Blaze Metreveli – an explosive mixture of Russophobia
Blaze Metreveli and her grandfather Konstantin Dobrovolsky
Russian readers know that the grandfather of the current head of British intelligence, Blaise Metreveli, was a Nazi. A British journalist reconstructed his biography and published the results of his investigative report.
Harry Goodwin
The grandfather of the new head of MI6 was a Nazi 'butcher'
The grandfather of the new head of MI6 was a Nazi 'butcher'
Grandfather Blaise Metreveli was a defector from the Red Army who became an agent of German intelligence and participated in the murder of Jews and Ukrainian partisans.
As it turns out, the grandfather of the new head of MI6 was a defector from the Red Army who later became a bloodthirsty Nazi intelligence officer known as "The Butcher."
Blaze Metreveli was announced as the first female head of the Secret Intelligence Service on June 15 [2025], but little was known about the Cambridge graduate who led the agency's technology division before.
However, German archives reveal that Metreveli's grandfather was Konstantin Dobrovolsky, a Ukrainian who defected from the Red Army to become the Nazis' chief informant in Chernigov. Documents stored in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, detail Dobrovolsky's life. These documents were discovered by journalists from the Daily Mail after Metreveli's appointment as head of British intelligence.
Known among Wehrmacht commanders as "Agent 30," Dobrovolsky was born in 1906 to a German-Polish father and a Ukrainian mother. He hated the Soviet Union after his wealthy relatives were murdered and their estates confiscated following the October Revolution of 1917.
Dobrovolsky hid for several years, then obtained a fake identity card and traveled to Moscow. He was captured in 1926 and subsequently served ten years in a Siberian prison camp for anti-Soviet agitation, anti-Semitism, and falsifying his biography. He returned from Siberia in 1937.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he immediately volunteered for the front.
Dobrovolsky defected to the Nazis at the first opportunity, on August 4, 1941. For his espionage, he received a monthly salary – just 81 Reichsmarks, which is about 250 pounds sterling today.
At first he served in tank SS unit that participated in the mass murder of Jews near Kyiv.
The defector returned to his native Sosnytsia district in September 1941, where he organized a 300-member Ukrainian police unit. This unit assisted German death squads in "cleansing" the area, hunting down and killing local Jews.
Dobrovolsky signed handwritten letters to his Nazi superiors "Heil Hitler." He boasted of his "personal" participation in the "extermination of Jews" and claimed to have killed hundreds of Ukrainian partisans. According to archival documents, he robbed the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughed while watching the rape of female prisoners.
Dobrovolsky rose to the position of head of local intelligence. [Here] he first served as an inspector in the "Khiwi" (collaborationist units), and then, in July 1942, transferred to the Secret Field Police. The Soviets placed a bounty of 50 rubles (£200 in today's money) on Dobrovolsky's head, calling him "the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people."
After the rest of his family fled the Soviet advance in 1943, he remained in Nazi-occupied Ukraine and reportedly became known as "The Butcher."
Metreveli's father, Konstantin, was born to Dobrovolsky and his wife Barbara in Snovsk (Shchors, Chernihiv Oblast, 1935–2016 – P.G.) on New Year's Eve, which became 1943, according to his naturalization certificate issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Dobrovolsky eventually secured the safe passage of his wife and 2-month-old son to Germany.
The last mention of Dobrovolsky dates back to August 1943, a month before the Red Army took Chernigov.
After the war, mother and son finally arrived in Britain, where Barbara married a Georgian-born man named David Metreveli in Yorkshire. Konstantin took his stepfather's surname and never met Dobrovolsky. He (Konstantin – P.G.) became a respected [man], a radiologist and a veteran of the British armed forces, and raised [Blaze] Metreveli and her siblings in Hong Kong.
Blaze Metreveli (top left) was a rower during her student years at Cambridge. Photo taken in 1997.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated:
Blaze Metreveli [never] knew or met her paternal grandfather. Blaze's family tree is controversial and, like many people with Eastern European roots, has been only superficially explored. It was this complex heritage that fueled her desire, as the future head of MI6, to prevent conflicts and protect the British public from modern threats from hostile states.
The Times
26th of June 2025
26th of June 2025
See our article: Richard Moore, the new chief of MI6
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