Dismissed from the OGPU in 1931 for protesting Yagoda's "Vesna" frame-up, he returned under Yezhov to organize the troikas of the Great Terror.
A Cheka veteran, he became chief of the Soviet militia in 1934 and Yezhov's deputy at the NKVD in 1936, where he organized the regional troikas that issued mass death sentences during the Great Terror. Arrested in 1939, he was shot in 1941 and has never been rehabilitated.
Career timeline
1934–1936Chief of the Main Directorate of Workers' and Peasants' Militia, NKVD
1936–1938Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
1938–1939First Deputy People's Commissar of Railways
Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror
“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”
Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.
Career timeline
1905Joins the Bund at 14; expelled from gymnasium for unreliability
1908–1911Social Democratic agitator in Volhynia and Podolia
1911–1913Exiled to Pinega; freed under 1913 Romanov amnesty
1913–1917US emigration: Philadelphia garment worker; co-publishes Novy Mir
1917.05Returns to Russia, joins the Mezhraiontsy
1917.06–08Joins Bolsheviks via Mezhraiontsy; chief agitator; VI Congress delegate
1917.09–10Petrograd Soviet Presidium; October rising
1917.11–1918.06VTsIK Presidium; Commissar for Press/Propaganda; founds Krasnaya Gazeta
The man who drove the Ukrainian mass operations to their peak
According to the testimony of GB Major Z.M. Ushakov, Leplevsky was so ruthless that even his own superior, Nikolai Yezhov, feared him.
A Chekist from Brest-Litovsk who headed the NKVD of Belorussia before taking charge in Ukraine, where he drove the mass operations of the Great Terror to their peak. One of Yezhov's closest lieutenants, he was among the first to be consumed by the machinery he had helped run.
Career timeline
1934–1936People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Belorussian SSR
1936–1937Chief of the Special Department, GUGB NKVD
1937–1938People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian SSR
1938Chief of the 6th Department, then of the 3rd Directorate (transport and communications), NKVD
