Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin (Russian: Васи́лий Михáйлович Зарýбин) (4 February 1894 – 18 September 1972) was a Soviet intelligence officer.
In 1923, he was appointed as the chief of economic division OGPU in Vladivostok and organized the fight with the smuggling of narcotics and weapons from Europe to China.
He is credited with obtaining information from Walter Stennes, a high-ranking German adviser to Chiang Kai-shek about Hitler's plans to attack the USSR in mid-1941.
On 12 October 1941, just as the Germans were on the outskirts of Moscow, Zarubin was personally directed by Joseph Stalin to his primary task: to discover if the United States would attempt to arrange for a separate peace with Germany.
One of his officers, Vassili Dorogov reported back to Moscow that he disapproved of his "crudeness, general lack of manners, use of street language and obscenities, carelessness in his work, and repugnant secretiveness.
"[1] Zarubin came to the attention of the FBI when in April 1943, he attempted to meet Steve Nelson, a member of the Communist Party of the United States in California.
"[2] The FBI bug confirmed that Zarubin had "paid a sum of money" to Nelson "for the purpose of placing Communist Party members and Comintern agents in industries engaged in secret war production for the United States Government so that the information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.
The Rezidentura under Zarubin achieved large results and made the weighty contribution to strengthening of the economic and military power of the Soviet Union.
For the results achieved during September 1944 Zarubin received the title of the Commissioner of State Security, and by the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on 9 July 1945 became a Major General.
The anonymous author asserted that Zarubin and his deputy Markov were directly implicated in the bloody occupation of eastern Poland during the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939-1941 and the murder of some 15,000 Polish soldiers—officers and NCOs, regulars and reservists—captured by the Red Army.