Lyushkov, however, failed to show up to greet Mekhlis. Yezhov had already formally relieved the loyal Lyushkov of his post (May 26, 1938), under the pretext of a future unspecified assignment in the central NKVD, but Lyushkov knew this constituted a death warrant and, taking advantage of his close relationship with Yezhov, managed to stall his return to Moscow. (Yezhov apparently sent an emissary to arrest him out in the Far East.) On June 9, Lyushkov told his deputy he had to travel to the frontier zone for a meeting with a very important agent. He went by train from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, then by car to Posyet, inspected the local border guard detachments, and on June 12 went out to the purported agent-rendezvous spot. Leaving his one companion at a distance, and wearing “a disguise”—mufti and hunting cap, under which he wore his full dress NKVD uniform—Lyushkov got lost in the rain and darkness. Near the Hunchun River, however, he found two Manchukuo border guards and willingly gave himself up, revealing his officer’s garments underneath. Imagine the lowly guards’ frame of mind: in the middle of nowhere, out of the predawn morning mists, appeared not some wayward small-fry contraband trader, but a man wearing an NKVD uniform and carrying a party card, Supreme Soviet elected representative ID, and papers signed by Yezhov identifying him as commissar of state security, third rank, equivalent to a major general in the Imperial Japanese Army.
Moscow officialdom was shaken. Was there an explanatory note? Did the Japanese kidnap Lyushkov? Yezhov cried and cried, blurting out, “Now I’m lost.”178 He informed Stalin, but omitted mention of the interrogation “testimonies” against Lyushkov and of how he had long shielded him from arrest.179 On June 15, 1938, Lyushkov’s wife, Nina, was arrested in their Moscow apartment, and accused of having known about but failed to report her husband’s planned defection.180 That evening, Blyukher showed up in Yezhov’s office to inquire about the Lyushkov situation and, no doubt, his own standing. Right at that moment, Yezhov was summoned to the Little Corner. Stalin decided to send the Lyushkov nemesis Frinovsky to Khabarovsk, more than 5,000 miles by train, to ascertain what had happened; he departed on June 17. Mekhlis, meanwhile, flew back from the Soviet Far East and, on June 20, gave a report in the Little Corner, after which Stalin immediately sent him eastward again, to further annihilate the cadres in the Siberian and Transbaikal military districts, on the way to renewed massacres of the Soviet Far Eastern Army.181
Whether by happenstance or calculation, the border point with Manchukuo that Lyushkov had crossed, some eighty miles southwest of Vladivostok, fell under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, rather than the more rabid Kwantung Army, which might have refused to yield such a prize catch once they had determined his bona fides. The Korean Army’s Russian-language linguist on-site concluded that Lyushkov constituted “the escape of the century” and radioed headquarters in Seoul; despite suspicions that he was a plant, Lyushkov was whisked to Tokyo. A Japanese Kwantung Army intelligence officer, chafing at his lack of opportunity to interrogate Lyushkov, leaked word of the defection to the Chinese-language press in Manchukuo on June 24; Polish military intelligence picked up the obscure newspaper sensation immediately, even before Frinovsky had a chance to clarify in person what had happened. Nazi newspapers reported the defection on July 1, thereby alerting Japanese diplomats in Moscow.