“All of Vinnitsa Is Talking about This Person”
In the course of investigations into violations of socialist legality, as well as the confirmation of candidates for the NKVD, the systematic beatings of detainees and staging of executions became widely known.
Victims and their families wrote copious complaints, statements, and letters to a wide variety of Communist Party, state, and NKVD offices at all levels of the regional hierarchy. In Vinnitsa, former Zionists, Bund members, and Red Partisans and their relatives provided documentation for the investigations. All these persons had in the past participated in the revolutionary movement, and Red Partisans had been categorized as participants of armed units fighting for Soviet power during the years of the revolution. Mass operations were conducted against these groups in 1938. On 13 and 14 August and then on 26 August, a special collegium of the Vinnitsa Oblast Court meeting in the prison building sentenced many of these individuals to be shot. In the course of the trial, former Red Partisans refused to acknowledge their guilt and demanded that Chekist investigators be expelled from the room. Defendant K. P. Borisov declared that the “participation of these executioners, agents of Hitler, does not frighten anyone, and the accused will tell the truth.” Following the verdict, the victims and their relatives wrote a large number of letters to various organs of the party and state regarding the injustice of their sentences. On 16 November, the Supreme Court of the USSR commuted the death sentences of these people to ten years in concentration camps, though many of these individuals continued to demand a re-examination of their cases.A significant share of petitions was addressed to the Chief Procurator of the USSR, A. Vyshinskii. Along with his request for a re-examination of his case, Borisov reported that during his interrogation, investigators Antonov and Gunia had conducted a staged execution.
On 7 January 1939, F. Ia. Shvarts wrote to Stalin, stating that her husband E. I. Shvarts was arrested, forced to confess to counterrevolutionary activity under torture, and sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to ten years in a concentration camp. She reported that her husband was beaten by interrogators V. F. Maistruk and F. Reshetnikov (actually Reshetilo) of the Vinnitsa Oblast NKVD Administration and the “trial itself was a violation of the Great Stalin Constitution.”
Fig. 1.2 V. F. Maistruk, from November 1937 to May 1939 head of a sector and then department of the Administration of State Security of the Vinnitsa Oblast NKVD. Photo from about 1952, HDA SBU, f. 12, spr. 9179, tom 1, obkladnik. By exclusive permission of the State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine.
On 8 March 1939, Vinnitsa resident M. G. Bruskin wrote to Vyshinskii from a distant labor camp in the far north, requesting a re-examination of his case. He claimed that the Vinnitsa UNKVD had fabricated his case. He wrote further that, “For all the years of my membership in the Communist Party I never thought about my personal life, all of my ideals, all of my life was dedicated to the party of Lenin-Stalin and Soviet power.... I ask that you re-examine my case, establish my innocence and return me from this distant camp.”50
Heightened scrutiny from the Oblast and City Party committees elicited testimony regarding the arrests and convictions of party and state workers. It emerged that Koroblev’s co-workers, Prishivtsyn, Reder, and L. N. Shirin, were actively engaged in the falsification of investigatory materials regarding this group and savagely beat them, aiming to elicit confessions of espionage and other hostile activity. In early August 1938, Reder presented a list of between forty and forty-five Communist Party and Komsomol workers to the detained Third Secretary of the Vinnitsa City Komsomol Committee, N.
Vasilenko, demanding that he confirm in writing that the individuals were members of a counterrevolutionary youth group.51 First on the list was the G. Mishchenko, the First Secretary of the Vinnitsa Oblast Committee of the Communist Party who had been elected only in May. Reder could not have carried out such actions without Korablev and Prishivtsyn’s approval.On 22 June 1939, Reder was arrested and, on 23 June, a closed meeting of the Party Organization of the Vinnitsa UNKVD was held “Regarding violations in the conduct of investigation by the former NKVD administration operative and party member Reder.” The party meeting became one of the key moments of the political campaign around the condemnation of violations of the law and the erection of party oversight over the organs of the NKVD in Vinnitsa Oblast. All speakers condemned the violations, particularly the methods of physical coercion employed against detainees. NKVD workers referred to the room where mass beatings and tortures took place as the “laboratory.” It was Reder who continuously held a key to this room.
At the meeting it was underscored that Reder and Shirin “specialized” in party workers, staging something akin to a hunt against highly placed members of the party with the aim of showing their treacherous activity. Of course, they also hoped to receive awards and promotions for their efforts. By the end of June 1939, however, the situation had entirely changed. Communist Party members like Saprykin, Fuks, and Mezhbein, who had been arrested under Reder’s orders, were released and wrote to the First Secretary of the Oblast Party Committee regarding the illegalities that had taken place. In the Vinnitsa City Party Committee, “Reder was spoken of as an animal.” Kostarzhevskii spoke about the purpose of the party meeting: “The crux is that we need to, now, uncover everything that went on under the leadership of Reder. It is a matter of an individual who in the given case has wholly discredited the organs of the NKVD.
All of Vinnitsa is talking about this person. This person has no place in our collective.” Reder was condemned by everyone in attendance. On 28 July 1939, he hanged himself in his jail cell in Kiev.52The staff of the Vinnitsa UNKVD affirmed its subordination to the Communist Party and the correctness of its line, condemning both the “violations of legality” and the individuals who had dishonored the NKVD. These cadres were now held to be enemies. “Purging itself” of them, the collective was ready to carry on the fight against enemies, but using “more legal methods.”
Following the investigations of Reder’s case, evidence regarding Prishivtsyn, Shirin, and other Vinnitsa Chekists was sent to Kobulov. On 9 August, the Assistant Division Chief in the Third Department of the Vinnitsa UNKVD, I. G. Vodkin, was arrested for employing illegal methods of interrogation and fabricating investigatory documents. On 19 September, his case was closed, but on 29 November the Military Tribunal of the Kiev Special Military Okrug directed his case to be investigated further.
On 2 February 1940, Zaputriaev was arrested in connection with this matter. The direct participation of Korablev in baseless arrests, illegal methods of interrogation, and the fabrication of investigatory documents was uncovered. On 21 December 1939, materials against Zaputriaev, Korablev, and other former staff were forwarded to NKVD USSR for the purpose of obtaining arrest warrants and bringing the guilty to justice. On 19 April 1940, while the matter was being decided in Moscow, the Military Tribunal in Kiev convicted and sentenced the operative plenipotentiary, Vodkin, to five years’ imprisonment and forfeiture of his title as Sergeant of State Security.
Korablev was arrested on 28 May in Moscow and transferred to Kiev on 5 June. His investigation lasted over six months. On 7 February 1941, the new Commissar of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, I. A. Serov, confirmed the indictment against Korablev and Zaputriaev. Korablev, it was said, unquestioningly carried out the orders of the “subsequently unmasked enemy of the people Uspenskii in connection with the treasonous activity of an antisoviet conspiratorial organization existing within the organs of the NKVD.” Korablev and Zaputriaev carried out mass groundless arrests. On Korablev’s orders, Shirin and Reder put group interrogation into practice in the so-called Laboratory. Regarding the accusations presented, Korablev fully acknowledged his guilt, proclaiming, however, that at that time he did not consider his actions to be criminal. Zaputriaev did not acknowledge his guilt, but did admit to having countenanced “individual mistakes” in 1938. On 16 April 1941, the Ukrainian republic NKVD confirmed the indictments of Korablev, Zaputriaev, and Shirin.53