Nikolai Skoblin

Plevitskaya was a committed Bolshevik considered to be a great beauty, who had been traveling the front singing and entertaining Red Army troops.

Skoblin and his wife moved to Paris, where in 1929 he was reinstated as commander of Kornilov regiment by Gen Alexander Kutepov, chairman of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).

[2] Nikolai Skoblin played a key role in the joint operation by Germany and NKVD against Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who, along with other senior Red Army commanders, was tried and executed on orders from Joseph Stalin in 1937.

[1] On 22 September 1937, Skoblin, operating under the direction of deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence Sergey Spigelglas, lured the ROVS chairman Yevgeny Miller into an NKVD safe apartment for a meeting with two supposedly German officers.

According to Pavel Sudoplatov, Skoblin, aided by Soviet intelligence officer Leiba Feldbin (Orlov), escaped to Spain and died in Republican-held Barcelona during a bombing raid.

The Miller abduction and Skoblin's relationship with Max Eitingon was the subject of a rancorous squabble between Stephen Schwartz and Theodore Draper in the pages of the New York Review of Books in April 1988.