Stalin's Singing Spy
The Life and Exile of Nadezhda Plevitskaya
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- €49.99
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- €49.99
Publisher Description
Stalin’s Singing Spy follows the remarkable life of NadezhdaPlevitskaya, a Russian peasant girl who achieved fame as one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favorite singers and infamy as one of Stalin’s agents. Pamela A. Jordan traces Plevitskaya’s life from her childhood in an isolated village to national stardom. She always declared that she was foremost an artist who sang for all people, regardless of their ideological leanings or socioeconomic background. She claimed throughout her career to be fundamentally apolitical, yet decades later in Europe, Plevitskaya was unmasked as one of Joseph Stalin’s secret agents along with her husband, White Russian General Nikolai Skoblin. Their experiences in exile shed light on Stalin’s covert operations and the hardships Russian émigrés faced in interwar Europe, an era of great political and economic turmoil.
In addition, this book uncovers the roles that the couple played in one of the Soviets’ major intelligence coups—the 1937 kidnapping of White Russian General Evgeny Miller in Paris. Jordan recreates Plevitskaya’s sensationalized 1938 criminal trial in the Palace of Justice, where she was accused of conspiring to kidnap Miller and portrayed as a Red femme fatale. The first Western biography of Plevitskaya and the first to reconstruct her dramatic trial, this book provides a fascinating window into Soviet-era espionage in interwar Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dense, fascinating biography, political scientist Jordan (Defending Rights in Russia) traces the notorious career of a popular Russian folk singer turned Soviet spy. Born near Kursk sometime around 1879 (the exact date is disputed; Plevitskaya herself gave conflicting birth years up to 1886), Plevitskaya grew up in a large peasant family. She entered a convent intending to become a nun but abandoned it to work as a circus performer before signing on as a singer with the Lipkina Choir. Jordan shines when she describes the whirl of early 20th-century Russian culture and politics. Plevitskaya tried to keep them separate, claiming she had no interest in taking sides in the Russian Revolution. That proved impossible. In the 1920s, she and her third husband, Nikolai Skoblin, a White Army officer, were forced to flee to France. Lured by patriotic rhetoric and generous payments, the couple later agreed to spy on the Russian migr community for the Soviets. Unfortunately for both of them, they were implicated in the 1937 kidnapping of Gen. Evgeny Miller, a prominent anti-Soviet exile. There's an exciting story here, though Jordan's scholarly approach slows it down and subordinates Plevitskaya's outsized personality to the details of history. Illus.
