Vladimir Tolts:
In today's program, we will talk about the roots, forms and meaning of a social phenomenon that indestructibly exists in Russian (and not only Russian) history of the century. I want to introduce you to the work of a London-based researcher on denunciations and informers in Russia.
"... About these customs, about the constant denunciations of both princes and commoners against each other, Russian chroniclers narrate in detail. And not only they - foreigners who have visited Russia, almost everyone noted this property of its inhabitants - a tendency to denunciations. "
"... The people need strong power in order to survive, and it is precisely this - the strengthening of strong power - objectively that denunciation serves."
You may not agree with all the conclusions of the London researcher. But before arguing, it is worth listening to his reasoning and arguments.
Alexander Gorbovsky - "Informations and informers in Russia".
“Already at the very beginning of Russian history, a feature appeared that turned out to be regrettably fateful both for this people and for the whole country. Kievan Rus, and then and later, under the Tatars, it became a custom to denounce each other. In a sense, this can be understood - after all, it is always pleasant to destroy another. The collector of Moscow, Ivan Kalita, understood this joy more than others and reported on the princes-neighbors of Moscow. The chronicler wrote how, after another denunciation, having killed another relative and prince, Kalita left the Horde with a great award. His sons returned to Moscow with great joy and merriment. On denunciations and on the blood of the executed, Moscow rose and was exalted. Betrayal and denunciation, laid in the very foundation of construction, predetermined in many respects the mores of the society that took shape in this place. Doesn't the infected embryo grow along with the defect inherent in it from the very beginning?
"The Russian chroniclers narrate in detail about these customs, about the constant denunciations of both princes and commoners against each other. And not only they - foreigners who have visited Russia, almost everyone noted this property of its inhabitants - a tendency to in Moscow already in the time of Ivan the Terrible wrote:
“It is precisely the Muscovites who are innate with some kind of malevolence, by virtue of which it has become a custom for them to mutually accuse and slander each other before the tyrant and to burn with hatred for one another, so that they kill themselves with mutual slander.”
And in subsequent kingdoms and times, the customs of the people remained the same. Here is the testimony of the chronicler about the times of Godunov:
"Priests, blacks, sextons, prosvirni denounced each other, wives denounced their husbands, children denounced their fathers. Husbands hid from their wives from such horror. And in these accursed denunciations, a lot of innocent blood was shed, many died from torture, others were executed. tongues, impaled, burned on a slow fire.
And here is the testimony of the English court physician about the "quietest sovereign" Alexei Mikhailovich:
"The king had informants literally on every corner. Whatever happened at some meeting, at a feast, at a funeral or at a wedding, all this became known to him."
And most pleasant, sweetest of all was the common man to destroy his master, the one who stood above him, to see his benefactor in the blood, on the chopping block, under the hand of the executioner. social envy was in Russia long before Marx and Lenin, who designated it with the words "class hatred" and elevated to virtue. Servants and black people especially tried to inform on their masters. And the tsars of Moscow short-sightedly, as much as they could, themselves encouraged this. Under Peter the Great, a procedure was established in which a serf who denounced his master received his freedom immediately. From reign to reign, the subjects asserted a conditioned reflex - you inform the authorities about someone and then everything that he has acquired will become yours. So there is nothing, perhaps, to blame the Bolsheviks for everything, when after so many generations the peasants habitually and efficiently divided the property of the richer dispossessed fellow villagers, whom they themselves denounced. Earlier, much earlier, those poisonous seeds were planted in their souls, which bore fruit a couple of centuries later under the Bolsheviks. But the fact that the people's soil was quite consistent with such sowing - this goes without saying. And although Lenin said that the Decembrist conspirators were terribly far from the people, they showed themselves to be connoisseurs of the people's soul. The first thing they were going to do, having seized power, was to establish the Ministry of State Piety, the prototype of the Cheka, GPU, NKVD or KGB. Like all these bodies, the deanery had to protect the form of government and supreme power by all means. Moreover, like the Cheka, the NKVD or the KGB, this institution was supposed to plant its informers everywhere, who would report on every step and word of the citizens. This is one to one how the Bolsheviks subsequently acted to retain power through denunciations.
Russia experienced both the best and the worst times, but only one area of social life flourished in it invariably - the area of denunciations. Moreover, on the eve of the revolution for some reason more than ever. Coachmen, janitors, girls from the half world, even people from society, all willingly cooperated with the police and denounced. On the eve of the revolution, there were about forty thousand professional police informers in Russia alone.. This is a huge number for those times. Paradoxically, there were significantly more informers than all the revolutionaries, those whom these forty thousand were supposed to follow. Even Lenin's inner circle was full of informants. In the 12th year in Prague in the atmosphere the greatest conspiracy Lenin held a party congress. So, among the 28 participants selected, over faithful and over tested, four were scammers. The director of the police department, already in exile, said that every step, every word of Lenin was known to him to the smallest detail. The secret instruction of the police department recommended recruiting informers from those who are at the head of the party. Apparently, that's how it was. After the revolution, one of the Bolshevik informers wrote a letter of repentance to Gorky. There were lines like this:
"After all, there are many of us - all the best party workers" .
Already in exile, employees of the Security Department recalled their informant agents - Lunacharsky and Kamenev. Silent rumors circulated among the old Bolsheviks that Stalin, for some time, was also allegedly an informer. The incriminating documents were allegedly handed over to Khrushchev at the time. But he, they say, forbade making them public.
"It's impossible. It turns out that our country was led by an agent of the tsarist secret police for 30 years."
Perhaps it is not so accidental that the first thing that the indignant people did in February 1917 was that for some reason they rushed to destroy the lists of police informers. The lists of informers were finally confiscated and destroyed by the Bolsheviks later, when they came to power. Even then, before the revolution, in the very mass character, in the readiness to convey almost everyone, already then in the bowels of the people, snoring, pouring strength, that bloody embryo that appeared to the world shortly after the Bolshevik coup. The Bolsheviks had to be only his godfathers. The native father must be sought not there, but in the very depths of the customs and mores of the people.
As soon as the dawn of freedom dawned over Russia in February 1917, what did the free people begin to do? This people began to do what they loved and used to do always - joyfully informing each other.
One of the leaders of the Labor Party left an instructive sketch of the mores of the free Russian people. Summer 1917:
"We were pestered by scammers. You used to stand in the crowd, and someone drags you aside and whispers that such and such a priest said a counter-revolutionary sermon. Another arbitrarily hands over a list of apartments in which there are speculative stocks. that ... Sometimes, returning home at night, I typed in my pockets a whole bundle of such denunciations.
Notice that no one forced anyone to do this, this free people. But this was Russia, as it was, as it was inherited by the Bolsheviks, before Lenin, and before Stalin, and before Yezhov. The people themselves had long been and quite predisposed to what awaited them under the new government.
Indeed, after the Bolshevik coup, as was the case after the February revolution, many immediately rushed to denounce. Now to Smolny. From the memoirs of Trotsky:
"Informants came from all sides, workers, soldiers, officers, janitors, socialist junkers, servants, wives of petty officials came. Some gave serious and valuable instructions."
Of course, the Bolsheviks could not ignore, miss this popular impulse. Here is a telegram signed by one of the then leaders of the Cheka Menzhinsky: "To take measures of planting, informing at factories, factories, centers of provinces, state farms, cooperatives, forestries, punitive detachments, the countryside."
Another document of those years:
"The secret department of the Cheka proposes to develop its agent-information apparatus to the maximum."
Is it necessary to say that the call to inform met with full understanding among the masses? Moreover, when new government the denunciation was greatly facilitated - it did not require any evidence at all. This was written openly, in black and white. Here is what the Soviet Justice magazine wrote in 1925:
"Develop the ability to report and do not be afraid of a false report."
They denounced out of malice, out of envy, out of class hatred or because of the eternal hatred of each other, and often simply out of fear of not conveying. The embodiment of those years and their symbol was, of course, the child-hero, the child-traitor - Pavlik Morozov. Pionerskaya Pravda happily wrote:
"Pavlik does not spare anyone: his father got caught - Pavlik betrayed him, his grandfather got caught - Pavlik betrayed him. Pavlik was raised and educated by a pioneer organization."
The pioneer informer immediately had many imitators all over the country. And so that it was completely clear to the children who to follow, "Pionerskaya Pravda" from issue to issue began to publish denunciations of children against adults - parents and teachers. She spoke enthusiastically about the followers of the valiant young informant. On the denunciation of one of them, two adults were arrested. The wife was sentenced to 10 years in the camps, and the husband to death.
“For this signal, Mitya received a nominal watch, a pioneer costume and a one-year subscription to the local newspaper Lenin's Grandchildren.
Readers, children and adults, flooded the editorial office with letters admiring and congratulating the hero. For the most part, ordinary people sincerely revered informers as their heroes, and on occasion they themselves were not averse to informing.
How many informants there were under Stalin and how many after him remains a mystery to this day. Referring to an analogy, in the socialist countries, 1% of the population consisted of full-time informers. Consequently, in the USSR, the KGB scammers should have at least consisted of about two million. It's minimum. Ignatiev, who was at one time the minister of the MGB, called a different figure - about ten million informers, both paid and those who "knocked at the call of the heart." Some call an even higher figure - one scammer for five adults. However, we will probably never know the truth, and why? In what feelings for the people and its history is this truth capable of confirming us? So that they do not write now retroactively, it seems to me that in those years ordinary people had no fear of informers.
I say because I myself lived in those years and remember them well.
Sergei Mikhalkov was once asked about that time: "Were you afraid?" “No,” he answered, “I was not afraid.”
- "How not afraid?"
- "You know, they imprisoned that one, imprisoned this one, you think: if they imprison, then for the cause, then guilty. But I'm not guilty."
And indeed, everyone knew - who was being arrested? - enemies of the people, spies or pests. And everyone knew that he himself was not a pest, not an enemy of the people and not a spy, so why be afraid? This is how they lived.
There is an area in which Lenin's contribution is still underestimated. One of his comrades-in-arms at the party congress spoke about this as follows:
"Lenin taught us that every member of the party should be an agent of the Cheka, that is, watch and inform, go to inform."
Now it has already become known that the very system of agents-informers of the Cheka was also deployed on the direct orders of his own - Lenin. As you know, this creation outlived not only its creator, but also all those who succeeded him in this post. The routine and daily routine of denunciations in Soviet times led to the fact that few people saw something shameful in this occupation. If they guessed about someone that he was an informer, then because of this they did not stop letting the person into the house, they did not even stop communicating with him - they were afraid to annoy him so that he would not take revenge. The only thing is that they tried to be more careful on the tongue and warned others about it. And it's all. Such were the manners of the epoch, such were we.
Why are we, if Pushkin himself went through the same temptation. When he was exiled to Mikhailovskoye, his coachman Peter recalled:
“Guardians were assigned to him from the landowners Rokotov and Peshchurov..
But after all, he didn’t throw any of the “informers” out of the window, although he understood who they were and why they constantly go to him. He received the scammer, invited him into the house, kept up a conversation with him, and sat him at the table. So what to say about us?
After Kalinin, Voroshilov headed the Supreme Soviet. Once he ordered that materials be prepared for him on the staff of his apparatus through the MGB. why he needed it - it's hard to say. Something else is interesting - the referent, having looked through several hundred dossiers, found that literally everyone had compromising evidence. In other words, denunciations of the employees themselves against each other. Only the newest workers, who had just arrived in Moscow from the village, turned out to be without a "tail" - watchmen, cleaners and couriers. They simply did not have time to "squeal" either on them, or on each other. And on the rest, I repeat, there were denunciations on everyone.
The revelations of the 20th Congress created real panic among the informants. And what if the authorities, in order to wash themselves off the past, begin to extradite them? By the way, at the top such an option in case of popular anger was really discussed. But the authorities clearly overestimated the people. Anger? Why would? No anger, of course, followed, despite the temporary shock from the revelations of the congress, there were no interruptions in denunciations. The KGB immediately began to recruit new cadres of informers to work in the new conditions. Moreover, now for each recruited KGB officer was paid 100 rubles. Money in those days is not so small. Recruited, and ran to the checkout.
This is what such a report sounds like. (From the archive of materials of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB):
"Recruited as an agent of the KGB of the USSR "Alik", head of the department of the Institute scientific information on social sciences Academy of Sciences of the USSR "(1984th year).
“It was at that time,” writes Alexander Gorbovsky, “that I myself worked there, at that institute, and more or less knew everyone. So now I’m trying to guess who he is, this is“ Alik ”. from that?
From the same KGB archive:
"Two messages have been received from the Sinyagin agent characterizing the situation in the Shostakovich family."
And here is another denunciation, now against Solzhenitsyn:
"According to the data received by the State Security Committee, on December 29, Solzhenitsyn in Moscow in the Church of the Resurrection on Uspensky Vrazhka performed the rite of baptism of his second son Ignat. At the baptism, in addition to the mother of the child, Svetlanova, were present ..."
Such denunciations were constantly written against almost all writers and cultural figures.
"From the agent" Clarin "received information about the ideologically immature moments in the work of Mikhail Zhvanetsky.
From agent "Svetlov" - denunciation of Andrei Mironov.
From agent "Sasha ..." Etc.
The denunciations of staff informants, as before, were supplemented with excess by denunciations of "conscious citizens" submitted on their own initiative. Here is a denunciation signed by the communists of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences:
"Communists are signaling the arbitrariness and lawlessness that the director planted at the institute - Academician Primakov E.M., real name Kirshenblat."
Yes, yes, a denunciation of the same Primakov whom everyone knows. In the administrative language of those years, such denunciations were called "signal". For example, they said: a friend received a signal. As soon as it became known that someone was going to be promoted or, God forbid, a trip abroad, denunciations of his colleagues immediately appeared on him.
Bobkov, former First Deputy Chairman of the KGB, recalls:
"If the Bolshoi Theater was going on tour - an anonymous wave."
Once, one of the leaders of the Soviet Sociological Association was invited to the high office of General Secretary Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko. The visitor began to faithfully convince him how useful he and his fellow scientists could be for the leadership of the CPSU. And I heard in response that no sociological research and polls of the Central Committee are needed. And here's why: Chernenko said:
"The Party has an army of volunteer informers. We have a complete picture of everyone, of everyone."
In the KGB, reviews were regularly drawn up on denunciations, and they were delivered by courier mail to all members of the Politburo. This order was instituted under Stalin. So he remained with all who succeeded him, including the last General Secretary Gorbachev. These reviews were based on conversations overheard by scammers and letters read on the sly. In fact, it was the same if these top hierarchs of the CPSU themselves overheard or read other people's letters. For a person who has an idea of \u200b\u200bhonor, the occupation is more than shameful.
However, everything was in the traditions of this country. What are some members of the Politburo, who are they, if at one time the Empress Empress Catherine the Great herself did not disdain to read the correspondence of her subjects and sentenced at the same time:
"And I'm curious that Novikov writes to Radishchev or vice versa."
Here is an extract from another such report, which conveys how the people reacted to the next speech of the Secretary General:
"The milling worker of the Elektrosila plant, in the circle of his acquaintances, expressed the opinion that ... The artist Nikolaev said ..."
"Student of Gorky University Zeitlin, in the presence of a group of students, said ..."
"The housewife Frolova, the city of Gorky, in a conversation with the residents of the house said ..." "The duty officer on the platform of the Paveletsky railway station Mikhailova said ..." and so on.
But this was usually said in a narrow circle, among their own, whom they knew for more than one year, whom they trusted. Scammers were everywhere, in every company, in every feast. Even talking face to face, within four walls with someone you believed about - you wouldn’t inform, it was impossible to be sure. They talked about hidden microphones, they believed that if there is a telephone in the room, this is also an eavesdropping device. Microphones were discreetly installed in the apartment while you were visiting or at work. Usually, for this, it was necessary to specially drill a wall, then collect concrete dust, and it was troublesome. Therefore, as I was told, for some time now in the concrete structures from which the walls and ceiling are assembled, they began to leave specially unfilled places. Eavesdropping, like the production of concrete structures, was reliably put on stream. Is it canceled now? Hardly. And why? Unless, if the new technology can do without it.
Any professional activity has its own jargon - computer scientists, musicians, doctors. Delivering is no exception. For example, an informer or scammer is supposed to be denoted by the mysterious word "source", and for the one who is reported, there is a special phrase "person involved in the undercover message". Sounds very nice. And with all that, the habit did its job. The fact that someone knocks on you was balanced by the fact that you yourself, if you want, can inform on anyone, cut off his oxygen.
Yuri Nagibin wrote about this time as follows:
“But there are happy people around. They always have plenty of vodka, bread and potatoes are enough. They go to choose, they can send a complaint to the newspaper and denunciation where it should be. There are more than enough rights. They are happy.”.
Everything was exactly like that. Perestroika brought changes everywhere except in this area. The only difference was that the informers, secret agents and informers" were ordered by the KGB to be called in a new way, in the spirit of the times, "Unspoken Helpers"- so it was supposed to call them now.
But history has taken yet another turn. Communist rule is over. Yeltsin and the Democrats in the Kremlin. Now, it would seem, the end of denunciations. Hooray! Do not hurry. Naturally, the new government inherited the information system and was not going to refuse denunciations. It's just that what was done secretly under the communists is being done openly in this country today - democracy, after all. For example, under the communists, telephones were tapped, which everyone guessed so, but it was customary to talk about it in a whisper. Today we are allowed to talk about it aloud. Not much better than this - telephone conversations are eavesdropped as then, or rather, much more. But now no one, including officials, hides this. The order of the Minister of Communications dated January 31, 1996 is devoted to the order of tapping phones. It says in black and white that listening systems are installed from now on:
"At telephone exchanges of all telephone networks, controlled subscribers must be assigned one of the following control categories."
I - writes Alexander Gorbovsky - do not really know what category of control my Moscow telephone is in today. However, I would not really like to know, because neither respect nor love for the authorities that stand behind all this will add to me, I think, too. Like eavesdropping, informers are also no longer a secret. If anyone hoped at first that a new human face would come to power, then Bakatin, who after Yeltsin's victory became head of the KGB, immediately put an end to these hopes. Here are his direct words:
"Transfer of archives to agents only through my corpse."
And that said it all. These are not Germans who immediately published lists of their informers, agents of their KGB. Otherwise, they believed, the past cannot be washed off and left. In Russia, no one was going to wash off or leave the past. At the same time, Sergei Stepashin proclaimed publicly and publicly:
"The agency was, is and will be" .
Moreover, he also notified everyone that his department is actively introducing scammers and informers into new parties and political movements. This is in the new, democratic, non-communist Russia. So where next?
And as in the old days, not a single person in the entire vast country raised his voice, was indignant. Why be indignant about where we live? This people and this country has always been like this. So, everything is in the spirit of tradition. The zealots of the "national spirit" have every reason to rejoice.
The new time sets new tasks for scammers: now the authorities are trying to use them to collect taxes. He snitched on someone who did not pay extra tax and receives 10% of the amount - it’s good for informers and it’s convenient for the authorities. And the Moscow government approved a whole program to protect volunteers. If he "lit up", let's say, the democratic government takes care of relocating him to another city, changing his name and documents, even paying for plastic surgery to change his appearance. How much could all this cost? How many medicines could be bought with this money, cure the sick, feed the hungry, how many lives could be saved. And who cares, not the authorities. Maybe the people? Wherever there, the people are silent as always. Over time, one must think, the scale of denunciation that occurs in Russia today will become known. It will become known how politicians and oligarchs eavesdrop on each other, how the authorities collect information about the people with the help of all the same faithful "informers". Usually something opens up when a new owner comes to the Kremlin. When the press, with the permission of the new authorities, begins to "water" his predecessor. So it's like a little bit of a wait. Whether everything happens this time or not, the crow will not peck out the eye of the crow. For us, there is no difference. What new things can we learn? And most importantly - what would give us a reason to be proud of our history in its modern presentation?
Sometimes it happens to hear that denunciation in this country is the product of circumstances, external, temporary and incidental. Some believe that the Byzantines taught us bad things, others say the Tatars.
"It was they who incited the simple-minded and kind Russian princes to constantly report on each other to the Horde."
Still others blamed the autocracy for everything. But most of all it is customary to say that the Communists are to blame for everything.
"Lenin and Stalin morally corrupted the people, which in itself are simple-hearted and kind." - Of course, but to hang all the dogs on the Communists is where it's convenient.
But for how many years they have not been in power, just as there is no tsar, no Tatars, denunciations and informers, as they were, remain. "seconded", "volunteer assistants" how are they still there? And the authorities are interested in whistleblowers as always. As one of the top FSB officials told reporters:
"These people deserve all respect."
In a word, with all historical turns, with any change of authorities, the same irreplaceable character always remains on the stage - the figure of an informer-informer. You might think that political and everyday life in Russia is generally unthinkable without him.
The question involuntarily arises - what gives rise in the people to this readiness of each to convey? I would not like to think that this habit of denunciation was generated simply by total meanness. It is even more difficult to believe that the reason for this would be the propensity of citizens to exterminate their own kind. Although both are not so incredible. But even with all my ardent love for the people, it always seemed to me that this was still not enough, there had to be something else. And it seems to me that this is what is needed in Russia above all else in order to protect citizens from themselves. It is worth the power to weaken a little, and its drive belts to sag a little, as in dark mass, denoted by the mysterious word "people", with wild force flashes what Pushkin designated "Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless". The zoological instincts of murder and destruction rise - this is Gorky. That's why in the eyes of the average person strong power has always been preferable to the arbitrariness of the anarchy of the troubled and transitional years. Even the violence emanating from the authorities seems easier to bear than the arbitrariness and atrocities of the people themselves, left to their own devices.
Is it because after the death of Ivan the Terrible and in troubled times with such nostalgia did the people commemorate their ferocious tsar-father? Isn't it true that even after the advent of democracy, having barely sensed freedom, the common people immediately yearned for a "strong hand" and for "past times" ("Then there was order ..."). And now in Russia, for all its democracy, many regretfully recall the disenfranchised Brezhnev times(“Back then, at least they didn’t kill people on the street, but there was at least some kind of justice for bribe-takers and embezzlers”).
For the average person, a strong, albeit cruel, power is safer than any anarchy and arbitrariness.. And he is probably right about this - the people need strong power in order to survive. Namely this - strengthening strong power, objectively and serves as a denunciation. That is why neither Stalin nor other rulers needed to plant denunciations, they were generated by the people's instinct of statehood, the desire for strong power. And one more function of denunciation - until recently in Russia there was neither a permanent Parliament nor local self-government. A thievish governor or, say, the first secretary could neither be replaced nor reined in. This could only be achieved through denunciation. The denunciation was the traditional and the only tool for influencing political reality. In other words, in Russian conditions, denunciation was a form of participation in political life. We should not forget that in Russia denunciations were often almost the only channel that allowed the rulers to see the unvarnished reality as it really was. There are many examples when the decisions of the authorities were corrected under the influence of denunciations that came to the very tops of power. In other words, whether anyone likes it or not, it turns out that that in the conditions of Russia, denunciation makes the government more effective. Is it possible to discount and forget how many atrocities, embezzlement and crimes were also suppressed solely thanks to denunciations. Those who work in law enforcement agencies know it better than others. In Great Britain, for example, thanks to anonymous phone calls (in Russia this would be called a denunciation), only recently several dozen murders have been solved and 2,600 criminals have been arrested. Thus, the denunciation makes the punishment inevitable, contributes to the strengthening of law and order in society.
From all this one could conclude that as soon as the scammer contributes to the rule of law, the stability of power, protects the peace of the people's life, then he is a true benefactor of the people. And the harm it does to individuals is more than compensated for by the benefit it brings to society as a whole. Most listeners, of course, will not agree with this. For too long we have been taught to judge everything in black and white.
But among those who are listening to us now with imperturbable faces, there are others. These are the people this program was about - the scammers themselves, the scammers at rest, and those who denounce now. Like all people who are not free, they make me want to say something to comfort them. Though I don't think they need it at all.
But who am I to judge or, moreover, to justify them?
Recently on bookshelves Paris, Berlin and Vienna, a curious study by the German professor Carol Sauerland called "Thirty pieces of silver" has appeared, which deals with the problem of denunciation.It is known that denunciation existed in all countries and at all times.Usually it was considered something shameful. Only in the twentieth century, having reached hitherto unprecedented proportions, it began to be considered in some countries "a matter of valor and heroism."
In Dante's Divine Comedy, informers are placed in the very last, ninth circle of hell. It is there that the scammers frozen in the ice, "who deceived those who trusted", traitors of relatives and friends, homeland and like-minded people, traitors of "companions and benefactors" suffer for their deeds.
An interesting fact is cited in the book, when the Elector of Cologne complained in 1686 that he could not find anyone willing to take fiscal positions, because people "are afraid of contempt and reproach of their neighbors."
However, there were exceptions. Karol Sauerland talks in his book, for example, about the decree of the Duke of Württemberg. This edict, passed in the middle of the sixteenth century, obliged subjects to report all violations of laws and regulations. And in Silesia in 1705 there was a procedure according to which the scammer received at least a third of the amount appointed by the court as a fine to the one he denounced. This order, by the way, was adopted by Peter the Great. However, about denunciation in Russia a little later. Since the author is German, he begins his work from Germany.
DENUSIONS UNDER HITLER
A significant part of the book "Thirty Pieces of Silver" is devoted to the period of the National Socialist dictatorship. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they were themselves overwhelmed by the wave of denunciations that literally overwhelmed them. Hitler even complained to his Minister of Justice that informants were "disorganizing" the work of the new government. And a year later, the Minister of the Interior of the "Third Reich" issued a circular that ordered "to put an end to denunciation, since this phenomenon is unworthy of the German people and the National Socialist state."
According to Karol Sauerland, when, at the beginning of the war, Himmler and Heydrich proposed a law obliging the citizens of the Reich to report "where appropriate" all suspicious phenomena, all the institutions involved were against it. Everything - from the State Planning Commission to the Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda.
The reasons for such a negative attitude of the Nazi elite to the "signals of the workers" were purely ideological. The unity of the German people and the solidity, as it was then expressed, of the "state of the whole people" were cornerstones National Socialist ideology: "One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer!" Secret informers gave rise to general distrust and mutual suspicion, and this threatened the said unity. Hence the dislike for snitches.
However, the Nazis' dislike for squealing was rather theoretical. Judging by the figures published in the book, more than two-thirds of all the investigations that the Gestapo conducted in cases of treason, incitement and anti-people activities began precisely with denunciations. Most often, these were reports of "slanderous statements" made in a pub.
But not only drinking companions and waiters knocked at the Gestapo. "Signals" came from colleagues, neighbors, relatives. It is curious that the researchers did not find a single case during the entire period of the Nazi dictatorship when a husband would inform on his wife. But the wives denounced their husbands. And one more interesting feature: the residents were very reluctant to “surrender” rural areas Germany parish priests.
Whom the inhabitants of the “Third Reich” willingly informed on was the “subhumans”: Jews, Poles, homosexuals. But here, too, the activity of informers decreased markedly after Stalingrad, and even more so after the landing of the Western allies in Normandy.
Germany's defeat became a reality, and would-be informers feared they would be held accountable after the war. They really were afraid. Only one single case is known when a scammer was brought to trial and convicted. Alas! In the twentieth century, whistleblowers, with very few exceptions, have always gone unpunished. Moreover, in the Soviet Union, starting with Lenin, the denunciation was welcomed and encouraged. Carol Sauerland also talks about this in great detail in the book "Thirty pieces of silver".
A new society was being built. It was built not on the basis of "absolute", universal moral values, but on the basis of an ideological doctrine. Loyalty to this doctrine, the party and its leader was to become more important than love for mother and father. This is how mass cynicism was brought up. So meanness was justified by lofty ideas.
DENUSIONS IN RUSSIA
The chapter of Sauerland's book, which deals with Soviet times, is called "In the KGB empire." The name is not accidental, although power in the USSR was, of course, not in the hands of the state security agencies. The country was ruled by the party nomenklatura, and the KGB was the instrument of its power. But after all, the guardsmen were “only” executors of the will of Ivan the Terrible, their spiritual inspirer, and those times still went down in history as the guardsmen.
It was the guardsmen who determined the nature of the era, became its main characters, its symbol. So the main actors of the Soviet era can be called security officers. The party was, if anyone remembers this slogan, an “inspiring” and “determining” force, the KGB was a real force. Real also because the fear inspired by the "organs" was a mass mental reality.
But, in fairness, it should be said that the informers were not invented by the "organs". In chronicles telling about the history of Russia, in the memoirs of contemporaries and notes foreign travelers reference is made, frighteningly often, to the "deplorable tendency" of the people to denunciation. During the time of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, the Russian princes, it seemed, only did what they rode to the Horde in order to snitch on each other to the authorities. Incidentally, the legendary "collector of Russian lands" Ivan Kalita distinguished himself here the most. But the others were no better.
Chroniclers tell, for example, about Prince Yuri, the grandson of Alexander Nevsky and the son of Daniel of Moscow (the Danilov Monastery is named after him). Unable to defeat his rival for the great reign of Mikhail of Tverskoy on the battlefield, Prince Yuri went to the Horde and there said that Mikhail, firstly, poisoned his wife Agafya (she was the sister of the owner of the Horde, Khan Uzbek), and, secondly, wants to run abroad.
Interestingly, even at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the events mentioned above took place, escaping abroad was considered a crime. Moreover, Yuri Danilovich “drip” to Khan Uzbek that Mikhail of Tverskoy was going to run away not empty-handed, but with his, khan’s, money: “He collected many tributes from the cities and wants to flee to the Germans, but he doesn’t want to go to you (khan) and does not obey your authority."
After the denunciation of Mikhail Tverskoy, he was "invited" to the Horde and put to a painful death. Well, Yuri Danilovich returned from Derbent (where the headquarters of the Golden Horde was then located) to Moscow with a khan's label for a great reign. By the way, he ruled for seven years, after which he was killed by the son of Prince Tverskoy Dmitry Mikhailovich, who avenged his father's death.
Over time, methods improved, and denunciation became a tool not only political power. Already in the time of Peter the Great, for example, the tax police resorted to the help of informers. The fact is that under Peter the Great, many people did not let the earned capital into circulation, because, as the historian Klyuchevsky writes, arbitrariness and bribery reigned “above”, and society (including those of its respected representatives who earned this capital) was absolutely useless.
Instead of investing in production (in modern terms), people either hid what they earned from their bosses and tax collectors (the tax police of those years), or those who were richer sent money abroad to London, Venice and Amsterdam banks. Peter issued a decree: “If someone informs where a neighbor hides money, a third of that money is sent to that informer, and the rest goes to the sovereign.” “The denunciation,” writes Klyuchevsky, “became the main instrument of state control, and the treasury greatly honored him.”
In the end, Peter created a special institute of fiscals. “The denunciation has become a state institution, free from any risk,” concludes the historian. And he adds bitterly: “This introduced a morally poor-quality motive into management and society.”
But those who ran the society at that time did not seem to care too much. Just like society itself. In the memoirs of Count Ernst Munnich, who began his career in the thirties and forties of the 18th century, under Empress Anna Ioannovna, we read: “In no single court, perhaps, there were more spies and slanderers, as at that time in the Russian one. About everything that was said in noble conversations and houses, (the favorite of the Empress Biron) received the most detailed news. And since this craft opened the way both to mercy and to rich rewards, many noble and high-ranking persons were not ashamed to serve as an instrument for that.
What can we say about the common people! Even under Peter the Great, a serf who denounced a master guilty of state crimes was entitled to freedom. Naturally, later, when the people went into revolution, the tsarist "guard" recruited dozens of informers, moreover, in all revolutionary parties without exception. The most famous of the Okhrana informants was, of course, Azef. Karol Sauerland mentions in his book about this legendary creator of the fighting organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Azef led the preparations, for example, for the assassinations of the Minister of the Interior Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, uncle of Tsar Nicholas II. With the direct participation or assistance of Azef, twenty-five major terrorist acts were carried out. It seems incredible that, at the same time as his underground activities, Azef worked for the tsarist “guard”. Moreover, he himself offered her his services, starting his career as an informer, by the way, in Germany. He reported on the mood of Russian students who studied at the University of the German city of Karlsruhe. Azef died in Germany: after being exposed, he was hiding from the revenge of his party comrades in Berlin. He is also buried here - in the cemetery in Wilmersdorf.
But we are talking about a terrorist-SR. And what about the Bolsheviks? Good too. According to historians, on the eve of the First World War, the activities of the RSDLP, as well as the Social Democratic organizations of the Latvian Territory and the Kingdom of Poland, were “covered” by more than two thousand secret employees of the “guards” and gendarme departments.
So, for example, about the meetings of the first Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Conference of the RSDLP in 1912, which were held under the strictest secrecy, three informants presented detailed reports to the police at once.
One of them, Roman Malinovsky, himself later became a member of the Central Committee and a deputy of the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma. In his youth, Malinovsky was a simple criminal. Then he became a popular leader of one of the largest Russian trade unions - the metalworkers' trade union - and one of the few workers in the leadership of the RSDLP and the main Bolshevik speaker in the Duma. The Okhrana officers at secret meetings even had to ask him to moderate the revolutionary fervor of his speeches.
Roman Malinovsky was Lenin's favorite and his "nominee". But even when the suspicions about Malinovsky among many of Ilyich's party comrades-in-arms grew into confidence, Lenin continued to stubbornly defend his pet.
By the way, the main role in exposing Malinovsky was played by ... the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia, General Dzhunkovsky. A man of "exceptional decency", as contemporaries said about him, he was against political provocateurs and could not allow a secret police informer to sit in the country's parliament, and besides, he had previously been convicted of a criminal offense. Dzhunkovsky forced Malinovsky to give up his deputy mandate, threatening otherwise to publicly announce his cooperation with the Okhrana.
And in tsarist times, such idealists were a rarity in the secret police, but in Soviet times they were not in sight. The Bolshevik Party and its punitive organs welcomed the scammers with open arms, whose zeal was simply amazing. Speaking about the first weeks after coming to power, Trotsky writes in his memoirs: “Informants came from all sides. Workers, soldiers, officers, janitors, socialist junkers, servants, wives of petty officials came. Some gave serious and valuable instructions."
Whistleblowing was no longer just encouraged - it was declared the greatest civic virtue. About Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father, poems and songs were composed, monuments were erected to him (for example, on the Lenin Hills in Moscow, near the Palace of Pioneers), schools and ships were given his name, the young shift was called on to study by his example ...
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya addressed the children of the Land of Soviets in the early thirties: “Look, guys, around you. You will see how many more old ... remnants. It will be good if you discuss and write them down.
By the way, the first and most famous song about Pavlik Morozov, which was performed countless times in Stalin's time, was composed by Sergei Mikhalkov, the author of the old Soviet and new Russian anthem. The writer Yuri Druzhnikov, who wrote an excellent book about Pavlik Morozov, recalls this song, which he happened to sing in the choir as a child, remarks: “Given that the content of the feat is known, I will cite only rhymes for economy.” Let's follow his example:
“Gray - to the side - by example - a pioneer.
No wonder - it's hot - in the barns - the fist.
Paul - taught - speaking - exposed.
Herbs - ringing - violence - relatives.
Summer - leaf - juvenile - communist "...
The Russian archives have preserved the book of Anatole France “The Last Pages. Dialogue Under the Rose" with notes by Stalin, who read this book very carefully. The phrase "write, scoundrels, denunciations" is underlined. And three more vertical lines are marked in the margins. And the scoundrels wrote denunciations: against neighbors and work colleagues, against casual acquaintances and relatives...
Everyone knows how often Stalin watched "Days of the Turbins" at the Art Theater. It is less known that his other favorite performance at the Moscow Art Theater was "Love Yarovaya". In this play, the wife betrays her husband. This play, by the way, until the eighties was part of the school curriculum.
“Well, okay,” someone will say. - You never know what happened in Stalin's times. In general, Stalin was a pathological type, paranoid, suffered from persecution mania ... And he himself seemed to have once served in the Okhrana. Then, however, other times came ... "
A lot of interesting things are also told about denunciations and informers in the post-Stalin era in the book “Thirty pieces of silver” by Carol Sauerland. In particular, about how many secret informants there were in these supposedly “other” times. In 1987, more than one hundred thousand secret informants worked for the state security of Poland, for example. The Ministry of State Security of the GDR ("Stasi") received from January 1985 to November 1989 (when the Berlin Wall had already fallen) denunciations of 260 thousand informers.
At the same time, it must be taken into account that the list of informants, according to the secret instructions of the Stasi, was constantly updated. Therefore, it is simply impossible to calculate how many informers there were during the existence of the GDR (or socialist Poland, or the Soviet Union). But Professor Sauerland gives the following impressive figures. In East Germany, there was one full-time Chekist for every two hundred citizens, and a freelance informer for every hundred.
How was it in the Soviet Union? Former Minister of the Ministry of State Security and Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Ignatiev once said about ten million informants. Today, some researchers believe that every sixth citizen of the USSR was an unofficial "assistant" of the KGB. And that's over thirty million. In his documentary research on the scammers “Slaves of the GB”, the well-known journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin tells, in particular, about the case of Leonid Vasilyev, an engineer from Kazan, who wrote an “anti-Soviet”, as they said then, poem in 1983.
Vasiliev left fifty copies of this poem in the corridors of various institutions, on stairwells, sent it to the editorial offices of newspapers ... One can imagine how many denunciations came to the KGB. Roughly fifty! Workers, students, associate professors, professors and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences, who got the poem into their hands, had the opportunity to simply throw away the sheet without telling anyone, but no! All, as one, reported "where to go." Vasiliev was found and imprisoned for two years.
“My last name, first name, patronymic was well known in the KGB,” Vladimir Vysotsky sang. And he was right. Secret supervision of Vysotsky was established back in the mid-sixties. Several permanent informants were constantly at his side. And after marrying the French actress Marina Vladi (it was the seventieth year), the KGB decided quite openly where Vysotsky was allowed to perform and in which films to act. When the Taganka Theater went on tour abroad, not all actors were taken on these trips. But an escort from the KGB (or even several) was a must.
And if we talk about denunciation, then it is impossible to pass by the writers' brethren. There was such a Lev Nikulin, laureate of the State Prize of the USSR, author of the novels "Moscow Dawns", "Russia faithful sons”,“ Dead Swell ”and books with the meaningful title“ Supreme Measure ”. In Stalin's times, Nikulin was one of those who had a hand in the destruction of Babel. And the epigram went around in literary circles:
“Cain, where is Abel?
Nikulin, where is Babel?
Then a thaw came, the cult of personality was exposed, those who were lucky enough to survive left the camps ... And what about the informers and, in particular, Lev Nikulin? They continued to quietly do what they had done before - both literature and denunciation. And now a new caustic epigram has already gone for a walk: “Nikulin Lev, homeworker informer, Recently released a three-volume book.” And nothing.
Vadim Kozhevnikov, a hero of socialist labor and a laureate of the State Prize, being the editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine, received at the end of 1960 the manuscript of Grossman's novel Life and Fate.I got acquainted with the novel and decided that this work is “defaming”. Well, call Grossman, tell him: “Old man, I can’t type - you know why. Take the manuscript and don't show it to anyone." Instead, Vadim Kozhevnikov handed over the manuscript to the "authorities". This, by the way, was credited to him in the future: Chekists helped Kozhevnikov write the novel "Shield and Sword", which became the favorite book of the current Russian president, which, in general, is not surprising.
And yet we are talking about the past. What now? After all, there was perestroika, glasnost, democracy came ... The KGB no longer exists, however, the FSB appeared. Criminal articles punishing for "anti-Soviet activities", too. All this is so. But in August 1995, the State Duma of Russia passed a law guaranteeing "persons cooperating with the authorities" the protection of the state and even exemption from criminal liability for merits in solving crimes.
Whistleblowing is intelligently called "confidential assistance on a contract basis." By the way, the law prohibits the recruitment of judges, prosecutors, lawyers, clergymen and ... people's deputies as informers. True, quite recently one of the State Duma deputies was publicly congratulated on being promoted to the rank of colonel of state security, but the majority of people's deputies, if they were indignant, was only because their colleague was so carelessly "revealed".
Whistleblowing continues to be a thing not at all shameful. Was there a Russian proverb "The first whip to informer"? It has long been replaced by another: "It is better to knock than to knock." The Chekist “hotline”, through which citizens can report, while maintaining their anonymity, does not stop today. Of course, the Germans, the Americans, and the Austrians like to report "by authority" about parking cars in the wrong place...And although such a denunciation does not lead to extralegal prosecution, there is something vile here. And even more so, it should be disgusting to encourage denunciation.
Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta once reported that all residents of the Pruzhany district of the Brest region should become paid informants. For reporting on people illegally crossing the border (as you understand, these are not spies, but “shuttle traders” trying to avoid draconian extortions), residents of local villages will be awarded not only certificates of honor, but also cash prizes in the amount of two minimum wages. Particularly distinguished will receive preferential vouchers to sanatoriums and rest homes.
So it's too early to talk about the "past" ...
In a contest of liars
archival documents say
"To the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU
Comrade Khrushchev N. S.
…
Attorney General R. Rudenko
Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov
Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin
Number of prisoners
Mortality of prisoners
Special Camps
Notes:
6. Ibid. S. 26.
9. Ibid. S. 169
24. Ibid. L.53.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid. D. 1155. L.2.
Repression
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Somehow I was told
It used to go crazy.
They could not stand it with the question:
"Why don't you come for me?"
We went to the NKVD. Scarier than fairy tales
Our century. Crowding shadows behind.
author unknownBefore proceeding to consider the issue on its merits, I would like to clarify the concept of the term "Great Terror". Historians of the Khrushchev and subsequent eras call Stalin's purges of 1937-1938 the Great Terror. The author shares the point of view that the Great Terror began in 1918 and continued, either fading or flaring up again until the end of 1939, when mass repressions were replaced by selective ones. Was it not the Great Terror when Tukhachev's Yakirs and others like them poured blood over entire provinces, bombed Tambov villages and used poison gases against their people? And when thousands of sailors who brought the Bolsheviks to power were killed, and Kronstadt was flooded with sailors' blood, was this not the Great Terror? In our opinion, the peak of the Great Terror fell on the years of collectivization and the “destruction of the kulak as a class”, which led to the Great Famine and the death of millions of people. Stalin's purges of 1937-1938 are considered by historians of the communist era to be the peak of the Great Terror only because at that time, along with ordinary citizens, many communists fell into the hands of the executioners, and terror fell on the heads of the old Bolsheviks and communist leaders, which became its apotheosis. The murders by Stalinist executioners of "fighters for the people's happiness", "more valuable" than the millions who died due to the collectivization of peasants, became a decisive factor for communist historians in defining the concept of "Great Terror". This is an interesting, not fully explored topic, but we will not dwell on it, but will solve our problems. We are interested in such a "weapon" of terror as denunciation - the forerunner of interrogations, torture and bullets from executioners' revolvers.
“Give signals to the top” and increase vigilance long before 1937 called the leader. Speaking on April 13, 1928, on the eve of collectivization and the “destruction of the kulak as a class” before the activists of the Moscow party organization, Stalin linked the failures in the economy with the presence in the country of internal enemies and, first of all, the “capitalist elements” of the countryside - the kulaks, as well as with the intrigues of agents of imperialism. To successfully move forward, the Secretary General proposed to widely develop criticism and self-criticism in society, especially in the working environment. He stated: “... if criticism contains at least 5-10 percent of the truth, then such criticism should be welcomed, listened to carefully and take into account a healthy grain. Otherwise ... all those hundreds and thousands of people devoted to the cause of the Soviets, who are not yet sufficiently experienced in their critical work, but through whose mouths the truth itself speaks, would have to close their mouths.
In July 1928, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Stalin announced the concept of “strengthening class struggle as the construction of socialism is completed” and again there were calls for vigilance and exposure of enemies. And the party responded to the calls of the leader. The ruling party and state elite began to intensively cultivate and plant the institution of denunciation. A powerful propaganda apparatus stupefied people with the poison of mutual suspicion and misanthropy. Articles in the newspapers, books, plays, films with saboteurs, saboteurs, spies and trespassers flooded in.
Stalin Prize The writer and playwright Konstantin Trenev was awarded the first degree for the play "Love Yarovaya". In the play, the husband and wife were on opposite sides of the barricades. Yarovaya, who was looking for secret documents at the White Guard headquarters, was seized. Her husband, officer Yarovoy, saved his wife, explaining her actions by the jealousy of his wife, who was looking everywhere for love correspondence. When the Reds came to the city, Lyubov betrays her husband, who tried to hide in someone else's clothes, to "comrades", and when he is arrested, "turns away from him with a groan." After the words of the commissar, who calls Yarovaya a faithful comrade, she replies: "Only from today I am a faithful comrade." The play was staged for a long time in many theaters of the country. A film of the same name was shot, the heroine of which was supposed to become a role model for the Soviet people.
In poetry, works similar to the poem “TVS” by Eduard Bagritsky (Dzyubin) were considered “relevant to the moment”:
... As if continuing a long-standing dispute,
He (Dzerzhinsky) says: “Under the window there is a courtyard
In prickly cats, in dead grass,
You can't figure out which age.
And the century is waiting on the pavement,
Focused like a sentry.
Go - and do not be afraid to stand next to him.
Your loneliness to match the age.
You look around - and there are enemies around;
Stretch out your hands - and there are no friends;
But if he says: “Lie,” lie.
But if he says: "Kill", kill.
I also felt a heavy burden
A hand resting on his shoulder.
trimmed soldier's mustache
Touched my cheek too.
And my table was spread out like a country,
In blood, in ink, a square of cloth,
Rust of feathers, shreds of paper -
All friend and foe guarded.
Enemies came - to the same chair
They sat down and collapsed into the void.
Mud sucked on their tender bones.
The ditches closed over them.
And the signature on the verdict curled
A jet from a shot through the head.
Oh mother revolution! not easy
Trihedral frankness of the bayonet.
In 1937, denunciations began to be used to eliminate the leader's recent associates. This is clearly seen from the "case" of the secretary of the Kyiv regional committee, Stalin's protege in Ukraine, Postyshev. When mass arrests were made in Kyiv in the autumn of 1936, clouds began to gather over Postyshev. On January 13, 1937, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a special resolution on the Kiev Regional Committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (b)U, in which the leadership of the republican organization was accused of clogging the apparatus with enemies. Postysheva was reprimanded, removed from office and appointed secretary of the Kuibyshev regional party committee.
Against Postyshev, Stalin used not only cases of alleged pests in the Ukrainian party leadership, but also the real vices of his recent henchman.
Being strong leader, candidate member of the Politburo Postyshev surrounded himself with a group of workers personally devoted to him, who formed in the republic his cult as one of the leaders of the Soviet people. Taking advantage of her husband's position, Postyshev's wife, Tatyana Postolovskaya, played an active role in political life and in solving personnel issues.
At the February-March (1937) plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Postyshev was accused of personal immodesty and abuse. Stalin devoted part of his speech at this plenum to T.P., an informer from Kyiv. Nikolaenko. The leader said: “Nikolaenko is an ordinary member of the party. She is an ordinary small man”. whole year she gave signals of trouble in the party organization in Kyiv, exposed the nepotism, the philistine-philistine approach to workers ... the dominance of Trotskyist wreckers. She was brushed aside like an annoying fly. Finally, in order to fight her off, they took her and expelled her from the Party ... Only the intervention of the Central Committee of the Party helped to unravel this tangled knot. What happened after the investigation of the case? It turned out that Nikolaenko was right, and the Kyiv organization was wrong ... But who is Nikolaenko? She, of course, is not a member of the Central Committee, she is not a people's commissar, she is not a secretary of the Kyiv regional organization, she is not even a secretary of any cell, she is just an ordinary member of the party. As you can see simple people sometimes turn out to be much closer to the truth than some high institutions” (128).
Member of the CPSU (b) P.T. Nikolaenko was one of the ardent adherents of the Stalinist doctrine of intensifying the class struggle, who saw enemies everywhere. Early becoming a member of the party, she worked as a women's organizer, studied, and in 1935 went to work in the museum town in Kyiv. Once she told the director of the town that one of the employees, in her opinion, was stealing exhibits, and with the proceeds he was buying things and products in Torgsin. Finding no support from the director, Nikolaenko began to denounce him as well. In order to get rid of Nikolaenko, she was sent to WAMLIN graduate school, but even here she began to identify and expose "enemies". The party organization of UAMLIN, with the participation of Postolovskaya, succeeded in expelling Nikolaenko from graduate school. She began to work at the courses of the political department of the South-Western Railway, continuing to declare that enemies settled in UAMLIN, and Postolovskaya "sits like a queen, surrounded by enemies." This became known to Postyshev's wife, who obtained from the bureau of the city committee of the party the expulsion of Nikolaenko from the party. The operation was carried out with a forgery. The exclusion decision, which took place in January 1936, was issued in September 1935. Nikolaenko filed an application addressed to Stalin, and the commission of the Party Control Committee decided to reinstate him in the CPSU (b). However, in Kyiv, they were in no hurry to issue her a ticket and reinstate her at work. A turn in the fate of Nikolaenko occurred after L.M. Kaganovich. He was told about Nikolaenko's revelations and her troubles, and he reported her to Stalin. As can be seen from the speech at the plenum, the leader showed genuine interest in Nikolaenko. In this case, he acted in the same way as he acted quite recently, urging the Soviet people to follow the example of Alexei Stakhanov. In his speech at the plenum, Stalin, in essence, called on the “little people” to act like Nikolaenko, making it clear that the authorities would support them, would not give them offense, and those who especially distinguished themselves could even become national heroes. With his speech, he also reinforced the legend of the democratic nature of the leader and his innocence in mass terror.
In 1937-1938, a propaganda campaign of unprecedented activity was launched around the NKVD and Yezhov personally. " bloody dwarf"Received all possible awards and titles. At the same time, he held several key party and state posts: Secretary of the Central Committee, Chairman of the CPC, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, candidate member of the Politburo. The cult of Yezhov became widespread as a man who mercilessly destroys "enemies of the people." Cities, enterprises, collective farms, steamships were named after him ... Yezhov's portraits were printed in newspapers, they were taken out to rallies. In the newspapers, his name was called with the epithets "Stalin's People's Commissar", "Iron People's Commissar" and "People's Favorite". Two versions of Boris Efimov's poster "Steel Yezhov's Gauntlets" were widely known, where the People's Commissar crushes a multi-headed snake in iron gloves, symbolizing the Trotskyites and Bukharinites.
“... Enemies of our life, enemies of millions, Trotskyist gangs of spies crawled towards us, Bukharinites are cunning snakes of swamps, embittered rabble of nationalists. The bastards hid, carrying fetters to us, but the animals fell into Yezhov's traps. A devoted friend of the great Stalin, Yezhov broke their treacherous circle ... ”The campaign around Yezhov and the NKVD was accompanied by calls for vigilance and exposing the enemies of the people.
However, Yezhov was not the "creator" of the Great Terror, but was only an obedient and active performer. As follows from the journal of records of visitors to Stalin's office, in 1937-1938 Yezhov visited the leader "on briefings" almost 290 times and spent a total of more than 850 hours with him. It was a kind of record. More often than Yezhov, only Molotov appeared in Stalin's office (129).
Ezhov's henchmen also made their own contribution to the development of denunciation. So one of the bloodiest executioners, who then worked as the head of the NKVD Directorate for the Leningrad Region, Leonid Zakovsky, who called himself an ally of Dzerzhinsky, directly called for false denunciations in the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper. At the beginning of the article, he gave advice on how to act " soviet man". He wrote: “You see, your neighbor is living beyond his means. What will the consumer do in this case? Gossip with his wife and forget about it. But this is not how a Soviet person should act: he should immediately inform the authorities about this. Recently, we received a statement from a worker that he was suspicious (although he does not have facts) of an accountant - the daughter of a priest. They checked: it turned out that she was an enemy of the people. Therefore, one should not be embarrassed by the lack of facts; our authorities will check any statement, find out, sort it out.” It must be said that such appeals were not in vain - there was no shortage of denunciations (130).
Party leaders of the highest level were also engaged in unwinding the mechanism of terror.
In 1937, at the 5th Congress of the CP (b) of Georgia, the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the CP (b) of Georgia, L.P. Beria, who became Yezhov's successor, declared: "Let the enemies know that anyone who tries to raise his hand against the will of our people, against the will of the Lenin-Stalin party, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed."
In his speech in 1937, the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Belarus V.F. Sharangovich, who was shot after the 3rd Moscow trial, declared: “We must completely destroy the remnants of the Japanese-German and Polish spies and saboteurs, the remnants of the Trotsky-Bukharin gang and the nationalist carrion, crush and grind them into powder, no matter how they disguise themselves, no matter what hole they hide in!
“We have every working people's commissar!” - Broadcast from the podium at a solemn meeting at the Bolshoi Theater dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, sensitive to the political situation and lived "from Ilyich to Ilyich without a heart attack and paralysis" member of the Politburo Anastas Mikoyan.
An active propaganda policy was a powerful catalyst for the growth of general suspicion and spy mania and plunged the country into an epidemic of whistleblowing and ideological hysteria. Meetings were held everywhere in labor collectives, institutes and schools, at the direction of the party organs, where they denounced the "Trotsky-Bukharin scum" and called for vigilance.
The denunciation began to be presented as an example of the fulfillment of a high civic duty, and denunciation took on a total character and became an organic feature of behavior in society. Both volunteer patriots and those recruited and instructed by the NKVD and therefore more qualified scammers-agents denounced. The genre of the denunciation covered a wide range: from “operational” information about the anecdote heard the day before “with a smell” to serious messages in which “love for the motherland” was visible and, along the way, bosses, colleagues, neighbors or friends were accused of Trotskyism or sabotage.
It was at this time that the slogan was thrown to the masses: “Every citizen is an employee of the NKVD”, and the saying “The first whip for an informer” among the people was replaced by a more relevant one: “It is better to knock than to knock”. During these years, on the basis of unfounded denunciations, many people were arrested and physically destroyed, who were accused of espionage, sabotage, and most often of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. Purely everyday conversations, jokes and anecdotes about the situation in the country were qualified as anti-Soviet activities and severely punished. The repressions carried out by the Stalinist regime during this period have no equal in human history. In the country of "victorious socialism" with the "Stalinist constitution", which proclaimed freedom of speech, press, assembly, street processions and demonstrations, as well as the inviolability of the person, home and privacy of correspondence, millions of people were subjected to repression. And after the publication of the Constitution of the USSR - “the most democratic fundamental law in the world”, the “Law of December 1, 1934” continued to operate in the country, establishing a 10-day investigation of political crimes, a ban on appealing sentences and filing petitions for pardon, hearing cases without the participation of the parties and the summoning of witnesses, etc.
Estimates of the scale of Stalinist repressions vary greatly due to different concepts and definitions of the word "repression". For the same reason, estimates of the number of deaths as a result of repressions also differ - from hundreds of thousands executed under Article 58 to seven million who died of starvation in the early 1930s.
According to the human rights organization "Memorial", in total, from 11-12 to 38-39 million people became victims of repression during the Stalinist period. Of these: 4.5 million were convicted and shot or imprisoned for political reasons, 6.5 million were deported, 4 million were disenfranchised, 7 million died of starvation, 18 million became victims of so-called labor decrees.
According to an analysis of the statistics of the regional departments of the KGB of the USSR, conducted in 1988, the organs of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB in 1918-1953 arrested 4,308,487 people, of which 835,194 people were shot (131) .
Russian explorer Luneev, referring to the generalized reports of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB of the USSR, reports that in 1930-1953, 3,613,654 people were convicted on political charges in the country, of which 755,528 people were sentenced to capital punishment (132).
According to the commission "to establish the causes mass repression against members and candidate members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks elected at the 17th Party Congress”, chaired by P.N. Pospelov (1956), in 1937-1938 alone, 1,548,366 people were arrested on charges of anti-Soviet activities, of which 681,692 people were shot.
The history of mankind did not know such bloodletting without war. Along with executions in hundreds of thousands of “cases” fabricated by the NKVD, the executions of many people were carried out “in a simplified manner” according to the so-called “Stalin lists” compiled by the NKVD and on the personal instructions of the great leader. The Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (AP RF) has preserved 11 volumes (383 such lists for 44.5 thousand names), signed in 1936-1938 by Stalin and members of the Politburo (133).
The lists of the executed include the names of prominent oppositionists, leading officials of the party, Soviet, Komsomol and trade union bodies, people's commissars and their deputies, major economic managers, prominent military workers, writers, leaders of culture and art, as well as major NKVD workers who became participants and unwanted witnesses of the lawlessness. In these lists, the great leader marked with crosses, arrows and other signs the names of those who should be sentenced "in the first category", i.e. shoot and hold on to whom.
At the June plenum of 1937, 18 members of the Central Committee were arrested and sent to the chopping block. And before they died, they unanimously praised the leader. Rudolf Eikhe, who flooded Siberia with blood, admitted all the false accusations, died crying: “Long live Stalin!” ... Yakir, declared a German spy, wrote in his last letter: “Dear, close comrade Stalin! I die with words of love for you, the party, the country, with ardent faith in the victory of communism. On this declaration of love, the leader wrote: “A scoundrel and a prostitute. Stalin." The comrades-in-arms sitting nearby confirmed the resolution and clarified: “A completely accurate definition. Molotov. “The scoundrel, bastards and whores - one punishment: the death penalty. Kaganovich. Kaganovich had to bend especially hard, because Yakir was both a Jew and his friend.
The torture of those arrested was personally sanctioned by Stalin, who, on January 10, 1939, sent an encrypted telegram to the party and Chekist leaders of the regions and republics. Here is her final passage: “The CCVKP (b) believes that the method physical impact must necessarily be applied henceforth, as an exception, in relation to open and non-disarming enemies of the people, as an absolutely correct and expedient method. It would be interesting to know how the great leader would behave during interrogation under "physical pressure." Would he have admitted that he worked for the tsarist secret police if, during interrogation, for example, his ribs had been broken and some sensitive part of his body had been stepped on with a boot on the floor?
Curious data on the state of the punitive apparatus of the NKVD and on the organization of work with informants in the 1930s characterize Yezhov's letter to Stalin. The background to this letter is as follows. After the assassination on December 1, 1934, the head of the Leningrad party organization, Sergei Kirov, Stalin instructed Yezhov to oversee the investigation of this case, in fact, appointing him as his representative in the NKVD. It was then, according to the people's commissar of internal affairs, Genrikh Yagoda, that "the systematic and persistent crawling into the affairs of the NKVD Yezhov begins." “Meddling in all the details of the investigation,” wrote historian Nikita Petrov in his work, “Yezhov gave it exactly the direction that Stalin wanted.” Yagoda, who tried to obstruct Yezhov, was stopped by the leader's formidable roar: "Look, we'll beat our face ..." In our opinion, this unique document should be read in full.
1. It seems to me that the shortcomings of the Leningrad Cheka, with all the specific features of Leningrad and the leaders of the Leningrad Cheka, are a phenomenon of a wider order. Other organizations of the NKVD, including the central apparatus, suffer to varying degrees from the same shortcomings. In this regard, I considered it necessary to present to you a number of my thoughts on the shortcomings of the work of the Cheka and some measures that, it seems to me, would improve the work of the State Security Directorate of the NKVD. While sending a note on the organization of undercover work. In the next few days I will present my thoughts on the organization of investigative work and relations with the prosecutor's office (the relationship with the prosecutor's office, in my opinion, is so abnormal that it requires the intervention of the Central Committee). And the third note is about the personnel of the KGB bodies. In the note I am sending on the organization of undercover work, I touch only on the shortcomings and do not speak about the positive aspects of the work, which, in my opinion, are well known. In addition, I consider it necessary to make a reservation that the leadership of the NKVD is waging a rather energetic struggle against all these shortcomings in undercover work. However, even here, in my opinion, serious assistance from the Central Committee is indispensable.
2. Comrade told me. Yagoda that he agreed with you on the issue of my speech at a meeting of authorized NKVD criticizing the shortcomings of the work of the Cheka on the example of Leningrad. I cannot speak without your direct instructions.
3. For all these questions, I ask you to take me personally. I'll take a little time. If you are unable to receive me in the near future and consider it necessary for me to speak at a meeting of the Chekists, please instruct me whether I can speak in the spirit of the note I sent you. Yezhov.
APPENDIX
« On the size of the agency and the organization of its work.
The basis of all the work of the Cheka on the search is agents. The size of agents and work with agents are organized as follows:
1. A network of agents of general information. These are the so-called "informants". The network of awareness is very large. It has tens of thousands of people in each region separately. There is no centralized regulation of the size of the information network. In each region, it is set arbitrarily and depends mainly on the taste, methods and concepts of Chekist work on the part of regional leaders, and most often on the part of ordinary employees of the regional departments of the Cheka or their grassroots organizations (district department, city department, operational sector). In total, according to insufficiently accurate data, there are 270,777 informants in the Union. In addition to this number, the Operations Department has informants for the unorganized population, the so-called courtyard information; then a special network of informants for the Army and transport. There is no record of informants in this category. In any case, the total number of informants throughout the Union will be approximately 500,000 people.
So much gravity prevails in this case, shows a comparison of the number of informers in individual territories and regions. For example, the Saratov Territory has only 1,200 informers, while the Northern Territory has 11,942 people. The ratio is approximately the same for other comparable territories and regions. Informants do not have any income from the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, they work for free. The work of the awareness network is organized on following beginnings. Among the most active informants, the so-called residents stand out. Resident subordinate to an average of 10 people. informants. Residents also work for free, combining work in the Cheka with their main job in the service in an institution, in production, etc. In total, according to the recorded data for the Union, there are 27,650 people. residents. (This number is not included in the number of 270,777 informers I mentioned above.) Thus, this or that KGB organization does not have direct contact with an informer. He is associated with his resident, who works voluntarily and for free. Through the resident, the Cheka receives information from the dozens he leads. In general, the management of the intelligence network is entrusted to the Secret Political Department of the State Security Administration in the center and to the Secret Political Departments in the territories and regions.
2. A network of special intelligence agents. These are the so-called "special informants". If it is the task of informants in general to inform about everything that he notices abnormal, then the task of a special informant is to highlight only special issues. Proceeding from this, the special intelligence agency is formed by the relevant departments in the State Security Directorate at the angle of those specific tasks that each department sets for itself separately (ECU - sabotage, sabotage; Special Department - espionage, terror, counter-revolution; Secret Political Department - political parties, clergy, etc.). This type of informant, in the whole sense of his organization, should be a more qualified person, versed in special matters. According to the developments carried out by the department, they are recruited in certain segments of the population (for the illumination of the clergy - mainly among confessors, for the illumination of the intelligentsia - among writers, artists, engineers, etc.). By type, special informants are something between an informer in general and a real agent of the Cheka, who is actively developing one or another counter-revolutionary formation. Special informants also work for the vast majority of them for free, with rare exceptions. In the matter of establishing the number of special informants, the same drift prevails. There is no centralized record of this category of informers. Even taken separately, each department of the Central Administration does not know it. The number of special informants is known only to special departments in the territories, regions, republics or in lower Chekist organizations, where the corresponding departments exist. As far as I was able to get acquainted in Leningrad, the number of these agents is also an impressive figure. In Leningrad, if we take all the departments as a whole, there are up to 2,000 special informants. Unlike general informants, a special informant is directly connected with the corresponding department of the Cheka and sends his information there. Intermediate in the form of a voluntarily free-of-charge resident here, as a rule, is not.
3. The network of the main agents of the Cheka. These are the so-called agents. This network of agents is paid. In addition to being paid for their work, they also receive special amounts necessary in the course of development (organization of drinking, etc.). The network of this active agency, working on specific assignments, is much smaller, however, and in individual regions it sometimes numbers hundreds of people. The composition of the agents is also not regulated by anyone, but is set arbitrarily by employees of the regional and regional departments of the NKVD. The size of this network is directly dependent on the nature of the developments being carried out by one or another regional or regional administration. There is no centralized network accounting.
On the procedure for recruiting agents and managing it
Such a huge number of agents in itself to a large extent already determines the question of who recruits agents. The practically established procedure for recruiting agents is as follows.
1. According to the general information network, recruitment, as a rule, is carried out not by the Cheka's own apparatus, but by residents working for free, i.e. the same informants. The apparatus of any link of the Cheka is walled off from informants. They don't know anyone by sight, for the simple reason that the management organization system is built in such a way that the immediate supervisor of the informers is a resident who works for free. Only the resident knows his informers, and only the resident is known in the Cheka. The work of recruiting agents and managing them is entirely based on trust in the resident. If we take into account that the resident manages an average of ten informants, that the resident is also recruited from the most active informants, that the resident has some kind of main job of his own, then it becomes completely clear how poorly the management of the informant network is. In order to actively manage the intelligence network, to give it a daily direction in its work: what kind of information the Cheka is interested in depending on the situation, it takes a very long time. A resident, loaded with his main job, cannot pay such attention to an informant. As a rule, the resident meets informants very rarely.
2. Special informants are recruited by the relevant departments of the Cheka (starting from the district and ending with the Central Office). Recruitment by special informants actually falls entirely on the rank and file of the relevant departments of the Cheka. Based on a selective check in Leningrad, it was established that the recruitment of special intelligence was almost entirely entrusted to full-time trainees and assistants. authorized, with whom special informants maintain constant contact. The management of special informants is also in fact in the hands of full-time trainees and assistants. authorized. If we take into account that full-time trainees and assistants. Commissioners are the lowest officials in the Cheka, leading 90% of the technical work, it will become quite obvious how unskilled the management of special intelligence is. It can be said with certainty that almost every special informant, in terms of the general level of development, as well as in terms of knowledge of the specific task entrusted to him, knows more than his leader.
3. Of particular, exclusively responsible importance is the recruitment of an agent - a paid employee of the Cheka for one or another special development. The practice of foreign intelligence services, and indeed of the old tsarist secret police, shows what tremendous decisive importance was attached to the recruitment of the necessary agent in the work. Even the memoirs and specialized literature available in this area shows how responsible people were entrusted with the recruitment of agents and how complicated the process of this recruitment itself is from the point of view of choosing an agent. In fact, it is not so much the quantity of agents that plays a role here, but its quality. One good agent for this or that organization can give more than a hundred bad agents. In addition to all this, the very environment from which agents are recruited is extremely diverse. Depending on the nature of the development, it is sometimes necessary to recruit a direct White Guard, a speculator, a priest, a politician, etc. From this it is obvious how acute the question of recruitment and, in particular, the leadership of such agents is in itself.
Despite all this, and in this case, continuous drift prevails. The recruitment of this kind of agents is also entrusted to minor people. In the vast majority of cases, agents are recruited by rank-and-file employees of the Cheka (authorized officers, detectives) and very rarely - by the heads of departments, or heads of departments. True, the agent's final approval must be authorized by the head of the department, however, this has turned into an empty formality, not binding to anything. As a rule, the head of the department, who approves the recruited agent, never sees him in the eye, but approves only on the basis of formal signs presented to him by the commissioner or the head of the department.
In Leningrad, in the matter of recruiting agents, they went straight to disgrace. For example, the Special Department in 1934 once found that it had almost no agents, and decided to acquire the latter. The now convicted Deputy The head of the Special Department, Yanishevsky, called all the employees of the department and set the target figures for recruitment. Each employee of the Special Department, starting with pom. authorized, undertook to recruit at least 10 people daily. agents. Some zealous workers of the Special Department, when I interrogated them about this, not only did not understand all the stupidity and criminality of this kind of recruiting agents, but boasted that they had exceeded this task, giving 15 and 20 agents a day. It is quite obvious that with such a method of recruiting agents, more than a dozen hardened counter-revolutionaries took advantage of the wide-open doors of the Cheka in order to "recruit" themselves to carry out their subversive work within the Cheka. The facts, which I will report below, fully confirm this case.
The leadership of the agents is also in fact in the hands of the commissioner or detective. In rare cases, the head of the department is in charge, and even more rarely - the head of the department. Thanks to such a system of leadership, low-skilled people, often very qualified agents, actually nullify the leadership, and provide all the opportunities for the agents to misinform the Cheka.
Investigative apparatus of the Cheka
Strictly speaking, there is no special investigative apparatus in the Cheka. If we consider that the basis of the work of the Cheka is search (agency) and investigation, then there is no distinction between these two types of work in the Cheka. As a rule, a person conducting some kind of undercover development, he also conducts an investigation into this undercover development in the event of its completion.
In practice, this case is presented in the following form. This or that representative, directing his agent or a group of agents, reaches such a moment of undercover development when he starts an investigative file. The head of the department authorizes the institution of an investigative case, and, therefore, the arrests. After that, the same commissioner, who led the undercover development, conducts an investigation. Such a merging of undercover and investigative work, along with a number of its positive aspects, also has a number of negative ones. On the positive side, first of all, the fact that the worker conducting the investigation knows the case, starting from its origins, i.e. from the first agent service (meaning the agent message). Knowing the intelligence business, it is easier for him to conduct an investigation. In addition, in the course of the investigation, as a rule, it turns out the need for additional undercover developments and a new undercover installation, which the investigation is conducting. The negative side of this fusion of search and investigative work is that the investigator often gives a lot of "exaggerated" cases. The fact is that in Chekist practice, the concept of the qualifications of an employee, his suitability and ability to work, according to the current expression of the Chekists, “did a pretty business,” was established. Since the result of any "dealer" is a well-completed investigation, often the investigator who is both leading and undercover work is carried away and gives direction to the agents in the sense desired for the "dealer", sometimes ignoring the serious data of the agent, which do not coincide with the desire of the investigator to present the case in the right spirit. . There are a lot of such "exaggerated" cases in Chekist practice. If it were possible to separate search work from investigative work, i.e. so that the search was conducted by some people, and the investigation by others, in this case a certain control of the investigation over the search would be ensured. I do not put this question now on the plane of a positive resolution. The question is not clear to me how feasible this thing is, especially since the positive aspects of such a fusion of search and investigative work are very great. Judging by the Leningrad cases I have reviewed, I must say that people do not know how to conduct an investigation. In most cases, investigators are operatives whose strength is not investigation, but search. It is understandable, it requires less qualifications, less culture, and so on. I think that the basis of the foundations of weak investigative work is the extremely low qualifications and general literacy of the Chekists. In fact, often a Chekist from some department, such as the ECU or the SPO, conducts a major investigation. In the course of the investigation, he has to deal with either major political figures or major specialists. In order to expose this person, it is necessary first of all and a general rather high level culture and knowledge of the subject, which is discussed in the investigation. In any case, if not a thorough knowledge, then a conscientious study of it in the course of an investigation. Neither one nor the other, as a rule, is not. All this is further aggravated by the fact that the cadres of Chekist investigators are completely ignorant of the laws, while this, so to speak, procedural side of the matter plays an important role. Meanwhile, the Chekists have the most dismissive attitude towards this side of the matter. Laws, as a rule, are regarded as some kind of formalism; laws are not observed during the entire investigation, but are left to the end. The Chekists have already entered into everyday life and their work, when the investigation is over - to express themselves: "Well, the investigation is over, it will be necessary to file a case for the prosecutor's office." This design is the most insignificant for the Chekists and the most unpleasant part of the matter. In order to illustrate by examples all the shortcomings of investigative work, we can cite the same investigation in the case of the Zinovievites in Leningrad. Despite all the enormous positive achievements of this investigation, which cannot be underestimated in any way, it also has a number of particular shortcomings, of the order that I spoke about above. For example, if you carefully read all the protocols of the investigation, the first thing that catches your eye is the standard of questions common to all those being interrogated. In most cases, the answers are also almost of the same order. This happens because the investigators copy each other's questions and often require similar answers from the interrogated.
As a result of this, if you look closely at the protocols, the line of individual interrogation of each person under investigation is erased. The result of this is that all the protocols, if you read them carefully, are politically too smooth and trimmed. It turns out that all the defendants were all the time engaged in counter-revolutionary work, it was enough for them to be arrested by the OGPU and everyone began to repent, politically spit on their past and approve of the activities of the party and Soviet power. In fact, this is not so. I myself witnessed this (almost all the defendants passed through me). I must say that many of them did not repent to any extent, on the contrary, when they were arrested, they only more clearly stuck out their counter-revolutionary face and essence. Of course, I do not propose to write down all the curses that they uttered at the address of the party and its leaders, but it would be possible to set off this feature in the protocols in general. From them, in any case, the face of the enemy would be seen more accurately. And, finally, the last thing that should be paid attention to from the point of view of the shortcomings of the investigation is that in such a political case, emphasis was correctly placed on the political side, however, technical issues were completely bypassed. Meanwhile, the technique of relations with party and Soviet bodies, with bodies of the same Cheka, is very instructive and interesting. It would be possible to sharpen the attention of our Party organizations on it, not only from the point of view of general political vigilance, but also from the point of view of recognizing the methods of the enemy's daily organizational technique. For example, to say that the shot Rumyantsev is the secretary of the Vyborg District Council: what kind of relationship did he establish with the District Committee, with whom he contacted in the district, how he behaved, how he deceived his chairman, giving money to his political friends, how they met, etc. . All this is not trifles, but a very serious matter in such a peculiar counter-revolutionary formation as the Zinoviev White Guard. They introduced a great deal of new and original work into the methods and techniques of underground work of the past, which stemmed entirely from the special conditions in which this group found itself in the Soviet Union. Double-dealing in itself predetermined a different technical connection and technique of relationships with the outside world. Such are the negative aspects of this, by and large, magnificent consequence. I must say that the most qualified Chekists sat at this investigation, however, even this most qualified part of the Chekists lacks culture and knowledge. They were lost in conversation with the oppositionists, since many do not know not only the oppositional struggle of the Zinovievites, but also the history of the party in general. In a word, we do not have Spiridonoviches, which we desperately need. (Meaning A.I. Spiridovich - Major General royal police. - IN AND.)
Personnel
The peculiarity of the Cheka is such that the cadres of the Chekists must be especially checked. People in the Cheka are in such a sensitive area of political work that a lot is required of them, and above all, that they be seasoned Bolsheviks. In fact, the connection with agents, often consisting of people alien to us, the lack of criticism of their work, all this puts the Chekists in a special position. One traitor among the Chekists can do such a lot of counter-revolutionary nasty things for the Soviet Union that an entire organization cannot do. Are the KGB cadres in this sense, if not an ideal, then, in any case, an approximation to it? The example of the composition of the Chekists of the Leningrad Cheka does not speak of this. I had to, looking through the apparatus of the Leningrad Cheka, clean out 280 people. from the operational departments, and it must be said that the police, the registry office, the fire department, etc., were not included in the number of those checked, but, in fact, only the Directorate state security with its Special Department, ECU, SPO, Operod, etc.
Of these 280 people. 180 people I was forced to send 100 people to the camps. I found it possible to use it not at the KGB work, but at work in the police, the registry office, in the fire departments and the economy of the Cheka. There are so many people alien to us among the purged ones that they could betray us at any moment. I'm not sure they didn't betray. There are former white officers, many noblemen of fairly prominent families, no less than former Trotskyites and Zinovievites, a significant part of people who are simply decomposed both politically and morally ... Personally, I think that I have calculated little, I will have to continue the purge, especially in terms of transferring Chekist work in other places. However, I could not do this for the reason that I would have to crush the Cheka, while there was a lot of work. I agreed with Yagoda that after the first batch of Chekist replacements from other regions, which I had planned with Yagoda, arrive in Leningrad, it would be possible to continue purge the rest of the Chekists after some time.
What is the rest of the Chekists?
In most cases, these are uncultured people. As a rule, they are loaded with operational grandfathers, they almost never pick up books, they do not read not only political and economic literature, but they rarely even read fiction. By the way, the common thing that catches the eye among the Chekists is a dismissive attitude towards reading, towards culture, towards knowledge. Such a situation with the Chekist cadres, it would seem, with all its acuteness, should have raised the question of educational work among the Chekists and their studies. In fact, there is neither one nor the other. No major political educational work among security officers is not conducted. The whole thing comes down, as a rule, to the fact that Chekists educate, in the favorite expression of many, in the spirit of “Chekist discipline”. If it can be called serious education, then the matter is limited to this. There is no political education of people in the spirit of devotion to the party, in the spirit of Bolshevik vigilance, perspicacity, and modesty. All education is too narrowly concentrated on Chekist features, on its departmental specialty. In this sense, the Chekists should take as an example the Red Army, where, along with the passage of specific military disciplines, along with the passage of a specialty, a Red Army soldier and a commander are politically educated so well that each of them simultaneously goes through an excellent party school. Suffice it to say that the experience of appointing 300 regimental commissars as heads of political departments brilliantly justified itself, showing that they turned out to be perhaps the best leaders of the political departments of the MTS, although, as you know, the party gave many qualified people from party work to the political departments. The peculiarity of the KGB environment, plus the entire amount of their upbringing, is reflected in living conditions Chekists. The overwhelming majority of Chekists are a closed environment and in their everyday life there are massive cases of “bourgeoisness”. Suffice it to say that the wives of the Chekists have become literally a household name ... ”(134) .
The denunciation took on enormous proportions. One could become an “enemy of the people” by telling a joke in front of an informer, accidentally dropping a portrait of the leader, or accidentally keeping a book from the 1920s with a portrait of Trotsky (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky ...) in an apartment or at work. Newspaper reports were not uncommon that one person exposed 69 enemies, and another 100, and so on.
In one of the cities, a party member "exposed" his entire party organization. At the 18th Party Congress, when the "excesses" committed during the purges were subjected to belated and partial criticism, the story of one informer about how he managed to get the removal of fifteen secretaries of local party organizations was announced. In a report at the same congress, A.A. Zhdanov said: “In some organizations, the slanderers are so unrestrained that they put their feet on the table. For example, in one of the districts of the Kyiv region, the slanderer Khanevsky was exposed. None of the numerous claims he made against the communists were confirmed. However, this slanderer did not lose his presence of mind and in one of his revealing statements to the regional committee of the CP (b) U he made the following request: “I am exhausted in the fight against enemies, and therefore I ask for a ticket to the resort.” Some members of the party, in order to be safe, resorted to the help of medical institutions. Here is a certificate issued to one citizen: “Comrade (the name of the rivers), for reasons of health and consciousness, cannot be used by any class enemy for his own purposes. Raypsych. Oktyabrsky district of Kyiv” (135) .
Some delusional denunciations led to incredible results. So a certain citizen Silakov deserted from the Red Army, and then surrendered to the authorities. He stated that he planned to raid the post office in order to raise money for a terrorist organization, but then changed his mind and decided to voluntarily give himself into the hands of the Soviet authorities. In the NKVD, “methods of physical influence” were applied to Silakov, after which the version he presented was radically changed. Now, not only Silakov and his friends figured as terrorists, but the whole military unit from which he deserted. At the head of the "organization" was now its commander, and the purpose of the conspirators was to commit terrorist acts against members of the government. Almost the entire personnel of the unit, from the commander to the drivers, was arrested, many of them along with their wives. Silakov's two sisters, his father and his old sick mother, were also involved in the "case". They also brought in an uncle who only saw his nephew once, but served as a non-commissioned officer in the tsarist army. According to the new version, the uncle turned into a "tsarist general." The “case” has grown to such an extent that “not a single cell remained in the Minsk prison, no matter where a person connected with Silakov’s conspiracy was sitting.” After Yezhov's arrest, Silakov and all those arrested in connection with his "case" were interrogated anew, and they were asked to retract their testimony. Some did not agree to this, fearing a provocation, and only after persuasion and appropriate “influence” did they refuse to plead guilty to a crime that threatened them with the death penalty. As a result, Silakov was sentenced to three years in prison for desertion.
The disunity and depravity of people, poisoned by mutual suspicion and trained in lies and slander, contributed to the fact that, in the words of Khrushchev, “just charlatans who chose to expose the enemies of the people as a profession” entered into the business. In this regard, Khrushchev related an incident that became "an anecdote that was passed from mouth to mouth throughout Ukraine." At one of the meetings, a woman, pointing her finger at the communist Medved, shouted: “I don’t know this man, but I can see from his eyes that he is an enemy of the people.” The bear, not at a loss, found the only suitable answer: “I don’t know this woman who has just come out against me, but I can see from her eyes that she is a prostitute” (Khrushchev said that the Bear “used more than expressive word"). The most terrible thing was that, according to Khrushchev, only such "resourcefulness" saved the Bear; “If the Bear began to prove that he was not an enemy of the people, but an honest person, he would have brought suspicion upon himself” (136).
And even a clinical case that characterizes the atmosphere of fear of the 30s is described in Vladimir Tendrikov's story "Paranya", in which a village fool who declared herself the leader's bride exposed several "enemies of the people". I also recall the stories of fellow countrymen about fellow villagers arrested on denunciations, who, for the sake of a joke, asked the village fool, nicknamed "Vasya the collective farm", to show where the collective farm and where the commune was. At the request of the pranksters, Vasya took off his pants, showed what was in front, and called it a collective farm, and then turned his back to the audience and showed the “commune”.
If we evaluate the actions of Stalin and his henchmen that have become known during the period of collectivization and mass repressions, then the conclusion suggests itself that the country was not ruled by righteous Leninist revolutionaries, but rather a gang of murderers.
At the 20th Congress of the CPSU, party leaders of various levels, covered in the blood of the people, assured each other that they knew nothing about the repressions, and attributed everything to a dead godfather. And none of them, with the exception of Beria and several of his henchmen, suffered punishment for their crimes.
But something else is also known: more than 90% of the arrests were initiated by denunciations “from below”. Most people were imprisoned on the basis of denunciations, an inexhaustible stream that went to the NKVD. And they were written by normal Soviet people. They wrote. They denounced. They knocked. In society, it began to be considered morally justified to “signal to the authorities” about deviations from the “general line of the party”, about doubts about its correctness, about bourgeois survivals in everyday life, changes in the consciousness of this or that person and other similar sins against the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
What prompted people to inform? One of the reasons for the mass denunciation was settling scores with objectionable people. The surest way to settle accounts with the enemy was a signal about his political unreliability, ties with the Trotskyists, with the opposition, with the enemies of the people. With the help of denunciations, official, personal and domestic problems were solved. They wrote to remove an objectionable boss, to eliminate a competitor and thus make a career. They wrote to improve living conditions - to send a neighbor to jail and get his room in a communal apartment. Wives wrote denunciations against their husbands because a lover appeared and it was necessary to get rid of the husband. Husbands wrote to their wives, wives wrote to their husbands' mistresses. They remembered old grievances, avenged everything. Everything vile, vile and dirty that had accumulated in the souls splashed out through denunciations.
Many denunciations were made out of fear - to save themselves and their families. Any person who heard a carelessly spoken word and did not report it could pay the price himself.
Convicted of non-information were subjected to criminal punishment under Art. 58-12. It happened that after a too frank conversation between old acquaintances, both interlocutors denounced each other. Only trusted friends could carry on conversations that deviated even slightly from the official line. The selection of interlocutors was very careful. Ilya Ehrenburg said in his memoirs that his daughter had a poodle who learned to close the living room door as soon as the conversation of the guests became muffled. He received a piece of sausage for his vigilance and learned to accurately recognize the nature of the conversation.
The routine of denunciations led to the fact that they no longer saw something shameful in this occupation. If they knew or guessed about someone that he was an informer, then because of this they did not stop letting him into the house, they did not stop communicating with him, because they were afraid of revenge. People tried to be more restrained in conversations and warned about the caution of loved ones. Such were the morals of the era, such were the people.
Rybin, a security officer of those years, recalled: “Comprehending in the department the investigative cases against those repressed in the thirties, we came to the sad conclusion that millions of people participated in the creation of these unfortunate cases. Psychosis literally gripped everyone. Almost everyone was zealous in search of the enemies of the people. With denunciations about enemy intrigues or accomplices of various intelligence services, people themselves drowned each other.
They also wrote denunciations because they were forced by the Chekists, who had a "plan" for landings. Often denunciations of innocent people were given by the arrested after torture in order to avoid further physical torment and humiliation. Recently, a repressed woman appeared on television and spoke about her cellmate. Returning to the cell after many hours of interrogation "with passion", she said: "Today I planted seventeen people." When asked why she did this, the woman replied: “I am sitting, and let them sit.”
As for the Communists, they were obliged to exercise vigilance in the order of Party discipline. Many of them seriously believed that the development of the country was hindered by numerous enemies and conspirators who had to be fought by all available means. Party members who did not find "enemies of the people" among their colleagues and acquaintances were "worked out" at meetings for "lack of vigilance." Of course, there were also non-Party people who denounced for ideological reasons, but their share in total number scammers was small.
If we talk about the direct material interest of scammers, then inside the USSR this motive was not the main one. It was believed that helping the security forces was a civic duty. Volunteer informers were not paid for their "vigilance". The most significant was the payment for the denunciation of the bread hidden by the fists. Of the grain confiscated from the kulak, 25 percent went to the collective farm as a share of the vigilant poor who reported on the "hidden class enemy." If they were paid to NKVD agents, then, as a rule, small sums. They were reimbursed for "operational purposes". The incentive for acting agents was the assistance and support of the authorities in such matters as promotion, obtaining an apartment, obtaining permission to travel abroad, and others.
There were informers at all levels of government and in all spheres of society, from members of the Central Committee and the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to collective farmers recruited by the NKVD.
So in March 1938, the former secretary of the Leningrad regional committee of the Komsomol, Utkin, who had recently been released from prison, came to an appointment with the first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee Alexander Kosarev. After meeting with him, Kosarev sent a letter to Yezhov, in which he said: “Utkin, in great secrecy, told me that the testimony he gave in the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs allegedly did not correspond to reality, was forced, and that he considers himself an honest person. In response to these statements, he received a corresponding rebuff from me. I told him that his behavior was an enemy slander against the organs of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, that such behavior once again indicates that he, Utkin, is an enemy, and an enemy that has not been disarmed "(137) .
After this denunciation, Utkin was arrested again, spent 16 years in camps, from where he left in the mid-50s as an invalid. There were scammers among famous Soviet athletes. On the eve of the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repressions Big city"published a denunciation of the once famous runner Seraphim Znamensky on the founder of the Spartak society, one of the famous Starostin brothers, Nikolai Starostin. The denunciation was published for the first time 75 years after it was written. Znamensky and Starostin at that time were neighbors in the stairwell. The multi-page "document" titled "On the shortcomings in the DSO "Spartak" and the incorrect behavior of athletes" lists the mistakes of the executive secretary of the "Spartak" society Nikolai Starostin and his "non-Soviet" behavior. “... Now the work in Spartak is poorly set up thanks to the wrong leadership, the wrong approach, the approach is not Soviet ... Starostin is in a high position, he was entrusted with leading the Soviet society, it is difficult to immediately say that you, they say, look like a White Guard, I am a Soviet person, this takes time... N. Starostin spends all his time, attention, money and sticks out only football, forgetting other types, forgetting the TRP complex and in football singles out only individuals, for example: the Dynamo team has a team, and Spartak “only a bunch of their own people, that’s what causes problems, they don’t allow young people to grow up ... Concerning their behavior. I live with them in the same apartment. Recently, in connection with the survey that began, the societies have become quieter, at first I didn’t sleep at night, every day there was a booze, where do people get money from? Drinking discredits Soviet sports and athletes, in addition to this, money is needed for this. Gathering almost every day, dispersed only in the morning. I told Andrei Starostin several times - how do you not get tired of these boozes, you don’t let me sleep, but accustomed to looking at people as plebeians, he ironically answered that “you, Seraphim, are an eccentric” ... In order to arrange such boozes or play cards for money, need money. For 1000 or 1500, which Andrey receives as an MS (master of sports), of course, you can’t live like that. I also receive 1,000 rubles, I live with my wife, and in order to train, arrange enhanced nutrition, I just have enough ... All Starostina is not enough honest people... I can say that they had extra currency, everyone who traveled knows this. For those who went on a business trip, they release currencies up to 1000 francs. What could I buy with this money: a coat, a suit, 1 shoes and 2 shirts. Everything is included in one suitcase. And in order to have 4 suitcases, you need to fill them with something. I know Nikolai had 4 suitcases, Peter had 4 suitcases, Andrey had 4 suitcases. I myself saw the wife of Nikolai Starostin at the dacha, who sorted out dresses, there were 13 of them, she said that Nikolai paid dearly for them and she didn’t like one thing. Andrei also brought 10 or 12 dresses for his wife, crepe de chine dresses. This requires money ... I know that N. Starostin arranged good birthday parties for his wife.
…N. Starostin offered his brother Georgy to buy currency, but he didn’t buy it, he said that he didn’t need it, but he didn’t offer it to me personally, in general they didn’t have confidence in me because they called me “unreliable”, in general “Lop-eared”, they often laughed “well, you can't”, etc.
I was summoned to the commission to T. Makartsev ... N. Starostin informed me that Kabakov would instruct me in everything. Kabakov went out into the corridor and said in a trembling voice: "Seraphim, you know what to say." I told him that I myself know what to say. “Otherwise you can say something, you can let us down, you don’t know anything.” “... I can say directly that the Starostins, apparently, were engaged in dishonest deeds. If I don’t have anything behind me, then I won’t call some Seraphim Znamensky and persuade him that I didn’t say anything. ”
Neither in 1937 nor in 1938 was any of the Starostins arrested. All four ended up in the Lubyanka in 1942, and were released only in 1954. They were accused of "anti-Soviet agitation", "waste and misuse of funds" of their sports society, that is, in fact, on the same points that Znamensky had mentioned 5 years before. In the same 1942, Seraphim Znamensky, for unknown reasons, committed suicide (138).
OGPU and NKVD informers in the villages recorded and reported to their curators "anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary" statements of "kulaks" and "individual" collective farmers. The Chekists, summarizing the denunciations received from informants, reported their content to the leader: "On the basis of the difficulties, sharp negative moods are noted among some of the collective farmers."
- “I worked on the collective farm for four years and did not earn anything, now I have 10 pounds of flour and nothing more. How to live on - I do not know. The local party members do not care about us, since they are well-fed, do the government need us, why do they not pay attention to our plight? (Ural).
“Those fools who conquered Soviet power, every day we stand in the back of the head in order to get 2-3 pounds of bread. Take these rulers, knock their heads off, let them do whatever they want with us. No one will believe that Soviet power rules. If the Soviet government ruled, then it would not send all the bread and would not leave young children without bread ”(Ural).
- “Soviet power froze us, so I haven’t eaten for three days and now I’m hungry, probably, the Soviet authorities are striving for this. The hand will not tremble in case, or - here you go, chop off my head ”(Ural).
- “We lived, we have to die of hunger, the children scream:“ Bread! ”, - and where will I get them, and, probably, I will have to crush the children and decide my own life, because it’s hard to die of starvation” (Far Eastern Territory).
- “Did I think that in the summer I worked until I dropped, skinned, naked, barefoot, so that now I could sit without bread and swell from hunger, because I have 7 of them, and everyone is sitting and shouting: “Give me bread!”, - but how is the mother to move? I'm going to lie down under a tractor, I can't bear this suffering" (Far Eastern Territory) (139) .
Informants also reported about food difficulties in the regions of the Central Black Earth Region:
- “We are sitting hungry, they took away bread, and now they are demanding seeds. In the spring we will die of hunger, we must not give seeds and not sow the land. (Fist of the village of Pereverzevka, Belovsky District, in a group of peasants.)
- “If the state does not provide seeds and food, we will not sow, but by spring we will disperse from the village, like the Ukrainians in 1932.”
“It is impossible to live on a collective farm, the collective farmers are sitting without bread, you have to take your horse from the collective farm and go somewhere to beg, because I have not had bread for two weeks.” (Poor collective farmer Kanailov, M. Uporonsky village council, Dmitrievsky district.)
Chekists, according to reports of informants, note the growth of anti-sowing sentiments of part of the collective farmers in the reports: "We will not go to sow in the field until they give us bread." “Let the communists cultivate the land of the collective farm, but we will not go on an empty stomach.” “This year they were robbed and left hungry, and it will continue to be so, and therefore there is no need to sow.” “We won’t go to sow in the field, we won’t work hungry, let them give bread, and then ask for work on spring sowing.” (Member of the collective farm named after Mareykis, Novosilsky district.). “There is no need to work on the collective farm, because anyway the Bolsheviks take away all the grain, the Bolsheviks ruined our collective farm, we need to stop working. Let only commissars work, but for the peasant there is little sense from the collective farm. (Member of the collective farm in the village of Vvedenka, Lipetsk district.) “This year, all the bread was taken away and we were left hungry, and next year it will be so, and therefore there is no need to sow.” (Member of the collective farm "Krasnaya Niva" N. Oskolsky district.)
Informants also reported mass cases of brigades and individual groups of collective farmers refusing to go to work. Brigadier Startsev declares: “We are all hungry, and we will no longer work, let the communists themselves work, who receive bread” (Levo-Rossoshsky district).
The denunciations also contain pogrom statements and appeals from collective farmers:
- "It is necessary to boycott the spring sowing, and when the war starts, to rise up together against the communists." (Fist. Seventy-sixth Gremyachinsky district, arrested.)
- "Soviet power will bring to death, you need to remove the locks from the collective farm barns and take away the seeds." (A collective farmer at the plenum of the Nikolsky Village Council of the Maloarkhangelsk District.)
- "By spring at the station people will go Like flies to honey, at the stations in the barns of Zagotzern lie thousands of poods of grain. The hungry people will go to smash the barns, and the authorities will scatter. (A middle peasant in the village of Nelitsa, Valuysky district.)
- “We will eat the last crumbs of bread, and then we will go to select it at the stations and in the city. We are now powerless, but hungry people will be stronger, and if the government does not voluntarily give bread, then it will feel bad.” (A middle-class collective farmer of the Afanasyevsky village council of the Izmalkovsky district.)
- "What to starve - to take apart the seeds and all sorts of collective farm funds." (Collective farmers of the villages of Berezovka and Kochetovka, Ivnyansky district.)
Chekists report that “the negative sentiments expressed by some groups of collective farmers and individual farmers are of an insurrectionary and defeatist nature”:
- "We do not need Soviet power, it led to death."
- "We will not go to defend the communists."
- "When war is declared, we will beat the communists and activists who robbed the peasants."
- "Would rather war and the end of Soviet power, she took everything from us and left us hungry." (Individual individual farmers and collective farmers are the poor and middle peasants of the village of Griboyedovo, Bondarsky district.)
“We can’t do without war, if they don’t give us bread, then by spring there will be a war of communists not with foreign states, but with us.” (Individual owner-middle peasant in the village of Pokrovki, Liskinsky district.)
“The Communists have brought us to ruin. In connection with the famine, every collective farmer and individual peasant will oppose the communists, and the Soviet power will be overthrown. (Middle peasant in the village of Zalomnoye, V. Mikhailovsky district.)
At the end of the summary of the OGPU plenipotentiary for the Central Chernozemsk Region, it is reported that "confiscated elements expressing insurrectionary tendencies are being seized." Report No. 25/2 was signed by the OGPU PP for the Central Chernobyl region Dukelsky and early. SPO PP Revinov (140) .
Remembering the situation in 1937, the famous aircraft designer A.S. Yakovlev in his book “The Purpose of Life” wrote: “In those days, failure in work, a mistake could be regarded as conscious sabotage. The label "pest" and then "enemy of the people" could be stuck not only on failure, but simply on suspicion. A wave of distrust and suspicion of sabotage hit both individuals and entire organizations.
Honored Test Pilot Hero of the Soviet Union EF. Baidukov, in his book Stories from Different Years, recalled how his colleague, Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot Levanevsky, suddenly stood up during a meeting with Stalin and said: “Comrade Stalin, I want to make a statement.” "Statement?" Stalin asked. Levanevsky looked at Molotov, who was writing something in a notebook. The pilot, apparently, decided that Vyacheslav Mikhailovich was taking minutes of the meeting and began to speak in his direction: “I want to officially declare that I do not believe Tupolev, I consider him a pest. I am convinced that he deliberately makes sabotage aircraft that fail at the most crucial moment. I won’t fly on Tupolev cars anymore!” Tupolev sat opposite. He got sick." Although Levanevsky's "statement" then had no consequences, but after a while the famous aircraft designer A. Tupolev was arrested.
“The arrests also took place because the aircraft designers wrote denunciations against each other, each praised his plane and drowned the other,” recalled Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel-General M.M. Gromov. Similar accusations were made by many people against their colleagues in other branches of science, technology and industry.
Here are excerpts from several typical denunciations of citizens given in the "Summary of the work of the reception of the 8th department of the GUTB NKVD for February 1937." dated March 3, 1937. The spelling of the statements is observed:
Kerpelli Yu.L. reports: “... my younger brother Sergei was discovered (quite by accident) in c. Kukhtina Nina Frolovna Trotsky's book "My Life", published in Berlin in Russian ... Kukhtina's son-in-law Vitaly Vasilyevich Zaitsev works at the American Embassy and lives with her.
Mirzakhanov V.A. MIIT student reports: “... a student of our institute Alekhin F.A. an ardent Trotskyist and with exceptional malice treats the party and the government. “During the trial of the Trotskyists, he became especially insolent, defending all the views and actions of these spies and saboteurs ... he said furiously that if he had bombs and grenades, he would know what to do with them. He said that he would have to sit in jail or escape abroad.
Engineers Sorokin G.M. and Speransky I.S., working at the plant. On May 1, Glavmashdetali reported: “For some time now, it began to seem to us that the work of the plant was hindered by forces hostile to the ideas of industrialization and reconstruction of the textile industry, in terms of the quality of output by our plant.” “Solvent boilers with a set of rubber-coated boilers, manufactured by our plant in the amount of 18 quality control kits, are not allowed to be released, nor are they allowed to operate due to failure to weld the boiler seams. Nevertheless, these boilers were sent to customers, without the passport of the plant's Quality Control Department... the boilers leaked after installation on site. "Tempered steel gears, according to specifications, must be made of steel No. 5. In reality, they are made of No. 2 or No. 3." Further, the applicants cite a number of other facts confirming, in their opinion, sabotage.
Berman, a member of the CPSU (b), reports: “Several years ago, as a student, Ponomarev attended a circle of young naturalists at the Zoo. In this circle, under the flag of propaganda of biological knowledge, there were people who carried out the racial theory of fascism and even anti-Soviet views. One of these people, with whom Ponomarev was then friends, was expelled from Moscow. Recently, this man returned to Moscow after being exiled and sent a letter to Ponomarev with a request to “meet and restore the old relationship.” “Above this whole group was “someone” a citizen of a foreign power (apparently Germany), who lived in the USSR as an “agent of Hagenbeck, to buy up animals” .
The apogee of squealing is such a unique phenomenon as political denunciations of oneself. As an example, two cases from the same “Summary of the work of the reception of the 8th department ...” can be cited. So citizen Boyko SV. appeared at the reception of the NKVD with a statement in which he writes: “I did not come myself, my conscience led me, I was led by the fear of those monsters, those traitors to the motherland who stand and will long remain in my memory, like lepers, ulcers that from all , including from me, were hidden, the ulcers of which were shown to me in their entirety by the prosecutor and the court of the people ... Trotsky's gang infected me, led me to crimes that today have no place in my homeland ... I slandered the leaders, the party of the people, I I harmed where it was possible, sowed evil, which no longer has a place in my mind. “My conscience will then be clear before the leader and the party of the people ... when I tell everything to the investigation.”
Karlinsky G.P. appeared in the NKVD with the following statement: “I consider my stay at liberty in the future intolerable and absolutely impossible for the following reasons: firstly, having previously been in the ranks of the CPSU (b) from 1920 to 1922 and from 1926 to 1935. It had nothing to do with the Stalinist ideology; I was a member of the Party, actively worked and fought (in words) for the ideal purity of the ranks of the Party, until about 1931, and with the beginning of the five-year plans, all my thoughts turned to constant (internal) contradictions with me. I confess that that insignificant part of the literature - Trotsky, Zinoviev at that time had a strong effect on me and, all this made me double-deal, and at the same time, from 1929 I begin to occupy responsible positions, up to the head of the Industrial Construction of Uralmashstroy and vreed . Head of "Pribalkhimstroy". “It is too much to write about all my dishonest and bad deeds, but I think that this will be stated by me in the conduct of my case, if it should be. One thing I think, my further stay at liberty is simply dangerous. “I can and want to work, to benefit the owls. Construction, but above all, must wash away the dirt that has accumulated in me over the years.
Both applicants came to the NKVD with pre-written statements in which they declare their ideological hostility, but do not seek to denigrate other persons. What made these people commit self-incrimination? May be, psychological pressure atmosphere of fear and terror? Maybe it's psychopathy? Or is it a preventive step of people who feel the inevitability of arrest and understand that it is better to surrender themselves and thereby alleviate their fate? We will never know this, just as we will never know what the further fate of these unfortunate people is.
As in the 1920s, when the Chekists "on the ground" were recommended to have informants from the middle peasants "who criticize the Soviet government" in 1937-1938, the practice of using informers-provocateurs continued. So on October 23, 1938, the first secretary of the Stalingrad regional committee of the CPSU (b) A. Chuyanov sent a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) addressed to I.V. Stalin, in which he reported that the state of affairs in the NKVD bodies in the Stalingrad region was causing serious concern (141) .
The letter said that the bureau of the regional committee had considered the information of the head of Kotelnikovsky district department NKVD Yevdushenko dated October 16, 1938, which spoke about the counter-revolutionary work of the secretaries of the RK VKP (b), the chairman and secretary of the district executive committee and other workers of the district. After discussing this issue at the bureau of the regional committee, it was established and personally recognized by the head of the regional department, Yevdushenko, that the accusations brought by him against the regional leadership were slanderous. The provocative practice of Yevdushenko's work was also confirmed by the fact that he gave his secret collaborators (agents) clearly provocative assignments. So the secret officer Vasiliev gave the head of the NKVD district department exposing material on the landowner's son. After that, Yevdushenko told Vasiliev: “Let's organize a group of people who should be engaged in agitation against the Soviet government, and become their head of the organization. And whoever goes against the Soviet regime, they will join you, and you will denounce them to us, and we will ruin them.
Secret collaborator Vasiliev refused to create an anti-Soviet group. Then Yevdushenko beat him and said: “If you don’t want to kill people, then, you bastard, I myself will try to kill you. Bear in mind that you are a former dispossessed.” Five days passed, and Vasiliev disappeared to no one knows where. Further, the letter reported that in the practice of the regional department of the NKVD, during the investigation, methods of physical coercion were used against the arrested. They were beaten, and the continuous interrogations, during which the arrested stood, lasted for 2-3 days.
This is a letter from A. Chuyanov, head of the department of leading party bodies G.M. Malenkov sent the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs L.P. Beria. The further fate of the letter is unknown, but it gives a characteristic picture of the state of affairs in those years in the NKVD.
The "efficiency" of the work of scammers is characterized by this fact. At the end of 1937, Yezhov demanded that the NKVD of the regions and regions report on espionage and sabotage organizations that were uncovered with the help of workers and collective farmers. The results were discouraging. A typical cipher came on December 12, 1937 from the head of the Omsk NKVD: “There were no cases of espionage and sabotage Trotskyist-Bukharin and other organizations exposed on the initiative of collective farmers” (142) .
It should be noted that not all citizens performed their squealing "duty" flawlessly. In the book “I chose freedom”, Viktor Kravchenko cites the following episode: “The director of one enterprise once drove the mother of an “enemy of the people”, an old woman, in his car, after which his driver said: “Comrade director, I may be a son of a bitch , which should report everything that it sees and hears. But I swear by my own mother, I won't say a word this time. My mother is a simple woman, not such an intelligent lady. But I love her, and thank you, Viktor Andreevich, I speak like Russian - Russian. Indeed, no one found out about this incident, although the director was subsequently charged with various “serious crimes”. D0N09Ys came to the authorities not only from agents and informers-volunteers, but also from the heads of enterprises, heads of personnel departments and heads of special units. As an example, the report of the leaders of the Tomsk garment factory on January 29, 1938 to the city department of the NKVD about the arrested workers of the factory can be cited: “In the case of Glushkov I.P. we report the following: To manage the departments, workshops and construction of the Tomsk garment factory, Glushkov selected the staff from among class-hostile elements and unskilled forces, which led the factory to complete collapse. Who was in charge of the factory:
1. Glav, accountant Mogilevsky is an exclusively anti-Soviet element, a Kolchak man recommended for work by Burumov, an enemy of the people. Tried for violating credit reform. He was a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, from which he left as not agreeing with the party line.
2. Beginning Planning Department Petrov, the son of a kulak, whose father fraudulently made his way into the party of the CPSU (b), was expelled from the party and now withdrawn by the NKVD. Relatives have also been arrested. His brother is an officer.
3. Beginning cutting shop Stepanov, non-commissioned officer, dispossessed kulak. He fraudulently made his way into the party of the CPSU (b), from where he was expelled, now seized by the NKVD.
4. Commercial director Vorontsov, twice convicted in the past for counter-revolutionary cases, expelled from Moscow in 1930. Glushkov called from Barnaul to work. Currently hiding.
5. Chap. a construction engineer, he is also the chief mechanic Ermes, a foreign citizen who does not have a special education, just like Vorontsov, he was invited to work from Barnaul, finding shelter in Glushkov's apartment.
6. Head. cadres Roshchin, who twice crossed the Soviet border, lived in China and others like them.
Glushkov's activity was as follows: in connection with the expansion of the factory and an increase in its turnover, the resolution of the Presidium of the Tomsk City Council allowed the transfer of the factory to new buildings, for which a period of 20 days was given. Because of this, construction work and preparation of equipment for translation were required.”
The message was signed and about. factory director Nesteryanov, Kashkin's party organizer and head of the special. parts of Nizhevich.
Briefly about the persons involved in the report. I.P. Glushkov was arrested in 1937. Sentenced to 10 years in labor camp and 5 years of disqualification. N.T. Stepanov was arrested in December 1937. The case was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti. Released in January 1939. A.P. Roshchin was arrested in 1937. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence of the crime. Secondly arrested and shot in 1938. The situation at the enterprises at that time is also characterized by the report of the head of the special unit of the Tomsk garment factory to the city department of the NKVD about A.S. Demidova. August 5, 1938. Secret.
“Since August 1937, the Tomsk Garment Factory was hired as head. personnel Demidova Anna Stepanovna. As a member of the CPSU (b) party, at one time Demidova served as secretary of the party committee and, with the organization of district committees, was recalled to the Kuibyshev district committee. Due to the fact that Demidova was a relative of the former secretary of the city committee Malyshev, Demidova was recently expelled from the party, and from here she was removed from work. By order of the director of the garment factory Demidov, from August 1 of this year. enrolled in the position of personnel training.
From a conversation with Demidova, I established: Demidova's husband, whom she divorced in 1935, Nikanor Petrovich Mungalov, born in 1891, was a member of the CPSU (b) party from 1918 to 1923, was expelled for anti-party actions. For the second time from 1925 to 1927, as a candidate and from 27 to 37 a member, he was expelled from the party for the second time for anti-party talk, abuse of service and polygamy. Malyshev's wife is Demidova's sister. Please inform me if there are any obstacles to finding Demidova at the work of the factory as a head. staff training".
Beginning specialist. parts. Signature (Nizhevich). (Secretary of the Tomsk City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, M.F. Malyshev, was arrested in 1939. Sentenced to VMN with a replacement for 15 years of labor camp and 5 years of disqualification.) (143)
In those years, a person could become an informer involuntarily. In the early 50s, shortly before the death of the leader, Lidia Fedoseevna Timashuk (1898-1983), a cardiologist, head of the Department of Functional Diagnostics of the Kremlin's Lechsanupra, became such a "scammer". August 28, 1948 L.F. Timashuk, after taking a cardiogram from A. A. Zhdanov at his dacha, wrote down the diagnosis of "myocardial infarction" in the conclusion. However, well-known physicians, professors P.I. Egorov, V.N. Vinogradov and doctor G.I. Mayorov did not agree with this conclusion, forced her to rewrite the conclusion, excluding the word “heart attack” from it, and prescribed a treatment that was categorically contraindicated in a heart attack, which they did not find based on the clinical picture. Timashuk informed her superiors in writing about the incident. Since Lechsanupr was subordinate to the Ministry of State Security (MGB), she sent a letter to the head of the Main Security Directorate of the MGB. However, those not versed in medical matters MGB officers sent her letter to the one who, in her opinion, made the wrong diagnosis - the head of the Lechsanupra of the Kremlin, Yegorov. Professor Vinogradov demanded that Yegorov fire Timashuk. Yegorov summoned her, accused her of incompetence and transferred her to the 2nd polyclinic of Lechsanupra, where the patients were of a lower rank. In connection with the decrease, she had to write an explanatory note. “...28/VIII at about 12 noon A.A. ECG, filed which I diagnosed "myocardial infarction" in the region. left ventricle and interventricular septum, which she immediately informed the consultants about. Etc. Egorov and Dr. Mayorov they told me that this was an erroneous diagnosis and they did not agree with it, there was no heart attack in A.A., but there was a “functional disorder due to sclerosis and hypertension” and suggested that I rewrite the conclusion without pointing to “myocardial infarction” ...
29/VIII at A.A. repeated (after getting out of bed) a heart attack, and I was summoned from Moscow for the second time, but by order of Acad. Vinogradova, etc. Egorova ECG 29/VIII on the day of the heart attack was not done, but was scheduled for 30/VIII, and for the second time I was categorically asked to redo the conclusion, not indicating myocardial infarction ...
I think that the consultants and the attending physician Mayorov certainly underestimated serious condition AA, allowing him to get out of bed, walk in the park, go to the cinema, which caused a second attack and in the future can lead to a fatal outcome. Despite the fact that, at the insistence of my boss, I redid the ECG without indicating “myocardial infarction”, I remain of my opinion and insist on observing the strictest bed rest for A.A.”
After being transferred to the 2nd polyclinic, Timashuk sent two letters to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks A.A. Kuznetsov, where she repeated her arguments, but Kuznetsov did not answer her letters. August 31, 1948 A.A. Zhdanov is dead. During the autopsy of the body, Timashuk's diagnosis was confirmed, and the diagnosis of the attending physician and titled consultants turned out to be erroneous. At that time, no one found malicious intent in their actions.
Timashuk's letters were in the archive for four years. In August 1952, she was unexpectedly summoned to the MGB and asked to tell in detail what happened at Zhdanov's dacha shortly before his death. She told, and soon the arrests of doctors began. Under torture, one of the doctors accused in the case, Academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences V.N. Vinogradov. Timashuk's letter about the wrong treatment of A. A. Zhdanov was used by official Soviet propaganda in a campaign related to anti-Semitism and the cause of doctors.
January 20, 1953 L.F. Timashuk was awarded the Order of Lenin "for the assistance rendered to the Government in exposing murderous doctors." A month later, the Pravda newspaper published an article by Chechetkina “The Post of Lydia Timashuk”: “Not long ago we did not know this woman ... now the name of the doctor Lidia Fedoseevna Timashuk has become a symbol of Soviet patriotism, high vigilance, implacable, courageous struggle against the enemies of our Motherland. She helped unmask the American mercenaries, the monsters who used the doctor's white coat to kill Soviet people. The news about the awarding of L.F. Timashuk the highest award- the Order of Lenin - for help in exposing the thrice damned killer doctors, she flew around our country. Lidia Fedoseevna became a close and dear person for millions of Soviet people" (144).
After the death of Stalin and the closure of the “case of doctors”, the Decree on awarding Lydia Timashuk with the Order of Lenin was canceled. In 1954, she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, so the case could be considered closed, if not for a passage from Khrushchev’s report “On the cult of personality and its consequences” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, which said: “It should also be recalled "case of pest doctors". Actually, there was no “case”, except for the statement of the doctor Timashuk, who, perhaps under the influence of someone or at the direction (after all, she was an unspoken employee of the state security organs), wrote Stalin a letter in which she stated that the doctors allegedly used the wrong methods treatment." Thus, the next leader made Lydia Timashuk the only one responsible for the case of the “killer doctors”. She herself did not agree with this alignment and for many years tried to prove that she had been slandered. She was accepted into the Central Committee, reassured, but nothing was done to rehabilitate her in the eyes of society. In one of her letters to the Central Committee, Timashuk wrote: “Thirteen years have passed, and my position in society is still not clear, there is an opinion among the people that the “doctors case” arose because I supposedly slandered honest doctors and professors, thanks to what was created "the case of the doctors." These rumors continue to this day, constantly traumatizing me. Guide 4th Chapter. Management headed by prof. A.M. Markov in April 1964 told me that I could no longer remain in the position of head. department of functional diagnostics (despite the fact that the department I lead bears the title of “Communist Labor Brigade”), because professors who suffered in the 4th Directorate work, and they created such conditions for me that I was forced to retire. After I retired, I lost the opportunity to get an apartment, I was denied a reference for receiving a personal pension, etc. Having worked in the system of the 4th Chapter. Management 38 years old, I retired with a lot of undeserved resentment. After all, I am not only a doctor who devoted my whole life to serving the people and my beloved cause, I am a mother who raised her son - an officer of the Soviet Army, a fighter pilot, who, when performing combat mission, defending the Motherland, he received burns and injuries on a burning plane. Now he is an invalid of the Patriotic War of the 1st group, awarded the Order of the Patriotic War. I have grandchildren - schoolchildren, pioneers and Komsomol members, my husband is a doctor at the Central Military Hospital ... I will not describe how offensive and unfair reproaches I am subjected to when my name is pronounced, such a situation can no longer exist ”(145) .
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Stalin demanded not only submission, but also complicity. Hence the mental crisis that Pasternak so well described in 1937 in an oral conversation with Dr. Nilson:“... they once came to me ... with some kind of paper, where it was written that I approve the decision of the party to execute the generals. In a way, it was proof that they trusted me. They did not come to those who were on the list to be destroyed. My wife was pregnant. She was crying and begging me to sign this paper, but I couldn't. That day, I weighed everything and tried to establish how much chance I have of staying alive. I was convinced that I would be arrested - and my turn came. I was ready for it. All this blood was hateful to me, I could no longer endure it. But nothing happened. As it turned out later, my colleagues saved me indirectly. No one dared to report to the higher authorities that I refused to put my signature.
Such moral greatness was available to few. Everyone was isolated. What did the silent individual protest mean compared to the gigantic rallies that approved the execution of the generals and at which shouts were heard:
"Dog death!" - in relation to the leaders of the opposition? How could the secret oppositionist know whether the speakers were sincere or not? There was no sign of opposition or even neutrality. Everything was drowning in mass imitation of enthusiasm. Even the children and relatives of the convicts publicly disowned their parents.
Destruction family ties It was conscious purpose Stalin. When, in November 1938, Stalin liquidated the Komsomol leadership headed by Kosarev, he complained that the organization "lacked vigilance." According to Stalin, the Komsomol paid too much attention to the implementation of the charter, which proclaims this organization a political school for future communists. Stalin believed that a good young communist needed not political training, but the qualities of an enthusiastic informer.
Many denunciations were made out of fear. Any person who heard a carelessly spoken word and did not report it could pay the price himself. Party members who could not find "enemies of the people" among their acquaintances were "worked out" at meetings for "lack of vigilance." Sometimes this happened: a conversation between old acquaintances suddenly became too frank and ended with the fact that they denounced each other. Only old, trusted friends could carry on conversations that deviated even slightly from the official line.
The selection was very thorough. Ilya Erenburg tells in his memoirs that his daughter had a poodle who learned to close the living room door as soon as the conversation of the guests became muffled. He received a piece of sausage for his vigilance and learned to accurately recognize the nature of the conversation.
But not all conscientious citizens performed their squealing duty flawlessly. In his book I Chose Freedom, Kravchenko cites the following episode: “The director of one enterprise once drove the mother of an “enemy of the people”, an old woman, in his car, after which his driver said: “Comrade director, I may be a son of a bitch who should report everything he sees and hears. But I swear by my own mother, I won't say a word this time. My mother is a simple woman, not such an intelligent lady. But I love her, and thank you, Viktor Andreevich, I speak like Russian - Russian. Indeed, no one found out about this incident, although the director was subsequently charged with various “serious crimes”.
If Nazism contributed to the release of sadistic instincts, establishing this by legislative order, then Stalinist totalitarianism automatically encouraged meanness and spitefulness. Even today in the press you can come across notes about "especially conscious" citizens who report to the police about the misconduct (true or imagined) of their fellow citizens and as a result achieve their deportation to remote areas.
In Stalin's time, this was a common practice. Schemers who cause squabbles at home and at work, anonymous letter writers, etc., can cause trouble in any society. Under Stalin, these people prospered.
The activity of scammers has grown to incredible proportions. There were frequent reports in Soviet newspapers that, for example, one person reported on 69 people, and another - on 100, etc. In one of the cities, a member of the party "exposed" his entire organization.
At the 18th Party Congress, when the "excesses" committed during the purges were subjected to belated and partial criticism, the story of one informer about how he managed to get the removal of fifteen secretaries of local party organizations was announced. Another well-known slanderer from Minsk, as reported at the congress, “made the following request: “I have run out of strength in the fight against enemies, and therefore I am asking for a ticket to the resort.” (Loud laughter)".
Some completely delusional denunciations led to incredible results, anonymous letters were just malicious inventions, but they achieved their goal. Here is an example: a certain Silakov deserted from the Red Army and then surrendered.
He said that he planned to raid the post office to get money for a terrorist organization, but then decided to voluntarily give himself into the hands of the Soviet authorities. This was not enough for the NKVD. Silakov was properly beaten, and after that another version was developed, in which not only he and his friends appeared, but the whole military unit. At the head of the conspiracy was now not Silakov, but his commander.
They intended to carry out terrorist attacks against members of the government. Almost the entire unit, from the commander to the drivers, was arrested, many of them along with their wives. Both of Silakov's sisters, his old sick mother and his father, were also involved in the case. They even brought in an uncle who saw his nephew only once, but he was a non-commissioned officer in the tsarist army. According to the new version, the uncle turned into a "tsarist general."
This ridiculous case was inflated to such an extent that “there was not a single cell left in the Minsk prison where a person connected with the Silakov conspiracy was not sitting.” After the fall of Yezhov, Silakov and all the convicts along with him were interrogated anew. They were given the opportunity to withdraw their testimony. Some did not agree to this, fearing a trap, and then they had to be spoken to differently. These people by force forced to retract their false confession of guilt in a crime that threatened them with the death penalty. As a result, Silakov himself was sentenced to three years in prison, but only for desertion.
But snitching flourished not only on an amateur voluntary basis. The NKVD everywhere organized a special network of "sexots" (secret employees), who were recruited from the local population.
Sexots were divided into two groups: the first included volunteers - frank scumbags and spiteful critics who wanted to annoy their friends, and "idealists" who were confident that they were working for the good of the "Cause". The second group consisted of coercive seksots; often these people were promised to alleviate the fate of their relatives in prison. They hoped that they would tell the truth and not cause trouble for their friends. But it was self-deception: the pressure became stronger and stronger.
Sexot, who did not supply information, was automatically taken under suspicion. And as the population as a whole learned to keep its mouth shut, informers had to increasingly report harmless deeds and words, interpret in their own way, or simply invent, in order to satisfy the thirst for conspiracies that was overwhelming the NKVD.
In the memoirs of eyewitnesses there is a story about how one sexot became a convinced communist. He was unable to join the party due to past ties to the White Army, and therefore decided to serve the cause of communism in the only way he could. At first, he tried to maintain impartiality. He was just doing his duty, which is always nice. When he managed to overcome remorse, personal inclinations and dislikes, he felt like a real hero. But hints of hostility towards the government were not enough.
The NKVD officers, of course, knew perfectly well that a wide section of the population fell into this category, and they demanded new specific information. Seksot tried to resist, but was himself accused of hiding the facts. And he began to "interpret" the overheard conversations in his own way, until any distinction between truth and falsehood was erased from his mind. But even so, he was in bad standing because he tried to maintain a semblance of persuasiveness in his denunciations. His fabrications seemed too restrained to the authorities, and he himself was arrested.
Any report on the work of a Soviet institution, research institute, etc., even before the Great Terror, suggests that life in it was a tangle of intrigues. The same can probably be said about many other countries. But the means available to the intriguer under Soviet conditions made him much more dangerous. In order to advance, it was necessary to "compromise".
Others, seek their expulsion from the party, and often their arrest. It was a common way of promotion. The object could be a rival whose position seemed too strong, or one of his subordinates, with the help of which it was possible to denigrate the boss. According to the most rough estimates, every fifth employee of a Soviet institution in those years was in one form or another an NKVD informer.
Stalin steadily smashed all forms of solidarity, comradeship, with the exception of those created on the basis of personal devotion to himself. Terror completely destroyed personal trust. The most affected, of course, were the organizational and collective ties that still existed in the country after 18 years of one-party rule.
The most powerful and important organization that required commitment to itself, to its ideals, was the party, or, more precisely, its pre-Stalinist composition. Then the army. Then the intelligentsia, which was rightly considered a potential bearer of heretical ideas. All these group "commitments" aroused a particularly violent reaction.
But when Stalin began to act against the whole people as such, he was completely logical. Only by such methods could society be fragmented, destroy all trust and all devotion, with the exception of devotion to himself and his proteges.
Only the most bosom friends could hint to each other about disagreement with official views (and even then not always). The average Soviet citizen could not determine the extent to which the official lie "works". Such a person thought that he probably belonged to a scattered and helpless minority, that Stalin had won his battle by destroying the notion of truth in the minds of the people.
But not everyone attributed the blame to Stalin. He always knew how to stay in the background, deceiving even people like Pasternak and Meyerhold. And if minds of this caliber (albeit not of a political cast) were misled, then it is clear that similar ideas were widespread. The fear and hatred of the whole country then concentrated on Yezhov ...
