The man who drove the Ukrainian mass operations to their peak
According to the testimony of GB Major Z.M. Ushakov, Leplevsky was so ruthless that even his own superior, Nikolai Yezhov, feared him.
A Chekist from Brest-Litovsk who headed the NKVD of Belorussia before taking charge in Ukraine, where he drove the mass operations of the Great Terror to their peak. One of Yezhov's closest lieutenants, he was among the first to be consumed by the machinery he had helped run.
Career Timeline
- 1934–1936People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Belorussian SSR
- 1936–1937Chief of the Special Department, GUGB NKVD
- 1937–1938People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian SSR
- 1938Chief of the 6th Department, then of the 3rd Directorate (transport and communications), NKVD
- 1938Arrested and executed
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPeople's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeHe drove the Ukrainian mass operations to their peakAs Ukrainian NKVD chief from June 1937 he directed the operations under Orders No. 00447 and No. 00485 and the invented "Ukrainian Military Organisation" case. He was arrested that April and shot at Kommunarka in July 1938.
The Military-Fascist Conspiracy Case and the Third Moscow Trial
Leplevsky was, alongside Nikolai Yezhov and Mikhail Frinovsky, one of the principal fabricators of the so-called 'military-fascist conspiracy in the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.' Appointed chief of the Special (V) Department of the GUGB NKVD in November 1936, he set to work constructing cases against Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other senior Red Army commanders. The Special Department employed the so-called 'conveyor' method (relentless, round-the-clock interrogations) to extract confessions from arrested officers, and these fabricated testimonies became the decisive basis for the closed trial of Tukhachevsky and seven co-defendants on 11 June 1937, with execution following the next day.
Immediately after the Tukhachevsky affair, on 14 June 1937, Leplevsky was dispatched to Kiev as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. This was a deliberate move to scale the methodology of the military purge across the entire union, and his tenure in Ukraine unleashed a republic-wide campaign against an alleged 'Right-Trotskyist underground.' The scale of the operation was so massive that in August 1937 a Moscow inspection commission led by Yezhov's deputy Leonid Belsky was sent to Kiev to review the work.
Leplevsky was also deeply involved in the preparatory investigation for the Third Moscow Trial (the 'Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites') of March 1938, the climactic show trial targeting the old Bolshevik leadership, including Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. In a bitter irony, Leplevsky himself was already under arrest by the time that trial opened, and within four months he fell victim to the very judicial machinery he had helped to perfect.