Ivan Grigoriev. Workdays of killers

“If we analyze the protocols and albums of convicted “terrorists” according to the dates and places where they planned to carry out terrorist attacks, we get such a completely wild and incredible picture that on the days of the festivities on May 1 and November 7, almost entire people walked in the columns of demonstrators on Red Square tens and hundreds of “terrorists” who, passing by the mausoleum, were allegedly supposed to shoot, but for various reasons they were allegedly prevented, or on the Mozhaisk highway, where government vehicles were passing, which the terrorists did not even know about, on certain days in the summer " “entire groups of different “terrorists” were on duty, supposedly waiting for these cars to shoot at them, which, again, was supposedly prevented by some reasons that were invented for the credibility of the testimony.”

This is what one of the high-ranking state security officials subsequently said, who in the 1930s served in the Moscow regional department of the NKVD. In those days, the number of investigative cases coming from the field about “attempts” to destroy Comrade Stalin was so enormous that even the bosses could not treat it without irony - although all these fakes were churned out precisely on orders from “above.”

Actually, we are mainly talking about fakes. The main material for the author of the book was the interrogation protocols of those who were arrested by the NKVD in the period from mid -1937 to the spring of 1938. As you know, this was a special time. At the beginning of 1937, the party decided to launch the next stage of intensifying the “class struggle.” After the decision of the February-March (1937) plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to expand the state security apparatus, the infamous order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov # 00447 dated July 30, 1937 followed. The sphere of repression was included in socialist planning: control figures were “lowered” from above , and large-scale “mass operations” were launched throughout the country; This was the time of the so-called “Yezhovshchina” - the peak of Stalinism.

A. Vatlin demonstrates the everyday “life” of terror using the example of just one administrative unit - the then Kuntsevo district of the Moscow region. Perhaps, everyone who reads the title of the book will immediately have a question: “Why this particular area?” Exactly like this: “Why Kuntsevo?” - and the introductory chapter is named. From it we learn that the author of the book has been working for a long time as part of a public group under the Moscow government, which is engaged in perpetuating the memory of victims of political repression - in particular, preparing a martyrology for those buried in Butovo (where, as is known, in about a year, from August 1937- from October 1938, more than 20 thousand people were shot). They were taken to shoot, in particular, from the Kuntsevo district - fortunately, it was nearby. Now this area (like Butovo) is the territory of Moscow. And in the mid-1930s, Kuntsevo was a town of 40 thousand inhabitants, and the population of the area was about 200 thousand people. The places were country houses - and this also played a role. Not far from Kuntsev was the “nearby” dacha of Comrade Stalin himself, and the dachas of many other party and government figures were located nearby; in general, the predilection of VIPs for the Krylatskoye area, Mozhaiskoye and Rublevo-Uspenskoye highways was formed in those very times. The resting places of such high-ranking individuals had to be maintained in a special order; therefore, the region was in a special place, and the security service there was a reliable “springboard” for a future career.

As the author writes,

"this book is a reminder of what is difficult to believe. A successful businessman or politician who has a mansion in Barvikha or Nemchinovka, a motorist who drives daily along Aminevskoe or Rublevskoe highway, the last representatives of the exotic village of Troitse-Lykovo, residents of the residential areas of Strogino, Teply Stan or Ramenki, hard workers from Solntsev, from Shchukinskaya or Mnevnikov, children skiing from the Krylatsky hills or relaxing in Suvorov Park, should know that a ruthless machine of state terror passed through these places in 1937-1937, taking with it hundreds of innocent lives.”

As usual, the plan had to be carried out at any cost. The examples given show that by the mid-1930s, falsifications in the work of NKVD investigators had assumed a truly Kafkaesque - or, if you prefer, Orwellian - character. For example, after by the end of March 1938 the defense factories located in the region had been “cleaned out” two or three times and there was simply no contingent “suitable” for investigators left there, the imagination of the Kuntsevo state security figures gave birth to “ case" of Norwegian spies. Since there were several people in the cells of the regional NKVD who had been arrested six months ago, but “forgotten” in the heat of repression, they were made the core of the “group” that allegedly received assignments from Norwegian counterintelligence (for some reason, specifically “counter-”). For the “set,” several new accomplices were also selected (that is, arrested) as “ordinary” members of the spy network. The whole sin of these people was that their surnames, first names, and sometimes patronymics sounded foreign. These turned out to be a primary school teacher, an accountant at a framing workshop, a fireman at a printing house, and a rake at a brick factory. As was clear from the investigation, the objects of interest of the “villains” who sold themselves to the bourgeois Varangians were an aircraft factory in Fili and, for some reason, a worsted weaving factory. However, such fantasies were not yet the limit of idiocy. On the same days, another Kuntsevo NKVD investigator identified and neutralized a group of spies at the nearby “dermantine-oilcloth” (as it was written in the file) factory named after. Nogina; one of them, as noted in the interrogation report, passed on to foreign intelligence information about the mastic and paints used in the production of kitchen oilcloth.

Anyone who has read J. Hasek's novel "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk" probably remembers dull-witted informers and policemen like the secret agent Brettschneider, who always hung out in the tavern "At the Bowl", or the gendarmerie sergeant Flanderka - always drunk, but steadily trying to get the main character confesses that Schweik is a spy. But here is not a fictional, but a very real story of a certain teacher Zverev near Moscow, who was arrested and a year and a half later sentenced to five years in prison for the fact that (in the words of the protocol) at a teachers’ conference “he spoke not as a Soviet person, saying that in The students themselves, who spend 2-3 years in the same class for 2-3 years, are to blame for their low performance. From his words, it is clear that Soviet children are like idiots and are not capable of learning." And if Hasek’s novel is more funny than bloody, then in real Soviet reality, ridiculous accusations and hastily scribbled “pieces of paper” ruined thousands of lives in just one small area.

From the summer of 1937 to the spring of 1938, more than 560 residents of the region became victims of the Kuntsevo regional department of the NKVD - and these are only those whose names and fates are reliably known; In total, during this time (over six months!) no less than 1000 people were arrested on “political” (like those cited above!) charges. When you read a book in which all this is set out in detail and, so to speak, “close-up”, you get the impression that we are talking about some unique, out-of-the-ordinary atrocities. However, the real horror is that, even despite some “excesses” of the Kuntsevo NKVD members (who were diligent people), the situation in this Moscow region was quite typical. And in “percentage” terms, the scale of human losses here was not yet so great: in cities - especially in the capital and regional ones - the scope of repression turned out to be much wider.

The book has two chapters with short and understandable titles: “Performers” and “Victims.” By the way, there are also a lot of photographs - both of those and others. And at the end, about thirty pages in small print, are the names of the arrested residents of the Kuntsevo district - sentenced to death and sent to camps. And only occasionally there is a note next to the name of the arrested person: “released” - this means that even such an investigation, for some reason, could not make the arrested person an “enemy of the people.” But it must be said that in the Kuntsevo district administration of the NKVD, in the mid-1930s, genuine “shock workers” of terror gathered. The zeal of the state security officers was so ardent that their “lawlessness” subsequently (during the “ Beria ” era, which began with the game of legality and the eradication of “Yezhov’s” cadres) became the subject of special proceedings.

However, it would be better not to go too far, since the authorities demanded to give a plan at any cost! At the March (1938) peak of repression, the entire “investigation” boiled down to conducting one interrogation (or rather, obtaining a signature on a pre-prepared protocol) and drawing up a two-page indictment. In addition, district level employees were constantly warned that for failure to comply with instructions “from above” they themselves would be subject to criminal liability. So the work schedule of the “fighters” was extremely tense. Not only regular employees, but also field communications officers and even fire department instructors went to make arrests. Or - to save effort and time - the intended victim was called to the district police station, and there they presented an arrest warrant.

But no matter how the volume of work increased, each of the investigative cases received the necessary bureaucratic support. Killing a person was not a problem - the correct “registration” of the murder caused much more trouble. As one of the employees testified, they usually fabricated fictitious interrogation protocols during the day (based on denunciations, intelligence data, etc.), and at night they forced the accused to sign them. The means of coercion are well known. However, the author of the book concludes, most of the “confessions” were obtained not through beatings and torture, but through persuasion : this was due to respect for the authority of the investigator, who in the eyes of many personified justice. If required, regular “witnesses” were also brought in; and, for example, in 1939 it turned out that one of the most “in demand” in this capacity in the Kuntsevo region was a drunken janitor who did not understand Russian well and was also an epileptic.

The preferred “theme” of crimes also varied depending on the settings of the Center (although in this case the “Center” was located only ten to fifteen kilometers from the “periphery”). Until the end of 1937, the emphasis was on accusations of counter-revolutionary propaganda and sabotage; spy networks were handled “at the top” - in the counterintelligence agencies. However, by the beginning of 1938, espionage had become much more “popular”, so that the fight against the machinations of foreign intelligence services was entrusted to the regional departments of the NKVD; Of course, they immediately began to catch spies, terrorists and saboteurs in batches who were annoyingly interfering with the construction of a bright future. In addition to the strategic goals of the party elite and Comrade Stalin personally, such a change in “orientation” also had a purely pragmatic explanation: a supply of data on “anti-Soviet” elements - kulaks, “formers”, etc. - was already exhausted, and collecting new incriminating evidence was too troublesome (there weren’t enough people anyway). In cases of espionage, the investigation was simplified as much as possible: no witnesses, no references, or similar nonsense were no longer required. A common “case” was opened for each “spy group”, where the testimonies of all “participants” were filed - and the issue was resolved.

Of course, using the example of one small region it is impossible to demonstrate all aspects of the processes that took place on a national scale. However, “observing” through the prism of A. Vatlin’s book the dispassionate circulation of the bureaucratic executioner machine, one can imagine much more deeply not only the atmosphere of the “Yezhovshchina”, but also its psychological consequences. The “Great Terror” became a kind of “rehearsal” for the steadily approaching great war. A radical shake-up of personnel on an all-Union scale - from district to state - awakened (or resurrected?) a feeling of fear among the masses as the main incentive for productive (as understood at that time) work. Without “big blood,” the modernization of the country according to the Stalinist model was doomed to lose momentum and stall - just as the victory in the war, won a few years later, would hardly have been possible. The scale of losses was well within the “planned” indicators - and, apparently, these losses were initially conceived by the organizers of the terror as one of the types of industrial costs (along with finance, energy resources, minerals, etc.) that would be needed for further economic development . Although they killed not only and not so much “for the benefit of the cause” (for example, during the construction of some industrial facility), but simply like that - as they say, “for the sake of mischief”; Terror is terror. And, realizing all this, I would like to conclude by writing something pathetic about the “lessons of history,” expressing the confidence that, they say, “never again,” but somehow it doesn’t hold up. Because in history school we are traditional repeaters. Remember what Kuntsevo’s teacher Zverev said?