Trial & Conviction

One morning in September 1937, the leader of the Paris colony of White Russians, General Eugene Karlovitch de Miller, who at the time was secretly negotiating to send 20,000 men to fight with Spanish Rightists, stepped out of his office. He was never seen again.

He left a note saying he was going to a rendezvous with General Nicholas Skobline, one of his assistants. The note ended: "Peut-etre c'est un guet-apens" (Perhaps it is an ambush). There are witnesses who later that day saw a big box carried on board the Soviet freighter which lay unloading hides at Le Havre. Without completing her unloading, without properly clearing port, the Mary a Ulyanova cast her hawsers and scuttled out to sea.

Soon afterwards General de Miller's "staff" summoned a meeting of White Russian officers, confronted General Skobline with General de Miller's note. The officers were reminded that the White Russian court had previously acquitted Skobline of charges that he was on the Soviet payroll and had had a hand in the abduction of General Alexander Paul Koutiepoff (TIME, April 14, 1930). Skobline denied any knowledge of the de Miller affair and walked out of the meeting. He was never seen again.

Next day Skobline's wife, Nadine Plevitskaia, a dark singer with tragic features, was questioned at police headquarters. Police found her answers to questions "sometimes reticent, contradictory or inexact." She said she wanted protection, asked to be put up for the night. Finally she was arrested on suspicion of complicity.

Fortnight ago Mme Skobline was brought to trial. Over 60 witnesses trooped to the stand and piled up evidence against her. She said, among other things, that her husband "waited for her" outside a dress shop for an hour and a half the day de Miller disappeared. Last week, although the fate of General de Miller has never been conclusively established, she was convicted of aiding in his kidnapping and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, ten subsequent years of exile from Paris. Said La Plevitskaia, tears rolling down her cheeks: "I am alone in the world and completely abandoned."

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