On the Web, on the website of the "Memorial" movement, a list of NKVD employees for 1935-1941 appeared. The information, which had been kept under the heading "secret" for decades, was in the public domain. The database contains 40 thousand security officers who worked during the years of the "Great Terror", when citizens, as they say, were sent to be shot without trial or investigation.
The descendants of the Chekists and current FSB officers are also unhappy with the appearance of documents on the Web. Some are afraid of revenge from the descendants of the repressed. Others understand: after years, their personal data with a "track record" may similarly appear on the Internet, and who wants everyone to know about his "exploits"!
HAVE AN OPINION
How to live with a list of executioners in your bosom
Dmitry Olshansky
Is the man who found in the archives the names of those who repressed and killed his great-grandfather in 1937 and is now eager for satisfaction?
BETWEEN
The website of the "Memorial" movement went offline after the publication of the directory of the NKVD employees
The section with the specified information works intermittently and often gives an error message
Database with data of 40 thousand employees of the NKVD. Shortly before this, Tomsk resident Denis Karagodin published his investigation into the people involved in the execution of his great-grandfather Stepan during the Great Terror. One of them turned out to be Nikolai Zyryanov, an employee of the Tomsk city department of the NKVD. Zyryanov's granddaughter Yulia wrote a letter to Denis in which she repented for the actions of her grandfather. The response to these publications was mixed. Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov this topic is "sensitive", and the descendants of the Chekists wrote an open letter to Vladimir Putin with a request to close access to the base, fearing revenge. "Lenta.ru" asked people whose relatives worked in the NKVD to talk about how they feel about the public discussion of the role of their ancestors in the events of 80 years ago.
"Here, try to figure it out!"
Yuri Vasiliev, lives and works in Latvia. Grandfather Yakov Vasiliev served during the war in the NKVD troops, later worked in the police in Riga.
This digging in the past is like digging in dirty laundry, you are definitely not interested in looking for a clean one! And now for me this is also not necessary. My grandfather lived well, raised two children, he died in 1981, I was only seven years old.
In my opinion, a discussion about the people who worked in the NKVD is unnecessary. Whoever remembers the old will be out of sight. Now you have a lot of forces in Russia who want to rock the country with such and other unnecessary things. If any of the victims really wants to seek the truth, even if he is looking for it himself, he takes it to the courts. But the guilty cannot be found, and they were not, the system is to blame. And it’s not that she’s to blame, it was and it was impossible to save the country in another way.
Alexey Ivanov (name and surname have been changed). One of the grandfathers served in the NKVD troops.
I support the dissemination of any information about the history of Russia, including the full opening of the archives of the 20th century. Maybe it makes sense not to open archives that are 80 years old, so that people who are mentioned in them can die in peace, but after this period, all archives need to be opened and published every year.
In the twentieth century, crimes were committed in Russia against the Russian people and humanity. Some do not want the people to know the truth, but it is in the interests of the people. The people have the right to know their history, and to hide this information is a crime against them.
As for the relatives of criminals, they are not responsible for their ancestors. Everyone should be judged only for their own deeds.
In Russian, the word "repentance" (on behalf of the biblical Cain) is an inaccurate translation of the Greek Christian and ancient term "matanaya", which literally means "change of mind" or can be conventionally conveyed by the word "change of mind."
In the original sense of the word "change the mind", all of us, the inhabitants of Russia, need to define our attitude to the events of history. And, seeing the good deeds of the ancestors, just the same to see their evil deeds. Call crimes crimes, condemn them, not justify them, and say that we do not agree with these actions. As the German people did after 1945, by the way.
As for the apologies of the descendants of the executioners to the descendants of the victims, I think this is an extremely positive and Christian phenomenon. Only it is necessary to better define the subtle differences between repentance in the sense of a change of mind and repentance, when you seem to apologize for the sins of another person, as for your own. It's probably better to say "my condolences" or something like that. This is also a delicate ethical and philosophical question.
Tatiana Zheltok, lives in Poland. Great uncle - NKVD Colonel Alexander Rabtsevich, his younger brother Mikhail Rabtsevich - Colonel (later General) of the KGB.
From public discussion from the growing power of its inadequacy, people are already dizzy. Living and remembering is very important, but I don't see the right healthy opportunity for public discussion. The energy nightmare this debate produces is dangerous in many ways.
I believe that finding out who is to blame will lead nowhere. It is not that simple. War is not red and white, but much more complicated. People in their families cannot figure it out.
Photo: Georgy Petrusov / RIA Novosti
We must live today! Live and remember the past, but not live in the past. I am not a man of the past, and this digging will not cure people (and, judging by what is happening, the majority need to be cured of resentment and anger). Here in Poland for six years they have been looking for those responsible for the crash of Kaczynski's plane near Smolensk. Do you think you can find those to blame for the terrible events of history, about which you and I know so little.
My relatives worked in the NKVD and the KGB for another part - foreign intelligence and diplomatic relations. I wouldn't even know what to tell you if my relatives were involved in this nightmare! Probably, I could not have such relatives.
And how many people who did not work in these bodies are to blame for the fate of the repressed? Someone just reported, and there are an awful lot of them too. Try to figure it out! Terrible milestones of history, not conveyed by any words. Horror.
"A person is responsible only for himself"
Serafim Orekhanov. Great-great-grandfather worked as the head of the investigative unit of the Moscow department of the NKVD in 1935-1939. Orekhanov found him on Memorial's lists.
Lenta.ru: Are you sure that the person you found in the Memorial database is really your great-great-grandfather?
Serafim Orekhanov: I am sure because I knew that he existed, knew his name and patronymic, knew that he worked in the NKVD. I didn’t know only his position and rank - now I know.
What did you know about your grandfather before? What did the parents tell about him?
I know the history of my family quite well, and although it was four generations ago, I know the house in Lubyanka where he lived, I know that he had a severe, hot-tempered disposition - no wonder - and I even know the place in the Novodevichy cemetery where he is buried. We didn't talk much about this at home, but as an adult, my father began to talk more about his family. Her story is as interesting and as tragic as the story of any other family who happened to live in the 20th century in Russia. Hardly anyone other than us needs the details of this story.
Has your attitude towards your great-great-grandfather changed?
I had no special relationship with him: not even his photographs have survived. I am sure that all the employees of the NKVD are exactly the same victims of this system, as well as those whom they sent to camps or shot. Many of them ended up in the same ditches as their victims, and those who escaped were drunk at best. I saw an interview with one of the executioners who shot people at the Butovo training ground near Moscow. Already in the nineties, being a very old man, he complained that “they didn’t suppress the reptile” and that the repressions were insufficient. Isn't this a miserable person?
I heard about the forthcoming publication for a long time, I wanted to stop by the Memorial office and ask to have a look at their data, but I never got ready. In any case, this did not come as a surprise to me: I entered the base knowing that I would find my great-great-grandfather. I think the publication of these lists is an excellent occasion to start talking about the Great Terror, about Stalin and about the Russian XX century in general. Not in the discourse of relations between the authorities and the people, but in the discourse of family stories, which, it seems to me, is a much more suitable basis for the formation of a healthy sense of history instead of endless disputes about a "strong hand", "price of victory" and other abstractions.
Have you thought before about the need for public discussion of this page of our history and is it worth starting it now?
Of course it's worth it. I grew up in a circle in which the attitude towards Stalinism, and indeed everything Soviet, was quite unambiguous: it was a catastrophe, the worst that could happen to Russia, the most terrible period in our history, a huge step back. And I, in general, had no reason not to share these views.
On the other hand, the Soviet experiment of the early 1920s was the greatest of utopias and possibly the greatest moment in the history of Russian culture. All this has been said many times, but I would very much like the discussion of the Soviet legacy - and the Great Terror as its central part - to be more specific. To discuss the fate of people, not ideas.
This is a reproach against whom?
It is clear that this applies primarily to the conventionally patriotic camp, which tends to neglect details, but conventional liberals often do the same. For example, from time to time there is a proposal to demolish the Mausoleum. Guys, well, actually this is Shchusev, to take and demolish a work of art, whether we like it or not, for anti-Bolshevik purposes - this is Bolshevism.
And it also seems important that the discussion of the Soviet should be separated from the Great Patriotic War: after all, the war did not radically change the nature of the Stalinist regime. By making the conversation about the Second World War the central part of the dispute about the Soviet, we are simply trying to get away from discussing much more complex, but also much more than all of us, concerning things.
Should the state pursue a policy that condemns people (not just leaders) who took part in the repression?
It seems to me that our history is already too much monopolized by the state. I think no special policy is needed here, but such things as the story of Denis Karagodin, or the “Last Address” action, or the publication of personal testimonies of people who have experienced it all, in the Prozhito project, are needed. When history is under the jurisdiction of the state, it inevitably becomes, firstly, the history of power, and secondly, an abstraction that can be argued about to the point of hoarseness, but which has very little to do with our life.
Is public repentance necessary on the part of the descendants of the NKVD workers, or should the discussion be conducted impersonally?
Of course not. I don't believe in collective responsibility. Its place is in the Old Testament. No one should be held responsible for the sins of others - neither in a metaphysical sense, nor in a legal sense. I wrote about this in my
Recently, the Russian human rights organization "Memorial" posted on the Internet a database of employees of the NKVD, a punitive structure of the Stalinist era that carried out massive repressions.
This news caused a huge scandal in Russia, which has not abated for a week. The heirs of the Soviet Chekists, as well as a few living persons involved in the lists, sent an open letter to the Russian President, demanding that access to Memorial's information be closed. The descendants of state security agents fear for their own safety! “Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can avenge repressed ancestors,” the authors of the open letter say.
The database is directly related to Ukraine - it contains information about 987 employees of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR who worked in the central apparatus of the punitive department in Kiev, as well as seven regions (Vinnitsa, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Chernigov). Nevertheless, the disclosure of the names of the Ukrainian NKVEDists did not provoke any noticeable reaction in our country. Why is there such a difference in perception?
Title holders
First of all, it is necessary to clarify what is at stake. No "secret NKVD database", as many believe (and as presented by some media outlets), has never existed. We are talking about the reference book “Personnel of the USSR State Security Agencies. 1935-1939 ", compiled on his own initiative by the modern Russian researcher Andrei Nikolayevich Zhukov. He drew information from the orders of the leadership of the NKVD of the USSR on personnel: who was awarded, who was promoted, who was transferred to a new position, and who was dismissed from the authorities or imprisoned. For 15 years of work, information has accumulated on almost 40,000 people.
The base covers not only investigators who directly tortured people and forced their victims to incriminate themselves and others by beatings. Other cadres of the NKVD also got into it - quartermasters, military veterinarians, military doctors, police officers (not to be confused with state security agents), border guards (they were also formally part of the NKVD), that is, people who had no direct relation to repression.
Thus, the directory "Personnel structure ..." is not at all "Wikipedia of the executioners", as the Russian "Novaya Gazeta" effectively recommended the result of Zhukov's many years of work. And the author himself did not pursue such a goal. "The task set by A. N. Zhukov, - we read in the description of" About the Project ", - is to give a complete list of persons who, in the period from December 1935 to June 1939, were awarded special ranks in the state security system" ... And no more!
It also makes sense to clarify that the information collected for each person cannot be called a dossier. Still, the dossier, according to the "Dictionary of Foreign Words", is "a collection of documents (evidence, characteristics, certificates, etc.) related to some case, issue, person, as well as a folder with such documents." However, the reference book takes into account only personal data about a particular person: full name, year and place of birth, nationality, party affiliation, the beginning of service in the authorities, positions, titles, awards, whether he was repressed, year and place of death.
Moscow lags behind
Vsevolod Balitsky headed the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR in 1934-1937, is present in the database
Why did the publication of the guide make such a splash in Russia? Because the archives of the special services (and not only the special services!) Are still there behind seven locks. The country still lives within the framework of the Soviet historical myth, a little tweaked by love for the imperial house of the Romanovs and the blunt glorification of Stalin.
It got to the point that too frank publications of the times of "perestroika" about Stalin's repressions are now viewed as a denigration of the glorious past.
Against this background, the clarification of the personalities of the NKVD officers looks, of course, a sensation. Already on the first day of work, the project site was opening intermittently, barely coping with the flow of people who wanted to know the names of the creators of the Great Terror.
Does the published information threaten the lives of the descendants of the reference books? Unlikely. According to the dry personal data given in it, it is impossible to understand whether this or that person took part in the interrogation and torture of people. And why should the descendants of the NKVD be afraid in the country of the victorious NKVD?
There are several reasons why Zhukov's handbook did not become a sensation in Ukraine. The first and obvious - this kind of book was published in Kiev back in 1997. It is called "Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine: individuals, facts, documents." Its authors Yuri Shapoval, Vladimir Prystaiko and Vadim Zolotarev presented on 608 pages biographies of security officers-NKVD officers of various ranks and ranks, published previously classified documents, and so on. So Moscow, skidding in its Soviet past, lagged behind Kiev by two decades.
Nikolai Yezhov, one of the most terrible symbols of the Stalinist terror. Headed the NKVD of the USSR in 1936-1938
The second reason is that the historical memory of the Ukrainian society is much larger than that of the Russian one. Over the past decade, we have touched upon (and made the subject of public discussion) many painful points of recent Ukrainian history - the Holodomor, the "golden" September 1939, Carpathian Ukraine, the Holocaust, the UPA, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the persecution of the sixties, and so on.
Yes, and the process of decommunization, with all its costs, prompted to rethink the role of certain episodes and personalities of our recent history. And Russia only has to learn the lessons of history - real, and not the one that is set forth in modern Russian bestsellers, such as “The Truth About the Soviet Union. Which country have we lost? "
Where did the spies come from?
Of course, the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR was an integral part of the NKVD of the USSR, and many events were carried out on orders from Moscow. For example, in May 1938, the NKVD sent out an orientation that an anti-Soviet White Guard officer underground was operating in all regions of Ukraine, which, on the instructions of the Russian Combined Arms Union, was carrying out counter-revolutionary work and had connections with Socialist-Revolutionary organizations.
It is easy to understand that the directive regarding an organization with such a name was received from the capital of the Soviet Union. And the method of work of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR in this case was no different from other republics. In particular, the Poltava regional administration arrested the former generals of the tsarist army Dobriansky and Yakovlev, as well as former colonels Kapustin, Zembalevsky, Tolkushin. They were elderly people who had long since retired from politics and had no anti-Soviet intentions. Nevertheless, under torture they were forced to confess that a ramified White Guard underground was operating in the region. The "punishing sword" of state security. Hence the different working methods.
Here are just a few "original" tasks entrusted and carried out by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR: the deportation in 1936 of the Poles of the Kiev and Vinnitsa regions to Kazakhstan, the fight against the OUN underground in 1940-1941, the conduct of four waves of mass deportations from the now Soviet Galicia, the creation of operational KGB groups for "cleaning" Bukovina, etc.
Actually, a deep understanding of the mechanisms of such events gives an idea of the behavior of a totalitarian state that destroys its own citizens. This is a guarantee that this should not happen again in the future. The disclosure of the names of the employees of the punitive authorities is only the first step on this long path. By themselves, surnames do not give anything. During the years of perestroika, such information, indeed, aroused considerable interest. But now we have gone much further. And Russia remained at about the same point where perestroika ended.
© kurer-sreda.ru. Prison-museum of the NKVD in Tomsk
24 Nov 2016, 07:42The human rights organization "Memorial" published a guide about the Chekists of the era of mass repressions of 1935-1939. It turned out to be at least 2.5 thousand people who served on the territory of the modern Siberian Federal District.
Memorial has published a reference book “Personnel of the USSR State Security Agencies. 1935-1939 ", compiled by the researcher Andrey Zhukov. He worked with archives declassified in the 1990s - orders for awarding NKVD employees and their curriculum vitae.
In Siberia, Zhukov singled out the following territorial bodies of the NKVD, which existed at different times: East Siberian edge (until 1936), East Siberian region (existed since 1937) and West Siberian edge. In addition to the district bodies of the NKVD, the composition of regional offices in the Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Chita and Omsk regions, the Krasnoyarsk Territory and the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic is given.
In total, the names of about 2.5 thousand NKVD officers who worked in the territory of the modern Siberian Federal District during the period of mass repression have been published. For example, in the Novosibirsk region the researcher managed to find out 250 names, in the Krasnoyarsk region - 323, in the Omsk region - 402. In Chita and Buryatia - one each.
The only employee of the NKVD in Buryatia, discovered in open sources, was Colonel Nikolai Ivanov, who was born in Vyazma in 1902. After serving in the Red Army and working at the Elektrosvet plant in 1939, he became a student of the courses of the NKVD of the USSR, in June of the same year he became Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Buryat-Mongolian ASSSR, then headed the department. He had four orders of the Red Star and medals of the Order of the Badge of Honor and two orders of the Patriotic War of the first degree. He died in 1962.
For most of the personnel there is no detailed information - only titles and awards. Even the dates of birth and death are rare. In a number of cases, the Siberian "Chekists" themselves became convicted. For example, junior lieutenant of the state security Yuri Mlinnik, who served in the Irkutsk region and was a candidate for membership in the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - he was arrested in 1938, convicted in March 1939, but released in April. In 1996 he was rehabilitated.
Among the former Novosibirsk employees of the NKVD who were included in the list, one can single out the colonel of state security Nikolai Deshin, who was born in the Voronezh province. He graduated from the Novosibirsk school of the NKVD in 1939, during the Great Patriotic War he was the head of the department of the NKVD in the Novosibirsk region. After the creation of the Ministry of State Security, he moved there, in 1950 he left for the Velikie Luki region. He died on retirement in 1977.
Colonel Anatoly Koshkin also studied in Novosibirsk, then worked in the NKVD and MGB of Kemerovo cities. He headed the UMGB of Khakassia in 1950, after the death of Joseph Stalin he became the deputy head of the department, in 1956 he became the deputy head of the KGB for the Krasnoyarsk Territory, then he headed the state security bodies in Norilsk, from 1965 to 1974 he was the head of the KGB department in Krasnoyarsk. He shot himself in the office - it was reported that in the last months of his life he complained of headaches.
A section has appeared on the website of the Memorial movement, which is a database "Personnel of the USSR State Security Bodies. 1935-1939", which contains data on 39,950 NKVD employees. The information that formed the basis of the base was collected by researcher Andrei Zhukov.
The description of the project indicates that the guide will be useful to those interested in Soviet history. "So, in particular, with the help of the reference book it will be possible to attribute many state security officers of the Great Terror era, still known only by their surname (as a rule, even without specifying the name and patronymic) - from signatures in investigative cases or from references in memoir texts. The publication of the reference book is a significant step towards a deeper and more accurate understanding of the tragic history of our country in the 30s of the twentieth century, "- Znak.com quotes the message of" Memorial ".
The structure of the database allows you to search both alphabetically and by location of service, titles or awards of individuals. Repressed NKVD officers were placed in a separate category. The completeness of information about specific persons in the directory depends on the source from which the information was obtained. In some cases, only surnames and initials are known about a particular NKVD employee; in some cases, the dates of the beginning and end of the service have been established.
In May of this year, "Memorial" published a directory on a CD. As Radio Liberty reported then, the main source of information was the orders of the NKVD of the USSR on personnel. It contains the numbers and dates of orders on the assignment of special titles and dismissals from the NKVD, which often meant subsequent arrest. They also contain information about the position held at the time of dismissal, received state awards and awarded with the signs "Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU". In addition, the compiler of the reference book, Andrei Zhukov, used data from other sources - first of all, about those who died and disappeared during the war years, as well as those who were subjected to repressions.
At the presentation of the disc, the chairman of the board of the international "Memorial" Arseny Roginsky said that many years ago he drew attention to a man who came to Memorial over and over again and worked through one "Book of Memory" after another, writing something into the granary book.
“In general,“ Memorial ”is a place where there are many eccentrics of all kinds. he does. It turns out that from all the "Books of Memory" he then subscribed to the employees of the state security agencies, "- said Roginsky.
Later it turned out that Andrei Zhukov was working on a variety of sources, not only on the "Books of Memory". First of all, these were personnel orders of the NKVD bodies, which are stored in the State Archives of the Russian Federation and are available for study.
“At some moment we realized that something had to be done out of this. It is impossible to leave all this in the possession of home cards or notebooks, granary books, of which Andrei Nikolaevich had accumulated an unmeasured amount. and the theme was more or less defined. Not everyone was interested - from Adam and Eve to our days. We limited ourselves to a certain period, and it is indicated on the disc: 1935-1939. We chose for this disc from everywhere, from the gold reserves of Andrei Nikolaevich, those people who received special titles during these years. As we remember, they were introduced in 1935. Those people who received them during the first four years are our characters, "says a representative of Memorial.
According to Roginsky, even draft versions of the database made it possible to make important discoveries. So, for example, it turned out that in the novel by Yuri Dombrovsky "The Faculty of Unnecessary Things" all the names of the Chekists are genuine.
"Even books have been written about many characters, some were themselves defendants in criminal cases for various reasons. Someone - because they refused to carry out the 447th order (secret order of the NKVD dated July 30, 1937" On the operation to repress former kulaks , criminals and other anti-Soviet elements ", according to which 390 thousand people were executed from August 1937 to November 1938 and 380 thousand people were sent to camps. Approx. site) or did not actively conduct it, such cases are also known, "says the historian Yan Rachinsky about the people mentioned in the database.
As Rachinsky noted in an interview with the "History Lesson" project, it took 15 years to compile the database.