The day before the Berlin Wall was built, a Russian named Bogdan Nikolaevich Stashinsky went over to the West, confessed that he was a Soviet secret agent and that years earlier he had hunted down and killed two Ukrainian anti-Red emigrés in Munich. The reason why the deaths had not attracted special attention—one was put down as a heart attack, the other as suicide—proved bizarre. His weapon, said Stashinsky, had been a single-barreled aluminum air gun that fired a pellet of liquid potassium cyanide through a fine mesh screen, releasing a poison spray. The poison caused death within 90 seconds after it was inhaled, leaving no mark on the victims.
Last week, in the Federal High Court in Karlsruhe, the airgun killer was on trial, and for three days he quietly explained the circumstances behind his cold-blooded crime. Oddly enough, the friends and relatives of Stashinsky's victims who crowded the courtroom felt less hate than pity for the man in the dock. His was a tale of blackmail, grief, fear and love that moved the lawyer representing the widow of one victim to define the crime as manslaughter, not murder. Added an attorney for the other widow: Stashinsky was only "a poor devil."
No Choice. Stashinsky's bedevilment began innocently enough. In the summer of 1950, he was riding home on the train from Lvov, where he was studying to be a mathematics teacher, when he was picked up by Soviet transport police for traveling without a ticket. Stashinsky, the son of a poor peasant in a nearby village, was relieved when police let him go after merely asking some questions.
But the cops obviously concluded that they could use Stashinsky; a few days later, he was summoned back to police headquarters and blackmailed into becoming an informer. The area around Lvov was a hotbed of guerrilla activity by anti-Communist Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had fought with the Nazis against the Russians during the war. Stashinsky's family, especially a younger sister, supported the guerrillas. Unless he cooperated, police told Stashinsky, his family would be sent to Siberia. Testified Stashinsky last week: "I had no choice. I wanted to see an end to the fighting. I wanted to protect my family. And I wanted to go on studying."
The new MVD recruit easily passed his first test: he asked his sister to put him in contact with a local underground group, then turned in its leaders. Soon afterward, Stashinsky was enrolled in a spy school at Kiev. Assigned to East Berlin, Stashinsky was bored with his tasks; he passed information to and from other Soviet couriers, and once he was ordered to copy down the license plate numbers of Allied military vehicles. One of Stashinsky's few excitements was a girl he met in an East Berlin dance hall, Inge Pohl, with whom he fell in love. Inge did not know her lover's real employer, thought Stashinsky was a translator.