The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  “I look at the face of the assassin,” wrote Borys Vitoshynsky in his report on the first day of the trial. “He often smiles, almost imperceptibly striving to create a ‘sympathetic impression.’ But are we Ukrainians the only ones to whom it seems that there is something repulsive about his behavior?” To the question that troubled many in the room—Was Stashinsky a traitor to his own family, or did he sacrifice himself to save it from persecution?—Vitoshynsky had a very clear answer: he was a traitor. “For indeed,” wrote the former prisoner of Bereza Kartuzka and Auschwitz, “could his parents and sisters have supposed for a moment that their son and brother would make them the first victims of his betrayal under the lunatic pretext of protecting them from the Bolsheviks?”

  Vitoshynsky found support among some of the non-Ukrainian reporters whom he met at the trial. One of them was Dominique Auclères, a correspondent for Le Figaro and an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe—she had just published a book in Paris about a woman who claimed to be Princess Anastasia, daughter of the last Russian tsar. “Stashinsky is posing! He behaves as if he were in the theater; moreover, he makes the impression of someone with a weak character,” she told Vitoshynsky. On another occasion she said to him: “I would not grant Stashinsky any extenuating circumstances. He is an informer and a coward. He not only killed Bandera but earlier he even betrayed his own family, which he supposedly wanted to protect.” Vitoshynsky was glad to quote Dominique Auclères in his reportages.7

  The court reconvened after the coffee break, and Bogdan Stashinsky was asked to describe his first major assignment with the Soviet secret police. In early 1951, Stashinsky said, Captain Sitnikovsky told him to penetrate the resistance group on which he was reporting. The task was to collect information on someone who had helped assassinate the well-known Ukrainian communist writer Yaroslav Halan.

  The audience listened with a mixture of shock and disbelief as Stashinsky described his penetration of the resistance unit led by his own sister’s fiancé. He told the court that Mykhailo Stakhur, the killer of Yaroslav Halan whom he tracked down in the forest and betrayed to Sitnikovsky, was killed in action, not caught on the basis of the information supplied by him. The Bandera people in the courtroom knew that he was lying. Since that summer they had had in their possession Soviet reports on the trial, which prominently featured Mykhailo Stakhur as one of the accused—clearly not dead.8

  As noon was approaching in Karlsruhe, Heinrich Jagusch declared the court adjourned for lunch. The proceedings would resume at 3:00 p.m. Journalists rushed to the telephones to file their first reports on the trial. Among them was Vitoshynsky, whose article appeared in the Banderite Shliakh peremohy on October 10. It ended with the following statement: “We apologize for the highly condensed form of this report, but technical conditions oblige us to relay this material to Munich immediately, so that our readers may learn at least in abbreviated form about the first day of the trial.” Despite his apology, Vitoshynsky turned out to be the most detailed chronicler of the trial. No other correspondent had as much background knowledge and intimate interest in what was going on in the courtroom.9

  Stashinsky’s attorney, Dr. Helmut Seidel, got a chance to question his client immediately after the lunch break. Seidel was an experienced attorney, and Stashinsky was lucky to have him on his side. “Stashinsky got a defender from the government, a good attorney from Karlsruhe . . . who is not a man of left-wing convictions,” wrote Bandera’s successor, Stepan Lenkavsky, to Jaroslav Padoch in May 1962. Seidel asked Stashinsky about the motives that had led him to work for the Soviet secret police. Stashinsky responded that he considered the insurgency senseless and doomed. He also said that he was appalled by the atrocities that had been committed by the members of the underground. “I have already spoken of burned homes in our village,” noted Stashinsky. “On coming to that settlement with my parents, I was deeply shaken. I could not forget it.”

  Seidel’s next question dealt with the threat to Stashinsky’s family. “Did the promise not to punish you and your parents in the event that you helped also apply to your sister, who maintained ties with the resistance movement?” asked the attorney. Stashinsky answered in the affirmative. He was helpless, maneuvered into a situation that left him no choice but to join the secret police. Seidel was looking for mitigating circumstances to convince the judges that Stashinsky had joined the KGB under duress, not of his own free will. In his testimony throughout the day, Stashinsky clearly followed the strategy adopted by his attorney.10

  The attorneys for Bandera’s and Rebet’s families had a very different strategy. They questioned Stashinsky’s motives and his story, trying to portray him as a traitor both to his family and to his people. During the first day of hearings, only Dr. Adolf Miehr, who represented Daria Rebet, had the opportunity to ask a question. When Stashinsky testified about breaking and then restoring relations with his family, Miehr inquired whether he knew what had happened to Ivan Laba, the commander of the underground unit who had dated his sister and whom he had betrayed. Stashinsky responded that he had died in battle. He did not know exactly when that happened, but he had heard of it from family members shortly before leaving for Poland and Germany in the summer of 1954. That could be true. Laba had been killed by the secret police in 1951. No one in the West knew of this at the time.11

  Neither Hans Neuwirth nor Charles Kersten nor Jaroslav Padoch got a chance to ask questions during the first day of the proceedings. Led by questions from Jagusch, Stashinsky continued to testify for the rest of the afternoon about his involvement with the Soviet secret services. After graduating from the Kyiv school, he was sent first to Poland and then to East Germany, where he first met his case officer, Sergei Damon. On Damon’s orders he traveled to Munich to meet with a Ukrainian émigré whom the KGB wanted to recruit as an agent. He described how he stuffed dead drops and spied on American and West German military installations. “Stashinsky,” wrote the ever-present Vitoshynsky, “speaks as if he were not being tried for known and less known murders and other heinous crimes that he had committed, but as if he were telling an interested public about his exploits. He sometimes smiles, probably thinking that by twisting his lips that way, which suggests cynicism and laughter, and with his subdued voice he is presenting himself as a good-hearted and naively innocent type.” The nervousness that had been apparent during the morning session seemed all but gone. “He responds to questions with almost unvarying indifferent equanimity; he does not get excited; he does not raise his voice,” said another member of the audience in describing Stashinsky’s demeanor.12

  The first day of the trial was nearing its end. It was largely a two-man show: Jagusch and Stashinsky. The first tried to establish the facts and understand the motives, while the second worked hard to convince the judge that he was answering his questions as honestly and completely as possible. It seemed during the first day of the proceedings that Stashinsky’s strategy had failed. While Jagusch treated the accused with utmost respect, addressing him almost exclusively as “Herr Stashinsky,” he often questioned Stashinsky’s motives. When Stashinsky reminded the court about how shocked he had been by the sight of the burned Polish houses, the judge told him: “You were deeply affected by the burned settlement at the end of 1943, when you were twelve years old. You had your conversation with Sitnikovsky at nineteen years of age.” It was not looking good for Stashinsky.13

  40

  FIRST MURDER

  On the morning of October 9, the second day of the trial, Borys Vitoshynsky, reporter for the Bandera organization’s newspaper Shliakh peremohy, was at the entrance to the Federal Criminal Court long before the building opened for business. “This morning was again clear, sunny, and pleasantly cool, refreshing the weary faces of journalists who had doubtless spent the night working to prepare articles and information for their papers,” he wrote in his report on the trial. “The doors to the building where the trial is going on are still locked, and a very young police officer is walking by them. And
those waiting before the doors are constantly growing in number.”1

  Finally, after a thorough document check, journalists and visitors were allowed into the building and then into courtroom 232. At a quarter to nine, the police brought Stashinsky into the courtroom. Five minutes later, Heinrich Jagusch, in his robe and one-lens glasses, entered with the rest of the judges. With all the attorneys—Stashinsky’s Dr. Helmut Seidel, Daria Rebet’s Dr. Adolf Miehr, and Yaroslava Bandera’s Dr. Hans Neuwirth, Charles Kersten, and Jaroslav Padoch—in attendance, the proceedings could begin. It was a day that Daria Rebet and her twenty-year-old son, Andrii, had awaited with particular trepidation: Stashinsky was expected to testify on the killing of their husband and father. Unlike Bandera’s followers, who had close ties with the West German intelligence and counterintelligence services, the Rebets had no inside information about either the killer or his testimony. As Andrii Rebet remembered later, they only learned that Lev Rebet had been murdered by a KGB assassin from the newspapers. According to CIA records, in the months leading up to the trial, Daria was followed by someone in what her friends believed was an attempt to scare her and possibly cause a heart attack. She withstood the pressure and was now ready to face her husband’s killer.2

  Many in the room were curious to learn why the KGB had decided to kill Lev Rebet at all; he was a journalist who had no known involvement with the secret services or their clandestine operations in the Soviet Union. Andrii recalled that with most of his father’s political allies leaving for North America, Lev Rebet had also made plans to emigrate to the United States. He had even begun taking courses to become a lathe operator, and it was only his wife’s refusal to go overseas that made him stay longer in Germany. In a perverse way, the question of why Rebet was killed two years earlier than Stepan Bandera also roiled Bandera’s followers, who had spent years trying to prove that they, not Rebet and his circle, were the true threat to the Soviet regime in Ukraine. More than that, they had long claimed that Rebet’s opposition to Bandera undermined the unity of the nationalist camp and thus benefited the Soviets. After Stashinsky’s revelations were made public, rumors spread throughout emigré circles that Rebet had been chosen simply as target practice to prepare the assassin for the real job of killing Bandera. After trying the spray pistol on a dog, claimed the cynics, the KGB tried it on a human being, who just happened to be Rebet.3

  Back in March of that year, Hans Neuwirth had tried to explain the choice of Rebet as Stashinsky’s first target in a memo for the investigating judge Fritz von Engelbrechten. He wrote that the leaders of the Bandera faction rejected any suggestions that Stashinsky had been assigned to kill Rebet merely for practice. They proceeded from the premise that in calculating outcomes, “the Bolsheviks are too good and sober to run the risk of being prematurely compromised without a palpable goal and benefit.” But having rejected that theory, the Banderite leadership could not come up with an alternative. Still believing that Rebet’s revolt against Bandera was in the interests of the KGB, they were at a loss to explain the KGB’s motive. “Thus,” wrote Neuwirth, “there is no palpable motive why the Bolsheviks would liquidate Rebet. On the contrary, he was beneficial to them because of his oppositional activity.” The memo eventually got into the hands of Daria Rebet and her circle; it was then published, adding to the already tangible atmosphere of distrust between the two nationalist groups.4

  Jagusch began by showing Stashinsky a photo of the man whom the accused identified as Dr. Lev Rebet. Jagusch then read aloud a brief biography of the Ukrainian leader that followed Rebet’s life story, from his study of law at Lviv (then Polish Lwów) University to heading the nationalist underground in the wake of Bandera’s arrest in 1934, and from his participation in the government of independent Ukraine, proclaimed in 1941 against German wishes, to his imprisonment in Auschwitz, his break with Bandera, and his role as editor of the newspaper that became a platform for the democratic opposition in the nationalist camp. After finishing with the biography, Jagusch asked Stashinsky an open-ended question: “What can you say about Rebet?”

  What he knew about Rebet, explained Stashinsky, came almost exclusively from his case officer, Sergei Damon. Like other KGB officers at Karlshorst, Damon spoke of Rebet as an ideologue and a newspaper editor. The KGB argued that nationalist newspapers such as Rebet’s were spreading anti-Soviet propaganda and preventing émigrés from returning to their homeland. Stashinsky had never read any of Rebet’s writings, however; he had taken Damon at his word.5

  The previous day, when Stashinsky had testified about his contact with Ivan Bysaga, the KGB agent closest to Rebet, Jagusch had made a special effort to find out what Stashinsky himself had thought about the early plans to kidnap Lev Rebet. “Is it true that you saw those goals and that method of kidnapping as Sergei [Damon] presented them to you?” asked Jagusch. Stashinsky confirmed that that was indeed the case. “I worked for the KGB and had to carry out the assignments I was given,” he told the judge. Jagusch pressed on: “Did you think it was right?” Stashinsky answered in the affirmative. “There are various kinds of people,” responded Jagusch, “who agree to collaborate with the KGB; some even do so gladly. You, Mr. Stashinsky, belong to that category.” Stashinsky was silent. He had nothing to say, or at least preferred to say nothing. Those in the audience could see that he was at a loss.6

  Jagusch moved on to the issue of the murder weapon. “Have you ever seen this device before?” Jagusch asked Stashinsky, showing him a tube approximately eighteen centimeters long that resembled a somewhat over-sized pen. “Dead silence prevailed in the chamber,” wrote Borys Vitoshynsky in his report. “All eyes turned to Stashinsky.” Stashinsky calmly told the judge that the tube had been reconstructed on the basis of a drawing he had made at the request of the police. Jagusch asked whether the object was the same as the one given him by the man from Moscow. After examining the tube, Stashinsky responded that the length was exactly the same, but the replica was heavier than the original.

  “He turns it over in his hands, takes it apart and puts it back together, explaining that the ‘apparatus’ is quite similar ‘in principle’ to the real one that he used to kill people, but that the replica is still somewhat different,” wrote Vitoshynsky. A thought occurred to him: What if the spray pistol brought to Karlshorst by the man from Moscow had been mass-produced? How many of the “heart attacks” suffered by opponents of the Moscow regime were indeed natural? “No one can answer that question,” wrote Vitoshynsky. “Perhaps many simply avoid answering the question, reassuring themselves that only the two assassinations to which Stashinsky has confessed are involved.” Stashinsky believed that a pistol similar to the one he used to kill Lev Rebet had been used previously to assassinate someone else, but he did not know who the victim was and never dared to ask. When the pistol was presented to him by the “man from Moscow,” Stashinsky explained to the court, he had no time to think about anything: the weapons expert began immediately to instruct him in its usage.7

  Once Stashinsky’s confession had become public in the fall of 1961, many in the Ukrainian emigration had hypothesized that the first victim of Moscow’s clandestine killing spree had been Danylo Skoropadsky, the hale and hearty fifty-four-year-old son of Pavlo Skoropadsky, who ruled Ukraine in 1918. The Skoropadsky family was the closest thing Ukraine had to its own ruling dynasty in the twentieth century. Pavlo Skoropadsky, a descendant of an eighteenth-century hetman—ruler of Cossack Ukraine—and a high-flying officer in the Russian imperial army, had assumed the title of hetman in 1918 and ruled Ukraine under German tutelage for eight months—the longest period of relative stability in Ukraine’s turbulent revolutionary history. When the Germans left at the end of 1918, the Bolsheviks forced Hetman Skoropadsky to leave Ukraine. He spent the interwar period in Germany, running a pro-independence movement that served as an alternative to the radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. He died in April 1945 of wounds from a bomb dropped by an American airplane. The old hetman’s cause of crea
ting a monarchical, multiethnic Ukrainian state was continued by his son, Danylo, who took over the movement in 1948 at the age of forty-four.

  Danylo Skoropadsky had lived in London, traveling from time to time to Germany and then to the United States and Canada to rally his supporters and create a common front with the other Ukrainian organizations, including the nationalists, who by then had divided into three factions. If Bandera and Rebet were “splitters,” Skoropadsky was a “unifier.” In April 1956, less than a year before his death, Skoropadsky served as a cosponsor of a 10,000-strong Polish-Ukrainian demonstration protesting the visit of Nikita Khrushchev to Britain—one of the Soviet leader’s first foreign trips. On February 22, 1957, Skoropadsky went to his favorite restaurant for dinner. He felt sick and went home, and soon he lost consciousness. That night he was taken to a hospital, where he died the next morning. The inscription on his tombstone read: “I am building Ukraine for all and with all.” Rumor had it that he was killed by a KGB agent named “Sergei,” who allegedly followed him during the last days of his life.8

  At the end of the day, Stashinsky testified about the beginning of his hunt for Lev Rebet, with the spray pistol wrapped in a newspaper. Jagusch offered him both the replica of the pistol and a newspaper to demonstrate how he had concealed his weapon. “At the request of the president of the senate,” wrote one of the Ukrainian journalists present in the courtroom, “Stashinsky demonstrates to the court in the greatest detail, for almost thirty minutes, how the ‘apparatus’ should be wrapped so as not to raise the slightest suspicion of a passerby. He is very professional, perhaps even too professional with all the explanations and demonstrations. . . . Such is the impression of more than one onlooker in the room. . . . All his attention is keenly focused on the death-dealing weapon—he is like a hunter entranced by the very appearance of his hunting rifle. . . . The audience listened with bated breath to his calm, coldly objective words of explanation.” Throughout the rest of the day, Stashinsky kept his cool, showing little, if any, emotion. Perhaps the only exception was his description of the moment when he killed Rebet. “Walking past him, I suddenly raised my hand,” he said with a sigh, “and slowly . . . well, like that, I squeezed the trigger and went on.” Blood rose to his cheeks, adding color to his otherwise pale face.9