Insider chronicler of the NKVD during the Great Terror
Arriving in Novosibirsk as militsiya chief in early 1938, he refused to hand his detectives over to the arrests and convoys of the mass operations. After a month of clashes with oblast NKVD chief Gorbach he was transferred out; four months later he was arrested himself.
A veteran Cheka operative from 1919, he headed the Ivanovo oblast militsiya from 1935 and in February 1938 became deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Kazakh SSR and head of its militsiya. Posted to Novosibirsk just before that, he refused oblast NKVD chief Gorbach's demand to throw militsiya personnel into the arrests of the mass operations and was pushed out within a month. Arrested in Alma-Ata in June 1938, he held out against spy confessions for over nine months, then deliberately wrote absurd statements, such as being an illegitimate son of the Manchukuo emperor Puyi, to put the fabrication itself on record. Sentenced to ten years in 1940, he was released to the front as a private in 1942 and rehabilitated in the mid-1950s. His memoir NKVD from Within: Notes of a Chekist (published posthumously in 1995) is a rare inside account by a surviving senior officer, widely cited by historians.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1919Joined the Cheka; intelligence officer in a Western Front division special section
- 1922Served in the Moscow governorate GPU secret-political department; aide to Bulanov
- 1925–1927Worked in the NKID cipher department and Sovkino
- 1930–1931Served in the OGPU plenipotentiary offices for Central Asia and the Leningrad Military District
- 1931–1933Head of GPU in Khibinogorsk; then Tatar ASSR OGPU and Kazan criminal investigation
- 1935–1938.1Head of Ivanovo oblast criminal investigation and chief of the militsiya directorate (deputy UNKVD chief)
- 1938.2–6Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Kazakh SSR and head of its militsiya (Alma-Ata); arrested in June
Related historical events
Resistance in custody and the memoir
After his arrest in June 1938 in the Kazakh SSR's People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Shreyder was accused of spying for Germany, Poland and Japan, involvement in Kirov's assassination, and counterrevolutionary activity. He was held in facilities in Moscow's Butyrka and Lefortovo prisons, Yaroslavl and Ivanovo. According to his memoir, he was beaten during interrogations; beatings and demands for false confessions continued after he was transferred to Moscow in April-May 1939. After resisting false testimony for more than nine months, he invented deliberately absurd stories, including an affair with a daughter of Menelik II in Ethiopia and being an illegitimate son of Manchukuo's emperor Puyi, in an effort to have the case transferred to Moscow. Some of these statements entered the investigation file. The case was ordered closed in July 1939, but the investigation resumed in August, and an NKVD Special Council sentenced him to ten years in a labor camp. Transferred to a camp in late 1940, he was released in 1942 and sent to the front as a private. He wrote his memoirs in the 1970s; part appeared in 1995. In 2018, historian Aleksandr Teplyakov argued that the unpublished sections were also important evidence about personnel, internal relations and repression in the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD, and called for publication of the complete text.