Activities and affiliations

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The Latvian Chekist who built Dalstroy and colonised Kolyma with forced labour for gold

Berzin landed at Nagaev Bay in February 1932 and built Magadan on empty tundra. Shalamov wrote: 'Berzin tried — quite successfully — to solve the problem of colonising a harsh land while simultaneously solving the problems of reforging and isolating prisoners.'

A Latvian peasant's son who studied painting at Berlin's Royal Academy, Berzin joined the Bolsheviks through the Latvian Riflemen in the First World War. In 1918, on Cheka orders, he posed as a disaffected officer to penetrate Lockhart's anti-Soviet conspiracy, securing the plotters' arrest. From 1926 he directed OGPU prison-labour construction of the Vishera chemical complex, then in 1931 became Dalstroy's first director, tasked with extracting Kolyma's gold and building Magadan from tundra. He pioneered a camp economy combining wages, early release, and family resettlement with brutal production quotas. Arrested at the Great Purge's height in late 1937, he was shot in 1938.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The Hammer of Leningrad

In his final plea: "Please take into account that I slandered a great many honest people during the investigation... About myself I have nothing to say, because I know my fate well."

A Latvian Bolshevik who rose through Siberian and Belarusian security posts to become the NKVD chief of Leningrad and an enforcer of the Great Terror. He directed the Kirov murder investigation, deported over 11,000 'former people', fabricated the 'Belarusian National Centre' case, and organised large-scale national operations targeting Latvians. Promoted to Yezhov's deputy NKVD commissar and Moscow NKVD chief in early 1938, he was arrested within months by the same apparatus, shot, and posthumously denied rehabilitation.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1894–1940 ✕ Executed

The 'North Caucasian' Chekist who opened the mass operations in West Siberia

A stenographic record survives of his briefing to subordinates in the summer of 1937, as Order No. 00447 was being prepared: 'The limit for the first operation is 11,000... You may take 12,000, or 13,000, or 15,000. I am not restricting you to that figure. You may take 20,000 in the first category.'

A Chekist born into a Jewish family in Kiev, originally surnamed Korol and often written Mironov-Korol, he made his career in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov as one of the 'North Caucasians' and was Frinovsky's closest associate. As head of the West Siberian NKVD he opened the mass operations of summer 1937, chairing the regional troika formed with prosecutor Barkov and party secretary Eikhe and telling his men not to feel bound by their quotas. Transferred in August 1937 to Mongolia as Soviet plenipotentiary, he organized the Mongolian purge in which some eight thousand lamas perished, then headed the Second Eastern Department of the foreign affairs commissariat until his arrest in January 1939; placed on the execution list sent to Stalin on 16 January 1940, he was shot.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1894–1955 ✕ Executed

From tsarist officer to Beria's untitled enforcer in state security

On 8 July 1939, aboard an NKVD special railcar from Moscow to Tskhaltubo, Soviet plenipotentiary to China Bovkun-Luganets and his wife were killed and the deaths staged as a car crash; at the 1953 interrogations the testimonies conflicted over who struck the blows.

Born into a poor family at Sachkhere in Georgia, he passed through tsarist army service and prisoner-of-war camps before entering the Georgian Workers'-Peasants' militia in 1921 and moving to the GPU in 1922 on Beria's recommendation. When Beria took him to Moscow in late 1938 as deputy head of the 3rd special department of the central NKVD, he became Beria's personal operative for abductions and secret killings. He sat on the Georgian NKVD special troika from August 1937 to July 1938, taking part in its mass execution decisions during the Great Terror, and was first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs of Georgia in 1941, later deputy interior minister of the republic, with the rank of lieutenant-general. Sentenced to death at the Tbilisi trial of September 1955 and shot on 15 November 1955, he has not been rehabilitated since.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1894–1972 ○ Natural causes

The NKVD rezident who ran a Gestapo mole and coordinated Soviet atomic espionage in America

On 12 October 1941, as German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin personally summoned Zarubin and gave him one task in Washington: 'Find out if the Americans will try to arrange a separate peace with Germany.'

A leading officer of Soviet foreign intelligence, Zarubin spent 13 of his 23 years of service as an illegal rezident operating under deep cover across Europe and Asia. As illegal rezident in Berlin from 1933 to 1937, he personally ran Gestapo officer Willy Lehmann (codename 'Breitenbach'), whose reporting on the structure, personnel, and operations of the RSHA and Gestapo, as well as German military plans, was rated among the most valuable Soviet intelligence of the prewar period. From 1941 to 1944 he served as chief NKVD rezident in the United States, coordinating the atomic espionage network that fed critical nuclear research data to Moscow during the Manhattan Project. After the war he became deputy chief of foreign intelligence (1945–1948), overseeing illegal operations worldwide before retiring and training future KGB officers.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who manufactured the wrecking cases

In 1934, Time magazine described Prokofiev as the OGPU commissar "who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, 'shot for sabotage.'"

A Chekist who, as OGPU Economic Directorate chief (1926–1931), manufactured the great 'wrecking' cases against Soviet technical specialists. Rose to NKVD second deputy commissar under Yagoda, then was arrested and executed in 1937 after Yagoda's fall.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov's chief of secretariat, keeper of the Great Terror's papers and figures

In November 1938, days after Yezhov lost the NKVD, his chief of secretariat was arrested — the man who had kept every figure of the Great Terror now became a deposition witness against his own patron.

An economic functionary who had passed through the Finance Commissariat, the Soviet Control Commission, and the Central Committee apparatus, he followed Yezhov into the NKVD in January 1937, serving as deputy chief and then chief of its Secretariat and chief of the 9th Special Department, and from 1938 headed the 1st Special Department in charge of operational records, registration, and statistics. The paperwork and figures of the Great Terror passed through his hands to Yezhov's desk, earning him the Order of the Red Star and the Honorary Chekist badge. Arrested on 13 November 1938 immediately after Yezhov's fall, he testified against his former patron and was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in February 1940; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

From North Caucasus NKVD chief to government protection head, an executor of the Great Terror

In November 1938, government protection chief Dagin was arrested in Beria's internal NKVD purge. The guardian of the Kremlin was led to the Lubyanka's basement cells.

Yevdokimov's trusted operative, Dagin directed mass arrests in the North Caucasus NKVD during the Great Terror. As head of government protection, he guarded the Kremlin leadership, until Beria had him arrested in 1938 and shot in 1940.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The Bloody Dwarf, an executor of the Great Terror shaped by the party personnel apparatus

"I know no more ideal worker than Yezhov. Rather, not a worker but an executor... Yezhov has only one flaw: he does not know how to stop." Ivan Moskvin, Yezhov's patron, to his son-in-law Lev Razgon

Yezhov was born in 1895 in Kovno governorate to a peasant father from Tula and a Lithuanian mother; his 1922 and 1924 forms instead claimed a St Petersburg birth in a Russian worker family and a 'March 1917' party entry, which the record and his own interrogation contradict. He was actually admitted to the RSDLP in Vitebsk on 3 August 1917, and his NKVD career was an extension of the party personnel apparatus. As NKVD chief, under Stalin's leadership, he organized the mass arrest and execution operations of 1937–38. At least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 executed for state crimes, while the Gulag population grew by 685,201. He was no career Chekist, yet he took part in torture and personally carried out the sentence on A. S. Kalygina on 27 November 1937. Arrested on 10 April 1939, he was executed in February 1940; a Russian court denied his rehabilitation in 1998.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov’s confidant who kept the Great Terror’s ledgers

In the summer of 1938 the albums of the mass operations piled up in Moscow, more than a hundred thousand names awaiting review. The records chief who fixed guilt and sentence out of that paper heap was Tsesarsky.

Born to a clerk's family in Odessa, he passed from the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Borotbists into the Bolshevik party in 1919. He worked in the Central Committee apparatus in the 1930s, from 1935 as report aide to CC secretary Yezhov, and when Yezhov took over the NKVD he followed him in, holding a plenipotentiary post created for him before heading the GUGB 8th Department in charge of records and registration. The album reviews of the mass operations and the paperwork of the execution lists passed through his hands, and in 1937 he was promoted to senior major of state security. In 1938 he headed the Secret Political (4th) Department and then the Moscow oblast NKVD before being shunted off to run the Ukhto-Izhemsky camp; arrested in December 1938 right after Yezhov's fall, he was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in January 1940. Rehabilitation was denied in 2002.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The interrogator who beat a confession out of Tukhachevsky, and spoke of beating only once it was his turn

Under his own interrogation he admitted: “I personally had to beat enemies of the party in Lefortovo, and elsewhere, but I never understood the suffering experienced by those being beaten.” The men beating him as he said it worked for the same service.

Born in 1895 in Kiev Governorate to a Jewish carpenter's family, Ushakov left school at thirteen and joined the Kiev Cheka in 1920, spending fourteen years in Ukraine. In January 1937 he came to Moscow as assistant head of the Special Department of the GUGB. That spring he was lead investigator in the fabricated ‘military-fascist conspiracy’ case against the Red Army, manufacturing the confessions of Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Uborevich. He conducted Tukhachevsky's first interrogation on 25 May 1937 and beat him so severely that blood marked the protocol. In 1938 he tortured Robert Eikhe by working on ribs that had not yet healed. Arrested at Khabarovsk in September 1938, he was shot on 26 January 1940 and has never been rehabilitated.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1944 ✕ Executed

The spy who stole the war’s timetable in Tokyo

“The world war… exerted the deepest influence on my entire life. Whatever other factors may have affected me, it was solely because of this war that I became a communist.” — from his 1927 autobiography

A Soviet intelligence officer who worked under cover as a German correspondent in Tokyo. He warned of Operation Barbarossa and confirmed Japan's southward turn, enabling Siberian divisions to be thrown into the Moscow front. Executed in 1944; made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1953 ✕ Executed

The NKGB chief named first in the Katyn order, who wrote plays under a pseudonym

Testifying as a witness on 21 July 1953, he said of Beria signing a book he had not written: “This is not even plagiarism, it is something more.” The hand that drew a line at literary dishonour drew none at the death lists of 22,000 Poles.

Merkulov was the most educated man in Beria's circle and, for a decade, his executive hand. He entered the Georgian Cheka in September 1921 and was noticed by Beria in 1923, and by December 1938 he was the NKVD's number two. When the Politburo named a troika on 5 March 1940 to dispose of some 21,857 Polish prisoners without hearings or charges, the first name in the decision was Merkulov's. After the Germans found the Katyn graves in 1943 he directed the preliminary work behind the Burdenko Commission's attribution of the massacre to the Germans, so the man who organised the killing organised the denial. He headed state security twice and under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk wrote plays. Arrested in the Beria case, he was sentenced to death on 23 December 1953 by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court and shot the same day.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1955 Cause disputed

The executioner who served twenty-seven years under three chiefs

In April 1940, donning a leather butcher's apron and shoulder-length gloves, Blokhin personally shot about 7,000 Polish prisoners in the Kalinin NKVD basement over 28 nights — one every three minutes.

The Soviet executioner who headed the NKVD Kommandatura for 27 years, carrying out death sentences at the Lubyanka. Serving under Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, he personally executed victims of the Great Terror and commanded the Kalinin execution team during the 1940 Katyn massacre.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1967 ○ Natural causes

Soviet judge at the Nuremberg IMT, death-sentence arbiter of the Great Purge

Before the Nuremberg trials convened, Nikitchenko said: "If… the judge is supposed to be impartial, it would only lead to unnecessary delays."

Deputy Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court (1938–1949) and Soviet judge at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1945–1946), he was a key executor of Stalin-era judicial repression. Joining the Bolsheviks in 1916, he began his career in military tribunals during the Civil War and rose to deputy chairman of the Military Collegium under Vasily Ulrikh, presiding over the Moscow show trials that sentenced Zinoviev and Kamenev to death in 1936. He was one of three principal drafters of the London Charter establishing the IMT's legal framework, and at Nuremberg filed the sole dissenting opinion against the acquittals of Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche. Reprimanded by the Party Control Commission in 1940 for 'conveyor-belt' procedural violations in Far Eastern trials, he retired in 1951 and died in 1967.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1973 ○ Natural causes

The NKVD chief in Spain who shipped the Republic's gold to Moscow and broke the POUM, then fled Stalin

In July 1938 Orlov received a telegram ordering him aboard a Soviet ship moored at Antwerp. He took his wife and daughter onto a boat for Canada instead, and left letters addressed to Yezhov and to Stalin: so long as he and his elderly mother in Moscow were left alone, he would not say what he knew. He kept silent for fifteen years.

Born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin. After the Red Army and the border troops in the civil war he joined the foreign department (INO) in 1926 and ran illegal stations in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and London; in September 1936 he arrived in Madrid as liaison to the Republic''s interior ministry and the following year became NKVD chief for Spain. Two operations carry his name: the shipment of 510 tonnes of the Republic''s gold reserve from Cartagena to the USSR, and the framing of the POUM as a traitor organization, in the course of which its general secretary Andreu Nin was abducted and killed. Reading his recall in July 1938 as a death sentence, he fled with his family to the United States, and after Stalin''s death published The Secret History of Stalin''s Crimes, an insider''s testimony on the Great Terror. His claims to general''s rank and to having recruited the Cambridge ring have, since the archives opened, been judged largely inflated; his actual rank was major of state security.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik commissar of the Peter and Paul Fortress

On 25 October 1917, Commissar Blagonravov directed the shelling of the Winter Palace from the Peter and Paul Fortress. The ceremonial guns were useless — soldiers had to drag three-inch field guns from the arsenal by hand.

A former tsarist officer who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. As commissar of the Peter and Paul Fortress during the October Revolution, he directed the fortress artillery's shelling of the Winter Palace and held Provisional Government ministers in the Trubetskoy Bastion. He later led the transport directorate of the Cheka and OGPU, overseeing railway security and road construction, and became Commissar of State Security 1st Class in 1936. Arrested during the Great Terror in 1937 and shot the following year.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

The man who drove the Ukrainian mass operations to their peak

According to the testimony of GB Major Z.M. Ushakov, Leplevsky was so ruthless that even his own superior, Nikolai Yezhov, feared him.

A Chekist from Brest-Litovsk who headed the NKVD of Belorussia before taking charge in Ukraine, where he drove the mass operations of the Great Terror to their peak. One of Yezhov's closest lieutenants, he was among the first to be consumed by the machinery he had helped run.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1940 ✕ Executed

The trade official who became a deputy commissar

In the 1923 party debate he voted for the Trotskyist resolutions. Fifteen years later Stalin remembered: on 3 October 1938 Zhukovsky was reassigned to head the Ridder mine in Kazakhstan but was arrested on 22 October, before he could even leave Moscow.

An unusual figure among Yezhov's NKVD deputies: a trade official, not a career Chekist. Born in Kyiv to a Jewish family, he served as a Soviet trade representative in Germany before Yezhov brought him into the NKVD in 1936 to run administration and supply. He became deputy commissar in 1938 but was arrested and executed in the purge that followed.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1940

A 'North Caucasian' Chekist moved from Chechnya to Primorye

In December 1917, as a private in a mounted partisan detachment, he took part in seizing the quarters of General Dukhonin, the Russian army's last commander-in-chief, who was killed by the soldiers soon after.

A 'North Caucasian' Chekist whom Yevdokimov named in 1934 among 'his people' inside the OGPU, he ran the NKVD in Chechnya (Chechen-Ingushetia) from the summer of 1936. Naumov counts him among the regional chiefs who proposed above-average figures in the kulak operation. After the Far Eastern reorganization he became head of the Primorye oblast NKVD in August 1938, with the rank of major of state security, and lost the post as Yezhov fell.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1945 ○ Died in prison

Operational secretary of the GUGB whose 'certified' signature closes the Great Terror's operational orders

A 1943 camp evaluation described the man who had certified the mass-execution orders as an exemplary foreman and petitioned to cut three years off his sentence.

An NKVD brigade commander from the border troops, he served as operational secretary of the Main Directorate of State Security from April 1937 to September 1938 and certified the copies of Yezhov's Great Terror operational orders, including No. 00447. A protégé of Frinovsky, he briefly headed Beria's secretariat, was arrested in 1939, sentenced to fifteen years and died in a Krasnoyarsk camp in 1945.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1952 ○ Natural causes

The only Yezhov deputy to survive, who ran the GULAG as Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs

When Beria replaced Yezhov and arrested Yezhov's men one by one, Chernyshev alone was not removed. Instead he was given the GULAG as well, and ran the entire camp system for the next two years.

A state security official who served as Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for fifteen years from 1937 until his death in 1952, and the only one of Yezhov's deputy commissars to escape the purge. From 1939 to 1941 he concurrently headed the GULAG, overseeing the entire camp system, and during the war directed the operational planning of mass deportations from the Baltic states. After the war he supervised construction for the Soviet atomic project, channelling GULAG labour into nuclear facilities.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1896–1967 ○ Lung cancer

Stalin's shadow for 25 years as head of personal security

"If I've been arrested, it means Stalin will soon be gone," Vlasik said upon his arrest. A month and a half later, Stalin was dead.

A Belarusian of peasant origin, Vlasik led Stalin's personal security from 1931 to 1952: a quarter-century during which he managed every dacha, residence, and security detail surrounding the Soviet leader. After Nadezhda Alliluyeva's death he became a de facto tutor to Stalin's children and functioned as the family's majordomo. Rising to lieutenant general with three Orders of Lenin and the Order of Kutuzov 1st Class, he was arrested in December 1952 in connection with the Doctors' Plot. Convicted in 1955 and stripped of rank and decorations, he was posthumously exonerated by the Russian Supreme Court in 2000.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1897–1937 ✕ Executed

Yagoda's chief of the Secret Political Department

At the February–March 1937 Central Committee Plenum, Stalin interrupted Yezhov's report: "What about Molchanov? What's his fate? Is he arrested or not?" Yezhov replied: "Yes, arrested, Comrade Stalin, he's sitting."

Yagoda's right hand at the OGPU/NKVD Secret Political Department, he directed repression of oppositionists, clergy, and peasants. He oversaw the Ryutin arrests, the post-Kirov mass arrests, and the first Moscow show trial. Demoted to Belorussia after Yagoda fell, he was arrested and executed in 1937.