Elizaveta Zarubina: an exemplary spy who has not known failures

In the early 1930s, the National Socialists came to power in Germany. We were still far from the massacres in the concentration camps, but the Jews no longer felt completely safe. Many Soviet agents were urgently evacuated from Germany. And since Yiddish is close to German, intelligence mainly sent Jews to the Reich.

And at this time, Soviet intelligence officers Vasily Zarubin and Elizaveta Zarubina, when Esther Rosenzweig was born, were traveling to Berlin. Everything about her betrayed her Jewishness, including her characteristic appearance. But it was vital to create a new intelligence network in Berlin. Its leaders viewed eternal peace with Germany as a utopia.

Esther’s task was to establish contacts with previously recruited local agents and to receive information directly from the German army. She did not receive any bribe money. In the current situation, it was necessary to recruit ideological agents driven by hatred of Hitler and his henchmen – you cannot lure such people to the other side, so Zarubina was chosen from all applicants , that she was incredibly sensitive to people.

In the 1920s, after the revolution, many young Jews and Jewish women joined the Communists, sharing the slogans of equality and brotherhood. We know that the Communist Party considered religiosity and the struggle for a bright future as incompatible, and that is why the “new converts” from Jewish families turned away from religion. Since there was practically an equal sign between Jew as an ethnicity and Jew as a religious person at that time, the names were changed from “Jewish” to “secular”.

Most often these were Russian names, which were perceived on the territory of the former Russian Empire as almost supranational, they could take French, German, English. Future intelligence officer Zarubina, changing her documents, preferred an intermediate option: Elizaveta Gorskaya. The name Elizabeth, on the one hand, was of Jewish origin, and on the other hand, it was common to many nationalities, since the surname Gorskaya could also belong to a Jewish, Russian and Polish woman. What you need for international.

The girl’s father, Joel Rosenzweig, an educated, cultured and broad-minded person, was the forest manager of a Polish landowner. The Rosenzweig family lived in the village of Rzhaventsy, Khotinsky district – now Ukraine, and at that time Austria-Hungary. However, Rosenzweig openly sympathized with the Russian Empire. This may have been influenced by his love for Russian literature.

From childhood, Esther listened to stories about the amazing and mysterious neighboring country and did not wonder why her father would not move to St. Petersburg, because it is a city that is beyond imagination and is sung by Russian writers. The truth was that under the Romanovs Jews weren’t allowed into St. Petersburg, but Rosenzweig managed to turn a blind eye to that.

For the education of his daughter, who early showed the ability of foreign languages, Joel spared no money. At first she attended the Chernivtsi gymnasium, then she entered university – although her payment in those years was unbearable for many. When the situation in post-war Eastern Europe worsened, Esther offered to send her and her brother to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was expensive, even for a wealthy forest manager, but he was okay with it anyway.

Moreover, back in Chernivtsi, Esther became a member of a clandestine cell, and took advantage of her trip to the Sorbonne to join the young communists of Europe, who are preparing a fire of world revolution, like the one that has just happened. produce in Russia. In Vienna, she constantly attended communist meetings, then she first got a job at the Soviet trade mission, and then received Soviet citizenship.

The key moment came when Esther declared herself – the girl spoke several European languages ​​and was ready for dangerous underground work. In the residence in Vienna, she became a translator and signaller. And in the twenty-eighth year she saw Moscow – she was sent there for retraining. There she received a new passport and officially became Elizaveta Gorskaya, and soon met another young intelligence officer, Vasily Zarubin, and became his wife. The relationship of young agents was encouraged: the family was considered the best working unit, more efficient and less suspicious than lone scouts.

For Soviet intelligence, Lisa Gorskaya-Zarubina turned out to be a real diamond. Not only did she learn languages ​​easily and was very erudite, but she also proved to be a master of the best psychological work in recruiting, evaluating objects of observation, and had a keen sense of danger and a good time. . She was given the toughest assignments, and she handled them brilliantly.

For example, before the Second World War, his task was to cool relations between Germany and France as much as possible so that they did not unite in an alliance. Zarubina coped with the task, successfully “compromising” the French officers – they would be preparing a coup, carried away by the ideas of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Zarubina (whose secret nickname, by the way, was “Vardo”) recruited the most valuable agent – the secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, who appears in intelligence documents Soviet under the name “Khanum”.

Elizabeth strove to turn all casual relations with her husband at work into friendly ones: she received guests with him, who immediately fell in love with the hostess. She was able to lead a fascinating conversation and find a common language with people who shared different interests.

In the thirties, the intelligence officer was urgently sent to Germany. The couple managed to call in Moscow to leave their little son there before a dangerous outing, and immediately drove to Berlin with new instructions and different routes. If in France they were Czech Kocheks, then in Germany they were already American. Before the United States entered World War II, Germany attempted to maintain friendly relations with the United States.

In Germany, which was most important, Zarubina re-established intelligence communications with SS-Hauptsturmführer Breitenbach. He was the head of the anti-communist spy department. This gave him the opportunity to warn Soviet agents more than once about the impending arrest or planned provocations against Soviet diplomats. He also managed to obtain and transfer information to intelligence services about the internal political situation in Germany and its military projects, such as the V rocket.

Agent Khanum died of illness, but Zarubina managed to prepare a replacement for him – an employee of the German Foreign Ministry. While working in a small post, he nevertheless had access to Ribbentrop’s secret papers and correspondence. Zarubina taught the agent how to take pictures with a microphoto camera, and the rookie took such a liking to it that he literally filled the Soviet intelligence with photos of the most valuable documents.

In the late thirties – early forties, Zarubina had to wander between Germany, the USA and the USSR. Either she recruited signalmen from the Americans to work in Germany, or, as an embassy employee, Elizaveta Gorskaya, she restored lost contact with a woman who was the wife of a high-ranking diplomat and provided Soviet intelligence with the most important information on foreign policy negotiations. It was Zarubina, again working in the United States, who brought to the attention of the Soviet government a certain secret project, later known as the Manhattan Project – the development and use of the atomic bomb.

However, in 1944 the FBI discovered the Zarubins and they were expelled from the United States as persona non grata. From that moment, Elizaveta Yulievna moved from temporary work to administrative work. In addition, she trained young scouts. Amazingly, with all the dangers of her job and life in Europe, she died at home and very ordinary – she was hit by a bus at the age of eighty-seven.