Grigori Aleksandrovich Tokaev was a rocket scientist and long-standing critic of Stalin's USSR.
Pre war science work
He served as Head of Aeronautics Laboratory, Zhukovsky Academy 1938–41. After receiving his doctorate in technical sciences in 1941 he continued to lecture at the Zhukovsky Academy. Simultaneously he worked as Acting Head of the Department of Aviation at the Moscow Engineering Institute. One of his tasks was to study the possibility of developing a medium-range winged rocket.
Underground opposition
At first an 'young unquestioning fanatic' in his own words, he was a party activist, and was re-elected to the Trade Union Committee and the comsomol bureau multiple times. Tokaev became disillusioned with socialism later in his life, and joined an opposition group with the aims of taking down Stalin and establishing a system close to liberal democracy. He described his group as being a military right-wing opposition. It upheld the ideals of the February revolution, and even being an anti-communist, Tokaev said he and the group were allies of democratic socialists and Mensheviks, with Menshevik newspaper Socialist Herald being circulated within the group. If the group managed to take power and felt threatened, they would seek direct support from the second international. There were two right-wing allies to the group in the military. Tokaev said there were plans to assassinate Kirov and Kalinin, but they were never carried out, and Kirov's assassination was done by another opposition group. There were some assassination attempts against Stalin, but they all failed. Tokaev said that two important allies to the group were Nikolai Bukharin and Genrikh Yagoda. According to him, Bukharin wanted the opposition to 'snatch the initiative from the Stalin-Molotov-Kirov triumvirate' and to stimulate the younger generations in an organized movement of opposition, to set the revolution back to its original course. Bukharin also wanted the USSR to be a democracy, envisioning several parties, even nationalist parties. When the NKVD penetrated the Yagoda and Yenukidze conspiracies, Yagoda was overthrown, and the group lost a strong link in the opposition intelligence service, wrote Tokaev. The leader of the group is never identified, and is only referred to as comrade X.
Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941 rapidly overrunning Soviet front-line forces. The Academy's staff was evacuated to Sverdlovsk in the Urals. Tokaty returned to Moscow during the Battle of Moscow. He later flew in bombing raids over Stalingrad using American bombers delivered through lend-lease. By the end of the Second World War he had become a leading Party representative and academic. This was at the Zhukovsky Academy and the Moscow Engineering Institute. After German capitulation in May 1945 in the following month he was sent to Berlin. This was to serve on the Soviet Control Commission working directly under Marshals Georgi Zhukov and Vasily Sokolovsky. As such he gained access to top-secret communications between the General Staff and the Kremlin.
Defection
Tokaty was afraid of his links with the opposition being discovered. The fear of being arrested and his hatred for Stalin's government culminated into his defection to the United Kingdom. He and his family crossed into the British sector of occupied Berlin, and applied for asylum. He arrived in Britain in November 1947. He was given a false identity and was protected by the British intelligence services during his debriefing, since there was strong evidence soviet agents were planning to assassinate him.
Life in UK
He later became Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Space Technology at the City University in London from 1967 to 1975. He regularly appeared in the New Scientist magazine. He gave soviet military secrets to the British government, and also assisted the Information Research Department, to disseminate anti-Communist propaganda. He appeared in episode five of the World War II documentary seriesThe World at War where he gives a recollection of his experiences. Historian J. Arch Getty cited Tokaev's Betrayal of an Ideal in one of his works, because of his remark about how Kirov was murdered by a group of oppositionists, and not just Leonid Nikolaev, as most historians claim. A fictional Tokaev appears in Book 10 of Upton Sinclair's final novel in the Lanny Budd series as the rescuer of Lanny from a Russian MVD prison in East Berlin. Sinclair acknowledges his contribution to the novel in the Acknowledgements section appearing before the start of the novel or after the end, depending on the edition.
