Yezhov's personnel chief who purged 14,000 Chekists
At Yezhov's dacha in summer 1938, he told fellow Chekists: "If I see things are bad, I'll shoot myself." That November, an hour before his train to Moscow, he did.
Bolshevik Chekist and Yezhov protégé. As NKVD Personnel chief (1936), purged 14,000 Yagoda-era operatives and led the Bukharin case. Leningrad NKVD chief when Yezhov fell. He shot himself in 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1917Chairman, Printers' Union, Krasnoyarsk
- 1920–1921Military commissar; Cheka investigator
- 1930Distribution dept head, Central Asian Bureau
- 1931–1933Deputy head, distribution dept, Central Committee
- 1936–1937Head, NKVD Personnel Department
- 1937–1938Head, 4th (SPO) Dept, GUGB
- 1938Chief, Leningrad NKVD
Related historical events
The Great Terror and the Leningrad NKVD
In May 1937, Litvin was appointed head of the 4th (Secret-Political) Department of the GUGB, a key post that put his signature on Stalin's 'execution lists.' The SPO was responsible for rooting out 'anti-Soviet elements,' and the lists he endorsed included thousands of Party and military officials. As a member of the NKVD Special Troika, he also directly sanctioned extrajudicial executions.
Transferred to head the Leningrad NKVD in January 1938, Litvin escalated the mass purges begun by his predecessor Zakovsky. In 1938 alone, 20,769 people were shot in Leningrad. A grim joke circulated among Leningrad Chekists: 'Under Zakovsky it was flowers; under Litvin, it's berries.' In January 1939, a Central Committee letter signed by Stalin denounced Litvin, alongside Zakovsky and Uspensky, as men who 'turned physical methods of interrogation from an exception into the rule and applied them to innocent people.'