1906–1967
○ Heart attack
The Stalin-era chief investigator who pioneered the Soviet detective story
Kamil Ikramov recalled that even in the Khrushchev years, whenever Sheinin drove past the house where Vyshinsky had lived, he wept real tears.
A State Counsellor of Justice 2nd Class who, as head of the USSR Procuracy's Investigative Department (1935, 1939–1949), directed investigations into the Kirov assassination, the Zinoviev–Kamenev and Bukharin–Rykov–Yagoda trials, and other major political cases of the Stalin era. He served on the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials as assistant to Chief Prosecutor Roman Rudenko. At the same time he built a parallel literary career: his collection Notes of an Investigator (1938) pioneered the Soviet detective genre, and his screenplay for Meeting on the Elbe (1949) won the Stalin Prize. Arrested in 1936 and again in 1951 (the second time in connection with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case), he survived both imprisonments and spent his later years as deputy editor-in-chief of Oktyabr and editor-in-chief of Mosfilm, dying of a heart attack in 1967.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1923–1927USSR Procuracy, Moscow
- 1927–1931Senior investigator, Leningrad Regional Court
- 1931–1935Investigator for especially important cases, USSR Procuracy
- 1935, 1939–1949Head of Investigative Dept., USSR Procuracy; State Counsellor of Justice 2nd Class
- 1945–1946Assistant to Chief Soviet Prosecutor, Nuremberg Trials
- 1953–1960Editorial board member, deputy editor-in-chief, Oktyabr
- 1960–1964Editor-in-chief, Mosfilm; member, Art Council, USSR Ministry of Culture
Related historical events
Early life and the 1933 Kotlas case
Lev Sheinin was born in 1906 in the village of Brusanovka (now Velizh district, Smolensk oblast); the family moved to Toropets in 1908. He joined the Komsomol in 1919, served on the Toropets district Komsomol committee, and began working at the local newspaper Svetoch. In 1921 he came to Moscow and studied at the Bryusov Higher Literary-Artistic Institute, hoping to become a writer, but in 1923 a Komsomol assignment sent him to the USSR Procuracy. He studied law in parallel at Moscow University, moved to Leningrad in 1927 as a senior investigator of the regional court, and joined the party in 1929. Returning to Moscow in 1931, he became an investigator for especially important cases at the USSR Procuracy; stories later collected in Notes of an Investigator and his 1931 criminalistics textbook belong to this period. The best-documented case of this early career is the Kotlas affair of 1933: from May to September he investigated the mass deaths of special settlers on the transit route from Kotlas to Yarensk. Of 2,680 people dispatched, only 880 reached Yarensk, and Sheinin himself wrote that even an approximate death toll could not be established. The case produced the unusual outcome of law-enforcement and security personnel being prosecuted together: it caused a scandal rare for the time, and about twenty officials, including OGPU staff, were put on trial. This is the phase that shows what kind of cases he actually handled before the great political investigations.