The trade official who became a deputy commissar
In the 1923 party debate he voted for the Trotskyist resolutions. Fifteen years later Stalin remembered: on 3 October 1938 Zhukovsky was reassigned to head the Ridder mine in Kazakhstan but was arrested on 22 October, before he could even leave Moscow.
An unusual figure among Yezhov's NKVD deputies: a trade official, not a career Chekist. Born in Kyiv to a Jewish family, he served as a Soviet trade representative in Germany before Yezhov brought him into the NKVD in 1936 to run administration and supply. He became deputy commissar in 1938 but was arrested and executed in the purge that followed.
Career Timeline
- 1932–1936Deputy trade representative in Berlin; head of the import department, Commissariat of Foreign Trade
- 1936–1937Chief of the Administrative-Economic Directorate, NKVD
- 1937Deputy chief of the 3rd Department and chief of the 12th Department, GUGB NKVD
- 1938Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
- 1938–1940Arrested, tried and executed
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationHead of Administrative-Economic Department of NKVD
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeYezhov's deputy commissarA foreign-trade official recruited by Yezhov, he ran the Administrative-Economic Directorate and became a deputy commissar in January 1938. He was among the first taken as Stalin dismantled Yezhov's circle, and was shot in 1940.
Revolution, Civil War, and Party Apparatus
Zhukovsky graduated from the Kiev Commercial College and was conscripted in 1916. After the February Revolution he entered the Kiev Military School and, while still a cadet, joined the Bolshevik Party in August 1917. He was commissioned as an ensign in October, but in December left the army and returned to Kiev to work on the party newspapers Proletarskaya Zhizn and Izvestia.
As the Civil War escalated he distinguished himself as a political commissar. In 1919 he served as deputy provincial military commissar in Kiev, then as deputy chief of the political department of the 4th Army on the Turkestan Front, chief of the political department of the 2nd Labour Army, and chief of the political department of the Formation Directorate of the Southwestern Front. In 1921 he was posted to Tashkent as head of agitation and propaganda for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan, and the following year served as acting chief of the Political Directorate of the Baltic Fleet.
From 1922 he worked in the central party apparatus in Moscow as secretary to Valerian Kuibyshev, gaining administrative experience at the highest level. During this period he studied chemistry at the Moscow Higher Technical School, where he met his future wife Elena Georgievna, a fellow student. In 1924 he moved into foreign trade: after stints at the Commissariat of Transport and the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), he was posted to Berlin in 1925 as the VSNKh plenipotentiary at the Soviet trade mission.
In 1932 he became deputy trade representative in Berlin and a collegium member of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, and in 1934 the 17th Party Congress elected him to the Party Control Commission, where he headed the foreign relations group. This entire trajectory (trade, not secret police; party oversight, not operational work) made him an unusual figure when Yezhov, who knew him from the party apparatus, brought him into the NKVD in 1936.