Mikhail Petrovich Frinovsky

Mikhail Frinovsky was born in January 1898 in the village of Narovchat, Penza gubernia, into a teacher's family and educated at a religious school. In January 1916 he enlisted in the cavalry, deserted that August, and became linked to anarchists, taking part in the killing of Major-General Mikhail Antonovich Bem, who was suppressing anti-war protests in Penza. From March 1917 he worked as an accountant, and in September 1917 he joined the Red Guard in Khamovniki, commanded a group of Red Guards, took part in the storming of the Kremlin and was severely wounded. The sources record the anarchist period and the Bem killing as conduct, not motive.

In July 1918 he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Red Army, serving as a squadron commander and head of the Special Department of the 1st Cavalry Army. In 1919 he was transferred to the Cheka, serving in the second half of that year as assistant head of the active section of the Special Department of the Moscow Cheka and taking part in the destruction of anarchists and the liquidation of anarchist and insurgent detachments in Ukraine. From December 1919 to April 1920 he served in the Special Department of the Southern Front; in 1920 he was head of the active section of the Special Department of the South-Western Front and deputy head of the Special Department of the 1st Cavalry Army; and in 1921–1922 deputy head of the Special Department and deputy head of the operational detachment of the All-Ukrainian Cheka. This is the phase in which the future organiser of mass operations was himself a field operative of repression.

In the 1920s he consolidated himself as an administrator. After heading the Kiev GPU in 1922–1923, he became head of the OGPU plenipotentiary for the South-East from 23 June 1923, transferred in November 1923 to head the Special Department of the North Caucasus Military District, became deputy plenipotentiary in March 1924, and from January 1926 first deputy plenipotentiary and head of the GPU troops of the North Caucasus region. The divergence between accounts concerns the July 1918 party and Red Army entry, which both sources place in 1918.

On 1 September 1930 he was appointed chairman of the GPU of the Azerbaijan SSR, where he was one of the organisers of dekulakisation. This is a documented repression role carried out in a non-Russian republic of the USSR, not a mere career step. On 8 April 1933 he was appointed head of the Main Directorate of Border Guards and OGPU Troops and directed the operation to suppress the uprising in Xinjiang. The official list of border-troop commanders records him, at the rank of Komandarm 1st rank, as chief of the Main Directorate of Border Protection (from 1934 Border and Internal Troops) of the OGPU and then of the NKVD for 1933–1937, succeeded by N. K. Krutsinskin.

Military operations also unfolded beyond the Central Asian border in the same period. The Soviet invasion of Xinjiang was a military campaign in Chinese north-western Xinjiang in 1934 in which two brigades of about 7,000 Soviet GPU troops backed by tanks, aircraft and artillery with mustard gas crossed the border to assist Sheng Shicai. The sources establish that Frinovsky commanded the Border Troops directorate that mounted the operation; the claim of personal command rests on the Russian-language source and is attributed as such.

By 1936 he was not a newcomer but a veteran of nearly twenty years in the punitive apparatus. As the Yezhov system took shape he moved to the working desk of the mass operations as deputy people's commissar of internal affairs, whose daily running and Mongolia mission belong to the already-written great-terror section.

Mikhail Frinovsky, Yezhov's first deputy people's commissar and head of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), was the operational chief who kept the mass operations of 1937 and 1938 turning day by day. The tallying of regional quotas under Operational Order 00447 and the approval of their increases, and the review of the "album procedure" of the national operations, crossed his desk. The signatures of two men, Yezhov and Frinovsky, constituted execution approval by the thousands.

His activity did not stop at the border. In August 1937 he led a Soviet delegation into Mongolia and supervised the imposition of a sweeping purge on the Mongolian leadership; the Mongolian terror that followed took tens of thousands of victims. He stood on the route by which the violence of the security organs was exported abroad.

Frinovsky is also named in numerous statements as a man who took part personally in the beatings of the interrogation rooms. After the documents of the terror were opened, researchers came to treat him as a case study in how terror as policy and terror as violence combined in a single person.

In September 1938, as the mass operations entered their termination phase and the Yezhov apparatus began to be dismantled, Frinovsky was transferred to be People's Commissar of the Navy. For a man who had never commanded a fleet the appointment was not an honor but a quarantine from the security organs. Half a year later, on 6 April 1939, he was arrested.

The long statement he wrote to Beria five days after his arrest became one of the key documents of Great Terror scholarship. In it Frinovsky described in an insider's language how confessions were manufactured: interrogators first drew up the outline of a case, extracted signatures by beating, and then polished the protocols "literarily". The statement itself, written in custody, naturally requires source criticism, but on the technical details of the operations it carries the weight of testimony from the operations' own chief implementer.

In early February 1940 he was sentenced to death at a closed trial and shot. His wife and seventeen-year-old son were executed as well. Frinovsky was never rehabilitated. The machinery of the terror closed itself down by consuming its own implementers, and in its final documents the machine's working principles were left to posterity.