Dolgopolov's text about Olga Zarubina was published in the April 14, 2020 issue of Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Below is my English translation available only on this blog.
Nikolay Dolgopolov: Intelligence in Zarubina’s Translation
Rossiyskaya Gazeta April 14, 2020
Intelligence Officer, Translator, Pedagogue Zoya Vasilyevna Zarubina would have turned 100 at this time
For half a century I was not at my alma mater, now Moscow State Linguistic University. So much has changed. They took me to a new building, showed me around, but I looked for that which was left over, for the old, the familiar. And, walking along the second floor, I stopped. Here in this corner was the location of the program for translators at the U.N. - the cherished dream of all translators of the country. The elegant, always well-dressed Zoya Vasilyevna Zarubina directed this program with her iron hand. She was the one who founded the program somewhere in the second half of the 1960s.
The program does not exist now. Gone is also Zoya Vasilyevna, who lived a long, difficult, interesting life, and died in 2009 at the age of 88. But Zarubina is remembered by everyone who has ever met her, listened to her lectures in excellent English, which was so different from the way we students spoke. She was both strict and benevolent, she beamed with confidence which she also inexplicably inspired in us as well, us, young people who dreamed of becoming translators. Looking at her, I felt - study hard, work hard, and you will certainly get what you want.
But something else was also present in this woman that was not there in the other professors of these tightly balanced 1970s. In those years of disciplined stagnation, and even in such a “travel-permitting” university [enabling graduates to go abroad], there was not a lot of gossip and intrigue. But almost everyone understood that, among the professors of foreign languages, there were also those who entered the rank of “teachers" [English in the original] from intelligence.
Sometimes something unusual was also heard about Zoya Vasilyevna Zarubina. Of course, no one could guessed, or had ever heard, that her father, Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin, a major general, was a station chief of [Soviet] intelligence in several countries, including the United States, and that her mother, Olga Georgievna, also worked undercover with him before the divorce. They took Zoya with them to different countries, and she involuntarily saw everything and learned a lot. Intelligence was almost in her genes.
And all this experience could not but turn Zarubina into a truly European woman, unusual for us at that time. Maybe we involuntarily reached out to her, since she had been behind the “Iron Curtain” and paved the road there for her young students.
She shared
her experiences as an intelligence officer-translator with a few talented young
people. She taught a special course for a narrow circle of those who could, if
selected, follow in her footsteps. Some succeeded in doing so.
It is a pity that my acquaintance with Zarubina at the university did not last longer. I really wanted to attend the UN program. However, life took me in a different direction. I did not have the luxury of spending additional years at school. My parents retired, were frequently ill, and I went to Iran as a translator to earn money. Still, there was some talk of entering the “Zarubina’s circle.” My father knew her from Nuremberg, where young Zoe worked as a translator in the most important international legal process in history. He remembered that at rare evening parties arranged by the Soviet delegation, Zoya Zarubina danced beautifully. On the wall in our apartment, among various big and small paintings, hung a pencil sketch of the artist Zhukov, capturing many of those who were there at the time. My father was dancing with a young woman, and my mother, not without reason being jealous of my dad, was for some reason sure that this was that same beauty. It’s a pity, but when I left home for several years, the drawing disappeared without a trace.
Surprisingly, it turned out that after the university I was well acquainted with Zarubina’s daughter - Tanya Kozlova. We worked together as translators in the most “travel-permitting” institution of the former country — the Sports Committee of the USSR. Several times I went abroad with Tatyana, we had mutual friends. But never, never (again, genetics?) did Tanya tell me that she was Zarubina’s daughter, and that Zarubina’s stepfather was the famous general Leonid Eitingon, one of the main organizers of Trotsky’s assassination, who planned and carried out the most ingenious Soviet intelligence operations before and after the war. And who went to prison after the fall of Beria. Tanya even published a book with his letters from prison. Eitingon was, of course, later rehabilitated.
The Intelligence Work with Her Stepfather
Perhaps it was with her stepfather at a young age of seven that Zarubina completed her first serious mission. Eitingon served in China in 1927 when local and not at all peaceful inhabitants attacked our consulate. They pushed everyone into one room. And Eitingon, who worked under a diplomatic cover, quietly whispered to his stepdaughter: try to get into the apartment and take out the bundle hidden there. Zoya quietly slipped out of the dining room, reached the apartment in the consulate, where everything was turned upside down by the Chinese. She quickly found the package that remained untouched. And, calmly walking past the watchful Chinese guards, she gave it to Eitingon. In the possession of a gun that was wrapped in rags, everybody felt much safer.
In principle, there was nothing unusual in that situation. Intelligence officers of all countries and nations use children as cover. The heroes of my books on intelligence told me how the kids assisted them. For instance, people with children or with strollers are involuntarily everywhere perceived, if not with positive emotion, then at least with a certain degree of respect. The loss of vigilance on the part of counterintelligence is understandable. Some who worked under the cover of an embassy or trade mission admitted that they often transported, or handed over secret documents, hiding them in diapers or in a stroller. And this never failed.
Sportswoman, Translator, Intelligence Officer
As Zoya was growing up, she got into sports. She trained in the “Young Dynamo” Club, of course. She preferred athletics, she was a great runner.
She studied well and entered the prestigious IFLI - the Chernyshevsky Institute of Philosophy, Literature and Art, which was closed in 1941. This was a kind of the prototype of today's MGIMO and provided a brilliant education. In addition, she learned English when she was a child: in China, she went to an American school and so she did not have any Russian accent.
But the war came, and, after two years at IFLI, Zarubina made a firm decision: she wanted to go to the front. The army personnel officers did not let her – she was much too valuable to be a frontline soldier. Prior to studying at IFLI, she dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. But her family dissuaded her: [they said] we already have too many intelligence officers. But the path to an intelligence career was open now. With her knowledge of English, French and German, where else could she go?
The Hostess in Tehran-1943
Some people who are in the know tried to convince me that she was not at the Tehran Conference. Her daughter Tanya was too small at the time to be left behind. But, at my request, those who truly know looked into her personal file: she was definitely there, but they could not go into details.
The good-looking lieutenant of state security (only a few knew that) Zoya Zarubina was in charge of the communications between the delegations of the USSR, the U.S., and Great Britain. She communicated with British Prime Minister Churchill, but mostly with the U.S. President Roosevelt, who lived in the Soviet embassy. The Americans considered her a kind of hostess, a mistress of the house.
Her activities as a hostess whose linguistic abilities the Anglo-Saxons were dependent on were not only limited to that. Such are the laws of her chosen profession. Zarubina did a lot of good, as noted (and most recently confirmed) by her official service record.
She had approximately the same duties at the conferences in Yalta, Potsdam, and at the Nuremberg Tribunal. True, in Nuremberg, some already knew that Zoya was mostly translating the documents that were of interest to our intelligence.
The Confrontation for the Non-Peaceful Atom
But, of course, Zoya Vasilyevna Zarubina was not only engaged in operational work. Who would have done the translations then? This became a burning question when top secret documents concerning nuclear issues began coming from the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada.
How to translate such documents was not taught at any university. Even the experienced technical translators were desperate. Academician Kurchatov, who led the Soviet atomic project, and was the only one who read all the translations, was not satisfied. Why did he get all that nonsense? And Zarubina was one of the first who, overcoming annoyance, strove to understand the unheard-of terminology. As many translators do, she compiled her own little dictionary. She talked to Kurchatov’s subordinates and tried hard to understand how it all fitted together.
Hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents had to be translated into Russian. I suppose Zoya figured out that many of those that came from the U.S. went through her father, the station chief Vasily Zarubin. You cannot escape your fate. Intelligence was meant to be and did become a family affair [for her].
But the struggle against “cosmopolitanism” became the order of the day in the USSR. As a result of a purge, her stepmother was forced to leave intelligence. In 1948, her father was pushed into retirement. Then came the turn of her stepfather: he was imprisoned for a long time. Zoya Zarubina, a language teacher at the MGB [Ministry of State Security], was asked to cast aspersions on Eitingon. So what? Just think, your stepfather. The alternative: leaving the job. And, without any hesitation, Zoya Vasilyevna left.
But, as we know, she triumphed anyway. She became a professor. After several years of not being permitted to travel, the ban was lifted. She created her own language school: she organized the program for U.N. translators.
... That's what I recalled at my alma matter. Zoya Vasilyevna is remembered there. And not only there.
