Mikhail Koltsov

Mikhail Efimovich Koltsov ( – February 2, 1940), born Moisey Haimovich Fridlyand , was a Soviet journalist, revolutionary and NKVD agent. He served as the editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine, Krokodil.

Biography Born in Kiev, Koltsov was the son of a Jewish shoemaker Haim Movshevich Fridlyand George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), accused Cockburn of co-operating with Koltsov to produce false stories, which favoured Soviet objectives in Spain. Ernest Hemingway, in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the war, represented Koltsov as the character Karkov. Koltsov described his experiences in The Spanish Diary, which was published in 1938.

Koltsov returned to the Soviet Union in November 1937 and became a close friend of Yevgenia Yezhova, the wife of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov.

On 19 December 1937, Koltsov published an article criticising some aspects of the purges. The article asserted that, to protect themselves, some people had smeared the innocent. It called on the party, the government, the courts and public opinion to stop such "heartless liars who violated the rights of Soviet citizens".

He was arrested on 14 December 1938, four weeks after Yezhova had committed suicide and nine days after Yezhov had been removed from the chairmanship of the NKVD and replaced by Lavrentiy Beria. After Yezhov's arrest in 1939, he told his interrogators in May that Koltsov and Yezhova had been lovers and that "Yezhova was connected with Koltsov with respect to espionage work on behalf of England". He was included on a list of 346 "enemies of the people" marked for execution, submitted by Beria to the Politburo, on 16 January 1940. The list included Yezhov, at least 60 other former NKVD officers and at least two more of Yezhova's former lovers, one of whom was the writer Isaac Babel. Koltsov was shot on 2 February 1940. His third wife, Maria Osten, was also sentenced and shot.

He was rehabilitated in 1954.