The intelligence officer who directed the Great Purge in Belorussia
Searching Bukharin's flat, Berman arrived "in a black suit, white shirt, a fine ring on his finger, and an elongated little fingernail." Anna Larina recalled: "He came as if to a banquet."
A Soviet intelligence officer who joined the Cheka in 1921 and rose through economic and counterintelligence posts before moving to the INO, where he ran illegal residencies in Berlin and Rome. As first deputy head of the Foreign Department in 1935, he oversaw foreign intelligence operations, and from 1937 as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Belorussia, he directed the Great Purge across the republic — arresting 60,000 in eight months and supervising mass executions at Kurapaty. Arrested in September 1938 after Beria took over the NKVD, he was shot in February 1939 and never rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1921–1923Cheka operative, Irkutsk Guberniya
- 1923–1928Department head, Economic Directorate, OGPU
- 1928–1931Head of Counterintelligence and Special Dept, OGPU Central Asia
- 1931–1933INO OGPU resident, Berlin and Rome
- 1935–1936First Deputy Head, INO GUGB NKVD
- 1936–1937Deputy Head, Secret-Political Dept, GUGB NKVD
- 1937–1938People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Belorussian SSR
- 1938Head, 3rd Directorate (Transport & Communications), NKVD USSR
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCheka agent
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPeople's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Belorussia
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeEnforcer turned targetThe Belarus NKVD chief directed mass arrests and the Kurapaty executions, then was arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939.
Interrogator for the Moscow Show Trials
In the summer of 1936, as deputy head of the Secret-Political Department of the GUGB, Berman played a central role in fabricating evidence for the First Moscow Show Trial, the case of the 'Trotskyite-Zinovievite United Center.' His key subject was the Old Bolshevik Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan. According to the memoirs of Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov, Berman induced Ter-Vaganyan to sign a false confession by promising to spare him the death penalty, yet during the interrogations he developed a genuine fondness for the prisoner. It was a strange friendship between Stalin's inquisitor and his victim. Ter-Vaganyan was shot on August 25, 1936. Berman also handled the interrogation of Karl Radek for the Second Moscow Trial and led the search of Nikolai Bukharin's apartment after his arrest in early 1937. Following the first trial, Berman was transferred to Belorussia as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, where he applied the interrogation techniques perfected in Moscow on a republic-wide scale.