The Hammer of Leningrad
In his final plea: "Please take into account that I slandered a great many honest people during the investigation... About myself I have nothing to say, because I know my fate well."
A Latvian Bolshevik who rose through Siberian and Belarusian security posts to become the NKVD chief of Leningrad and an enforcer of the Great Terror. He directed the Kirov murder investigation, deported over 11,000 'former people', fabricated the 'Belarusian National Centre' case, and organised large-scale national operations targeting Latvians. Promoted to Yezhov's deputy NKVD commissar and Moscow NKVD chief in early 1938, he was arrested within months by the same apparatus, shot, and posthumously denied rehabilitation.
Career Timeline
- 1913–1917Latvian Bolshevik agitation; arrested and exiled to Olonets
- 1918–1921Plenipotentiary of VChK; special-section chief on multiple fronts
- 1921–1925GPU chairman in Podolsk and Odessa; GPU plenipotentiary for Moldavia
- 1926–1932OGPU plenipotentiary for Siberia and West Siberia; chairman of the extrajudicial troika
- 1932–1934OGPU plenipotentiary for Belarus; NKVD People's Commissar of Belarus
- 1934–1938Leningrad NKVD chief; Kirov murder investigation and mass deportations
- 1938.1–1938.4Deputy NKVD commissar and Moscow NKVD chief
- 1938.4–1938.8Dismissed, arrested, shot; rehabilitation denied
Related historical events
1937, the Executor in Leningrad
Leonids Zakovsky, a Latvian whose real name was Henriks Stubis, belonged to the oldest generation of Cheka officers, in the service from 1917. Through the Civil War and the 1920s he built his career in the security organs of Odessa, Podolia and Siberia as a practitioner of harsh interrogation and mass deportation operations, and in Siberia he directed dekulakization operations during collectivization.
Immediately after the Kirov assassination in December 1934 he was appointed head of the NKVD for Leningrad province. For the next three years and more, Leningrad was among the regions of the Soviet Union where repression was most severe. The 1935 operation against the so-called former people, which expelled thousands of families of old nobles and officials from the city, the mass executions and camp transports of the kulak operation under Order No. 00447 in 1937, and the national operations aimed at Latvians and Poles were all carried out over his signature. He used beatings in interrogation as a matter of routine and enjoyed the centre's confidence as a regional chief zealous in filling quotas.
Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech quoted the testimony of Rozenblum, an old party member who survived Zakovsky's interrogation rooms: Zakovsky showed him the script of a fabricated Leningrad centre case and told him that cooperation would buy his life and refusal his destruction. His name remains in the party record as a case study in the fabrication machinery of the Great Terror.
1938, the Purge of the Purgers
In January 1938 Zakovsky was promoted to Moscow as deputy people's commissar of the NKVD and head of the NKVD for Moscow province. The summit was brief. Three months later, in April, he was removed from all security posts and shunted to a camp construction administration, and on 30 April he was arrested.
The charges laid against him were of exactly the kind he had pinned on countless others in Leningrad: that he was a spy for Latvian intelligence and a member of a Latvian nationalist organization inside the NKVD. The logic of the Latvian national operation he had executed came back upon the Latvian who had run it. On 29 August 1938 Zakovsky was shot, part of the purge of the purgers that removed the executors of the Yezhov apparatus.
A postwar review found the espionage charge baseless, but the Soviet procuracy refused rehabilitation on the grounds of his grave violations of socialist legality in office, that is, mass fabrication and unlawful executions. Zakovsky remains unrehabilitated to this day. His career stands as a leading example of how the Great Terror consumed its own executors.