Slutsky was born in 1898 into the family of a
Jewish railroad worker in a Ukrainian village,
Parafiivka, currently in
Chernihiv Oblast. As a youth he worked as an apprentice to a metal craftsman, then as clerk at a cotton plant. In the
First World War he served in the
Imperial Russian Army as a volunteer in the 7th Siberian Rifle Regiment. In 1917, he joined the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). During the
Civil War he fought for the
Red Army and afterward, in 1920, moved to the organs of the
GPU/
OGPU, where by dint of his affable personality he rose rapidly through the ranks. Originally, Slutsky worked in the OGPU's Economic Department engaged in industrial espionage. He received the first of two
Orders of the Red Banner for his role in directing the apparatus which stole the process for making ball-bearings from the Swedes. In another clandestine operation, he extorted $300,000 from
Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish Match King, by threatening to flood world markets with cheap matches made in the Soviet Union. In 1929, he was appointed as the assistant to
Artur Artuzov, head of the Foreign Department. In May 1935,
Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the secret police, replaced Artuzov with Slutsky. During Slutsky's tenure, the Foreign Department was principally engaged in tracking down and eliminating opponents of Stalin's regime, essentially emigre
White Russians and
Trotskyists. Major operations included kidnapping of General
Evgenii Miller, burglary of the Trotsky archive in Paris, assassination of
Ignace Reiss, and liquidation of numerous Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists in Spain during the
Civil War. Slutsky's illegals in Great Britain,
Arnold Deutsch and
Theodore Maly, were responsible for recruiting and developing the infamous
Cambridge Five. In August 1936, he participated in concocting evidence used in the first
Moscow Trial, the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre." The task of extracting false confessions from
Sergei Mrachkovsky and
Ivan Smirnov fell to him. The voluble Slutsky described his methods for "breaking-down" these
Old Bolsheviks to his subordinates,
Alexander Orlov and
Walter Krivitsky, who subsequently recounted these episodes in their memoirs. In character, the defector Orlov, who worked directly under him and knew him well, thought Slutsky was "distinguished by laziness, a propensity for window dressing and by subservience to his chiefs. He was gentle by nature, cowardly and double-faced." Elizabeth Poretsky, who met with him frequently in 1936, thought he "was a person of many contradictions ... he would weep while telling of the interrogation of some of the defendants at the trials and bemoan the fates of their families; in the same breath he would denounce them as 'Trotskyite fascists.'" But, as she noted, he might have been stage-acting, hoping that others "would betray themselves when he feigned sympathy for the victims of the trials." Poretsky adds that he courageously interceded with his superiors to save the families of condemned Bolsheviks. When
Nikolai Yezhov assumed control of the NKVD in 1937, he began to arrest and liquidate the department heads whom he knew were close to his deposed predecessor, Yagoda. Slutsky was spared, even though he was implicated in confessions as a "participant in Yagoda's conspiracy," because Yezhov feared that Slutky's arrest would cause Soviet agents who were operating abroad to defect. Nevertheless, Slutsky's days were numbered, and his end came on 17 February 1938. ==Death==