Alexander Ivanovich Uspensky

Upon taking office as Ukrainian People's Commissar of Internal Affairs in January 1938, Uspensky immediately set about building his own faction by arresting large numbers of senior NKVD officers who had served under his predecessor Izrail Leplevsky, charging them with belonging to a 'Right-Trotskyist organization' and a 'counter-revolutionary Zionist nationalist organization.' In February 1938 he requested a Politburo quota of 15,000 first-category (execution) sentences under the 'kulak operation,' and in May asked Yezhov directly to raise it to 35,000. Under Uspensky, the combined repression from the kulak operation and national operations in Ukraine reached eight times the Soviet average, and he personally led the arrest of some 36,000 people. Made a member of the Ukrainian Communist Party Politburo in June 1938, he publicly pledged loyalty to Nikita Khrushchev, declaring that 'only after the faithful Stalinist Khrushchev arrived in Ukraine did the smashing of the enemies of the people begin in earnest.' The mass execution records and purge files he left behind later served as evidence in the internal power struggles of the NKVD.

On November 14, 1938, Yezhov telephoned Uspensky: 'You're being summoned to Moscow. Your affairs are bad.' Then he hinted: 'You figure out for yourself how to travel and where to travel.' Realizing his arrest was imminent, Uspensky left a suicide note in his office and placed his coat and cap on the bank of the Dnieper, faking his drowning. After returning home that evening, he dismissed his guard and slipped away past 9 p.m., saying he had 'personal business.' His disappearance was not discovered until noon the following day.

Uspensky had issued himself a fake passport under the name Ivan Lavrentievich Shmashkovsky and boarded a train for Voronezh. Moving through Kursk, Arkhangelsk, and Kaluga, he eventually hid at the home of Larisa Matson near Moscow. Her husband, Gulag prison department chief German Matson, had been shot six months earlier. The pair relocated to Murom, where Matson found work as head of a maternity ward and Uspensky posed as a writer working from home. By March 1939, with funds running out, Uspensky resumed his flight. He drifted through Kazan, Arzamas, and Sverdlovsk before deciding to hide in the gold fields and heading for Miass.

Stalin was enraged by the news. Uspensky's disappearance was the third emergency involving a senior NKVD officer in five months, following Lyushkov's defection to Japan and Litvin's suicide by pistol. He sent Beria a note: 'The honor of the Chekists has been stained and disgraced. Catch Uspensky at all costs. This cannot be tolerated.' A nationwide manhunt ensued, and on April 16, 1939, acting on a denunciation from Matson, the NKVD arrested Uspensky in Miass. Under interrogation, he confessed to participation in a 'counter-revolutionary conspiracy within the NKVD,' recruited (he said) by Georgy Prokofiev in 1934, and to 'espionage for Germany,' alleging he had been recruited by German Matson as early as 1924.

On January 27, 1940, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death. After a brief reprieve for further interrogation, he was shot on the night of February 26. His remains were consigned to the 'unclaimed ashes grave No. 1' at the Donskoy Cemetery crematorium. His wife Anna Uspenskaya was also shot in March 1940 on charges of 'aiding preparations for her husband's flight abroad and failure to report.' The fate of their son, then a teenager, is unknown. Ten NKVD officers received decorations on April 29, 1939, for their role in Uspensky's capture.