The transport chief who assembled the deportation trains
In October 1941 Milshtein reported to Beria: 657,364 soldiers detained as stragglers since the invasion, 10,201 shot — 3,321 "before the ranks."
A Beria protégé who built his party career in Georgia, Milshtein was appointed head of the NKVD Main Transport Directorate in 1939, making him the operator of the railway apparatus of Stalinist mass deportations. His directorate assembled and moved the trains that forcibly relocated entire nationalities: Poles, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Ingush. For this work he received the Order of Suvorov 2nd class, a combat decoration the Soviet state itself annulled in 1962. Arrested shortly after Beria's fall in 1953, he was tried separately and shot in January 1955.
Career Timeline
- 1920년대–1938Party work in Georgia, including secretary of the Tbilisi city committee
- 1938–1939Deputy head of the Investigative Unit, NKVD
- 1939–1941Head of the Main Transport Directorate, NKVD
- 1941–1942First deputy head of the Directorate of Special Departments, NKVD
- 1942–1943Head of the Transport Directorate, NKVD
- 1943–1947Head of the 3rd Directorate (transport), NKGB and MGB
- 1951–1953Deputy head of the Gulag, MVD
- 1953First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian SSR
- 1953–1955Arrested, tried separately and executed
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeChief of NKVD Investigative Unit
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarThe transport chief who assembled the deportation trainsRunning the NKVD's transport apparatus through the war, he assembled and moved the trains for the deportations of the Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingush in 1943 and 1944. The Order of Suvorov 2nd class he received for it was a combat decoration given for deporting civilians, and the Soviet state itself annulled it in 1962.
- 1953The Fall of BeriaTried separately and executedArrested on 3 July 1953, four months after Beria sent him to Ukraine as first deputy minister, he was shot in January 1955 after a separate trial.
The 1941 Yugoslav Coup and Soviet Intelligence
The military coup that toppled the pro-German government in Belgrade on 27 March 1941 was led by Yugoslav Air Force officers, but Soviet intelligence also played a hand. According to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, Soviet intelligence dispatched operatives to Belgrade to assist the plotters, a mission that included Solomon Milshtein and Vasily Zarubin. At the time Milshtein was head of the NKVD Main Transport Directorate, responsible for internal security and deportations, yet here he operated in a wholly different register.
Sudoplatov described the objective as keeping Yugoslavia out of Axis hands and ensuring the new government would delay German and Italian military operations for as long as possible. After the coup succeeded, Germany resolved to invade Yugoslavia, extending the Balkan campaign and pushing back the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, by roughly two months, to 22 June 1941. Those weeks proved critical for the USSR. Milshtein's precise activities in Belgrade remain undocumented, but his involvement illustrates how the Stalinist state security apparatus moved fluidly between domestic repression and covert operations abroad.
The Deportation Railways: The Main Transport Directorate and the Expulsion of Nations
On 31 March 1939, Milshtein was appointed the first head of the newly created Main Transport Directorate (GTU) of the NKVD, giving him security control over the entire Soviet railway network. Formally tasked with counterintelligence and order on transport routes, the directorate soon became the logistical engine of the Stalinist regime's wholesale deportation of entire nationalities. After organizing the trains that expelled Poles in 1940–41, the GTU, under Milshtein's command, assembled and moved the railway convoys that forcibly relocated the Karachai, Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, and other peoples classified as 'punished nations' to Central Asia.
On 26 February 1944, Milshtein was appointed an NKVD commissioner with direct on-site responsibility for deporting the entire Balkar people from the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic. In the early hours of 8 March, all 37,713 Balkars were loaded onto 14 train convoys and dispatched to the Kazakh and Kirghiz steppes in a single day; 17,000 NKVD troops carried out the operation. That May, his transport apparatus also moved the trains that expelled the Crimean Tatars. In July 1944, Milshtein received the Order of Suvorov 2nd Class for this work: a combat decoration rarely awarded to a rear-echelon organizer of deportation trains, and a mark of how fully the Stalin regime regarded ethnic expulsion as part of victory.