Defense Tactics of Chekists under Investigation and Prosecution
The campaign to restore socialist legality unfolded with the arrest and conviction of only two of the eight subjects of this chapter. On 19 April 1939, Kaliuzhnyi was arrested. By that time, he had become acting chief of the Ninth Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD.
He was charged with conducting groundless arrests, fabricating nonexistent counterrevolutionary organizations, and providing his own targets quotas for arrests to subordinates. The Military Tribunal for Kiev Military District Troops, held from 23 to 26 December 1940 in the building of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD, sentenced Kaliuzhnyi to death, though his sentence was later commuted to ten years in the camps.40 Tiagin, as Kaliuzhnyi’s closest confidant, was arrested on the same day as Kaliuzhnyi on charges of exposing NKVD methods, fabricating counterrevolutionary organizations, and falsifying investigatory materials. On 25 August 1939, he was convicted by the Military Tribunal for Odessa NKVD Troops under statute 206-17 (a) of the criminal code of Ukraine and sentenced to seven years’ confinement in the camps without forfeiture of his rights.41For the remaining six “perpetrators of excesses” (peregibshchiki), the situation was at first not entirely bad. They were all forced out of the Odessa UNKVD, but they remained free; moreover, most continued their service. Gnesin successfully passed through two special reviews in August 1938 and February 1939. Only on 4 April 1940 was he dismissed from the NKVD, by a resolution of the Bureau of the Odessa Oblast Party Committee citing his “use of perverse methods of conducting investigations against subsequently rehabilitated detainees and falsification of cases under investigation.”42 By a 17 December 1940 decision of the Bureau of the Odessa Oblast Party Committee, Gnesin was likewise expelled from candidacy for party membership.
The main role in Gnesin’s dismissal from the NKVD was played by an Odessa Oblast Party member, Laiok, who, in Gnesin’s phrasing, spent a whole year essentially “hunting” him after receiving complaints from party members.43Gaponov was dismissed from the NKVD by a 19 April 1939 order of the Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, A. Z. Kobulov.44 Following his dismissal, Gaponov worked as the chief of a telephone station in Odessa. Remaining in Odessa proved to be a tactical error on his part. On 24 July 1940, the Bureau of the Stalin District Party Committee expelled him from the Communist Party; meanwhile, the leading figure in the complaints against him was, again, Shpak.45
While Gaponov was expelled from the party, Abramovich, having been sent to serve in the Gulag system in the Far East, was conversely accepted into the party in 1940. In the second half of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, he had already risen to work as a section chief in the Third Department of the Amur Labor Camp for the Far Eastern Krai. From May 1940, he worked as the chief of the Second Section of the State Security Administration (UGB) of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast UNKVD. Kordun remained in the Odessa Oblast UNKVD until November 1938, after which, in December, he was appointed to the position of a sector chief of the Iagrin labor camp; from 1 March 1940 to January 1941, he worked as the chief of a brick factory for NKVD construction project No. 203 located in the Archangelsk Oblast city of Molotov (Severodvinsk). Berenzon was dismissed from the NKVD in July 1939, but the following year became the political director of the 15th Auto-Transport Battalion based at the time in Stanislav (Ivano Frankivsk). Mashkovskii was relieved of his duties on 2 July 1939 on account of “the impossibility of further employment in the organs of the NKVD,” possibly because he was Polish.
In the summer of 1940, there was a sharp turn in the fate of the former workers of the SPO in the Odessa Oblast UNKVD.
Per a 7 June 1940 resolution from the assistant military procurator, Barinov, of the Kiev Special NKVD Military District, the case regarding Gaponov and his subordinates was split off from the Kaliuzhnyi case.46The new investigation developed slowly, however. In December 1940, Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR I. A. Serov agreed with the opinion of NKVD investigators that Gaponov did not have any part in the KPK case and thus it was sufficient to leave the matter with his dismissal from the NKVD.47 Yet the implacability of the procurators overcame the opinion of Beria’s deputy. Consequently, Gaponov was arrested on 16 January 1941 in Taganrog; Gnesin on 25 January 1941 in Odessa; Kordun on 28 January 1941 in Molotovsk; Abramovich on 5 February 1941 in Birobidzhan; and Berenzon on 3 March 1941 in Stanislav. Mashkovskii was also arrested at some point in early 1941. The looming war added its own correctives in the subsequent unfolding of events. All the suspects were convoyed to Siberia, to Prison No. 3 in Tomsk where, with the exception of Gaponov, they remained until March 1943, at which point they were transferred to Prison No. 1 in Novosibirsk in anticipation of their trial, which would be held in April 1943.
The materials of the judicial inquests regarding Kaliuzhnyi and Tiagin are less reflective of the campaign for the restoration of “socialist legality” than those against Gaponov and his “Gaponovites.” First, Kaliuzhnyi was considered during the proceedings to be a protege of Grechukhin and Uspenskii who, for their part, had given testimony against him as having participated in a conspiracy against the NKVD, as opposed to the accusation of “violations of socialist legality” that more often featured in the Beria purge. Second, in these cases “internal” NKVD documents figured more prominently than witness testimony from Communists.
Finding themselves under investigation and then prosecution, the Odessa Chekists employed three defensive tactics.
The first was the denial of personal culpability, ascribing all guilt to superiors, peers, and also (relatively rarely) local party organs. This was a natural response, as these Chekists found themselves in a situation where they were faced with the task of answering for having executed official orders coming directly from Moscow and Kiev. Thus, Kaliuzhnyi, for example, was accused of “establishing target quotas for the arrest of citizens.” Repression quotas, a key element of the mass operations, mutated unexpectedly into the personal criminal initiatives of individual provincial NKVD leaders.In transferring guilt onto higher leadership, the suspects all sketched a largely accurate picture of the harsh pressures exerted on practically all levels of the state security apparatus during the mass operations. Here, the youngest and least experienced had a certain kind of advantage before the court. Gnesin, who at age twenty-one had been mobilized into the security organs in March 1938 by a decision of the Odessa Oblast Committee of the Komsomol, described in a petition to Khrushchev the course of his “socialization” in the ranks of the NKVD. He said that he had not learned anything but vulgarity and beatings.48
The Chekists preferred not to speak about the role of the leadership of the Communist Party so as to not put themselves in danger. However, they occasionally “slipped up [progovarivalis’],” demonstrating that they understood perfectly who sanctioned and oversaw mass repressions. Gaponov, for example, stated at the beginning of 1940, “Was it not the [Party] Oblast Committee personified in its secretary, Teleshev, that held the city in the grip of fear and horror; was it not he who slandered Chernits, Shpak, and Berger, who sanctioned the arrests of Communists including in the KPK and ‘Black Earth Commune’ [cases], who but him?”49
The second defensive tactic used by these Chekists involved contesting the accusations against them by denying and minimizing the crimes they had committed.
One part of this strategy was the effort to discredit witnesses among released suspects; another part was to represent themselves as champions of the fight against “fraud [lipachi]” in their own ranks. Thus, Gnesin admitted that he conducted “lengthy interrogations of detainees [for up to] 15 to 20 hours” and acknowledged “insulting and using vulgarities against detainees,” but no more. Supposedly, he beat detainees only once, as part of a group, having received orders from above. In his 14 December 1940 statement to military procurator P. V. Lekhov, Gaponov also acknowledged two beatings, but claimed they had the sanction of higher authorities.50 Abramovich had allegedly written to Stalin regarding the disgraces transpiring in the administration, but Gaponov claimed the mantle of superiority in the restoration of socialist legality. He assured investigators in February 1940 that immediately after the directive of 17 November 1938, he informed the Secretary of the Odessa Oblast Party Committee and the Politburo of the Communist Party of Ukraine about the state of affairs and “transpiring disgraces” on the second day after the arrest of Kiselev and “canceled the decision of two or three troikas, returning the cases for further investigation.”51 Gaponov also said he “personally and immediately undertook an investigation of the Third Department’s group case against 100 Red Partisans and proved their detention to be groundless... [thus exposing] the destructive practices of Tiagin, Makievskii, Aizman, Rybakov, and Raev and flagging several of them for prosecution.”52 Despite the supposedly robust activity toward the freeing of innocent detainees that the Chekists undertook in 1939, they had no doubt as to the rectitude and necessity of the mass operations as whole. The Chekists readily acknowledged “insignificant” violations of the law, which, they claimed, served a worthy purpose in the fight against enemies of the people. They rejected all other accusations unequivocally.The third defense tactic employed by the Chekists was an attempt to demonstrate to investigators and jurists that they were and remained faithful Stalinists. They insisted on their loyal service in the Cheka and their allegiance to the party. Such pronouncements were made, as a rule, at a high emotional register. On 22 April 1941, Abramovich wrote: “I ask for Stalinist truth. Forgive me my beloved motherland! Forgive me Komsomol, my teacher. Forgive me my beloved party, which took me into its ranks two years ago. An innocent Communist is going to his death—a thirty-two-year-old worker, a caster. Long live Communism! Long live the Great Stalin! I ask [you] to remember that I deserve punishment, but not execution.”53
The defensive tactics of these NKVD operatives under investigation and prosecution are a testament to the fact that Chekists who found themselves among the “perpetrators of excesses” ultimately counted on the authorities to not severely punish them for undue cruelty to “enemies of the people.” And on the whole, this is indeed what happened. Nevertheless, firm measures for disciplining NKVD personnel proved necessary as there turned out to be too many individuals among their ranks partial to “excesses” and unwilling to give up the new position Chekists had taken in the hierarchy of power as a result of the Great Terror.