Nikolai was still a teenager when he enrolled in a Moscow school for vaudeville, hoping it would lead to an acting career. After six months of learning to be an “artistic whistler,” he was ready to join a traveling company. Then World War II intervened. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and Nikolai was drafted for a role in a military film. Soon Hitler’s troops were massed at Moscow’s door, and an evacuation of the city was imminent. Soviet intelligence officers hit on a scheme to leave behind a vaudeville troupe that would become part of the resistance; Nikolai and three other young actors were recruited to make up the troupe.
In the end, the Germans were beaten back and the services of the would-be partisans were not needed. But Nikolai had impressed his superiors, especially Major General Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD, as the KGB was then known. The general, overseer of Leon Trotsky’s slaying in Mexico, was one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished assassins. In short order, Nikolai signed on with Sudoplatov and joined a squad assigned to kill Franz von Papen, a Nazi appeaser who was Germany’s ambassador to Turkey. But Nikolai contracted typhoid fever en route and was not there when the attempted assassination went awry.
His next mission sent him behind enemy lines. He was only twenty-one years old, but was about to become a Soviet hero.
Nikolai’s target was Wilhelm Kube, the Nazi leader of German-held Belorussia. Secreted into the Belorussian capital, Minsk, by the Soviet underground in August 1943, Nikolai tracked down a housekeeper who serviced Kube’s quarters. He showed the woman how she could place a bomb with a delayed fuse beneath the Nazi’s bed, and argued that the killing would be an act of patriotism. The housekeeper finally agreed to do her part. Less than a week later, a courier awakened Nikolai with urgent news: “Kube is killed…. The bed and Kube blown to bits!” The housekeeper escaped with a partisan unit.
The Nazi’s assassination was one of Nikolai’s proudest moments, perhaps the proudest. In his memoirs, he wrote that it had been a chance to “kill a man whose name to millions symbolized fear and terror!” Stalin ordered medals for all who had participated in Kube’s demise, and Sudoplatov himself pinned Nikolai’s on the young spy’s lapel.
As I researched the episode, a small detail seemed to reveal a side of Nikolai that surprised me. In his memoirs, published in 1959, he wrote that he had brought the bomb to the housekeeper, showed her how to attach it to a bed frame, and left it with her. But a retired CIA agent referred me to a book by the late British writer Gordon Brook-Shepherd that cast doubt on that account. When I put the question directly to Nikolai, he indeed backed away from the version in his memoirs. He said he had instructed the housekeeper how to use the bomb, but that the actual explosive was provided to her by Nadya Trayan, a partisan who later became one of the Soviet Union’s most famous war heroes. Five decades had passed between the time he published his memoirs and I interviewed him. But I had trouble believing the discrepancy was the product of an old man’s fading memory; Nikolai seemed to have excellent recall of past events. The more likely explanation was that his memoirs omitted Nadya Trayan’s participation simply because it was a better story, at least from his perspective. The fact that he immediately owned up to the inaccuracy persuaded me that there was nothing malign about it.
The more time we spent together, the more Nikolai displayed those self-serving and self-absorbed aspects of his personality—but with an infectious charm. Probably his closest friend in San Bernardino was Nick Andonov, an émigré from Macedonia who practiced psychology. He said Nikolai could be quite demanding, calling at any hour to insist that Andonov come over for a long talk on some arcane subject the professor had been ruminating on. Nick would comply; he felt he had to—he wanted to—out of friendship.
To Andonov, Nikolai was an extremely sensitive, complex, and difficult figure who felt misunderstood by almost everyone. To that, I would add deeply emotional and sometimes self-pitying. When an effort to republish his memoirs failed, Nikolai retreated into an “it doesn’t matter” mode, sullen and withdrawn—why would I want them published anyway; no one wants to read about such archaic matters.
Nikolai also didn’t always own up to his embellishments. During our conversations, he would feign puzzlement if I asked a question that he found insulting, especially one that challenged the veracity of one of his stories. He would say, “I don’t understand the question.”
But in all these cases—when he withdrew at perceived slights by publishers or by me—he would get over the offense in a couple of days and return for more. He loved the attention.
His relationship with Tatjana was a bit of a mystery. The two of them had separated two decades before. (Nikolai blamed it on their age difference—she was nineteen years his junior. Also, she was too practical, while he was “metaphysical.”)
They did not attempt to hide their disagreements. He was rude and condescending toward her, extremely chauvinistic. When she attempted to speak, he simply talked over her or said, “May I have the floor?” and then took it. He especially reacted that way when the talk turned to politics (his were decidedly right wing). She could be equally dismissive, responding to one of his tirades with, “Right, Nikolai, umm-hmmm,” while rolling her eyes.
And yet they still had obvious affection for each other. After his physical condition worsened, they spoke almost every day. She screened calls for him, cooked for him, and let him entertain guests at her home. (His apartment was a disaster, he explained.) How many estranged wives would do all that for their husbands?
Most often, Nikolai was extremely polite and possessed of a self-effacing sense of humor. He had a coughing fit at one point and Tatjana asked if he needed anything. “Yes, a new throat,” he replied.
He also was an articulate, intelligent, and erudite man who was utterly riveting when he discussed psychology and why he found parapsychology to be the discipline’s ultimate form.
Did I find him heroic? I would say I respected and admired him. He was a man of conscience, and I didn’t mind his affection for the spotlight.
In 1945, the war concluded, Sudoplatov dispatched Soviet operatives to Eastern European countries, as what were called “sleeper agents” in an earlier age. Nikolai ended up in Romania, where for four years he posed as a Polish immigrant and readied himself for undercover assignments. Then he was recalled to Moscow to engage in intelligence missions against Moscow’s new enemies, the United States and its allies.
Acquaintances thought Nikolai a ladies’ man, dapper and slim. Sudoplatov praised Nikolai’s “blond, blue-eyed good looks” and “suave ways” as valuable assets, especially if “turning” a woman was part of the assignment. The general treated his protégé with sometimes astonishing indulgence and seemed to see Nikolai as “a young Sudoplatov.” “I have big plans for you,” the general had promised when Nikolai left for Romania.
But now Nikolai was losing his zest for the spy game. The romance and patriotism that had motivated him as a wartime intelligence officer had not carried over to peacetime. He wanted to try his hand at film-making or the theater, and lobbied Sudoplatov to release him from duty. The general refused, and Nikolai thought he knew why. Sudoplatov could not go to Stalin and admit that he had so wrongly judged an agent and vouched for him in the past; such a lapse was inexcusable, and “if he admitted it, he could be liquidated, and if I did, I could be,” Nikolai said.
In 1952, Sudoplatov told Nikolai he had been chosen to assassinate Alexander Kerensky, who ruled the provisional government between the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Stalin wanted Kerensky killed because he seemed about to unite anti-Soviet émigrés in Europe. Nikolai tried to talk his way out of the assignment, but managed to avoid it only when Stalin decided that Kerensky was not a serious threat and called off the mission.