Nicholas George IVANCHENKO (aka Nikolai Georgevich Ivanchenko ) [1913-1992]

The Shanghai Municipal Police Files on him stated he was born in Chita, Transbaikal Province of Russia 17th January 1913.

He left Russia for Manchuria in 1917 together with his parents and to have subsequently resided in Harbin where he attended school.

He arrived in Shanghai in September 1932 from Harbin and had no fixed employment till 1934, where he obtained a position as a chauffeur with the Shanghai Power Company in which capacity he worked until 1937 when he resigned. He had a brother, Victor Ivanchenko, who worked as a photographer. 

He applied for a visa to visit Hong Kong in 1940 for the purpose of taking up employment with N.A. Tonoff*, Camera Exchange Service of 1 Middle Road, Hong Kong. 

Source: The Shanghai Municipal Police Files, correspondence from 29th August 1940 - 4th September 1940

*Father of Anatole Nicholas ZAVADSKY / TONOFF / TOWNLEY [1917-1974]

“Exportkhleb, an official Soviet trading firm with offices in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou, had handled Soviet commerce in Hong Kong since before World War II, only closing its doors during those few months of 1945 when Japan and the Soviet Union were formally at war with each other. In 1948 a British intelligence report noted that “Soviet ships have been coming to Hong Kong on the average about one or two a month, trading from Vladivostok or from North Korean ports.” Soviet officials found Hong Kong useful as an entrepot to facilitate the transit of goods from Southern China to both the Soviet Union and to Communist-dominated Manchuria and North Korea. Soviet vessels delivered to Hong Kong such products as window glass, ammonia, soya beans, and Siberian deer antlers for Chinese medicine, in exchange loading cargoes of such minerals and metals as wolfram, tin, antimony, and tungsten. The Americans even claimed the Soviet Union smuggled “narcotics produced in the North, which were then shipped to Hong Kong in exchange for tungsten.” As Southern China drifted ever deeper into civil war and anarchy, the Soviet Union found Hong Kong a convenient and reliable source for products from that region. Between 1946 and 1948 Hong Kong’s exports to the Soviet Union annually amounted to several hundred thousand American dollars. Soviet imports to Hong Kong were far smaller, leaving the Soviet Union with a huge bilateral trade deficit. In late 1947, however, deteriorating Soviet-British relations led the British and Hong Kong authorities to expel from the territory Piotr Sizov, director of the Hong Kong Exportkhleb office, and Nikolai Ivanchenko, a stateless Russian, replaced him. In 1948 the Hong Kong authorities successfully sought permission from the British government to close Exportkhleb altogether, and implemented this at the end of the year”

Source: THE SOVIET UNION, HONG KONG, AND THE COLD WAR, 1945-1970, page 7, Michael Share Working Paper No. 41, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars

The Yangtze Supply Corporation (elected to the Membership of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce in 1947), based at 24 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong, dealing with ‘General Import/Export’, was a cover company for Soviet purchases of tin, antimony, wolfram and rubber in Hong Kong and Macau.

Source: Partially declassified confidential CIA documents 19th January 1950 CIA-RDP82-00457R004100430007-6

"3. In 1948 the USSR purchasing in Hong Kong and Shanghai was done by Eksportkhleb representatives through Chinese cover firms. In Hong Kong, Ivanchenko, the Eksportkhleb representative, did his purchasing through the Yangtze Supply Corporation*, a small Chinese firm which took the offers of the exporters. Payment was usually made in American dollars. The Yangtze Supply Corporation also made purchases through small brokers and from smugglers, and stored the concentrates until large stocks were accumulated for shipment. The Kwong Shing Cheong** aided the Yangtze Supply Corporation in the handling of tungsten. Ivanchenko collected a considerable squeeze from this business in 1949 both through making false invoices at market prices and by demanding a direct cash squeeze before agreeing to buy.*** In October 1949 he no longer was able to make purchases without first obtaining the permission of his superior in Shanghai or North China…”

Source: Partially declassified confidential CIA documents 19th January 1950 CIA-RDP82-00457R004100430005-8