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Sergei Yakovlevich Efron (; 8 October 1893 – 11 September 1941) was a Russian poet, White Army officer, and the husband of fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva. While in exile, he was recruited by the Soviet NKVD. After returning to the USSR from France, he was executed.
Efron contracted tuberculosis as a teenager and his mental and physical health was strained further upon learning of his mother's death. After becoming a student at Moscow University, Sergei volunteered for the military as a nurse. Due to his poor health, though, he was unable to serve in that capacity. Instead, he enrolled in the officer cadet academy.Efron, Ariadna. (2009). No Love Without Poetry: The Memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva's Daughter. Northwestern University Press. pp. 18–21. .
When Efron was a 17-year-old cadet in the officers' academy, he met 19-year-old Marina Tsvetaeva on 5 May 1911 at Koktebel ("Blue Height"), a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists. They fell in love and were married in January 1912. While they had an intense relationship, Tsvetaeva had affairs, such as those with Osip Mandelstam and poet Sofia Parnok. Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. "Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna". Oxford University Press, 1999.Elaine Feinstein (trans.) Marina Tsvetaeva: Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, 1971. page pix.
Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution. They had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya, (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917), and one son, Georgy.
Tsvetaeva was trapped in Moscow for five years, during which there was a severe famine. The famine was to exact a toll on her, with starvation and worry eroding her looks. With no immediate family, she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed them in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that they would be better fed there. Alya became ill and Tsvetaeva removed her but Irina died there of starvation in 1920.
In summer 1924, Efron and Tsvetaeva left Prague for the suburbs, living for a while in Jíloviště, before moving on to Všenory, where Tsvetaeva conceived their son, Georgy, whom she was to later nickname 'Mur'. He was a difficult child but Tsetaeva loved him obsessively. With Efron now rarely free from tuberculosis, their daughter Ariadna was relegated to the role of the mother's helper and confidante, and consequently felt robbed of much of her childhood.
In 1925, the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14 years. During this time Tsvetaeva contracted tuberculosis.
While residing in Prague, Efron became associated with the Eurasianism and became one of their leaders. In 1926 he and his family moved to Paris where he edited the journal of the Eurasianists and became one of the representatives of the "left Eurasianist" trend which was openly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In 1929, the Eurasianists were divided and their journal ceased to be published.
After defecting and then criticizing Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, Soviet spy Reiss had promised not to reveal any state security secretsReiss, Elsa, Ignace Reiss: In Memoriam, New International, Vol.4 No.9, September 1938, pp. 276–278. and fled with his wife and child to the remote village of Finhaut, Valais canton, Switzerland, to hide. After they had been hiding for a month, they were contacted by a refugee member of the Communist Party of Germany Gertrude Schildbach under orders from Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate, alias Francois Rossi, alias Vladimir Pravdin, codename LETCHIK ("Pilot"), a Russian expatriate, citizen of Monaco, and an NKVD agent. Schildbach wrote to Reiss to request a meeting and ask his advice. On 4 September 1937, Reiss agreed to meet Schildbach in Lausanne.Poretsky, Elisabeth K. (1969). Our Own People: A Memoir of "Ignace Reiss" and His Friends. London: Oxford University Press. pp. 243–270. Reiss, who was using the alias Eberhardt, was lured by Gertrude Schildbach onto a side road near Lausanne where Roland Abbiate was waiting for him with a Soviet PPD-34 sub-machine gun.Andrew, Christopher, and Mitrokhin, Vasili, The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of the KGB, New York: Basic Books, (1999), pp. 78–79. Reiss was hit by twelve bullets and killed instantly.Rosmer, Alfred, Serge, Victor, and Wullens, Maurice, L'Assassinat d'Ignace Reiss, Les Humbles, April 1938: Reiss was found with five bullets in the head and seven in the body The two then dumped Reiss's body on the side of the road.Barmine, Alexander. (2007) 1945. One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets. Originally published by New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Reprinted by Read Books. , Schildbach was never seen again.
Efron was allegedly in the car with the two assassins. He was also alleged to be an NKVD spymaster and to be running a "Union for Repatriation" office as a cover for recruiting NKVD operatives from within the Russian community in Paris. A police search of both the office and Efron's flat, however, yielded no evidence.
After Efron fled Paris, the police interrogated Tsvetaeva at the Paris Surete Nationale headquarters on 22 October 1937.Kelly, Catriona. (21 November 2004 ). Coded confessions. The Times Literary Supplement, posted online at Powells.com. Retrieved 6 August 2012. She was confused by their questions, answered incoherently, but is quoted as saying that in September he had been fighting in Spain and that "His trust might have been abused—my trust in him remains unchanged." The French police concluded that she was deranged and knew nothing of the murder. In fact, Efron had returned to Moscow under NKVD orders and was held under house arrest in a dacha until he was arrested on 10 December 1937.
Tsvetaeva may not even have known that her husband was a Soviet spy, or the extent to which he was compromised.
Efron and Alya were arrested for espionage. Alya's fiancé was actually an NKVD agent who had been assigned to spy on the family. Under torture Efron was pressed to give evidence against Tsvetaeva, but he refused to testify against her or anyone else., Channel one His daughter, however, confessed under beatings that her father was a Trotskyite spy, which led to his execution. Efron was shot in 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre; Alya served over eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after Stalin's death.
In 1941, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga. On 31 August 1941, while living in Yelabuga (Elabuga), Tsvetaeva hanged herself.
Russian Revolution and civil war
Efron volunteered for the military in 1914 and by 1917 was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve. In October 1917, he participated in the fighting against the Bolsheviks in Moscow, then he joined the White Army and participated in the Ice March and defense of the Crimea,Svanidze, Marina. (2007). Historical Chronicles with Nikolai Svanidze, Amfora, p.131. . while Tsvetaeva returned from the Crimea to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. During that time, though, the relationship between Efron and Tsvetaeva was strained, with little communication. Efron was disenchanted with what he felt was a revolution largely unsupported by the Russian people, the expression of which inspired Tsvetaeva's Daybreak on the Rails.
Post civil war
At the end of the civil war, Efron emigrated to Berlin. There, in May 1922, Efron was reunited in Berlin with his wife, Tsvetaeva, and daughter Ariadna who had left the Soviet Union."Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna" The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford University Press Inc. In August 1922, the family moved to Prague. Living in unremitting poverty, unable to afford living accommodation in Prague itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University and living in hostels, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a village outside the city. She writes "we are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker... the only meat we eat is horse-meat".Elaine Feinstein (trans.) Marina Tsvetaeva: Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, 1971. page px.
NKVD agent
While still in Paris, Efron was homesick for Russia. He was afraid of returning because of his past as a White soldier. Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance for his repatriation from the Communists, he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, and in doing so was established in a dacha, a safe house in the countryside. Alya shared his Stalinist views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In 1937, she returned to the Soviet Union. Later that year, Efron too had to return to USSR. In September 1937, an investigation by French and Swiss police implicated Efron in the murder of former NKVD spymaster and defector Ignace Reiss (also known as Ignaty Reyss and Ignatz Reiss), on a country lane near Lausanne, Switzerland.
Return to the Soviet Union
In 1939, Tsvetaeva and son Georgy returned to Moscow, unaware of the reception she would receive. In Stalin's USSR, anyone who had lived abroad was a suspect, as was anyone who had been among the intelligentsia before the Revolution.
Categories: Nkvd, 1893 Births, 1941 Deaths, Eurasianists, Soviet Jews, Soviet Male Writers, Soviet Poets, Jewish Poets, 20th-century Russian Male Writers, Writers From Moscow, Moscow State University Alumni, Soviet Emigrants To Germany, German Emigrants To Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak Emigrants To France, Jews Executed By The Soviet Union, White Russian Emigrants To France, White Movement People Executed By The Soviet Union
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