Slutsky, Abram Aronovich (1898-1938)

A Soviet Cheka-OGPU official who headed Cheka-OGPU foreign intelligence from May 21, 1935 to February 17, 1938.

Slutsky was born in 1898 to the family of a railway conductor in the village of Parafievka, in the Chernigovskaya gubernia of the Russian Empire. After graduating from a gymnasium (Russian high school) in the city of Andizhan (now in Uzbekistan), he worked first as a locksmith’s apprentice and later as a clerk in a cotton mill before he was drafted into the army in 1916. In 1916 and1917, he fought in World War I as a volunteer with the 7th Siberian Rifle Regiment of the Russian Army. In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik party. That August, he returned to Andizhan and took part in establishing Soviet power in Central Asia. During 1918 and 1919, he was a member and then chairman of the Andizhan committee of RCP (b) and chairman of the district court-martial. From October 1919 to June 1920, he served as a member of the Revolutionary and Military Council of the Andizhan fortified region.

In September 1920, Slutsky began his service at the Cheka in the city of Tashkent. Later he served as chairman or head of district and regional Cheka offices in the Central Asian part of Soviet Russia and then the USSR. In June 1922, Slutsky was appointed assistant chairman of the Supreme Court Martial of Turkestan and then the chairman of its Judiciary Board. A year later, he was transferred to Moscow to work as chairman of a court martial in the Moscow military region. In 1925, Slutsky was shifted again – this time to the position of chairman of the revisory commission of the State Fish Syndicate, which was part of the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy (VSNH) – the highest agency managing the Soviet economy in that period.

In June of 1926, Slutsky shifted to the Economic Directorate of the OGPU to be an assistant section head and then section head. In December 1927, he was promoted to head of the OGPU’s 2nd section; a year later, he was appointed to serve simultaneously as head of its 2nd division. In July 1929, Slutsky became assistant head of the entire Economic Directorate. In 1928, he took part in the investigation of the ill-famed Shahtinsky case – the trial from May to July of 1928 of a group of engineers and technicians who were falsely charged with creating a counterrevolutionary sabotage organization in the coal-mining Donbass area (now part of Ukraine).

In January 1930, Slutsky shifted to the OGPU Foreign Intelligence Department (INO) as an assistant to its head, Arthur Artuzov. From 1931 to 1933, Slutsky was reportedly the chief resident of the INO in Western Europe. Using the cover of an employee of the Soviet trade mission in Berlin, he traveled with special missions to Germany, Spain, France, Sweden and, allegedly, the United States. Among other things, Slutsky is credited with directing an operation which procured the process of ball bearing production from the Swedes.

In July 1934, Slutsky became deputy head of the INO, where he supervised the work in the field of scientific-technical intelligence (later known as the XY.) On May 21, 1935, he succeeded Arthur Artuzov as the head of the INO (then part of the GUGB NKVD), with the rank of the Commissar of the GB. After December 1936, when the divisions of the GUGB were assigned numbers for security reasons, Slutsky signed on as head of the 7th department, which stood for the INO at that time. Slutsky’s tenure was the heyday of the INO’s “illegal” operations, which were launched by his predecessor, Artuzov. For his service, he was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and two “Honorary Chekist” breastplates.

The last year of Slutsky’s tenure saw the mass purges that struck a heavy blow to the service: all Slutsky’s predecessors in the INO leadership were executed, one after another; among the INO staff of 450 (including its foreign field operatives), 276 were purged. On February 17, 1938, Slutsky died in the office of Mikhail Frinovsky, the first deputy to the Commissar, or Narcom, of the NKVD. At the time, the cause of Slutsky’s death was reported as heart failure, and he was buried with honors in the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. In his final years, Slutsky did have heart troubles and often received visitors lying on a couch in his office, hence the explanation was quite plausible. But two months after his death he was posthumously expelled from the Communist party ranks as “an enemy of the people.” After his arrest, the former head of the NKVD department of technical services admitted in the course of interrogations that he himself had given Slutsky an injection of cyanic acid – on the orders of the NKVD head, Nickolai Ezhov. After his arrest in April 1939, Ezhov confirmed this accusation during interrogations. Slutsky’s official biography indicates poisoning as the cause of his death, but the evidence is ambiguous, since not a single witness to his death survived the great purges. Moreover, Slutsky’s younger brother suffered from the same heart ailment and died in 1946 – at the same age Slutsky was when he died in 1938. ¹