Vladimir Yefimovich Tsesarsky

Владимир Ефимович Цесарский

1895–1940 ✕ Executed; rehabilitation denied

Yezhov’s confidant who kept the Great Terror’s ledgers

In the summer of 1938 the albums of the mass operations piled up in Moscow, more than a hundred thousand names awaiting review. The records chief who fixed guilt and sentence out of that paper heap was Tsesarsky.

Born to a clerk's family in Odessa, he passed from the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Borotbists into the Bolshevik party in 1919. He worked in the Central Committee apparatus in the 1930s, from 1935 as report aide to CC secretary Yezhov, and when Yezhov took over the NKVD he followed him in, holding a plenipotentiary post created for him before heading the GUGB 8th Department in charge of records and registration. The album reviews of the mass operations and the paperwork of the execution lists passed through his hands, and in 1937 he was promoted to senior major of state security. In 1938 he headed the Secret Political (4th) Department and then the Moscow oblast NKVD before being shunted off to run the Ukhto-Izhemsky camp; arrested in December 1938 right after Yezhov's fall, he was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in January 1940. Rehabilitation was denied in 2002.