The Case of the Noulens Couple in China and the Fate of Spy Tatyana Moiseenko-Velikaya
The book about the intelligence officer Ruth Werner contains an episode on the exposure of Comintern agents in China.
In 1931 the exposures of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern began. Arrested were the "director of internal communications" of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the head of the party's secret service, and a number of intelligence agents. The police fairly quickly got on the trail of one of the agents, Hilaire Noulens, and he was arrested together with his wife. Noulens would not admit that he worked for the USSR, calling himself a Belgian (the Belgian Foreign Ministry refused to confirm their citizenship), then a Swiss by the name of Berer (Switzerland did not confirm it either). Suddenly the international public came to the spouses' defence: it began with the French trade unions, which described him as an innocent secretary, then the newspaper "Inprecor" took it up, and the protest campaign spread across the whole world. By the autumn the prisoners were calling themselves by the surname Ruegg. The widow of Sun Yat-sen, who was connected with the Soviets, unexpectedly intervened in the case. In the end Albert Einstein, Theodore Dreiser, Henri Barbusse, Clara Zetkin and Maxim Gorky joined the campaign in defence of the Noulenses (the Rueggs).
The couple faced the death penalty. But the composition of the courts kept changing, the case was passed from the military to the civil authorities, and the Japanese attack on Shanghai forced the trial to be moved to Nanning. Despite the charges of directing subversive activity and of financing the Communists, in the autumn of 1932 the couple were given, under an amnesty, life imprisonment in place of a death sentence. It is believed that this was influenced by the 40 thousand dollars sent by Moscow for bribes. In August 1937 they were released on bail and fled to Shanghai, and in 1939 to Moscow.
The most interesting thing is the biographies of the agents. The husband, known as Ruegg and Noulens, was a Jew from near Kyiv, Yakov Rudnik, born in 1894. He took part in the storming of the Winter Palace, worked in Finland and in the Cheka in Petrograd, took part in the communist and strike movement in France, from 1920 was a political officer on the Southern Front, then worked in the apparatus of the Comintern, was a resident of Soviet intelligence in Europe, and spent two years in a French prison.
The wife, Tatyana Nikolayevna Moiseyenko-Velikaya, was born into a noble family in Saint Petersburg in 1891. She graduated from the Bestuzhev Courses in mathematics and theoretical mechanics, taught mathematics at a school, worked on the cultural committee of the Petrograd Duma, in the People's Commissariat of Education, at the Red Army institute, and in the economics faculty of Saint Petersburg University, served as a deputy of the Petrograd Soviet, was a teacher in Turkey, and worked in the Soviet embassy in Vienna, where she became close to Rudnik-Noulens. She worked in China from 1929.
It was Moiseyenko-Velikaya who interested me most in this book. Because I had heard the story of her exploits before. To be honest, until I read the same thing in the book by a GRU colonel, I did not fully believe that the tale told by our dacha neighbour about a former colleague, a fellow spy, could be true. I first heard of Moiseyenko-Velikaya as the wife of a Belgian who worked for Soviet intelligence in China, and for whom Einstein interceded. According to the narrator, she was a most charming old lady with aristocratic manners and an impeccable style. The book does not describe the couple's life after their return to the USSR, but I happen to know that Tatyana Nikolayevna climbed the nomenklatura ladder and taught, was never repressed, was very proud of her fighting past and talked about it a great deal. At home she reputedly even kept a file of foreign newspapers carrying appeals to save them from Chinese arbitrariness. Still, it is hard to credit that world-famous spies could live out their days so inglorious, unnoticed and quiet. Her husband became an ordinary member of staff at the Institute of Oriental Studies. Up to her last years Tatyana Nikolayevna Moiseyenko-Velikaya worked as deputy editor-in-chief of the journal "Sovetskaya Literatura" [Soviet Literature], and at my home there still stands a whole shelf of books from the "Literary Monuments" series which she obtained for my late neighbour.
