Abel: The True Story of the Spy They Traded for Gary Powers

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

A note on the Fisher names

Dramatis personae

Prologue

1: German-Russian beginnings

2: Newcastle upon Tyne

3: Gun-running

4: To the coast

5: Return to Russia

6: Recruitment

7: Scandinavian mission

8: Home again – Moscow and London

9: The Great Purge

10: Special tasks

11: Training for a new assignment

12: First US missions

13: Undercover artist

14: Testing times

15: Trial

16: Exchange of prisoners

17: An unquiet death

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a third edition of my biography of the spy known as ‘Rudolf Abel’, previously published under the titles Like Father Like Son: A Dynasty of Spies and The Kremlin’s Geordie Spy. Those to whom I remain indebted are Christopher Andrew, Arthur Andrews, Daniel Aravot, John Arnold, Robert Beatson, Calland Carnes, Ray Challinor, Ben De Jong, Vasily Dozhdalev, George Falkowski, Edward Gamber, Oleg Gordievsky, Ron Grant, Keith Gregson, Alex Heft, Maike Helmers, Per Oyvind Heradstveit, Frode Jacobsen, Knut Jacobsen, Lucy Jago, David King, Sergei Kondrashev, Lev Koshliakov, Boris Labusov, Colin Latham, Darren Lilleker, Anne McElvoy, Angus MacQueen, Richard Melman, Penny Minney, Robin Minney, Tom Mitchell, Dan Mulvenna, Melita Norwood, Linda Osband, Helge Ostbye, Chris Pocock, Colin Robinson, Charles Murray Roscoe, Dieter Sevin, Burt Silverman, Barry Stewart, Sean Street, Oleg Tsarev, Andrew Thorpe, John Wallwork and Nina Westgaard. Some people asked me to keep details of their help confidential and I continue to respect their wishes. I remain grateful to Natalia Kovalenko, Yelena Londareva, Oksana Silantieva, also to Konstantin Chistiakov, Maria Fedoseeva, Richard Miller, Nina Schrader-Nielsen and Rachel Viney who helped me find texts in Russian and Norwegian and translated passages for me. Not only did Geoffrey Elliott assist in finding and translating certain Russian material but his financial support enabled me to make my first visit to Moscow.

In my archive and library research I was indebted to Dilys Harding and her staff in Local Studies at Newcastle City Library, Eric Hollerton and Alan Hildrew at North Shields Library, Judith Etherton at the University of London Library, Martin Pegler at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, Tish Collins and her team at the Marx Memorial Library, Lesley Richardson at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, to Janet Coles and her staff at Bournemouth University Library and to all who assisted me at the National Archives. I am grateful for the help with the illustrations given by Jonathan Wardle, Stephen Murray, Ange Ferguson, Andy Price and Ken Slater.

The research and writing was undertaken when I was employed at Bournemouth University and at Teesside University. I record my thanks to Roger Laughton, John Foster, Su Reid and Chris Newbold. Also at Bournemouth, John Ellis and Julia Taylor assisted me in the application for University research funding that made possible a visit to Moscow in 2001.

There would have been no reincarnation of this work if it had not been for the perceptiveness and energy of Michael Smith at Biteback Publishing and I record my special thanks to him. I am grateful, too, for the editorial support of Jonathan Wadman and James Stephens at Biteback. Abel has benefited from new research and I now add Beth Amorosi, Michael Briggs (University Press of Kansas), John Donovan, Mary Ellen Fuller, Alan Myers, Anthony R. Palermo (who was Special Attorney with the team that prosecuted ‘Rudolf Abel’ in 1957), Mark Palermo and Patrick Salmon to the cohort of those to whom I am indebted.

However, it is important to state that although I have sought and relied upon the help of many, the contents of this book, its speculations and any errors of fact or judgement, errors in translation or transliteration, are my responsibility. And the following persons in particular knew, or will know, this. Trevor Hearing was present at the very beginning of this work and has encouraged and enthused me from the outset. I shall always be grateful. The support and friendship of Nigel West has also meant a great deal to me, and his books The Illegals and The Crown Jewels have continued to be valuable reference points. Professor David Saunders, who first proved that William Fisher was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Kirill Khenkin, who was one of Willie Fisher’s pupils, and Evelyn, Willie’s daughter, responded without fail to my every letter, call and question and I hope that this book will repay a little of the debt I owe them. My wife, Ann, has never complained about the amount of my time that I have put into this work and I would like my readers to know that without her certain support this book would never have been completed.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A NOTE ON THE FISHER NAMES

Names, the use and the spelling of names, are part of this story about the Fischer family, who were members of the German community in Russia from the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the distinctiveness of the German is lost when the name is transliterated into Russian. It sounds, and is spelt, ‘Fisher’. At various times, it was required that the Fishers formally and fully adapted the style of their names to the Russian custom, with a patronymic. Then, family members spent time in the West, where sometimes they had their name recorded in documents in the German fashion, sometimes in the English. Often, they may have settled for the easiest way out when registrars or clerks were completing documents for them. Moreover, there were many occasions in the twentieth century when it was prudent to choose one spelling over the other, usually the English rather than the German.

The father was known as, and usually wrote his name as, ‘Heinrich Fischer’; the son tended to write his name ‘William Fisher’. Predominantly, I have followed their custom. However, given the subject and the context of the story, Heinrich and William used other names as well, pseudonyms, code names and cover names (see the table overleaf). Willie’s wife also used and was known by the English name Helen, sometimes spelt Hellen, as well as the Russian Yelena, occasionally in the diminutives, Yelya or Ilya, but at home she was always called Ellie.

Heinrich Fischer

Heinrich Matthäus Fischer

Henry Mattheus Fisher

Matvei Fisher

Matvei Alexandrovich Fisher

M. A. Fisher

Andrei Fisher

A. Fisher

Genrikh Matveevich Fisher

G. Fisher

G. M. Fisher

William Fisher

William August Fischer

William August Fisher

Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher

William Fisher’s code names

ALEC

ARACH

FRANK

MARK

William Fisher’s pseudonyms/cover names

Rudolf Ivanovich Abel

Martin Collins

Emil Goldfus

Andrew Kayotis

Milton

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

FISHER (FISCHER) FAMILY

Aleksandr August Fischer – William Fisher’s paternal grandfather, born in Germany.

Evelyn Fisher – William and Yelena Fisher’s daughter, their only child.

Heinrich Matthäus Fischer – William’s father; Aleksandr and Maria’s son; born in Russia.

Henry Fisher – Heinrich and Lyubov’s first born son; born in England; William’s brother.

Maria Kruger – William Fisher’s paternal grandmother, born in Germany.

William Fisher – Heinrich and Lyubov’s second son born in England, 11 July 1903.

Stepan Lebedev – Kapitolina’s husband (died when Yelena was four years old).

Yelena Lebedeva – ‘Ellie’, William Fisher’s wife.

Boris Lebedev – Yelena’s brother; Lidiya’s father.

Ivan Lebedev – Yelena’s brother, falsely accused of Trotskyism.

Kapitolina Lebedeva – Yelena’s mother.

Lidiya Lebedeva – Evelyn’s cousin. Their close friendship (they referred to each other as ‘sister’) lasted into old age.

Seraphima Lebedeva – Yelena’s sister; suggested to William that he seek work in the translation section of the Soviet security service.

Lyubov Zhidova – William Fisher’s mother.

Vasily Zhidov – William Fisher’s maternal grandfather.

Agrafena Zhidova – William Fisher’s maternal grandmother.

WILLIAM FISHER’S FRIENDS

Rudolf Abel – William Fisher’s closest friend.

Kirill Khenkin – Willie’s wartime radio trainee; foreign press analyst for the KGB; defector.

Ernst Krenkel – Served in the Red Army with Willie Fisher; arctic radio operator and explorer.

Willie Martens – Son of Heinrich Fischer’s Russo-German friend Ludwig Martens. Willie Martens was a GRU officer, and the families continued to be close friends.

NKVD/KGB OFFICERS

Vladimir Burdin – KGB co-ordinator of the Abel–Powers exchange.

Yuri Drozdov – KGB officer managing the Abel–Powers exchange.

Felix Dzerzhinsky – Founder of the Cheka, the first of the Soviet state security organisations.

Leonid Eitingon (aka Colonel Kotov) – High-ranking NKVD Special Tasks officer; close colleague of Pavel Sudoplatov.

Reino Häyhänen – KGB officer transferred to illegals work as assistant to William Fisher. Defected and betrayed Fisher in May 1957.

Aleksandr Korotkov – NKVD assassin who rose to take charge of the KGB illegals directorate.

Anatoly Lazarev – Head of the KGB illegals directorate at the time of Willie Fisher’s death.

Mikhail Maklyarsky – NKVD Special Tasks officer during Operations Monastery and Berezino.

Georgy Mordvinov – NKVD Special Tasks colonel during Operation Berezino.

Aleksandr Orlov – NKVD officer commanding in Spain during the Civil War. Willie Fisher’s senior officer during European missions. Defected 1938.

Yakov Serebryansky – Pharmacist, assassin and early Cheka recruit who rose to be the first head of NKVD Special Tasks.

Yuri Sokolov – Legal diplomat but KGB rezident in the USSR delegation to the United Nations during part of the time that Willie Fisher was illegal rezident in New York.

Pavel Sudoplatov – Early Cheka recruit who rose to be KGB general. Headed NKVD Special Tasks in the 1940s and ’50s and was Willie Fisher’s most senior officer during this period.

Mikhail Svirin – Legal diplomat but KGB rezident in the USSR delegation to the United Nations, initially scheduled to manage Reino Häyhänen.

NKVD/KGB AGENTS

Anthony Blunt – One of the ‘Cambridge Five’.

Earl Browder – General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA 1930–45; married to Kitty Harris.

Guy Burgess – One of the ‘Cambridge Five’.

John Cairncross – One of the ‘Cambridge Five’.

Lona Cohen – American-born agent who spied for the USSR in the USA and the UK; married to Morris.

Morris Cohen – Recruited as a Soviet spy in 1937 during Spanish Civil War; service as a member of the ‘Abraham Lincoln Brigade’.

Aleksandr Demyanov – NKVD operative in Operations Monastery and Berezino.

Arnold Deutsch – NKVD operative, but also recruiter and case officer.

Iosif Grigulevich – NKVD operative, but also case officer and assassin.

Kitty Harris – NKVD operative, courier and safe house manager.

Donald Maclean – One of the ‘Cambridge Five’.

Valery Makaev – KGB illegal recalled from New York in 1951, leaving Willie Fisher in sole charge.

Konon Molody (aka Gordon Lonsdale) – KGB illegal, but also recruiter and case officer.

Kim Philby – One of the ‘Cambridge Five’.

IN THE USSR

Viktor Abakumov – Beria’s deputy. Became head of SMERSH.

Waldemar Abel – Rudolf’s brother; commissar, Baltic shipyards.

Andrei Andreev – Politburo member. Friend of Heinrich Fischer.

Lavrenti Beria – Head of NKVD. Stalin’s closest ally.

Georgy Chicherin – Marxist revolutionary and Soviet Foreign Minister from 1918 to 1930.

Vladimir Dekanozov – Head of NKGB Foreign Intelligence Department 1938–39.

Andrei Kapitsa – Pyotr and Anna Kapitsa’s second son, born 1931.

Anna Kapitsa – Pyotr Kapitsa’s wife.

Pyotr Kapitsa – Russian physicist, winner of Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work in low-temperature physics.

Sergei Kapitsa – Pyotr and Anna Kapitsa’s son, born 1928.

Vsevolod Merkulov – Senior officer in Soviet state security from 1941 until the early 1950s. Close associate of Beria.

Alfred Nagel – Worked for Moscow stock holding and trade co-operative in the 1920s.

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Thomas Baston, Daniel Currie, Adaphus Danvers, Thomas Edgar, Joseph Hogarth, Robert Hutchinson, Thomas Dugger Keast, John Leslie, W. McKie, Alfred Nagel, John Fyfe Reid – Conspirators and alleged conspirators in the 1907 cartridge cases in north-east England and Scotland.

Fullarton James – Chief constable of Northumberland at the time of Heinrich Fischer’s second application for naturalisation as a British subject.

J. B. Wright – Chief constable of Newcastle upon Tyne at the time of the cartridge cases.

IN THE UNITED STATES

Paul Blasco – FBI agent present at Abel’s arrest.

Ed Boyle –INS agent, Abel’s arresting officer.

Mortimer W. Byers – Trial judge in the case against Rudolf Abel.

Ed Gamber – FBI agent present at Abel’s arrest.

Edward Gazur – FBI special agent; debriefed and befriended Aleksandr Orlov.

Thomas Debevoise – Abel’s defence attorney; assistant to James B. Donovan.

James B. Donovan – New York lawyer. Defended Abel against espionage charges. Conducted the negotiations to exchange Abel with U-2 pilot Gary Powers.

Arnold Fraiman – Abel’s defence attorney; assistant to James B. Donovan.

Harry Gold – liberal spy ring courier; his confessions led to the arrests of David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.

David Greenglass – Machinist on the US atom bomb project. Spied for the USSR as member of the liberal spy ring. Gave evidence in court that led to the Rosenberg’s convictions.

Theodore Hall – Physicist who worked on the ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb, and passed secrets to the Soviet Union.

Robert J. Lamphere – FBI agent who was credited with uncovering a number of Nazi spies during the Second World War and Soviet spies during the Cold War.

Francis Gary Powers – U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Exchanged for ‘Rudolf Abel’ in 1962.

Ethel Rosenberg – Found guilty of passing atomic secrets to the USSR. Executed June 1953.

Julius Rosenberg – Codenamed liberal. Leader of the spy ring bearing this code name. Found guilty of passing atomic secrets to the USSR. Executed June 1953.

Burton Silverman, Jules Feiffer, Sheldon Fink, David Levine, Danny Schwarz – Artists who befriended the man they knew as ‘Emil Goldfus’ at the Ovington Studios in New York.

Morton Sobell – Engineer and part of the liberal spy ring. Passed conventional weapons secrets to the Soviet Union.

IN GERMANY AND BEYOND

Col. Heinrich Scherhorn – Captured German officer who collaborated with NKVD in the NKVD Special Tasks deception game Operation Berezino.

Otto Skorzeny – Waffen-SS special operations officer, tasked to relieve Scherhorn’s troops.

Wolfgang Vogel – East German lawyer who was the initial negotiator with Jim Donovan for the Abel–Powers exchange.

Ernst Wollweber – Seaman, weapons smuggler and early member of the German Communist Party. Head of the East German Ministry of State Security in the early 1950s.

NKVD/KGB CODE NAMES

ARTUR OR MAX

– Iosif Grigulevich.

BEN

– Konon Molody/Gordon Lonsdale.

DACHNIKI

– Morris and Lona Cohen.

ENORMOZ

– The American atomic bomb project.

HARRY

– Valery Makaev.

KARL

– Willie Fisher’s senior officer and Oslo rezident in 1934.

LESLI

– Lona Cohen.

LIBERAL

– Julius Rosenberg.

LUIS

– Morris Cohen.

LYUTENTSIA

– The exchange of Gary Powers and Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge.

Max; Aleksandr;

HEINE

– Code names for Aleksandr Demanyov, NKVD double agent for Operations Monastery and Berezino.

SCHWED

(The Swede) – Aleksandr Orlov.

STEFAN

– Arnold Deutsch.

VIK

– Reino Häyhänen.

VOLUNTEER

– Morris Cohen.

PROLOGUE

‘THE BRIDGE OF SPIES’

On Monday 19 August 1957, James B. Donovan received a telephone message from the Brooklyn Bar Association. Would he defend Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, the so-called ‘master spy’ arrested two months earlier and accused of spying for the Soviet Union?

Despite the severity of the charges and the notoriety of the defendant, Donovan took the case. When the trial began, he argued that his client’s arrest had been illegal, but despite his best efforts Abel was found guilty. The maximum sentence was death. Shrewdly, Donovan argued for a prison sentence on the basis that there might come a time – should an American spy be captured in the Soviet Union – when the United States would want a prisoner to exchange. Abel escaped the death penalty and was jailed for thirty years.

On 1 May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The pilot Gary Powers ejected safely but was captured, tried for spying and jailed for ten years. The Soviet secret service, the KGB, broached the idea of a spy swap – Gary Powers for their own man Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. The man who negotiated the deal on behalf of the US government was James B. Donovan, whose prediction in preventing his client’s execution had been so prescient. The negotiations dragged on for more than a year.

Shortly after dawn on 10 February 1962, several cars drew up beside the Glienicke Bridge on the south-western edge of West Berlin, the so-called ‘Bridge of Spies’. Ten men got out, all of them wrapped up against the cold in heavy overcoats. The only other people around, ‘informed sources’ told the Associated Press, were a few Germans fishing in the Havel river. The group of men walked up to the white line across the middle of the bridge which marked the border between West Berlin and East Germany. At the centre of the group was Rudolf Ivanovich Abel.

When they reached the white line, a second group of ten men walked onto the bridge from the East German side to meet them. They were all Russian, bar one. Like Abel, he was at the centre of the group. He was clean-shaven, wearing a dark suit, a heavy overcoat and a fur hat. This was Gary Powers.

There were no expressions of cordiality between the two groups and a good deal of suspicion, leading to a twenty-minute delay whilst the Americans checked that a US student who was also part of the deal had been freed. Only then did the spy swap take place. Gary Powers was whisked away first to the US Air Force base at Wiesbaden in West Germany and on to America to be reunited with his wife and family. Rudolf Abel walked across the bridge, went behind the Iron Curtain and, as far as the West was concerned, disappeared into obscurity.

It was not until after his death in 1971 that it emerged that the Soviet master spy’s real name was Willie Fisher. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in July 1903. His father was a Bolshevik revolutionary, an associate of Lenin. He fled the Tsar’s secret police two years before Willie’s birth and settled in Britain. Willie had simply followed in his father’s footsteps. This is the true story of the man they called Rudolf Ivanovich Abel.

1

GERMAN-RUSSIAN BEGINNINGS

Willie Fisher’s story begins in Germany, where his grandparents were born. His grandfather, Aleksandr August Fischer, was from Sachsen-Altenburg in Thuringia, south-east Germany. Aleksandr’s wife Maria Kruger was from Berlin.¹ Noticed by Prince Volkonsky, a Russian diplomat with responsibility in Saxony in the mid-nineteenth century, the couple were offered attractive employment in Russia, in Yaroslavl province, on the Adreevskoe estate owned by Prince Volkonsky’s cousin. Here, Aleksandr utilised his skills as a forester, miller and herdsman. He even served as a veterinary surgeon on the estate, possibly beyond, whilst Maria bred and reared chickens.

From the early 1860s the estate was thriving after a period of decline and by the middle of the decade counted a profitable distillery amongst its assets. The atmosphere of growth and well-being at Andreevskoe embraced the Fischers too, because they started a family. Heinrich Matthäus was born on 9 April 1871.²

The nearest big town to the Andreevskoe estate was the prosperous upper Volga port of Rybinsk, which linked trade between Moscow and Archangel and, by the Mariinsk Waterway, this part of Russia to the Baltic Sea and beyond. By the 1870s, large vessels were trading between Rybinsk and St Petersburg. The town was also an industrial centre, constructing ships and printing machinery. In the mid-nineteenth century the arrival of the railway from Bologoe, including a new bridge across the Volga, improved Rybinsk’s communication network. Aleksandr Fischer befriended a German working on the project, who, when Heinrich was born, became his godfather.

Heinrich was the first of twelve children.³ The size of the family was the context of a decision which was to make an impact on events over the next hundred years, across three nations and two continents. When Heinrich was only six years old, he already had a number of younger brothers and sisters and his parents, seeing that he was an alert, capable and confident little boy, wondered whether in fact there might be an opportunity for a better future for their son than they could provide themselves. Heinrich’s godfather and his wife had no children, so Aleksandr and Maria made an arrangement with the railwayman that he would bring up the boy as his own. Young Heinrich was certainly destined for a better life, but it was a new life away from his natural parents, his brothers, sisters and the home he knew. Neither the godfather nor his wife is named in Heinrich’s memoirs, but despite a hard life, the small boy does not seem to have been unhappy in his new circumstances. At the time of this fostering, the godfather had finished work in track construction and had been appointed stationmaster at Medvedevo,⁴ where the boy adapted to his new environment. Heinrich was responsible for household chores, cooking and cleaning, gathering and chopping wood. He was also involved in agricultural work: the station had an adjacent small holding with a cow, pigs and chickens, and his godfather took up farming himself for a short whilst. The young Heinrich was becoming versatile and self-sufficient. In addition, he was fascinated by his godfather’s first trade, metal working. He observed his godfather at work and by the time he left home at sixteen, he could forge and beat metal, and make metal tools, implements and household utensils, including samovars. The godfather specifically told the boy, ‘To learn how to work well, you have to be a thief. Learn how to steal with your eyes. When somebody does something you don’t know how to do, keep your eyes open and learn how to do it yourself.’⁵

The other significant gift the boy received through his godfather was his sound formal education. He was enrolled at a village school when he was seven, virtually as soon as he was fostered, and went on to the next level of his education at the Rybinsk municipal school. With the Rybinsk-Bologoe stage of the railway network completed, the godfather seems to have settled in or very near Rybinsk. In his memoirs, Heinrich Fischer takes care in describing his secondary education in the town, valuing it highly. In the Rybinsk school there were three classes, the pupils spending two years in each class. The municipal schools were quite new in this period and fees were payable. It is likely that the young Fischer started this school before he was eleven. Along with other pupils he would have followed lessons in the Russian language, reading, writing, arithmetic, practical geometry, physics, history and geography. Art featured in the curriculum, too, along with singing and physical education. As a German Lutheran, at least nominally, Fischer was excused the religious education classes in Orthodox Christianity that were compulsory for the Russian pupils, and religion was never to play any significant part in his life.

Craft classes were available in the municipal schools if there was community interest and financial commitment, and given the town’s recent growth and prosperity, this was likely the case in the Rybinsk school. The Rybinsk school certainly offered a class in book-keeping, which Heinrich took and put to good use by getting a holiday job in a construction company’s office. He could have followed up this opportunity and become a white-collar worker, but turned it down. His childhood had not been an easy time for him, but it had given him independence and confidence and it prepared him for the difficulties that were to come. He loved metalwork and had been brought up in the vicinity of a vibrant, growing town, built on river trade and now linked by rail to the big cities. The godfather understood the boy and in a German-language newspaper spotted a metalworking apprenticeship opportunity at the Goldberg plant in St Petersburg, which manufactured printing machinery.⁶

The sixteen-year-old Heinrich Fischer, now beginning to use the Russianised version of his name, Genrikh, who arrived in St Petersburg in 1887 must have been an impressive young man.* He had had a good education and he knew it. His level of knowledge and his intellectual skills were far above the average for his age group. He was bilingual, too, speaking both German and Russian. Not only did he have practical manual skills, he already regarded himself as a metalworker: his godfather’s influence and teaching had given him that. His experience of agriculture from large estate to smallholding meant that he understood the role of the rural economy. After all, his parents and godfather were Germans. They were skilled in agriculture and although they came to Russia before the emancipation of the serfs, serfdom was not something the family had undergone, even though it was within the felt experience of many living Russians. Heinrich Fischer had no feelings of religious obligation or guilt.

The young man knew Rybinsk as a thriving provincial centre and he arrived in St Petersburg to find this city in a new stage of industrial development. For skilled labour it was a seller’s market, and he was able to move from job to job (often using German contacts), earn good wages, extend his skills and advance his career as a metalworker and engineer, all increasing his self-confidence. At the same time he was inevitably drawn into an exciting social and cultural world. In the factories, groups of ‘conscious’ workers met together to study. There were structured curricula, with participants following classes in the natural sciences and atheism before moving on to political economy and the history and theory of socialism.

Work and politics were the centre, but not the only aspect, of Fischer’s life in St Petersburg. He was gregarious and enjoyed women’s company, and changed lodgings to be with like-minded, literate, cultured, working people, who, significantly, avoided heavy drinking. In his memoirs, although there is no evidence that he was a prude, Fischer expresses his distaste at seeing drunkenness and debauchery throughout his life. Without being judgmental he remembered, too, from his earliest years, that his natural father often arrived home hopelessly drunk from agricultural fairs.

Back at the municipal school in Rybinsk, he had been employed as a pupil teacher, coaching slow learners. Here in St Petersburg he carried on this work. In the factory, he helped more experienced colleagues who had trouble with their workshop arithmetic or geometry, and on one occasion he was offered a share in some accommodation in return for mathematics tuition. His political links put him in touch with activists at St Petersburg’s Technological Institution and it was this group that developed his political ideas and so imbued him with the works of Marx and Engels that within a few months he was teaching the Marxism classes himself. In 1893 Fischer became acquainted with Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, Lenin, who had come to St Petersburg to take up leadership of the Technological Institution Group.⁷

Each of these experiences was a step in a revolutionary political career. In the early 1890s, Fischer was an active member of the citywide Marxist group and connected with two interlinked political groupings – the ‘worker-intelligent’ and the ‘student-intelligent’ – who were convinced that organised and educated factory workers would be the engine to effect social and political change. He had emerged as a significant political activist and worker-revolutionary.

The inevitable happened. Early in 1894, at Fischer’s lodgings, a meeting was held to elect leaders of underground revolutionary cells. An informer was present and the 23-year-old Fischer was arrested and held in prison. Typically, he used his time on remand to study and, as political books were