Mikhail Petrovich Frinovsky

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.