"The profession of the executioner in the USSR has become very common"

The historian Alexei Teplyakov spoke about the phenomenon of state political terror, the destruction of 130 thousand Siberians in the 1930s, the punitive system as a guarantee of the preservation of the ruling regime, the “red banditry”, the forensicity in the structures of the local authorities and the death of Vasily Shukshin’s father.

The seminar “Repressed Siberian Province”, dedicated to the Day of Memory of Victims of Political Repression, opened in Novosibirsk. Taiga.info gives fragments of the report of the candidate of historical sciences Alexei Teplyakov “Mass operations of the Cheka-MGB as a tool of political terror”.

The terrorist activities of state security agencies in the Leninist-Stalinsky period are the most important manifestation of the archaization that was made by the Bolsheviks, and led to the restoration and strong consolidation of the phenomena of past eras in public life. The witnesses of the revolution and the Civil War had an acute sensation of the remnants of the Middle Ages. The system of Soviet punitive organs, which defended the achievements of the Bolshevik policy, clearly reproduced the most archaic forms of the Russian political investigation of the XVII - first half of the 19th centuries: absolutization of denunciations, mass arrests, inquisitive consequences, the use of provocateurs, secret trials, the use of painful executions, secret aborrows of the convicts.

Witnesses of the revolution and the Civil War had an acute sensation of the remnants of the Middle Ages

The ideas of mass terrorist reprisals with enemies were born, first of all, in the top leadership of the party. One of the main organizers of the execution of the royal family of Beloborodov wrote to the secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) Krestinsky with the Don’s uprisings blocked by the uprisings: “The basic rule of behavior in reprisal against counter -revolution is not judged, mass reprisals are carried out with them.” A convincing evidence of the terrorist nature of the authorities of the Soviet political police is constant mass repressions that required the presence of large punitive structures, the construction of which was constantly changing depending on the tasks to be solved.

In Chekist documents, the term “mass operation” is constantly found, which indicates the principle of work, which is a long -term phenomenon of the work of the Chekist police. Often, they understood the campaigns of group arrests, but, often, they were interpreted expanded, implying further condemnation, and conclusion, and expulsion. The commission of group executions also took place along the graph of mass operations .

In April 1933, the employees of the Barnaul OGPU compiled an act of execution of 327 people, and it said that 37 employees were fulfilled on the basis of the decision of the Plenipotentiary of the OGPU of the West Siberian Territory. The execution was attended, in particular, the prosecutor at the operational sector of the OGPU and the head of the operator. Among the 327 destroyed in the Barnaul prison was 23-year-old Makar Shukshin-the father of Vasily Shukshin.

The large device of the punitive system was a guarantee that it can at any time carry out arbitrarily large liquidation of opponents of the regime. For the needs of mass operations, the entire structure of the Cheka-NKVD was formed. At the time of exacerbation of terror, temporary operational sectors or groups from 30 to 100 people were created from the leading core of experienced workers of the regional or regional apparatus and security officers and policemen from the surrounding areas - they carried out a quick investigation and execution. The profession of the executioner in the USSR has become very common.

Small cities like Cherepanovo or Kansk were characterized by a factory of cases of conspiracies, according to which 100-200 people were immediately arrested

Local Chekist authorities, together with the police and internal troops, from 1918 to 1922, conducted wide cleaning of the population with the help of group detentions. Already in 1920, Chekist detachments from the provincial centers for mass arrests left for Siberian villages. Small cities like Cherepanovo or Kansk were characterized by a factory of conspiracies, which were immediately arrested for 100-200 people. Such arrest campaigns have always exceeded the investigative capabilities of the Chekists and the police, who perfectly understood that due to the lack of accusatory materials on hastily arrested people, they would not be able to investigate their guilt. Most of the captured were soon released, and it was believed that an effective policy of intimidation was carried out in this way.

In Siberia and the Far East, the phenomenon of the Bolshevik terror was local red banditry-spontaneous robberies against class opponents with the help of a lower party-Soviet and Chekist-myilician apparatus. The head of the Cheka-OGPU bodies in Siberia [Ivan] Pavlunovsky in September 1921 reported that he was not able to control the situation in the district bodies of the Cheka, which, as he gracefully expressed himself, moved away from the subordination of the provincial Cheka and, together with the local police, executive committees, party cells without trial, massively destroyed and robbed the surviving supporters of the White movement, often, often, often, Bringing personal scores.

In the report of the Altai lip ( the Provincial Department of Justice - approx. Taigi.info ) for May 1920 it was noted that police inquiry often stop at the very beginning with an indication that the arrested when trying to escape was shot. By the end of 1920, in the Biysk district, only the Okunevskaya party cell, that is, in a large village, shot 200 of the so-called “Kolchakovites”, the other-70, some-10-20 people each. During the period of red banditry, the mass operations of the Chekists were supplemented by the same large -scale reprisals of local authorities and communist cells, which were unofficial and were no less bloody.

Here it is worth emphasizing the specifics of the eastern part of Russia. The terrorist policy was associated with a huge criminalization of power, especially at the lower level, where it was actively replenished by a criminal and marginal element. In the Far East, the role of former bandits was especially noticeable. The leader of the faction of the RCP (b) and the authorized by the Government of the Far Eastern Republic in Vladivostok in 1922 was Roman Ceitlin, a Harbin smuggler famous before the revolution, who carried the opium party from Manchuria to Moscow and was more than once sitting in Chinese prisons.

The massive operations of the Chekists were supplemented by the same large -scale reprisals of local authorities and communist cells

Another oasis of the criminalism was Yakutia-the first leader of the local rons at the 1920 Khariton Gladunov was earlier than the communist expert, then got into the manufacture of false money, received hard labor. In 1918, he participated in the acceleration of the Yakut authorities, personally shot and robbed the magistrate, and then became the head of the police.

Sergey Alekseevich Nivrinov, deputy chairman of the Novonikolaev Privk, - he personally shot hundreds of people, which his colleagues spoke about praise to him. Leonid Zakovsky-the head of the Siberian Chekists in 1926-1932-became Deputy Yezhov in 1938, then he was shot. Gudkov and Ershov, ordinary warders, who received the term in 1937 for direct participation in executions, probably executed thousands of Novosibirsk. In the photo of the head of the Tomsk OGPU, Mikhail Filatov from the FSB Museum shows that he has a trace of a tattoo on his chin-something like chamomile. In criminal elements, the presence of a floral tattoo has a sign of belonging to the corresponding community. It is clear that no philatelic.

The apogee of mass operations is 1937-38, when more than 2 million people were arrested [in the USSR], including crime, of which over 700 thousand were shot. The wide cleaning of criminal contingents did not give results, the Chekists and the police then caught small crooks, condemned a huge number of innocent in criminal offenses, and the bulk of the seasoned recidivists remained at large, and crime before the war grew abruptly. In the 30s, terrorist methods led to the execution of 130 thousand Siberians, not counting those who died in places of prison: prisons and camps.

After the completion of a large terror, mass operations were a classic method of working in the attached areas of Poland, the Baltic states and Moldova. Only after the death of Stalin, mass operations left the arsenal of special services, but only in the territory of the USSR. They were used during the suppression of uprisings in the GDR, in Hungary, during the occupation of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. The power structures of Russia actively held mass terrorist actions in Chechnya, in fact, relying on rich Soviet experience.

Prepared by Yaroslav Vlasov