The deputy commissar who ran the Soviet police
Dismissed from the OGPU in 1931 for protesting Yagoda's "Vesna" frame-up, he returned under Yezhov to organize the troikas of the Great Terror.
A Cheka veteran, he became chief of the Soviet militia in 1934 and Yezhov's deputy at the NKVD in 1936, where he organized the regional troikas that issued mass death sentences during the Great Terror. Arrested in 1939, he was shot in 1941 and has never been rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1934–1936Chief of the Main Directorate of Workers' and Peasants' Militia, NKVD
- 1936–1938Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
- 1938–1939First Deputy People's Commissar of Railways
- 1939–1941Arrested, tried and executed
Related historical events
From Cheka to OGPU: Early Career and the 'Vesna' Protest
Belsky (born Abram Levin) began his Cheka career in 1918 as an instructor in the NKVD's organizational bureau, and was soon appointed chairman of the Simbirsk Governorate Cheka. During the Civil War he served on the Eastern and Southern fronts, and in 1921, as VChK plenipotentiary in Tambov Governorate, he took part in suppressing the Antonov Rebellion. He then moved to the Far East, where in late 1922, following the liberation of Vladivostok, he led the Primorsky Military-Revolutionary Committee, overseeing the consolidation of Soviet power in the region.
From 1923 to 1930, Belsky served for seven years as OGPU plenipotentiary for Turkestan and Central Asia, where he was deeply involved in the campaign against the Basmachi movement and the region's Sovietization. For this work he received his second Order of the Red Banner in 1927. In 1930 he was transferred to the post of OGPU plenipotentiary for Moscow Oblast.
Everything changed in 1931, when Belsky joined a collective protest against Genrikh Yagoda's fabricated 'Vesna' ('Spring') case, a mass operation targeting former Imperial Army officers serving in the Red Army on trumped-up charges of counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Belsky and several other OGPU officers openly objected, citing a lack of evidence. Yagoda responded by purging them: Belsky was dismissed from the OGPU.
Exiled to the margins of the state apparatus, he spent 1931–1933 working in the People's Commissariat of Supply. But in 1933, as Yagoda's grip weakened, Belsky returned under Nikolai Yezhov's patronage, first as OGPU plenipotentiary for the Lower Volga and then, in 1934, as chief of the Soviet militia. A man who had been cast out for opposing one fabricated case was now poised to become a central executor of the Great Terror, the irony that would define his legacy.