Sergei Efron

[2][3][4] Efron contracted tuberculosis as a teenager and his mental and physical health was strained further upon learning of his mother's death.

[5] When Efron was a 17-year-old cadet in the officers' academy, he met 19-year-old Marina Tsvetaeva on 5 May 1911 at Koktebel ("Blue Height"), a well-known Crimean haven for writers, poets and artists.

While they had an intense relationship, Tsvetaeva had affairs, such as those with Osip Mandelstam and a poetess Sofia Parnok.

[6] In October 1917, he participated in the fighting against the Bolsheviks in Moscow, then he joined the White Army and participated in the Ice March and defense of the Crimea,[9] while Tsvetaeva returned from the Crimea to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband.

Efron was disenchanted with what he felt was a revolution largely unsupported by the Russian people, the expression of which inspired Tsvetaeva's Daybreak on the Rails.

[10] There, in May 1922, Efron was reunited in Berlin with his wife, Tsvetaeva, and daughter Ariadna who had left the Soviet Union.

She writes "we are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker... the only meat we eat is horse-meat".

With Efron now rarely free from tuberculosis, their daughter Ariadna was relegated to the role of the mother's helper and confidante, and consequently felt robbed of much of her childhood.

Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance for his repatriation from the Communists, he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, and in doing so was established in a dacha, a safe house in the countryside.

In September 1937, an investigation by French and Swiss police implicated Efron in the murder of former NKVD spymaster and defector Ignace Reiss (also known as Ignaty Reyss and Ignatz Reiss), on a country lane near Lausanne, Switzerland.

[10][11][13] After defecting and then criticizing Stalin and Yezhov, Soviet spy Reiss had promised not to reveal any state security secrets[14] and fled with his wife and child to the remote village of Finhaut, Valais canton, Switzerland, to hide.

After they had been hiding for a month, they were contacted by a refugee member of the Communist Party of Germany Gertrude Schildbach under orders from Roland Lyudvigovich Abbiate, alias Francois Rossi, alias Vladimir Pravdin, codename LETCHIK ("Pilot"), a Russian expatriate, citizen of Monaco, and an NKVD agent.

[15][16] Reiss, who was using the alias Eberhardt, was lured by Gertrude Schildbach onto a side road near Lausanne where Roland Abbiate was waiting for him with a Soviet PPD-34 sub-machine gun.

[5] Efron was shot in 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre; Alya served over eight years in prison.