People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1939 ✕ Executed

The 'North Caucasian' Chekist who carried quota increases from Omsk to Khabarovsk

Omsk's approved first-category limit was 1,000. On 15 August 1937 Gorbach cabled Yezhov in cipher to ask for more: 'As of 13 August, 5,444 have been arrested in the first category in Omsk oblast...'

A North Caucasus Chekist whom Yevdokimov named in 1934 among 'his people' inside the OGPU, he served as deputy head of the Ordzhonikidze krai NKVD. As head of the Omsk oblast NKVD in 1937 he cabled Yezhov for quota increases and won an extra nine thousand, then followed Mironov at the head of the West Siberian (Novosibirsk) NKVD, where Naumov counts him among the chiefs who drove both the purge and the mass operations. Sent to head the Far Eastern NKVD in Khabarovsk in the summer of 1938 after Lyushkov's flight, he was arrested that November and shot the following year.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1939 ✕ Executed

The longest-serving chief who built up the Gulag

On the evening of 24 December 1938, Malenkov told Berman that 'Comrade Stalin cannot keep the brother of a German spy in government.' Chekists led their former boss to the Black Maria.

Berman entered the Cheka at twenty in 1918 and rose through Siberian and Central Asian posts, serving as internal affairs commissar of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR and chairman of the Uzbek GPU. From 1932 to 1937 he headed the Gulag, the longest-serving of its early chiefs, and transformed the camp system from a corrective-labour experiment into a central instrument of the Soviet economy. He delivered the White Sea–Baltic Canal and the Moscow–Volga Canal with prisoner labour and promoted 'reforging' (perekovka) as the public doctrine justifying forced labour. Moved to People's Commissar of Communications in 1937, he was arrested in Malenkov's office in December 1938 and shot in March 1939. He was rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1940 ○ Died in prison

A state-security administrator who commanded regional apparatuses

The judgment recorded that at the Novosibirsk NKVD he permitted “unfounded arrests” and the falsification of investigative materials.

Ivan Maltsev was a Soviet official from a working-class background who became a regional commander in the security organs through the Revolution and Civil War. Moving through the Urals, Siberia and the North Caucasus, he exemplified how the VChK, OGPU and NKVD fused local administration with political control. As head of the Novosibirsk regional NKVD in 1938, he belonged to the special-troika apparatus and bore responsibility for the machinery of the Great Terror; he was later convicted and never rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1940 ✕ Executed

A 'North Caucasian' Chekist who sat on the mass-operation troika in Kuibyshev

As NKVD chief in Kuibyshev, he sat on the special troika enforcing Order No. 00447 in 1937; in Moscow he headed arrests in the Great Terror, including the national operations.

Born to a poor Ukrainian peasant family in Voronezh province and raised in Samarkand, he joined the party in 1918 and made his career in the special departments of Turkestan and the North Caucasus, one of Yevdokimov's 'North Caucasian' group. As NKVD chief of Kuibyshev oblast from January to September 1937 he sat on the special troika set up under Order No. 00447 and carried out the repressions. Moved to Moscow that autumn, he headed the NKVD's administrative and economic directorate and then its operational department, responsible for arrests, searches and delivery of prisoners in the 'Right-Trotskyist underground' and national operations. He was arrested in November 1938, shot in January 1940, and in 2013 was ruled ineligible for rehabilitation.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1940 ✕ Executed by shooting

Yezhov’s iron deputy

As Navy Commissar, Frinovsky knew little of fleets and interrupted meetings with off-base remarks, seeking confirmation with "Am I right?" At one meeting Ivan Ivanovich Gren replied: "No, Comrade Commissar. You have not understood this question and what you are saying is wrong."

A Chekist who, as Yezhov's first deputy people's commissar and head of the GUGB, ran the operational machinery of the Great Terror's mass operations. He took part in organising the Moscow trials and one of the main organisational roles in the mass political repressions in Mongolia. With Yezhov's fall he was transferred to People's Commissar of the Navy in September 1938, arrested on 6 April 1939, and executed on 4 February 1940 under sentence of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. He was never rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1953 ✕ Executed

He staged Lithuania's annexation and took the declaration of war in Berlin

At 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941 in Berlin, Ribbentrop handed Dekanozov Germany's declaration of war on the USSR; interpreter Erich Sommer recalled that he listened calmly and said he deeply regretted that Hitler and Stalin had never met in person.

Born in Baku in June 1898 and executed in Moscow on 23 December 1953; the official biography records him as Georgian by nationality. From December 1938 to May 1939 he served as deputy head of the NKVD's Main Directorate of State Security, heading both foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, and executed the purges of their final wave. Sent to Lithuania as plenipotentiary in 1940, he installed Justas Paleckis as prime minister, organised the 14 July People's Seimas elections, and completed the annexation within about a month. After the war he held secondary posts including deputy foreign minister and deputy head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad; in April 1953 he became Georgian interior minister, was arrested on 30 June, and was shot on 23 December as a member of the 'Beria gang'.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1937 ✕ Assassinated

Soviet illegal who broke publicly with Stalin and was murdered by the NKVD

“Whoever remains silent today becomes an accomplice of Stalin.” — his break letter to the Soviet Central Committee, 17 July 1937

Born Nathan Markovich Poretsky into a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, he joined the Polish communist movement in 1919 and later ran Soviet military-intelligence and state-security networks in Western Europe under the names “Ludwig” and “Ignace Reiss.” He received the Order of the Red Banner in 1928 but broke with Stalinism amid the Moscow trials and Great Purge. In an open letter to the Soviet Central Committee dated 17 July 1937, he returned his decoration and declared support for the Fourth International. On 4 September 1937 he was lured out near Lausanne by his longtime acquaintance Gertrud Schildbach and shot dead by an NKVD team directed by Sergei Shpigelglas.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1941 ✕ Ruled a suicide, long disputed

The defector who first told the West how Stalin's secret service worked

In December 1936 Slutsky told him of the coming understanding between Moscow and Berlin: 'This time it is serious. There are perhaps only three or four months left before an agreement with Hitler...' Krivitsky's recollections are among Naumov's main sources for the hidden politics of 1936 and 1937.

Born into a Jewish family in Galicia as Samuel Ginsberg, he was a Soviet military-intelligence officer who ran illegal networks across Western Europe from The Hague in the 1930s. In December 1936 the foreign-intelligence chief Slutsky told him of the back-channel contacts between Moscow and Berlin, and in the summer of 1937 he talked through the real nature of the Tukhachevsky affair with Shpigelglas in Paris; when his fellow officer Ignace Reiss was assassinated that autumn, he defected. He published In Stalin's Secret Service in 1939 and testified before the US Congress, and in February 1941 was found shot dead in a Washington hotel, a death ruled a suicide and disputed ever since.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1947 ✕ Suspicious car crash

Risky diplomacy conducted behind an intelligence officer’s cover

In April 1938, he warned the Finnish side that Germany might attack Leningrad through Finland.

Boris Arkadyevich Rybkin was a Soviet intelligence officer and diplomat who operated in Finland under the name Yartsev. In 1938 he opened secret negotiations, framed as an effort to prevent a German threat to Finland, but Soviet demands for territorial concessions produced no agreement. The failed contact marked the first step in a Soviet-Finnish sequence shaped by negotiation, security fears and mistrust that led to the Winter War.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1953 ✕ Executed

The secret-police chief who arrived carrying reforms

Minutes before the test, Beria said, 'Nothing will come of it, Igor.' When the flash rose he rushed to embrace Kurchatov and Khariton, then suspicion surged back and he phoned a Bikini-test observer: 'Haven't we slipped up? Doesn't Kurchatov humbug us?'

Stalin's last secret-police chief and overseer of the atomic bomb project. Born in Merkheuli, Georgia, to a poor peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. Rising through the Transcaucasian security organs, he became NKVD commissar in November 1938, after which the Great Terror's mass operations sharply contracted. He supervised the killing of Trotsky in 1940 and the Katyn shootings of about 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia under the 5 March 1940 Politburo decision, and in 1944 personally directed the deportations of the Chechen, Ingush and other peoples. As chairman of the Special Committee from 1945 he ran the atomic project to its first test in 1949. After Stalin's death he was First Deputy Premier and Minister of Internal Affairs in 1953, pushing amnesty and rehabilitation until his arrest on 26 June; sentenced to death and executed on 23 December.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1955 ✕ Executed

He ran the Georgian police apparatus for a decade

Arrested in the 1951 Mingrelian affair, Rapava was thrown into the internal prison he had run for a decade, denied sleep for 160 days, and left naked in handcuffs in an ice-cold cell — the very torture methods he had once ordered his subordinates to use.

A Mingrelian who joined the Cheka in the 1920s, Rapava headed the Georgian NKVD and then the MGB for a decade starting in 1938, serving as the republic's chief security officer throughout the Great Terror and the war years. A close associate of Beria, he built Georgia's interwar security apparatus, but was caught in Stalin's 1951 'Mingrelian affair,' freed after Stalin's death, then re-arrested in July 1953 after Beria's fall and shot in 1955 after a public trial.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1955 ✕ Executed

The transport chief who assembled the deportation trains

In October 1941 Milshtein reported to Beria: 657,364 soldiers detained as stragglers since the invasion, 10,201 shot — 3,321 "before the ranks."

A Beria protégé who built his party career in Georgia, Milshtein was appointed head of the NKVD Main Transport Directorate in 1939, making him the operator of the railway apparatus of Stalinist mass deportations. His directorate assembled and moved the trains that forcibly relocated entire nationalities: Poles, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Ingush. For this work he received the Order of Suvorov 2nd class, a combat decoration the Soviet state itself annulled in 1962. Arrested shortly after Beria's fall in 1953, he was tried separately and shot in January 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1981 ○ Natural causes, Moscow

The NKVD's master of covert action: from Trotsky's assassination to Soviet atomic espionage

On 20 August 1940 in Coyoacán, Eitingon and Caridad Mercader waited in separate cars while Mercader struck Trotsky, and fled when Mercader was detained.

Born into a Jewish family in Shklov, Belarus, he survived a pogrom as a child, joined the SRs in 1917, switched to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, and rose through the Gomel Cheka. As an OGPU Foreign Department operative he ran undercover missions in China, Turkey, and Western Europe; during the Spanish Civil War he was Orlov's deputy and directed the transfer of Republican gold to the USSR. In 1940 he and Sudoplatov designed the operation that killed Trotsky, and in the German-Soviet war he masterminded strategic deception operations behind enemy lines as deputy head of the 4th Directorate. After the war he oversaw atomic intelligence as deputy head of Department S, but was arrested in 1951 and served twelve years; released in 1964, he worked as a publishing-house editor until his death of natural causes in Moscow in 1981, and was rehabilitated posthumously in 1992.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1938 ✕ Suicide

NKVD chief who sat on a mass-operation troika and killed himself before his arrest

Karutsky served on the special troika under NKVD Order No. 00447 and took part in Stalin-era repression. On 13 May 1938, anticipating arrest, he attempted suicide and died that day in hospital.

Born in Tomsk to a Jewish shop assistant's family, he was mobilised into a Kolchak army band in 1918, deserted to the Red partisans and served in the Cheka from 1919. He chaired the Turkmen GPU, was OGPU plenipotentiary in Kazakhstan, and headed the NKVD of West Siberian krai and of the Western and Moscow oblasts, among other posts, sitting on the special troika under Order No. 00447. At the same time he spoke out against fabricating evidence to raise 'clearance rates'. He became a member of the NKVD collegium in April 1938, but expecting arrest, shot himself on 13 May and died the same day.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1940 ✕ Executed

NKVD chief who chaired the Gorky oblast troika

From June 1937, as NKVD chief and chair of the Gorky oblast troika, he carried out repression under Order No. 00447. Arrested in December 1938, he was shot in January 1940.

Born in Oryol to a waiter's family, he joined the party in 1918 and entered the Cheka in 1920 by way of the First Cavalry Army's special department. On the Don and the Kuban he carried out dekulakisation and decossackisation, and in the Shakhty-Donets operational sector he took part in fabricating the 'Shakhty case'. After heading the secret-political department of the North Caucasus krai NKVD, among other posts, he was NKVD chief of Gorky oblast from June 1937 to December 1938 and chaired its troika under Order No. 00447. He was arrested on 4 December 1938, shot on 28 January 1940 and never rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1954 ✕ Suicide

From NKVD Deputy Commissar to General of the Army: the rare commander who held senior rank in both the security apparatus and the Red Army

At the Vorkuta uprising in 1953, Maslennikov appeared to negotiate. A prisoner shouted: 'General! You abandoned us unarmed in the swamps in 1941! You survived — we got twenty-five years!' Maslennikov listened calmly to the end.

A railway lineman's son, he rose to cavalry brigade commander in the Civil War, then joined the OGPU Border Troops in 1928 to crush basmachi guerrillas in Central Asia. Beria made him Deputy NKVD Commissar for all Border and Internal Troops in 1939. After the German invasion he led the 29th and 39th Armies in the Moscow counteroffensive and the North Caucasus Front in the Battle of the Caucasus, securing Baku's oilfields. In 1944 he commanded the 3rd Baltic Front to recapture Pskov, Tartu and Riga, becoming General of the Army. As Vasilevsky's deputy against Japan he helped plan the destruction of the Kwantung Army and earned the Hero of the Soviet Union. Returning to the MGB after the war, he was hounded after Beria's fall over a fabricated coup plot and shot himself in 1954.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1955 ○ Died in prison

"Second Lavrentiy"; Beria's man who ran the Mikhoels killing

On the night of 12 January 1948 Solomon Mikhoels and Golubov were lured to Tsanava's dacha outside Minsk and killed there, the death staged as a road accident; sources differ on the exact date and on how they died.

Born Lavrentiy Dzhandzhgava in 1900 to a poor peasant family in Nakhunavo, Kutaisi province, he joined the party in August 1920. From 1938 to 1951 he led Belorussian state security, organizing mass shootings and deportations in western Belarus; a 1955 case file states that he personally took part in the beating of arrested persons. When Stalin ordered the killing of Mikhoels, Tsanava's dacha became the operation's base, and on the night of 12 January 1948 the actor Solomon Mikhoels and Golubov were killed there. He became USSR deputy minister of state security late in 1951, fell from office the next year, was arrested in April 1953 and died of heart failure in Butyrka prison in October 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1963 ○ Natural causes

38-year Chekist who commanded both counterintelligence and foreign intelligence from Cheka to KGB

In a 1940 directive to the Lithuanian NKVD, he wrote of a suspect: "We intend to arrest him when he attempts to cross the border and, depending on his behavior during the interrogation, decide the question of his recruitment."

Born in St. Petersburg to a tram conductor, Fedotov joined the Cheka in 1921 and spent 38 years in Soviet security, a rare career spanning command of both counterintelligence and foreign intelligence. As NKVD/NKGB counterintelligence chief from 1939 to 1946, he oversaw wartime operations and took part in the Katyn massacre, then briefly led Soviet foreign intelligence as MGB 1st Directorate head and deputy chairman of the Committee of Information (KI). Reappointed KGB counterintelligence chief in 1954, he was removed in 1956 during the Khrushchev Thaw for Stalin-era violations of legality, stripped of rank and expelled from the Party in 1959, and died of natural causes in Moscow in 1963.