Newspaper Article

MAX EITINGON: ANOTHER VIEW

Conquest, Robert, Robert Conquest is the author of "The Great Terror," an account of Stalin's purges of 1936-38, and "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine."

1988

Overview

To me, at least, far the most interesting character in this affair is [Leonid Eitingon]. Who was he? Mr. [Stephen Schwartz] maintains that he was a close relative of Dr. [Max Eitingon]; Mr. [Theodore Draper] finds no evidence of any relationship. In any case, Leonid was a long-term officer of the Foreign Department of the secret police, and eventually its deputy head. In the 1930's he was one of its most prominent operatives in Western Europe, and eventually the organizer, on the spot, of the murder of Trotsky. He is spoken of as ''Leonid'' in reports both at that time and in the 1950's. In the meantime, in 1945, senior N.K.V.D. officers were given army rank. Among those listed (as major general) was Naum Isaakovich Eitingon: was this the same man? Leonid was certainly at this level: his superior in the Foreign Department, P. A. Sudoplatov, was named lieutenant general; his inferior, Gaik Ovakimian, major general (the latter, as Soviet consular representative in New York in 1940, also played a role in the Trotsky case). The natural conclusion (and moreover Eitingon is an extremely rare name) is that this is indeed the same man. All that needs to be assumed is that Leonid, a name he had come to be known by, was used on all but the most official occasions: there are many similar cases (my own younger sister for one). Mr. Draper has [Leonid-Naum], son of Isaac, on the genealogical table of his New York Review article of April 14; he suggests that there was another Naum. If so, was he also the son of another Isaac? It is not impossible: but the genealogical table itself is by no means guaranteed or complete. If there is only one Naum Isaakovich he is Max's first cousin. Otherwise he is surely a relative, however distant (unless we assume, as Mr. Draper suggests, that the takers-over of the Eitingon enterprise in Russia took the Eitingon name: that would involve, first, evidence that anything similar ever took place; second, that it took place in the Eitingon case).

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: CONQUEST, ROBERT / Draper, Theodore / Eitingon, Leonid / Eitingon, Max / Leonid-Naum / Schwartz, Stephen