Khrushchev's chief investigator who traced Stalin's crimes to the end
"Nikita Sergeyevich, you know that I am not an enemy of the people." — a single line sent from exile to Khrushchev, 1954
An Old Bolshevik who joined the party at 15 in 1916. As chief investigator of the Shvernik Commission under Khrushchev, she proved in 64 volumes that the Kirov murder, Moscow show trials, and Katyn massacre were Stalin's fabrications. She survived eight years in Kolyma and was rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1916Joins the RSDLP(b) at age 15
- 1918Shaumyan's secretary in the Baku Commune; Turkish death sentence commuted
- 1918–20Transcaucasian underground; courier of a secret letter to Lenin
- 1920–37Party cadre in Baku, Bryansk, Moscow; Moscow City Committee org-dept head; CCC member
- 1937–46Arrested; 8-year sentence in Kolyma Gulag
- 1949–54Re-arrested; indefinite exile in Krasnoyarsk
- 1956–62KPK member; Shvernik Commission chief investigator — exposed Kirov murder, Moscow trials fabrication, Katyn forgery
- 1962Demands disclosure of Stalin's possible Okhranka ties; Khrushchev refuses; retires
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeOld Bolshevik party cadre arrested in 1937Arrested in November 1937 on Bagirov's denunciation; sentenced by the NKVD Special Board in May 1938 to 8 years in corrective labor camps for 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization'; served in Kolyma. Later, as Shvernik Commission chief investigator under Khrushchev, she exposed the fabrications of the Great Terror cases.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret SpeechInvestigator for the commission preparing materials for the Secret Speech
The Shvernik Commission and Uncovering Stalin's Crimes
In 1960, Khrushchev formed the Shvernik Commission and appointed Shatunovskaya as its chief investigator. The Old Bolshevik who had spent eight years in Kolyma was now officially tasked with documenting the crimes of the system that had imprisoned her. Shatunovskaya tracked down former NKVD officers, camp survivors, and prison guards to secure eyewitness testimony. In the Kirov murder case, she located the guard who witnessed Nikolaev shouting that NKVD officers had "spent four months persuading me to shoot Kirov for the good of the party." She proved the Moscow show trial confessions had been extracted through torture and threats, and confirmed that the official Soviet claim attributing the Katyn massacre to the Nazis was itself a fabrication. The commission's 64-volume report documented the structural mechanism of Stalin's terror. But when Shatunovskaya sought to investigate Stalin's alleged collaboration with the Okhranka (tsarist secret police), Khrushchev stopped her: "That, we cannot do." She retired in 1962, and her unfinished investigative notes were published posthumously as About the Bygone Century.