Chekists under Fire: The KPK Case

The KPK case would play a large role in the fate of the Odessa Chekists. State security workers began to fabricate this case after the late January 1938 visit to the oblast UNKVD of G.

The reaction of Chekists against this potential threat was lightning fast and deadly. On 4 February 1938, Berenzon began a covert case (labeled “Untouchables”) against Samarin, after which Kaliuzhnyi received permission from the Chief of the UNKVD, Fedorov, to arrest Samarin and a series of KPK plenipotentiaries. Aside from Samarin, D. M. Kanfer-Berkovich, G. A. Aleksandrov, A. M. Agranskii, V. F. Sorokovik, A. A. Ivanov, and F. F. Vasiurenko were also arrested as part of this case. The arrests of the KPK workers were conducted over the month of February 1938, subsequent to which “no KPK worker was even permitted into the Obl[ast] UNKVD, motivated by the notion that there was a preponderance of enemies of the people in the KPK.”¹⁸ After a lengthy investigation, all these individuals were convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR as members of a Trotskyite group. Samarin was sentenced to be shot on 23 September 1938; the same fate awaited Aleksandrov, Agranskii, Kanfer-Berkovich, and Sorokovik on 10 October 1938. Ivanov and Vasiurenko were sentenced to fifteen years in the camps.

Had the KPK case been limited to the arrest and conviction of these individuals, it is likely that the Chekists would not have had to subsequently answer for their actions in court. On 29 May 1938, however, one more KPK investigator was arrested, S.

Shpak became a true nightmare for the Chekists and a revelation for the investigation into the former Chief of the SPO of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD that was at that moment already underway. A capable witness, Shpak had the ability during his time in detention to communicate with nearly all of the arrested party functionaries. Following his release from prison, he used his party connections to seek if not the conviction then at least the ouster and expulsion from the party of the more odious UNKVD workers. His sharp criticism was limited to the “rotten” falsifiers in the NKVD and did not touch on the broader system of power. He raised no doubts as to the necessity of repression in general against enemies of Soviet power.

Shpak was far from alone. By November 1938, the First Section of the SPO of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD had several fabricated cases in process against a series of Odessa party functionaries in which investigations had not yet been completed. The accused in these cases were ultimately released at the end of the 1938–1939 period and came forward with allegations against the NKVD. The cases involved workers from the Financial Department of the oblast government administration including its former chief, I. F. Senkevich;²⁰ the workers of the newspapers Black Sea Commune and Bolshevik Banner including the former head of the Black Sea Commune Department of Culture, M. S. Eidel’man;²¹ the former head of the Kolkhoz Organizational Sector (orgkolkhoznyi sector) of the Odessa Oblast Land Department, M. B. Barger;²² the former Chair of the Odessa City Council and Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, I. F. Iakubits;²³ the former instructor of the Odessa Oblast Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, A.

The victims under investigation in Odessa were subjected to practically the entire arsenal of investigatory methods used during the mass operations: hours-long “standings” (vystoiki) and “sittings” (vysidki), “conveyor-belt” (konveiernye) interrogations, beatings, and vulgar insults (maternye rugani). Interrogators spat in their faces, screamed in their ears, put out cigarettes on them, deprived them of food and water, threatened their relatives, staged mock executions, and used the false testimony of “pro forma witnesses” (shtatnye sviditeli), including those gathered from secret agents and informers.

Even more important, these newly freed party members’ testimonies portrayed UNKVD workers as having lost all perspective on their proper place (o svoëm real’nom meste) in the hierarchy of Communist power, convinced of their infallibility and imagining themselves as standing above the formal trappings of legality and the party itself. They charged these workers with seeking to discredit and “crush” the party by putting themselves—without any oversight—above the ruling system. The former suspect N. A. Mosalev testified regarding the investigator Berenzon: “At my references to the decision of the February-March Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Berenzon responded, ‘wipe your ass with it [podotris’].’ ”²⁶ Investigator Abramovich, in answer to detainee Teplitskii’s request for a meeting with the procurator, gestured to his genitals, stating, “here is your procurator.”²⁷ Barger was repeatedly told by his investigator, “Why are you sitting like a putz, this ain’t the Oblast Committee for you,” “the NKVD is not a charity.”²⁸ Meanwhile, Senkevich declared that when Abramovich spoke of the party he never pronounced the word “secretary” (sekretar’) as anything other than “shitretery” (srakatar’).²⁹

This “verbal” (slovesnyi) arsenal reflected a perception by Chekists of a new stasis having come together as a result of the Great Terror and, likewise, their new place in the system of power.

Once, in [N. I.] Burkin’s office, Berenzon declared in regard to the Oblast Committee and KPK that “They’ve trained all sorts of shit to come here and demand files.”... Displeased at discussions held with him in the personnel department during his appointment and confirmation as chief of the district department of the NKVD... Berenzon stated, “What are they, my mother, to talk to me like that?... You’re beating detainees... who gave them the right, they know me, I have served through two Oblast Committees, it is not correct to speak to me like that.”³⁰

The disruption in the balance of power between the NKVD and the Communist Party was also manifested in such a sensitive issue as the collection of compromising materials against party functionaries for the purpose of recruiting future secret agents. Irrespective of the 26 December 1938 decree of the NKVD USSR “On the prohibition of the recruitment [of secret agents] from several categories of workers in party, soviet, economic, professional, and public organizations,” Odessa Chekists continued to investigate members of the party-state elite. P. S. Kononchuk stated in his handwritten testimony of 20 December 1939 that “Abramovich and Berenzon spoke out in displeasure against the decree of the People’s Commissar forbidding the placing of covert operatives in party organizations.”³¹ However, it was not only rank-and-file NKVD workers who had no plans of renouncing their usual methods of work. Gaponov confessed in February 1940 that he had evidence regarding the moral corruption (moral’no-bytovoe razlozhenie) of the new Chief of the UNKVD, A.

Newly released representatives of the party-state elite played a major role in the judicial proceedings against Chekists. It is practically impossible to imagine repressed priests or “nationalists” convicted by troikas—whose fate did not worry Communists—in their place as witnesses. Such a weighty role for freed party members in Beria’s purge of the NKVD organs was no accident. While casting no doubt on the main goals of the mass operations, these party members were able to sound the alarm to the center regarding the thoroughly disturbed balance in the hierarchy of power and the necessity of a campaign to establish discipline at all levels of the organs of state security. It was precisely these individuals who personified the “restored” Soviet order and triumph of legality.