One of the most persistent associations with the USSR is the executions organized by the NKVD. Capital punishment, especially during the Great Terror of the 30s, was often sentenced with gross violations of the defendant's rights to defense. Thanks to the abolition of the regime of secret storage of certain documents, it became known that there were certain norms for the imposition of the death pen alty. Information about the methods of the execution procedure itself was also revealed.
The death pen alty in the Russian Empire
It is necessary to make a reservation that all statistical data are very approximate and are often interpreted depending on the researcher's goals. However, if it is impossible to name the number of people executed in pre-revolutionary Russia in absolute numbers, then it can be done in relative terms. There were very few death sentences in the 19th century. The most famous are the trials of the Decembrists (5 people were executed) and the Narodnaya Volya (also 5 people). The situation changed dramatically during the years of the First Russian Revolution (1905-1907). The government was forced to respond with decisive measures to the revolutionary terror. The proceedings weresimplified, the perpetrators of the attacks were sentenced to capital punishment in the mode of a court-martial. Just over 2,000 people were executed. This is quite comparable to the number of victims of terrorist attacks.
War Communism
This did not prevent the Bolsheviks who came to power as a result of the October Revolution from presenting the actions of the imperial authorities as real villainy. But already in the first years of the existence of the Soviet government, the former freedom fighters turned into real executioners. On December 20, 1917, the infamous All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was created under the Council of People's Commissars - a prototype of the future NKVD. Its main task was to identify and punish all opponents of the new system being established, which included both the leaders of the imperial organization, including representatives of the Romanov dynasty, and we althy peasants who evaded the surplus appraisal. In the Russian Empire, the death pen alty was most often carried out by hanging and occasionally by shooting. The Soviet Republic adopted the second method as a faster one. However, sometimes a person sentenced to death was strangled, drowned, burned or chopped with swords. There is also evidence that the condemned were sometimes buried alive.
In a situation where the old bodies of supervision and control over the activities of the courts and the execution of sentences were destroyed, and new ones had not yet appeared, the executioners were left to their own devices and couldimplement them in accordance with their own ideas. Some executions, especially those of the Romanovs, were public. In the presence of witnesses, the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Fanny Kaplan was also killed. Some formalization of the process occurred only in 1920. At the same time, those sentenced to death were granted minimal rights, for example, the opportunity to file a cassation complaint within 48 hours.
VCHK conversion
The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was created the very next day after the coup - November 8, 1917. In 1919, the head of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, received the post of people's commissar. In his hands, he concentrated two important departments that exercised supervision and control. This situation continued until February 6, 1922. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR adopted a resolution that transformed the Cheka into the State Political Administration, which became part of the NKVD.
In addition to administrative changes, the Soviet government attempted to standardize punitive activities. Even a cursory study of execution cases showed that capital punishment was adopted haphazardly, the basic principles of legal proceedings were violated, and persons who benefited from the physical elimination of the defendant often intervened in the trial. But the measures turned out to be cosmetic: the public execution of the punishment, the undressing of the condemned and the use of painful methods of carrying out the sentence were prohibited. It was forbidden to give the bodies of the executed to close relatives. On purposeprepared by the NKVD before the execution, the deceased were taken to deserted places in cars. The funeral was ordered to be carried out without a funeral ritual. The performers were required to equip the burial so that it was impossible to find. However, the surviving photos of the executions of the NKVD show that this decision was practically not applied in practice.
The elimination of executions from public practice inevitably led to the fact that the relatives of those sentenced often did not know about what had happened. The Soviet authorities tried their best to maintain this state of affairs. Only verbal informing those who applied to state bodies about what had happened was allowed. It was often stated that the defendant was serving a certain term in the camps.
Execution procedure
The October coup brought to the fore the declassed elements of society, with little or no education and drunken atmosphere of permissiveness. After the actual collapse of the Eastern Front of the First World War, the soldiers, demoralized by the unprecedented brutality of the confrontation, returned home and were included in an even more fierce civil war. That is why the earliest documents of the NKVD about executions are full of descriptions of brutal murders. Permissions for them were given by Soviet judicial practice.
The first executions were carried out, as the materials of the NKVD show, in basements. Executions and other methods of killing the condemned were put on stream. Eyewitnesses testified that there were always pools of blood on the floor and lime was used to hide it. Rarelythe sentence was carried out immediately: before death, people were tortured, as a rule, by drunken executioners. After the executions, the corpses were transported in NKVD vehicles to some distant and quiet place, where they were buried, abundantly sprinkled with quicklime. There were cases of throwing bodies into the river: after a while they surfaced quite far from the place of execution.
At the same time, the traditional method of reprisal for Soviet executioners was tested: the condemned was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. After that, a control shot was fired (or, if the executioner was drunk enough, a whole series of control shots).
Personal testimonies
In addition to the photos of executions preserved in the archives of the NKVD, there are many personal testimonies of their direct perpetrators. For the Soviet elite, this was a serious problem. Society was not supposed to know how the country was moving towards a bright communist future, so a special receipt was taken from each Chekist, in which he undertook to keep secret everything that he or his colleagues were doing. You could only name your position. But in reality, everything turned out differently. Firstly, the executioners were sure that they were doing the most important work for the young state - they were eliminating its enemies, and therefore they were en titled to special treatment. Secondly, rivalry quickly developed in the circle of executioners: those who killed a lot of people were most respected. At the trials of the late 1930s, when the former executioners themselves found themselves in the dock, they, wishing to avoid execution, spoke in detail about their struggle with"enemies of the people", boasting of the number of lives lost. At the same time, it became known that the reprisal against the enemies of the Soviet state was not necessarily sanctioned by a court decision: many Chekists arbitrarily killed those who were considered criminals, or in order to appropriate their property.
Chekists willingly resorted to stories about their activities during the judicial investigation in order to morally break the victim. Of course, one should not lose sight of the fact that many details were deliberately embellished, but the essence remained the same. In addition, during the reign of terror sanctioned by the authorities, it was not necessary to greatly embellish reality.
Yezhovshchina
December 4, 1934, the head of the party cell of Leningrad S. M. Kirov was killed. This event marked the beginning of the darkest period in Soviet history: the Great Terror. Some historians believe that the murder of Kirov was inspired by Stalin himself in order to finally crush all those who doubt the correctness of his course, but there is no evidence for this.
The executions of people carried out in the cellars and prisons of the NKVD took on a mass character. The department was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, who bluntly stated: "You will have to shoot quite an impressive amount." The purges began from the very top: such iconic figures as Tukhachevsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev were arrested and soon executed. Documents were sent to all local branches of the NKVD, in whichthe minimum number of executions required. The basements could not cope with such a flow of convicts, so new places of executions appeared. The NKVD received Butovsky, Levashovsky and other training grounds for this. In an effort to curry favor, NKVD functionaries in the field regularly sent telegrams to the center with requests to increase the rate. Of course, no one refused such a request. The highest officials of the state, primarily Molotov, personally left demands on top of the resolutions to increase physical pressure on the accused. The result of Yezhov's activities as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, according to minimal estimates, was 680 thousand shot and 115 thousand dead - that is, who could not stand the torture during the investigation.
Spiral of Terror
Historians note that despite the enormity of the events that took place in the USSR, they were subject to a certain logic. It was also logical that when the first stream of convicts dried up, the zealous Chekists began to destroy themselves. As already mentioned, this was beneficial to the authorities in many respects: those who knew too well about the methods of trial and reprisal of the period of terror were eliminated. The first to die were its immediate initiators. In October 1938, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks asked Stalin to transfer part of the property of the repressed to the use of the NKVD. The petition was signed by such prominent figures of the first stage of terror as Mikhail Frinovsky, Mikhail Litvin and Israel Dagin. The latter had a serious track record: organizing the nationalization of private enterprises in southern Russia, chairmanship in the local cells of the Cheka (directlyformed execution lists), as well as the leadership of the UNKVD of the Gorky region. The last stage of his career was the leadership of the guards of the party elite. But soon he ceased to be of importance to the NKVD. The execution of Dagin took place in January 1940, already at the end of the Great Terror. When the processes for the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism began, Dagin's candidacy, taking into account his activities, was rejected.
Anti-Semitism
Dagin's death is fully integrated into the general line of terror. It has long been known that the main ideologists of the Russian revolutionary movement were Jews: the legislation of the Russian Empire excluded them from legal public life, and the Jews compensated for this injustice. The anti-Semitic campaign was fully realized already at the end of Stalin's life, when the course for the fight against cosmopolitanism was announced. But the first executions of Jews were already carried out during the period of great terror and concerned primarily persons who at various times participated in the exercise of power.
In 1941, when the Great Patriotic War had already begun, a real tragedy unfolded in Ukraine. In accordance with the general policy of the Third Reich, all Jews were sentenced to death. The sentence began to be carried out on September 29. It resulted in mass executions in the Babi Yar tract. The executions of the NKVD were replaced by a new disaster for the local population. Of all those sentenced to death, only 18 people were able to escape.
Expansion of geography
At the service of the NKVDThe Soviet government also resorted to shooting enemies of the people in those cases when it was necessary to deal not only with its own citizens. Already at the end of the Great Terror, when the USSR began to pursue an active foreign policy in the Far East, the Chekists were needed to destroy those who were not very happy about the arrival of socialism. In 1937-1938. mass executions of Mongols and Chinese were carried out. A couple of years later, the same fate befell the Poles and residents of the B altic countries, under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, who found themselves in the sphere of influence of the USSR.
The war made it possible to make mass repressions invisible, but the purges did not stop. Party functionaries who appeared before the court after Stalin's death personally reported on tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers shot by the NKVD.
Rehab
The criticism of Stalin's personality cult undertaken at the XX Congress of the CPSU by Khrushchev made it possible to rehabilitate the repressed. However, fearing that such measures could lead to the collapse of Soviet power, Khrushchev showed caution: for the most part, only political figures were rehabilitated. Only M. S. Gorbachev, at the end of his reign, signed a decree of August 13, 1990, according to which all repressions of the period of collectivization and the Great Terror were recognized as illegal and contrary to fundamental human rights.
