People of the Revolution and the USSR

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 1893–1939 ✕ 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 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 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The Latvian Chekist who built Dalstroy and colonised Kolyma with forced labour for gold

Berzin landed at Nagaev Bay in February 1932 and built Magadan on empty tundra. Shalamov wrote: 'Berzin tried — quite successfully — to solve the problem of colonising a harsh land while simultaneously solving the problems of reforging and isolating prisoners.'

A Latvian peasant's son who studied painting at Berlin's Royal Academy, Berzin joined the Bolsheviks through the Latvian Riflemen in the First World War. In 1918, on Cheka orders, he posed as a disaffected officer to penetrate Lockhart's anti-Soviet conspiracy, securing the plotters' arrest. From 1926 he directed OGPU prison-labour construction of the Vishera chemical complex, then in 1931 became Dalstroy's first director, tasked with extracting Kolyma's gold and building Magadan from tundra. He pioneered a camp economy combining wages, early release, and family resettlement with brutal production quotas. Arrested at the Great Purge's height in late 1937, he was shot in 1938.

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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

From North Caucasus NKVD chief to government protection head, an executor of the Great Terror

In November 1938, government protection chief Dagin was arrested in Beria's internal NKVD purge. The guardian of the Kremlin was led to the Lubyanka's basement cells.

Yevdokimov's trusted operative, Dagin directed mass arrests in the North Caucasus NKVD during the Great Terror. As head of government protection, he guarded the Kremlin leadership, until Beria had him arrested in 1938 and shot in 1940.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The Bloody Dwarf, an executor of the Great Terror shaped by the party personnel apparatus

"I know no more ideal worker than Yezhov. Rather, not a worker but an executor... Yezhov has only one flaw: he does not know how to stop." Ivan Moskvin, Yezhov's patron, to his son-in-law Lev Razgon

Yezhov was born in 1895 in Kovno governorate to a peasant father from Tula and a Lithuanian mother; his 1922 and 1924 forms instead claimed a St Petersburg birth in a Russian worker family and a 'March 1917' party entry, which the record and his own interrogation contradict. He was actually admitted to the RSDLP in Vitebsk on 3 August 1917, and his NKVD career was an extension of the party personnel apparatus. As NKVD chief, under Stalin's leadership, he organized the mass arrest and execution operations of 1937–38. At least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 executed for state crimes, while the Gulag population grew by 685,201. He was no career Chekist, yet he took part in torture and personally carried out the sentence on A. S. Kalygina on 27 November 1937. Arrested on 10 April 1939, he was executed in February 1940; a Russian court denied his rehabilitation in 1998.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov’s confidant who kept the Great Terror’s ledgers

In the summer of 1938 the albums of the mass operations piled up in Moscow, more than a hundred thousand names awaiting review. The records chief who fixed guilt and sentence out of that paper heap was Tsesarsky.

Born to a clerk's family in Odessa, he passed from the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Borotbists into the Bolshevik party in 1919. He worked in the Central Committee apparatus in the 1930s, from 1935 as report aide to CC secretary Yezhov, and when Yezhov took over the NKVD he followed him in, holding a plenipotentiary post created for him before heading the GUGB 8th Department in charge of records and registration. The album reviews of the mass operations and the paperwork of the execution lists passed through his hands, and in 1937 he was promoted to senior major of state security. In 1938 he headed the Secret Political (4th) Department and then the Moscow oblast NKVD before being shunted off to run the Ukhto-Izhemsky camp; arrested in December 1938 right after Yezhov's fall, he was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in January 1940. Rehabilitation was denied in 2002.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The interrogator who beat a confession out of Tukhachevsky, and spoke of beating only once it was his turn

Under his own interrogation he admitted: “I personally had to beat enemies of the party in Lefortovo, and elsewhere, but I never understood the suffering experienced by those being beaten.” The men beating him as he said it worked for the same service.

Born in 1895 in Kiev Governorate to a Jewish carpenter's family, Ushakov left school at thirteen and joined the Kiev Cheka in 1920, spending fourteen years in Ukraine. In January 1937 he came to Moscow as assistant head of the Special Department of the GUGB. That spring he was lead investigator in the fabricated ‘military-fascist conspiracy’ case against the Red Army, manufacturing the confessions of Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Uborevich. He conducted Tukhachevsky's first interrogation on 25 May 1937 and beat him so severely that blood marked the protocol. In 1938 he tortured Robert Eikhe by working on ribs that had not yet healed. Arrested at Khabarovsk in September 1938, he was shot on 26 January 1940 and has never been rehabilitated.