Vladimir Nikolaevich Sukhodolsky
Владимир Николаевич Суходольский
1907–1966
○ Expelled from party, stripped of rank; died
NKVD major-general who led Tula's wartime defence and fell from grace
In the autumn of 1941, at age 34, Sukhodolsky joined Zhavoronkov and Chmutov on the three-man Tula City Defence Committee. With Red Army units withdrawn, the worker regiments and partisan detachments he organised held Guderian's panzers at bay for forty-five days.
A Soviet state security officer who headed the NKVD directorate for Tula Oblast at the decisive moment when German forces approached Moscow in 1941. As a member of the Tula City Defence Committee, he organised worker battalions and partisan detachments, built defensive lines, and neutralised Abwehr intelligence networks behind the front. After the war he served as MGB chief for Voronezh Oblast and later as a senior Soviet adviser to the Bulgarian interior ministry. In 1957 he was expelled from the party and stripped of his major-general's rank over his role in handling the 'KPM' anti-Stalinist youth group case in Voronezh in 1950, and was never rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1924–1931Worker at Tula Arms Factory; completed workers' faculty evening division
- 1931–1935Studied at Moscow Aviation Institute, transferred to Tula Mechanical Institute; graduated as mechanical engineer
- 1935–1938Engineer and senior designer at Plant No. 173, Tula
- 1938–1939Graduated NKVD Central School; operative, 8th Section, 1st Directorate GUGB NKVD
- 1939–1940Deputy Chief, 1st Department, Main Economic Directorate (GEMU) NKVD USSR
- 1940–1941Deputy Chief, Economic Department, NKVD/NKGB Estonian SSR
- 1941.4–7Chief, NKGB Tula Oblast
- 1941–1943Chief, NKVD Tula Oblast; member, Tula City Defence Committee
- 1943–1946Chief, NKGB/MGB Tula Oblast
- 1946–1951Chief, MGB Voronezh Oblast
- 1951–1955Senior Adviser, MGB/MVD/KGB to Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs
- 1956Retired on medical grounds
Related historical events
The KPM Case and Downfall
From the autumn of 1948 through the summer of 1949 an underground group calling itself the 'Communist Party of Youth' (KPM) operated in Voronezh. Its roughly sixty members, high-school students and university freshmen, sought to return the Soviet state to 'Leninist principles'. Their secret programme included the possibility of forcibly removing Stalin and his entourage. The future poet Anatoly Zhigulin was one of its leading members.
Starting in September 1949 the Voronezh Oblast MGB launched mass arrests, detaining about thirty people. Sukhodolsky, as head of the Voronezh MGB directorate, bore overall responsibility for the investigation. In June 1950 the MGB Special Board sentenced Zhigulin to ten years in camps; other members received similarly severe terms. Sukhodolsky remained Voronezh MGB chief until late 1951, when he was posted to Bulgaria as a Soviet adviser.
After Stalin's death in 1953, the KPM case became a liability during the Khrushchev thaw. Zhigulin was fully rehabilitated in 1956; Sukhodolsky was discharged from the KGB on medical grounds that same February. On 23 March 1957 he was expelled from the party, and on 3 September 1957 USSR Council of Ministers Resolution No. 1068 stripped him of his major-general's rank. He was never rehabilitated, even posthumously.