Cheese sandwiches and caviar: after midnight in Stalin’s infamous prison

Alexander Orlov was the archetype of the Russian spy; Eva Stricker, a young Hungarian artist drawn to the Soviet experiment. Their encounter in an interrogation room in 1936 marked both their lives.

Would they have recognised each other if their paths had crossed that autumn on Broadway? Both had recently arrived in the United States, though by different routes and for different reasons. Not long before, they’d spent several nights together.

It hadn’t been easy for either of them to leave Europe in 1938. She had travelled from Vienna via London with the help of affidavits guaranteeing she’d have financial support in the US and would be of use to her new country. One of her brothers was already in New York and doing all he could to save family members in Austria from Nazi persecution. They were Jewish, of course.

His story is more like something out of an adventure novel: first, there had been a dash from Paris to Cherbourg to board the SS Montclare before it left for Montreal. Then, he had entered the US under a false name and profession. Then, he too headed for New York, where, like her, he could count on help from family, though for different reasons and in even stranger ways. He too was Jewish, but that wasn’t the reason he fled – and, as far as we know, it played no part in their relationship.

Her name was Eva Stricker. She was born in 1906 into a well-off, assimilated Jewish family in Budapest that included several eminent scientists, among them the brothers Karl and Michael Polanyi. She was an artist, but her mother had insisted she learn a trade to support herself, so she became a ceramicist. She trained as a potter in Hungary and then Germany, and from 1930 to 1932 lived a bohemian life in Berlin, where she lodged in the former apartment of the painter Emil Nolde, at a time when street fighting between rival political factions was a daily event.

Recruited by the Soviet Union

Eva then went to join her lover and future husband, engineer Alex Weissberg, in Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine). Alex was one of the scientists the Soviet Union recruited to boost its industrialisation process and, though not a (…)

Full article: 4 142 words.

Sonia Combe

Sonia Combe is a historian and author of La loyauté à tout prix: Les floués du ‘socialisme réel’ (Loyalty at any price: deceived by ‘real socialism’), Éditions Le Bord de l’Eau, Bordeaux, 2019.

(1) Eva Zeisel, A Soviet Prison Memoir, compiled by Jean Richards and Brent C Brolin, Amazon, 2012.

(2) Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, Random House, New York, 1953.

(3) John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, Century, London, 1993. For a short time during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, it was possible to consult Orlov’s file.

(4) Edward Gazur, Alexander Orlov: the FBI’s KGB General, Carroll and Graf, New York, 2002.

(5) Founded in 1935. Its founder, Andreu Nin, was for a time close to Trotsky.

(6) There have been allegations that pre-1917 Stalin spied for the tsarist secret police.

(7) Walter G Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, The Right Book Club, London, 1940.

(8) Anatoli and Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: the Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – a Soviet Spymaster, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1994.

(9) Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: the Life and Death of Alexander Orlov, Oxford University Press, 2014.

(10) Kim Philby, My Silent War, Panther, London, 1969.

(11) His relative, Mary-Kay Wilmers, former editor of the London Review of Books, paints an unflattering portrait of him in her book The Eitingons: a Twentieth-Century Story, Verso, London, 2010.