Mark Zborowski

American anthropologist and spy (1908–1990)

Mark Zborowski (27 January 1908 – 30 April 1990) (AKA "Marc" Zborowski or Etienne) was an anthropologist and an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT). He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s.

Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Uman, near Cherkasy, in 1908. According to the story Zborowski told friends, his conservative parents moved to Poland in 1921 to escape the October Revolution in Russia. While he was a student, Zborowski disobeyed his parents and joined the Polish Communist Party. His political activity led to imprisonment and he fled to Berlin where he was unsuccessful in finding employment. He moved to France and attended the University of Grenoble, studying anthropology and working as a waiter.

In 1933, the penniless Zborowski turned up in Paris with his wife and was recruited as an NKVD agent by the Leningrad émigré Alexander Adler. He provided the NKVD with a written background and revealed that his sister and two brothers lived in the Soviet Union. According to historian John J. Dziak, the NKVD had recruited him into a special group who murdered special enemies of Joseph Stalin. Those assassinated included Ignace Reiss (1937), Andrés Nin (1937), and Walter Krivitsky (1941). Members of the group are said to have included Leonid Eitingon, Nikolai Vasilyevich Skoblin, Sergei Efron, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and perhaps the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon.

The NKVD took steps to infiltrate him into the Paris organization run by Leon Trotsky's son Lev Sedov. Known as Etienne, Zborowski befriended Sedov's wife, Jeanne Martin, and she recommended him for the position of Sedov's secretary. Because of his obsequious nature and untiring work, and because he was also a Russian speaker in what was mostly a French group, Etienne soon became indispensable to Sedov. He served as a member of the group's Central Committee, read and answered Sedov's mail, edited the Russian language version of the Bulletin of the Opposition, stored part of the Trotsky archive at his home, and served as Sedov's deputy in his absence. All the while Etienne reported on the activity of Trotsky (codename OLD MAN), Sedov (codename SONNY), and the Trotskyists (codename POLECATS) to his NKVD handlers.

On 8 February 1938, the overworked Sedov suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. Etienne convinced him to have the operation secretly at a small private clinic run by Russian emigres in Paris, the location of which Etienne immediately revealed to the NKVD. Sedov was operated on the same evening and appeared, over the next few days, to have a healthy recovery. Suddenly he became violently ill, and despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on 16 February at the age of thirty one. Historians differ as to whether or not the NKVD murdered Sedov, and there is considerable evidence to support either scenario.

After Sedov's death, Trotsky initiated an investigation of Etienne and entrusted the matter to Rudolf Klement, his one time aide and organizer of Trotsky's Fourth International. Before Klement could complete the investigation, an NKVD agent named Ale Taubman lured him to an apartment on the Left Bank and murdered him with the help of two other agents, the "Turk" and Alexander Korotkov. They cut off Klement's head and legs and stuffed the body parts in a trunk and threw it into the Seine. Several days later, the Trotskyists received a typewritten letter from Klement, accusing Trotsky of collaboration with Adolf Hitler. The letter, clearly an NKVD fabrication, was no doubt meant to explain Klement's disappearance and to denounce Trotsky at the same time. However, Klement's headless corpse washed ashore in August 1938 and was identified, from a scar on the one hand, by two Trotskyists.

Etienne now became the leader of the beheaded Trotskyist organization in Paris and continued to edit the Bulletin of the Opposition, along with Lilia Estrin Dallin (codename NEIGHBOR). He used his skills to play upon the vanities of the remaining Trotskyists and create internal divisions within the faction, especially isolating Victor Serge. In 1939, the defector Alexander Orlov sent Trotsky an unsigned letter warning him that an NKVD agent named "Mark", fitting the description of Zborowski, had infiltrated the Paris organization. Much to her later regret, Dallin convinced Trotsky that the letter was NKVD disinformation meant to create fear within the Trotskyist faction. Meanwhile, Etienne played a small but significant role in the plot to assassinate Trotsky. At the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris in September 1938, Etienne introduced his friend Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyist and interpreter, and probably the Soviet agent, to Ramón Mercader, the future assassin of Trotsky. Sylvia later said that the passionate Mercader seduced her, an unattractive twenty eight year old. She followed him to Mexico and infiltrated him into Trotsky's household. Mercader murdered Trotsky by striking him in the skull with an ice axe on 20 August 1940.

Zborowski fled to the United States following the German invasion of France. The American Trotskyists David and Lilia Dallin assisted in his emigration and helped him obtain employment at a screw factory in Brooklyn. With money from an unknown source, he rented a fashionable Manhattan apartment in the Dallins' building and once again resumed his former occupation, spying on Trotskyists. His codenames TULIP and KANT appear in nearly two dozen Venona decrypts. He reported to the Soviet controller Jack Soble. Zborowski spied on the Dallins and helped the NKVD search for Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer and mid level bureaucrat who defected from a trade mission in 1944. Kravchenko published a book, I Chose Freedom (1946), which described the repressions in the Soviet Union, the purges, the collectivizations, and the slave labour camps.

By 1945, Zborowski's usefulness as an agent had come to an end. He turned his attention to his academic career and found employment, with the aid of Margaret Mead, as a research assistant at Harvard University. In 1952, he published Life is with People (co authored with Elizabeth Herzog), a groundbreaking study of Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the Second World War. The book received critical acclaim and has been reprinted numerous times. From 1951 1954 he researched at Cornell University. He became an American citizen in 1947.

The defector Alexander Orlov unmasked Zborowski before a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in September 1955. The FBI already knew that Zborowski was an NKVD agent from information they had obtained from their double agent Boris Morros. Zborowski appeared before the Senate Subcommittee in February 1956. Zborowski was convicted of perjury and after an appeal and retrial he received a four year prison sentence in 1962.

Following his release, he resumed his academic career and published People in Pain (1969), a study of responses to pain by people of different cultures. He moved to San Francisco, where, in time, he rose to the position of Director of the Pain Institute at Mount Zion Hospital.

Zborowski died in 1990 at the age of eighty two.