat, who from 1922 to 1933 served as the Soviet unofficial representative in the USA and made a significant contribution into the US diplomatic recognition of the USSR in November 1933.

Boris Skvirsky was born on October 15, 1887, in Odessa, the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) into the family of a landlord who soon went broke and turned to the trade of vodka making. He attended three years in a Jewish primary school and in 1906 graduated from a secondary school of commerce. Skvirsky joined the revolutionary movement during the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907. At its height in October 1905, he participated in the student protest movement in Odessa. He earned his living as a private tutor and in July 1907 applied for admission to the Tomsk Technical Institute, but failed the physics entrance examination. Afterwards, he joined his father in Harbin, Manchuria, where he earned his living teaching at a Jewish school and simultaneously participated in underground activities of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party (commonly known as Eser party and its members as es-ery).  In June 1908 he was arrested and sentenced to a prison term in Harbin (which he served from June 1908 to June 1911) followed by “perennial exile.” In 1911, he was sent to exile in Yakutskaya Gubernia in the Russian Far East, where he taught at a Yakut school.  In Yakutsk from August 1912 to July 1913, he married Lydia I. Chevanova, a political exile and a former militant of the Eser party.  In July 1913, they escaped by separate routes and were reunited in Nagasaki, Japan.

From Japan Skvirsky proceeded to Brisbane, Australia, where he worked in various menial jobs while active in assisting political émigrés and in publishing a paper for Russian workers. Later, he managed to attend night classes in math and physics at a local university.  With the Russian democratic revolution of February 1917, Skvirsky became a  supporter of the democratic Provisional Government and sought its assistance to enable Russian political émigrés’ return to Russia. The Government gave money to send the émigrés back home, and on July 4, 1917, Skvirsky arrived in Vladivostok, where he found work as an office employee, joined the left wing of the Eser party and was elected a member of local Soviet (Russian revolution-bred form of government, which combined legislative and executive functions) from that party. In early 1918, after the right-wing socialists (commonly known as Mensheviks) and the Esers retired from the Soviets in protest to Bolshevik abuse of power, Skvirsky was elected member of the Vladivostok Zemstvo (the Russian system of self-government since 1864) and later vice-chairman of its executive council or Uprava. With arrival of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia (AEFS) in the Far East, Skvirsky managed to establish a rather close relationship with its commander Brigadier General William S. Graves. In 1920 Skvirsky occupied the post of assistant minister of foreign affairs in the Zemstvo Provisional Government of the Maritime Province.  After the departure of the AEFS in March 1920, the Japanese forces arrived in early April. By the end of the year, Skvirsky by then dissatisfied with the Eser party, established contact with the Far Eastern Bureau of the Bolshevik party (RCP (b)) and moved to Chita, the capital of the “buffer” Far-Eastern Republic (DVR) where he became an assistant minister of foreign affairs and in August 1921 applied for Communist party membership.

In mid-October 1921, Skvirsky was sent to Washington, D.C. as part of the DVR four-member “trade” delegation to the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament and Far Eastern Affairs (November, 12, 1921 to February 6, 1922) and after it was closed continued for a few months as “acting chairman” of the Chita Delegation. After the DVR was incorporated into the RSFSR in November 1922, Skvirsky was appointed by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) as its “unofficial representative” in the United States and in 1923, he was assigned as the Soviet diplomatic agent. By September of the same year, he organized Russian (later, Soviet Union) Information Bureau, which began publishing its magazine, Soviet Union Review, devoted to propaganda of the achievements of the socialist state, as well as a few economic publications to encourage potential business. Skvirsky soon became an authorized representative of VOKS – the Soviet society promoting cultural contacts – and helped to establish a program of Soviet-American cultural exchange. For 11 years Skvirsky was the chief spokesman for the Soviet Union in the United States and was instrumental in facilitating the US official recognition of the Soviet Union  in November 1933. In February 1936, The Washington Star wrote,

Not since the days of Citizen Zenet has any foreign diplomat a harder task in this country than Boris Skvirsky. Never has one acquitted himself better under difficult circumstances. For 11 years he was without official standing, and to his patient and tactful work in building solid foundations goes much of the credit for the resumption of Russo-American relations in 1933.

Skvirsky was appointed charge d’affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. (later counselor) and continued with his diplomatic and cultural liaison functions until he was recalled to Moscow in February 1936 (to be succeeded by Constantine Oumansky.) In a farewell article, The Washington Post quoted Skvirsky as saying, “It has meant 15 years out of my life, but I have enjoyed it very much. I’ve come to have a very great respect for America, and I shall miss my many American friends…”

After a brief stay in Moscow, Skvirsky was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan as the Soviet ambassador, but was recalled to Moscow on November 1, 1937. In Moscow, he was immediately subjected to a vetting by a special branch of the Central Committee of VCP (b) – a routine procedure in the 1936-1941 period for communists returning from overseas postings, which, however, too often amounted to a purge. Meanwhile, the former ambassador was given a job of a head of “Medical Instruments” trust. Skvirsky’s “vetting” (or, rather, purge) was completed in late March 1938. Although he was cleared of the charges brought in the course of his party purge, its materials were transferred to the NKVD that arrested Skvirsky on July 15, 1938. According to the available information, Skvirsky spent almost three years in prison without trial. On July 8, 1941, soon after the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR “for participation in a terrorist organization and espionage” and executed on July 30, 1941 at the Kommunarka testing ground not far from Moscow, which since 1937, was one of the major sites of mass executions. He was rehabilitated in November 1955. ¹