Margaret Mead

Human cultures are the most distinctive creations of human beings, drawing as they do not only upon the special contributions of the singularly gifted, . . .

Life is With People by Mark Zborowski.
New York : International Universities Press, 1952, page 9.

Note : apparently, Ms. Mead had survived an acquaintance with Etienne.

She was not the only one duped. "Etienne" had been reportedly able to con Trotsky himself (!). And many, many more, thereafter.

"No communist conspiracy" comes to the mind. (WPT)

From The Sword and the Shield, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, 1999

Despite Stalin�s increasing obsession during the 1930s with Trotskyist conspiracy, Trotsky never really represented any credible threat to the Stalinist regime. He spent his early years in exile trying vainly to find a European base from which to organize his followers. In 1933 he left Turkey for France, then two years later moved on the Norway, but his political activity in all three countries was severely restricted by the reluctant host governments. In 1937, having finally despaired of finding a European headquarters, Trotsky left for Mexico, where he remained until his assassination three years later. The chief European organizer of the Trotskyist movement for most of the 1930s was not Trotsky himself but his elder son, Lev Sedov, who from 1933 was based in Paris. It was Sedov who, until his death in 1938, organized publication of his father�s Bulletin of the Opposition and maintained contact with Trotsky�s scattered supporters. Sedov�s entourage, like his father�s was penetrated by the OGPU and NKVD. From 1934 onwards his closest confidant and collaborator in Paris was an NKVD agent, the Russian-born Polish Communist Mark Zborowski, known to Sedov as êtienne [sic] and successively codenamed by the Center MAKS, MAK, TULIP and KANT. Sedov trusted �Étienne� so completely that he gave him the key to his letterbox, allowed him to collect his mail and entrusted him with Trotsky�s most confidential files and archives for safekeeping.⁷

( page 69 )

 

Despite the numerous other duties of Serebryansky�s Paris residency, its main task remained the surveillance and destabilization of French Trotskyists. Until 1937 Lev Sedov, thanks to his misplaced but total confidence in �Étienne� Zborowski, was such an indispensable source on the POLECATS (as the Trotskyists were codenamed by the Center) that he was not marked down as a target for liquidation.¹² In the autumn of 1936 Zborowski warned the Centre that, because of his financial problems, Trotsky was selling part of his archive (formerly among the papers entrusted by Sedov to Zborowski for safekeeping) to the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History based in Amsterdam. Serebryansky was ordered to set up a task force to recover it, codenamed the HENRY group. He began by renting the flat immediately above the institute in the rue Michelet in order to keep it under surveillance. On Serebryansky�s instructions, Zborowski, then working as a service engineer at a Paris telephone exchange, was ordered to cause a fault on the Institute�s telephone line in order to give him a chance to reconnoiter the exact location of the Trotsky papers and examine the locks. When the Institute reported the fault on its line, however, one of Zborowski�s colleagues was sent to mend the fault instead. Zborowski promptly put the Institute�s phone out of action once again and on this occasion was called to make the repair himself. As he left the Institute, having mended the fault and closely inspected the locks to the front and back doors, he was given a five franc tip by the director, Boris Nikolayevsky, a prominent Menshevik émigré

( pages 70 - 71 )

 

Remarkably, many otherwise admirable studies of the Stalin era fail to mention the relentless secret pursuit of �enemies of the people� in western Europe. The result, all too frequently, is a sanitized, curiously bloodless interpretation of Soviet foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War which fails to recognize the priority given to assassination. Outside Spain, the main theater of operations for the NKVD� s assassins was France, where their chief targets were Lev Sedov and General Yevgeni Karlovich Miller, Kutepov�s successor as head of the White Guard ROVS. In the summer of 1937 Serebryansky devised similar plans to liquidate both. Sedov and Miller were each to be kidnapped in Paris, smuggled on board a boat waiting off the Channel coast, then brought to the Soviet Union for interrogation and retribution. The first stage in the abduction operations was the penetration of their entourages.

Like Sedov�s assistant �Étienne� Zborowski, Miller�s deputy, General Nikolai Skoblin, was an NKVD agent. . . .

Planning for the abduction of Sedov was at an advanced stage by the time Miller disappeared. A fishing boat had been hired at Boulogne to take him on the first stage of his journey to the Soviet Union.⁴⁰ The operation, however, was aborted—possibly as a result of the furor aroused in France by the NKVD�s suspected involvement in Miller�s abduction. A few months later Sedov met a different end. On February 8, 1938 he entered hospital with acute appendicitis. �Étienne� Zborowski helped to persuade him that, to avoid NKVD surveillance, he must have his appendix removed not at a French hospital but at a small private clinic run by Russian émirés, which was in reality an easier target for Soviet penetration. No sooner had Zborowski ordered the ambulance than, as he later admitted, he alerted the NKVD. But, for alleged security reasons, he refused to reveal the address of the clinic to French Trotskyists. Sedov�s operation was successful and for a few days he seemed to be making a normal recovery. Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled his doctors. Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on February 16 at the age of only thirty-two. The contemporary files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for his death.⁴¹ It had, however, a sophisticated medical section, the Kamera, which experimented with lethal drugs and was capable of poisoning Sedov. It is certain that the NKVD intended to assassinate Sedov, just as it planned to kill Trotsky and his other leading lieutenants. What remains in doubt is whether Sedov was murdered by the NKVD in February 1938 or whether he died of natural causes before he could be assassinated.42

Sedov's death enabled the NKVD to take a leading role in the Trotskyist organization. Zborowski became both publisher of the Bulletin of the Opposition and Trotsky's most important contact with his European supporters. While unobtrusively encouraging internecine warfare between the rival Trotskyist tendencies, Zborowski impeccably maintained his own cover. On one occasion he wrote to tell Trotsky that the Bulletin was about to publish an article entitle "Trotsky's Life in Danger," which would expose the activities of NKVD agents in Mexico. In the summer of 1938 the defector Aleksandr Orlov, then living in the United States, sent Trotsky an anonymous letter warning him that his life was in danger from an NKVD agent in Paris. Orlov did not know the agent's surname but said that his first name was Mark (the real first name of "Étienne" Zborowski), and gave a detailed description of his appearance and background. Trotsky suspected that this letter and others like it were the work of NKVD agents provocateurs. Zborowski agreed. When told about one of the accusations against him, he is reported as having given a "hearty laugh."⁴³

Following the death of Sedov, the NKVD's next major Trotskyist target in Europe was the German Rudolf Klement, secretary of Trotsky's Fourth International, whose founding conference was due to be held later in the year.⁴⁴ On July 13, 1938 the NKVD abducted Klement from his Paris home. A few weeks later his headless corpse was washed ashore on the banks of the Seine. The founding conference of the Fourth International in September was a tragicomic event, attended by only twenty-one delegates claiming to represent mostly minuscule Trotskyist groups in eleven countries. The Russian section, whose authentic members had probably been entirely exterminated, was represented by Zborowski. The American Trotskyist Sylvia Angeloff, one of the conference translators, was accompanied by her Spanish lover, Ramón Mercader, an NKVD illegal posing as a Belgian journalist who was later to achieve fame as Trotsky�s assassin in Mexico City.⁴⁵

( pages 74 - 76 )

---

7. Andrew and Gordievsky KGB, pp. 171-2; Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 334-6.  [Etc]

12. There are a number of examples in the VENONA decrypts of the use of the KHORKI (�Polecat�) codename for the Trotskyists.

40. k-4, 198.
41. There is, however, one later reference to him being �killed�; vol. 6. ch. 12.
42. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 179-80. Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 359-60. Costello and Tsarev, Dangerous Illusions, pp. 282-4.
43. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 405-10. Costello and Tsarev, ,I>Deadly Illusions, pp. 319-21.
44. vol. 6, ch. 12.
45. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3. pp. 407-8, 419-20. Sylvia Angeloff later described how, at an apparently �accidental meeting,� the �handsome and dashing� Mercader, posing as a Belgian journalist, had �swept her off her feet with his charm, gallantry, and generosity.� Hook, Out of Step, p. 242.

( notes on pages 584, 585, 586 )

The sword and the shield :
the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.
New York : Basic Books, 1999.

Hiding behind the Jewish themes #151; what other interpretation can you find, the reader ?

Zborowski,* Mark. Title Life is with people : the culture of the shtetl / Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog ; foreword by Margaret Mead ; introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Publisher New York : Schocken Books, c1995. Description xlviii, 452 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 0805210547 Language English Note Originally published 1962, c1952. With new introd. Note Includes bibliographical references (p. 431-433) and index.

* "Sorry", but this is not to be countenanced without comment.

The name Zborowski has been that of an old Polish family, how come this specialist in several lines had got to using it is something of a question.

He 'was born in 1907 in Russia, to a poor Jewish family. He emigrated to Lodz and joined the Polish Communist Party'*, which party was not that much of a Polish party (by the way).

Please see the literature on 'anti-Semitism', such as could be believed—which is far from uniformly observed. — (WPT)

    * Vaksberg, Stalin against Jews, New York : Knopf, 1994, p. 96.

Zborowski, Mark. Title People in pain / Mark Zborowski ; foreward by Margaret Mead. Publisher Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1985 printing, c1969. Description xviii, 274 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0835793427 Language English Note Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1969 (The Jossey-Bass behavioral science series) Note Bibliography: p. 261-268.

Zborowski, Mark. Title Life is with people; the culture of the shtetl [by] Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Foreword by Margaret Mead. Publisher New York, Schocken Brooks [1974, c1952] Description 452 p. 21 cm. Series Schocken, SB20 Language English Note Includes bibliography.

Zborowski, Mark. Title Life is with people; the Jewish little town of Eastern Europe [by] Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Foreword by Margaret Mead. Publisher New York, International Universities Press [1969,c1952] Description 456 p. 23cm. Language English Note Bibliography: p.433-436.

Zborowski, Mark Title People in pain / Mark Zborowski ; foreward by Margaret Mead Publisher San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1969 Description xviii, 274 p Series The Jossey-Bass behavioral science series ISBN 0875890466 Language English Note Includes index Note Bibliography: p. 261-268

Zborowski, Mark. Title Life is with people; the Jewish little-town of eastern Europe [by] Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Publisher New York, International Universities Press, [1962, c1952]. Description 456 p. 23 cm. Language English [ no forword (foreward) —: (?) — (WPT) ]

Zborowski, Mark Title Life is with people; the culture of the shtetl [by] Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Foreword by Margaret Mead Publisher New York, Schocken Books [1962, c1952] Description 452 p. ; 21 cm Series Schocken ;SB20 Language English Note Includes bibliography

Zborowski, Mark. Title Life is with people : the Jewish little-town of Eastern Europe / by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog ; foreword by Margaret Mead. Publisher New York : International Universities Press [1955, c1952] Description 456 p. ; 23 cm. Language English Note Bibliography: p. 433-436.

Zborowski, Mark. Title Life is with people; the Jewish little-town of eastern Europe [by] Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Foreword by Margaret Mead. Publisher New York : International Universities Press, [1952] Description 456 p. 23 cm. Language English Note Bibliography: p. 433-436.