The workdays of the killers

"If we analyze the protocols and albums of the convicted" terrorists "in the dates and places where they planned the implementation of terrorist attacks, then it turns out such a completely wild and incredible picture that during the festivities of May 1 and November 7, there were almost tens and hundreds of" terrorists "in the columns of the Red Square, who, passing by the Mausoleum, should have been supposedly fired, but supposedly had to shoot, but supposedly had to shoot, but it was supposed to shoot For various reasons, they allegedly interfered with them, or on the Mozhayskoye Shosse, where government vehicles drove through, which terrorists did not even know about, on certain days in the summer, entire groups of different “terrorists” were “on duty”, allegedly awaiting these machines for shooting at them, which again allegedly prevented some reasons for the believability of the testimony. ”

Thus, one of the high-ranking state security workers said later, who served in the Moscow Regional Administration of the NKVD in the 1930s. In those days, the number of investigative cases received from the places of “attempts” to destroy Comrade Stalin was so huge that even the bosses could not relate to this without irony - although all these fakes stamped precisely on orders “from above”.

Actually, fakes are mostly talking about fakes. The main material for the author of the book was the protocols of interrogations 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. In early 1937, the party decided to deploy the next stage of exacerbation of the "class struggle". After the decision of the February-March (1937) Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (b), the notorious order of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov # 00447 dated July 30, 1937, the scope of repressions was included in the socialist planning: on top, the control numbers were included, and large-scale "mass operations" unfolded throughout the country; This was the time of the so -called "Ezhovshchina" - the peak of Stalinism.

A. Vatlin demonstrates the daily "life" of terror on the example of just one administrative unit - the then Kuntsevsky district of the Moscow region. Perhaps everyone who reads the name of the book will immediately have the question: "Why is this area?" Exactly so: "Why Kuntsevo?" - And the introductory chapter is named. From it we learn that the author of the book has been working as part of the public group under the Moscow government, which is engaged in the perpetuating of the memory of the victims of political repression-in particular, the preparation of the martirologist buried in Butovo (where, as you know, over a year, from August 1937 to October 1938, more than 20 thousand people were shot). They drove to shoot, in particular, from the Kuntsevsky district - good, he was at the side. 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 district was about 200 thousand people. The places were summer cottages - and this also played a role. Not far from Kuntsev was the “neighbor” cottage of Comrade Stalin himself, and the dachas of many other party-state figures were nearby; In general, the addiction of the VIP Person to the Krylatskoye, Mozhaisk and Rublevo-Uspensky highway formed at those very times. The rests of such a high -ranking individuals should have been kept in a special order; Therefore, the district was on a special account, and the Chekist service there was a reliable "springboard" for a further career.

As the author writes,

"This book is a reminder of what is difficult to believe in. A successful businessman or politician who has a mansion in Barvikha or Nemchinovka, a motorist passing along the Amineevsky or Rublevsky highway, the latest representatives of the exotic village of Slykovo, the inhabitants of the sleeping areas of Strogino, the warm camp or ramenka, the hard workers from the Solnti, with the Shchukinskaya or Mnevniki, children Caps from Krylata hills or vacationers in the Suvorovsky park should know - in these places in 1937-1937, a ruthless machine of state terror passed, which claimed hundreds of innocent lives. "

As usual, the plan should have been fulfilled at all costs. The extended examples show that by the mid -1930s, falsification in the work of investigators of the NKVD adopted a truly Kafkian - or, if you like, Orwell - character. For example, after by the end of March 1938, defense plants located in the district were “cleaned up” two or three times and “suitable” for investigators of the contingent simply did not have left, the fantasy of the Kuntsevsky state security figures made the “case” of the Norwegian spies. Since several people arrested in the district NKVD were arrested six months ago, but “forgotten” in the fever of repression, they were made by the “group”, which supposedly received tasks from the Norwegian counterintelligence (for some reason precisely “counter-”). For the "set" they selected (that is, arrested) and several new accomplices - as "ordinary" members of the spy network. All the sin of these people was that their surnames, names, and sometimes patronymic sounded in foreign. These were the primary school teacher, an accountant of a baguette workshop, a stoker of printing house and a grabar of a brick factory. As it came from the investigation, the objects of the interests of the "villains" sold by the bourgeois Varangians were an aircraft factory in Fili and for some reason the Kamvolno-Kotak factory. However, such fantasies have not yet been the limit of idiocy. On the same days, another Kuntsevsky investigator of the NKVD revealed and neutralized a group of spies on the “dermantine-cellular” (as it was written in the case) factory named after Nogina; One of them, as noted in the interrogation protocol, transmitted foreign intelligence information about mastic and paints used in the production of the kitchen oilcloth.

Everyone who read the novel by Y. Gashek “The adventures of the brave soldier Schweik” probably remembered stupidly executive informers and police officers like a secret agent Bretshnemaner, who always protruded in the tavern “at the bowl”, or the gendarme wahmist Flender - always drunk, but steadily trying to get from the protagonist of the recognition of the Schweik - that Schweik is spy. But here is not a fictional, but a very real story of a certain teacher of Zverev, who was arrested and sentenced to five years later , who (in the words of the protocol) at the teacher's conference "did not act as a Soviet person, saying that the students themselves, who are 2-3 years old in the same class, are clear from his words. capable of teaching. " And if Roman Gashek is rather funny than bloody, then in the real Soviet reality ridiculous accusations and hastily slapped "papers" in only one small area were destroyed by thousands of lives.

From the summer of 1937 to the spring of 1938, more than 560 residents of the district became victims of the Kuntsevsky regional department of the NKVD - and these are only those whose names and fate are reliably known; In total, during this time (in six months!) Was arrested by "political" (like those brought above!) at least 1000 people. When you read a book in which all this is set out in details and, so to speak, “close-up”, it seems as if we are talking about some unique, out of the ordinary atrocities. However, the genuine horror is that, even despite some "excesses" of the Kuntsevsky Enkewers (who were diligent people), the situation in this area near Moscow was quite typical. And in the "percentage" attitude, the scale of human losses was not so large here: in cities - all the more metropolitan and regional - the scope of repression turned out to be much wider.

The book has two chapters wearing short and understandable titles: “performers” and “victims”. By the way, many photographs are placed and many - both of those and others. And at the end, pages are thirty small prints, the names of the arrested residents of the Kuntsevsky district - sentenced to death and sent to camps. And only occasionally against the name of the arrested there is a note: “freed” - this means that even such a consequence for some reason could not make the “enemy of the people” from the arrested enemy. And I must say that in the Kuntsevsky District Administration of the NKVD in the mid-1930s, genuine "drummers" of terror gathered. The zeal of state security officers was so ardent that their “lawlessness” subsequently (in the “ Beriyev ” era, which began with the game into the legality and eradication of the “Hedgehog” personnel) became the subject of special proceedings.

However, it would not yet be bend the stick, since the authorities demanded to give a plan at all costs! At the March (1938) peak of repressions, the entire “investigation” was reduced to a single interrogation (or rather, receiving a signature under a pre -prepared protocol) and drawing up an indictment on two pages. In addition, the district employees were constantly warned that for failure to fulfill the instructions “from above”, they themselves would be prosecuted. So the “fighter” labor schedule was extremely intense. Not only full -time employees, but also officers of the Feldsvyaz and even firefighting instructors went to the arrests. Or - to save time and time - the planned victim was summoned to the district department of the police, and there they had a warrant for arrest.

But no matter how the volume of work increases, each of the investigative cases received the necessary bureaucratic support. It was not a problem to kill a person - much more trouble was delivered by the correct “design” of the murder. As one of the employees showed, usually fictional protocols of interrogation were fabricated during the day (according to denunciation, agent data, etc.), and at night they made the accused sign them. The means of coercion are well known. However, the author of the book concludes - the majority of “confessions” was nevertheless obtained not through beatings and tortures, but by persuasion : respect for the authority of the investigator, who in the eyes of many personified justice. If required, they were also attracted to regular "witnesses"; And, for example, in 1939 it turned out that one of the most “demanded” in this capacity in the Kuntsevsky district was a drunken janitor, which did not understand Russian well and also epileptic.

The preferred "theme" of crimes also varied depending on the attitudes of the center (although in this case the "center" was only ten to fifteen kilometers from the "periphery"). Until the end of 1937, the emphasis was placed on charges of counter -revolutionary propaganda and sabotage; Spy networks were engaged in "upstairs" - in the counterintelligence organs. However, by the beginning of 1938, espionage became much more “popular”, so that the struggle with the machinations of foreign intelligence was entrusted with the district departments of the NKVD; Of course, they immediately began to catch spies, terrorists and saboteurs, who annoyingly interfered with the construction of a bright future. In addition to the strategic goals of the party elite and personally, Comrade Stalin, such a change in “orientation” also had a purely pragmatic explanation: a data supply for “anti -Soviet” elements - fists, “former”, etc. - It was already exhausted, and collecting a new compromising evidence was too troublesome (there were not enough people). In cases of espionage, the investigation was as simplified as possible: neither witnesses, nor characteristics, nor the like nonsense were already required. For each "Spy Group" a common "case" launched, where the testimony of all the "participants" was filled - and the issue was resolved.

Of course, on the example of one small area, it is impossible to demonstrate all aspects of those processes that took place on a country scale without exception. However, “observing” A. Vatlin through the prism of the book of the Book of Bureaucratic and Palayal Machine, you can imagine not only the atmosphere of “Herry”, but also its psychological consequences. The "Great Terror" has become a kind of "rehearsal" of a steady impending large war. A cardinal shake of personnel on the All -Union scale - from the district to the state - awakened (or resurrected?) A sense of fear in the masses as the main incentive of productive (in the then understanding) work. Without a “big blood”, the country's modernization according to the Stalinist model was doomed to loss of pace and slipping - just as it was unlikely to become possible in a few years victory in the war. The scope of losses was quite fit into the “planned” indicators - and, apparently, these losses were originally thought by the organizers of terror as one of the types of industrial costs (along with finances, energy resources, minerals, etc.), which will be needed for further economic development. Although they killed not only and not so much “for the benefit of the case” (for example, on the construction of some industrial facility), but simply like that, as they say, “for an acute”; Terror - it is terror. And, realizing all this, in conclusion I would like to write something pathetic about the "History Lessons", expressing the confidence that, they say, "never again," but somehow it is not pulling. For at the school of history we are traditional second -year -olds. Remember what the Kuntsevsky teacher Zverev said?