Elizaveta Zarubina stars: an exemplary spy who did not know failures

In the early 1930s, the National Socialists came to power in Germany. It was still a long way 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 sent mainly Jews to the Reich.

And at that time, Soviet intelligence officers Vasily Zarubin and Elizaveta Zarubina, born Esther Rosenzweig, were going to Berlin. Everything about her betrayed her Jewishness, including her distinctive appearance. But it was vital to create a new intelligence network in Berlin. Its leadership considered eternal peace with Germany to be a utopia.

Esther was tasked with establishing contacts with local, previously recruited agents and receiving information directly from the German army. She did not receive the money for the bribe. 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 the candidates, who was incredibly sensitive to people.

In the 1920s, after the revolution, many young Jews and Jewish women joined the Communists, who shared the slogans of equality and brotherhood. It is known that the Communist Party considered religiosity and the struggle for a bright future incompatible, and therefore “new converts” from Jewish families turned away from religion. Since at that time there was practically the same sign between Jewish as ethnic and Jewish as religious, the names were changed from “Jewish” to “secular”.

More often, these were Russian names, which were perceived as almost transnational in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and could take over French, German, English. The future intelligence officer Zarubina, who changed her documents, preferred a transitional option: Elizaveta Gorskaya. The name Alžběta was on the one hand of Jewish origin, on the other hand it was common among many nationalities, the surname Gorskaja could also belong to a Jew, a Russian or a Pole. What you need for international.

The girl’s father, Joel Rosenzweig, an educated, well-read, open-minded person, was a forest manager for a Polish landowner. The Rosenzweig family lived in the village of Rzhaventsy, Chotinsky district – now Ukraine and at that time Austria-Hungary. However, Rosenzweig openly sympathized with the Russian Empire. Perhaps this was influenced by his love of Russian literature.

From childhood, Esther listened to stories about the wonderful and mysterious neighboring country and did not wonder why her father does not move to St. Petersburg, because it is a city that stirs the imagination and is praised by Russian writers. It was true that Jews were not allowed in St. Petersburg under the Romanovs, but Rosenzweig managed to turn a blind eye to that.

Joel did not spare money for the education of his daughter, who soon demonstrated the ability of foreign languages. First, she attended the Chernivtsi gymnasium, then entered the university – although its payment in those years was unbearable for many. When the situation in post-war Eastern Europe escalated, Esther offered to send her and her brother to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was expensive even for a rich forest manager, but he still agreed.

In addition, Esther became a member of an underground cell in Chernivtsi and used her trip to the Sorbonne to join the young communists in Europe who are preparing a world-wide conflagration of revolution like the one that has just taken place in Russia. In Vienna, she constantly attended communist meetings and then first got a job at a Soviet trade mission, then got Soviet citizenship.

The key moment came when Esther became a self-nominator – the girl spoke several European languages ​​and was ready for dangerous underground work. At the residence in Vienna, she became a translator and liaison. And in the twenty-eighth year she saw Moscow – she was sent there for retraining. There she got 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 the Soviet intelligence service, Lisa Gorskaya-Zarubina turned out to be a real diamond. Not only did she easily learn languages ​​and was widely erudite, but she also proved to be a master of the best psychological work in recruiting, evaluating objects of observation, and had a heightened sense of danger and a good moment. She was given the most difficult missions and dealt with them brilliantly.

For example, before the Second World War, it had the task of cooling the relations between Germany and France as much as possible, so that they would not unite in an alliance. Zarubina coped with the task, successfully “compromised” the French officers – they were allegedly planning 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 Soviet intelligence documents as “Khanum”.

Elizabeth tried to turn any informal relations of her husband at work into friendly ones: she received guests with him, who immediately fell under the charm of the hostess. She knew how to conduct a fascinating conversation and find a common language with people who share different interests.

In the 1930s, an intelligence officer was urgently sent to Germany. The couple managed to call Moscow to leave their young son there before the dangerous sortie, and immediately left for Berlin with new instructions and different routes. If in France it was the Czech Kocheks, then in Germany it was the Americans. Before the US entered World War II, Germany tried to maintain friendly relations with the states.

In Germany, most importantly, Zarubina resumed intelligence communications with SS-Hauptsturmführer Breitenbach. He was the head of the anti-communist espionage department. This gave him the opportunity more than once to warn Soviet agents of impending arrests or planned provocations against Soviet diplomats. He also managed to obtain and pass on to intelligence information about the domestic political situation in Germany and its military projects such as the V-missile.

Agent Khanumová died of an illness, but Zarubina managed to prepare a replacement for her – an employee of the German Foreign Ministry. While working in a minor position, he nevertheless had access to Ribbentrop’s secret documents and correspondence. Zarubina taught the agent how to film papers with a micro camera, and the novice got such a taste that he literally filled Soviet intelligence with images of the most valuable documents.

In the late 1930s – early 1940s, Zarubina had to travel between Germany, the USA and the USSR. Either she recruited liaison officers among the Americans to work in Germany, then as an embassy employee, Elizaveta Gorskaya, she restored lost contact with a woman who was the wife of a high-ranking diplomat and supplied Soviet intelligence with the most important information about foreign policy negotiations. It was Zarubina, again operating in the United States, who alerted the Soviet government to a certain secret project that later became 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 on, Elizaveta Yulievna was transferred from agency work to administrative work. In addition, she trained young scouts. Strangely, with all the dangers of her work and life in Europe, she died at home and very ordinary – at eighty-seven, she was hit by a bus.