Vladimir Konstantinovich Konstantinov

Soviet Union state institutions Marxism–Leninism 1891–1940 ✕ Executed

Divisional commissar who served with Yezhov in the Civil War radio units and later ran the Leningrad Military District's Voentorg

Born into a workers' family in Gatchina, he was conscripted in 1912, served as a radio operator in the First World War and joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917. From 1918 to 1921 he worked alongside Yezhov in the Red Army's radio units. He then served as a political officer in the Volga and Leningrad military districts, became a divisional commissar in 1936 and in November 1938 head of the Voentorg (military trade) of the Leningrad Military District. In 1938 he often visited Yezhov's apartment and dacha; in his April 1939 statement Yezhov stated that they had sexual relations, and in the interrogation of 26 April that he had prepared Konstantinov as a terrorist. Arrested on 17 April 1939, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on 21 January 1940, shot the next day and posthumously rehabilitated.