People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1938 ✕ Executed

The security viceroy of the Far East

On 11 August 1937, Yezhov forwarded Lyushkov's telegram to Stalin, who scribbled in the margin: 'Deribas will have to be arrested. St.' Molotov and Voroshilov added 'For,' and Deribas was arrested the next day.

An old Bolshevik Chekist who served as OGPU-NKVD plenipotentiary for the Far East from 1929, directing the Maki-Mirage counter-intelligence operation against Japan and forced-labour construction of the BAM. After eight years as the region's 'viceroy,' he was swept up in the Great Purge and shot in 1938.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1960 ○ Natural causes

From prisoner to directorate chief, and dead in his own bed

The formula Solzhenitsyn recorded as Frenkel's: "From a prisoner we must take everything in the first three months — after that we don't need him!"

A Jewish merchant born in Constantinople who became known as the 'Timber King of the Black Sea' in Odessa and ran a smuggling operation. Arrested in 1923 and sent to Solovki, he proposed tying food rations to labour output (the 'nourishment scale') and was elevated from prisoner to camp administrator within a year. He went on to lead construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, BAM, and the NKVD railway directorate, becoming the de facto architect of the Gulag forced-labour system. During the Battle of Stalingrad his crews built the Volga rockada railway in six months, a feat that earned him his third Order of Lenin. Retired as a lieutenant general and died in his Moscow bed.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Founder of the Soviet Procuracy, caught between state security and socialist legality

Bukharin's widow recalled: 'A man of unyielding will and crystal honesty — he began putting the OGPU in order and very soon found himself unwelcome.'

A son of the St. Petersburg poor who joined the Bolsheviks in 1907, Ivan Akulov was a career revolutionary who rose through underground work, Civil War front committees, and party leadership posts across the Urals, Siberia, Crimea, and Ukraine. When the USSR Procuracy was created in 1933, he became its first Procurator, building the institutional framework of 'socialist legality' and carving out an independent prosecutorial space in the tense terrain between criminal justice and the state security apparatus. He was implicated in the emergency laws enacted after Kirov's murder, and in 1937 he was himself consumed by the repressive machinery he had helped construct.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Executed

The Gulag's first chief and builder of Belomor

At the Belomor site in 1932, Kogan told Mikoyan: "'Zaklyuchenny' insults, 'lagernik' is dull — I've coined 'kanaloarmeyets,' canal-army soldier." Mikoyan approved; the abbreviation 'zek' was born from his term.

The son of a wealthy Jewish merchant in Siberia, Kogan began as an anarcho-communist and was sentenced to death in 1908 for armed robbery, commuted to hard labour. Joining the Bolsheviks in 1918, he rose through the Cheka and border troops. In 1930 he became the first chief of the newly created Gulag, where he was instrumental in institutionalizing the Soviet forced-labour system. From 1931 he directed the White Sea–Baltic Canal project, mobilizing roughly 170,000 prisoners to complete the 227-km waterway in under two years, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Tied to the Yagoda network, he was arrested in 1938, shot in 1939, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Died under interrogation

Yezhov’s intimate who rose to deputy commissar and died under interrogation

Arrested in December 1938, he was dead under interrogation within a month, one of the five names Yezhov's own deposition listed as accomplices.

Born to a peasant family in Tambov province, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and came up through military commissar and district administrative posts before working in the Moscow city administration. Under Yezhov he became chief of the NKVD Administrative-Economic Directorate in July 1937, was promoted within weeks to deputy commissar of internal affairs, and in December 1937 moved on to serve as People's Commissar of the Timber Industry until October 1938. He held the rank of major of state security and the Order of the Red Star, and was married to Yezhov's secretary Serafima Ryzhova. Arrested in December 1938 after Yezhov's fall, he was one of the names Yezhov's own deposition listed as members of his conspiratorial group. He died on 19 January 1939 under interrogation conducted with unlawful methods, and was rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1941 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who ran the Soviet police

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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1960 ○ Died in custody

Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in the mass operations, arrested in the Beria case

As Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938, he served on the special troika and took part in the Great Purge. Arrested in the Beria case in 1953, he died in custody.

Born into a peasant family in Kapana, Kutaisi province, to an Armenian father and a Georgian mother (Topuridze was her maiden name), he was a Menshevik in 1905–1910 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. From 1920 he served in the Azerbaijani Cheka; from 1934 he headed the Azerbaijani GPU and NKVD, and as people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938 he sat on the special troika. From April 1938 he ran the NKVD's administrative and economic directorate, and in 1947–1953 he was deputy chairman of Azerbaijan's Council of Ministers. Arrested in July 1953 in the Beria case, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and died in August 1960 before the investigation ended.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The NKVD chief who expanded the Gulag and became a purge defendant

In April 1937, Yagoda was dismissed as NKVD commissar. When Stalin summoned him, Yezhov was already seated. 'You are four years late,' Stalin said. Accounts of Yagoda's last words at his execution diverge: one version says he shouted 'Long live Comrade Stalin!', another that he met death in silence. Either way, the architect of the Gulag had become a Gulag defendant.

A practical power inside OGPU and NKVD, he oversaw forced-labour projects such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal and was the architect of the Gulag system. As the first NKVD commissar, he consolidated the security organs. He opened the first purge phase after Kirov's murder, but Stalin replaced him with Yezhov for not purging enough. He became a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1891–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of the Shakhty case and boss of the North Caucasus

Stalin in 1938: "Yevdokimov came twice demanding Sholokhov's arrest for talking with ex-White Guards. I told him: you understand nothing of politics or life."

A Chekist of the civil-war generation, Yevdokimov made his name through field violence, commanding mass executions of surrendered Wrangel troops. Posted to the North Caucasus as OGPU plenipotentiary in 1923, he built a regional power base and designed the 1928 Shakhty case (the first major show trial of technical specialists), personally directing the extraction of confessions. As chief of the OGPU Secret-Operational Directorate from 1929, he was hostile to Yagoda and remained outside the security organs during Yagoda's tenure, having moved to party work in 1934. Under Yezhov he supplied the central NKVD with North Caucasus cadres and regained influence, but fell with Yezhov, was shot in 1940, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1937 ✕ Executed

The master of the Ukrainian security apparatus

On 7 July 1937, he went to Khabarovsk station to greet his replacement Genrikh Lyushkov and was arrested on the spot on a warrant signed by Yezhov. On 27 November — his 45th birthday — he was shot under the 'special procedure.'

Head of the Ukrainian GPU and NKVD (1923–1937) and the dominant figure in republican security. He directed repression during the Holodomor, sat on a Politburo troika with capital-punishment authority, and orchestrated fabricated nationalist cases. Commissar of State Security 1st Rank (1935); arrested and executed in 1937.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1938 ✕ Suicide

Yezhov's personnel chief who purged 14,000 Chekists

At Yezhov's dacha in summer 1938, he told fellow Chekists: "If I see things are bad, I'll shoot myself." That November, an hour before his train to Moscow, he did.

Bolshevik Chekist and Yezhov protégé. As NKVD Personnel chief (1936), purged 14,000 Yagoda-era operatives and led the Bukharin case. Leningrad NKVD chief when Yezhov fell. He shot himself in 1938.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1940 ✕ Executed

Stalin's brother-in-law who chaired the Moscow troika

Arriving in Crimea on 19 January 1921, Redens set up independent city Chekas in Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Kerch, each with the right to pass death sentences, reporting directly to him. These bodies carried out the mass purges of remaining Wrangel forces and 'class enemies.'

A Pole from Łomża, Redens joined the Cheka in 1918 and, as chairman of the Crimean Cheka during the Civil War, directed mass reprisals against the remnants of Wrangel's army. He became Stalin's brother-in-law through marriage to Anna Alliluyeva, sister of Stalin's second wife Nadezhda. As head of the NKVD directorate for Moscow Region from 1933, he oversaw security in the capital and, during the Great Terror, chaired the Moscow troika under NKVD Order No. 00447, presiding over mass death sentences carried out at Butovo and Kommunarka. Arrested in late 1938 on charges of spying for Poland, he was shot in February 1940.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1956 ✕ Died under interrogation

Builder of Soviet covert ops who kidnapped a White general in Paris, then tortured by his own service

Dressed in French police uniforms, they stopped Kutepov on the street on the pretext of questioning him and put him in a car. Kutepov resisted, and during the struggle he had a heart attack and died, Serebryansky told me. — Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks

Born to a Jewish family in Minsk, he was recruited by the OGPU in 1923 and built the first Soviet spy network in Palestine, eventually recruiting over 200 agents across Europe. In 1930 his team, disguised as French police, kidnapped White General Kutepov in Paris; he later stole Trotsky's archives and smuggled warplanes to Republican Spain as head of the NKVD Special Group for Special Tasks. Arrested in 1938 on Beria's orders, tortured by Abakumov into a false confession, and sentenced to death, he was amnestied at Sudoplatov's urging in 1941 and returned to wartime intelligence. Re-arrested after Beria's fall in 1953, he died under interrogation in Butyrka prison; rehabilitated 1971.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1893–1937 ✕ Executed

The operations chief who guarded Stalin

At a December 1936 Cheka dinner, Pauker reenacted Zinoviev's execution: dragged to his knees by two comrades, he begged 'For God's sake, call Comrade Stalin!' — and Stalin roared with laughter.

A Jewish hairdresser and make-up artist from Lemberg, Pauker served as chief of the OGPU/NKVD Operations Department and Stalin's personal bodyguard, directing arrests and executions during the Great Purge. Stalin trusted him intimately. Yet in 1937 he was arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate the leader and shot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1893–1938 ✕ Executed

The Cheka’s architect of political investigations

Asked, after the 1921 Tagantsev case and the mass executions of Petrograd intellectuals, why he had been so merciless, Agranov answered: "Seventy percent of Petrograd intellectuals were standing with one leg in the camp of our enemies. We had to burn that leg off."

Born on 12 October 1893 in Chechersk, Mogilev Governorate, into a Jewish shopkeeper's family, he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1912 and the RSDLP in 1915, and was arrested and exiled to Yenisei province that same year. From 1918, as secretary of the Sovnarkom, he took orders directly from Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, and in 1919 he entered the Cheka, investigating the Kronstadt rising, the Antonov peasant revolt and the Tagantsev case. Head of the OGPU Secret Department and then deputy chairman of the OGPU, he became first deputy NKVD commissar in 1934 while in practice running the state-security directorate, and directed the Kirov murder investigation; in 1937 he was demoted to the Saratov NKVD, arrested, and shot on 1 August 1938. He was never rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1893–1939 ✕ Executed

Chekist who went from chairing the Kabardino-Balkar troika to heading the NKVD prison department

As chair of the Kabardino-Balkar NKVD troika in 1937, he led repression; in 1937–38 he directly participated in the killing of Solovki special-prison inmates.

Born Luka Gritsyuk to a Ukrainian farm labourer's family in Dolsk, Volhynia, he won all four classes of the St George Cross in the First World War, joined the party in 1918 and helped organise the Dubrovytsia uprising. In the Cheka from 1920, he took part in the operation that lured General Tyutyunnyk out of Poland. From 1934 to 1937 he ran the Kabardino-Balkar NKVD and chaired the republic's special troika. From October 1937, as deputy head and then head of the NKVD prison department, he took a direct part in killing the inmates of the Solovki special-purpose prison. Arrested in October 1938, he was shot on 23 February 1939 and rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1940 ✕ Executed

The 'North Caucasian' Chekist who opened the mass operations in West Siberia

A stenographic record survives of his briefing to subordinates in the summer of 1937, as Order No. 00447 was being prepared: 'The limit for the first operation is 11,000... You may take 12,000, or 13,000, or 15,000. I am not restricting you to that figure. You may take 20,000 in the first category.'

A Chekist born into a Jewish family in Kiev, originally surnamed Korol and often written Mironov-Korol, he made his career in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov as one of the 'North Caucasians' and was Frinovsky's closest associate. As head of the West Siberian NKVD he opened the mass operations of summer 1937, chairing the regional troika formed with prosecutor Barkov and party secretary Eikhe and telling his men not to feel bound by their quotas. Transferred in August 1937 to Mongolia as Soviet plenipotentiary, he organized the Mongolian purge in which some eight thousand lamas perished, then headed the Second Eastern Department of the foreign affairs commissariat until his arrest in January 1939; placed on the execution list sent to Stalin on 16 January 1940, he was shot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1955 ✕ Executed

From tsarist officer to Beria's untitled enforcer in state security

On 8 July 1939, aboard an NKVD special railcar from Moscow to Tskhaltubo, Soviet plenipotentiary to China Bovkun-Luganets and his wife were killed and the deaths staged as a car crash; at the 1953 interrogations the testimonies conflicted over who struck the blows.

Born into a poor family at Sachkhere in Georgia, he passed through tsarist army service and prisoner-of-war camps before entering the Georgian Workers'-Peasants' militia in 1921 and moving to the GPU in 1922 on Beria's recommendation. When Beria took him to Moscow in late 1938 as deputy head of the 3rd special department of the central NKVD, he became Beria's personal operative for abductions and secret killings. He sat on the Georgian NKVD special troika from August 1937 to July 1938, taking part in its mass execution decisions during the Great Terror, and was first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs of Georgia in 1941, later deputy interior minister of the republic, with the rank of lieutenant-general. Sentenced to death at the Tbilisi trial of September 1955 and shot on 15 November 1955, he has not been rehabilitated since.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1972 ○ Natural causes

The NKVD rezident who ran a Gestapo mole and coordinated Soviet atomic espionage in America

On 12 October 1941, as German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin personally summoned Zarubin and gave him one task in Washington: 'Find out if the Americans will try to arrange a separate peace with Germany.'

A leading officer of Soviet foreign intelligence, Zarubin spent 13 of his 23 years of service as an illegal rezident operating under deep cover across Europe and Asia. As illegal rezident in Berlin from 1933 to 1937, he personally ran Gestapo officer Willy Lehmann (codename 'Breitenbach'), whose reporting on the structure, personnel, and operations of the RSHA and Gestapo, as well as German military plans, was rated among the most valuable Soviet intelligence of the prewar period. From 1941 to 1944 he served as chief NKVD rezident in the United States, coordinating the atomic espionage network that fed critical nuclear research data to Moscow during the Manhattan Project. After the war he became deputy chief of foreign intelligence (1945–1948), overseeing illegal operations worldwide before retiring and training future KGB officers.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who manufactured the wrecking cases

In 1934, Time magazine described Prokofiev as the OGPU commissar "who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, 'shot for sabotage.'"

A Chekist who, as OGPU Economic Directorate chief (1926–1931), manufactured the great 'wrecking' cases against Soviet technical specialists. Rose to NKVD second deputy commissar under Yagoda, then was arrested and executed in 1937 after Yagoda's fall.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1938 ✕ Executed

Yagoda's secretary who staged the Moscow trials and became a defendant himself

He scripted and rehearsed defendants’ testimony at the 1936 Moscow trial, was purged the next year, and was shot in 1938.

Born in Insar, Penza province, the son of a forest warden, he got a job in a Red Guard office in 1917 with Frinovsky's help and served in the Cheka from 1921. In 1929 he directed the secret transfer of the exiled Trotsky from Alma-Ata to Odessa and his deportation from the USSR. As secretary of the OGPU collegium and of the NKVD, and executive secretary of the Special Board, he became Yagoda's confidant, and at the 1936 Zinoviev-Kamenev trial he rehearsed each defendant's testimony. Dismissed in March 1937 and arrested, he gave detailed testimony against Yagoda at the third Moscow trial and was shot on 15 March 1938.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov's chief of secretariat, keeper of the Great Terror's papers and figures

In November 1938, days after Yezhov lost the NKVD, his chief of secretariat was arrested — the man who had kept every figure of the Great Terror now became a deposition witness against his own patron.

An economic functionary who had passed through the Finance Commissariat, the Soviet Control Commission, and the Central Committee apparatus, he followed Yezhov into the NKVD in January 1937, serving as deputy chief and then chief of its Secretariat and chief of the 9th Special Department, and from 1938 headed the 1st Special Department in charge of operational records, registration, and statistics. The paperwork and figures of the Great Terror passed through his hands to Yezhov's desk, earning him the Order of the Red Star and the Honorary Chekist badge. Arrested on 13 November 1938 immediately after Yezhov's fall, he testified against his former patron and was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in February 1940; he was rehabilitated in 1956.