Gaponov: Executioner and Victim of the Great Terror

Sergei Ivanovich Gaponov was a “chemically pure” type of Chekist, demonstrative of NKVD leaders during the Great Terror. Gaponov was born on 9 August 1908 in the city of Enakievo in Bakhmut Uezd of Ekaterinoslav Gubernia.

The beginnings of Gaponov’s collaboration with the organs of state security are connected with his study at the “Young Metalworker [Iunyi metallist]” School of Factory Apprenticeship (FZU) where there existed a circle of young Trotskyites. Local Chekists recruited him first to uncover “several dozen Trotskyites conducting substantive Trotskyite work in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, and Moscow,” and by April 1928, he was already working directly with the County (okrug) Department of the State Political Administration (GPU) as a valuable informer.⁵⁵ At the command of his Chekist overseers, Gaponov allowed himself to be expelled from the Komsomol and Party candidacy and, moreover, was subsequently arrested in the course of the final obliteration of Dnepropetrovsk Trotskyites. Almost immediately thereafter, he was hired officially by the Dnepropetrovsk County Department of the GPU and reinstated into the party.

The twenty-year-old Gaponov began openly serving as a Chekist in May 1929 in the capacity of a supplementary archivist (sverkhshatnyi arkhivarius) in the Dnepropetrovsk County Department of the OGPU.

Gaponov’s career took off in 1937 when young operative workers began to be massively promoted into leadership work. On 25 May, Gaponov was appointed acting assistant to the Chief of the Third Section of the SPO of the Vinnitsa Oblast UNKVD, where he proved himself an effective investigator who personally elicited the confessions of more than ten detainees.⁵⁷ On 1 October 1937, he was promoted to Kamenets-Podolsky Oblast, where he worked as a section chief and deputy chief of the UNKVD SPO. Here he managed to “uncover” an organization of the Ukrainian Communist Party consisting of seventy-five people who subsequently were sentenced to be shot.⁵⁸

At the end of March 1938, Gaponov was sent back to Kiev where he became the Deputy Chief of the First Section of the SPO of the Ukrainian republic NKVD and, from 4 April, acting chief of the Sixth Section of the SPO, making him a visible figure at the republic level.

Gaponov inherited a difficult situation from his predecessors—not only a mass of incomplete cases but also a horrific torture chamber known as the “TsAD” (Tsentral’nyi arestnyi dom, or Central Detention Building).⁶⁰ Gaponov’s time as chief turned out to be short-lived. On 15 January 1939, the new leadership of the Ukrainian republic NKVD promoted former district Party committee secretary A. I. Starovoit to lead the UNKVD.⁶¹ Gaponov remained as his deputy and on 7 March 1939 moved back to serving as an SPO chief. In this role, he would work on the most politically sensitive cases.

Despite his significant operative experience, Gaponov quickly came to be perceived as an undesirable element in the NKVD system. His close relatives, including his wife, had been labeled unreliable. His colleagues would underscore this in deciding Gaponov’s fate.⁶² Following a 19 April 1939 order from Deputy People’s Commissar of the Ukrainian republic NKVD A. Z. Kobulov, Gaponov was dismissed and transferred to work in the NKVD oblast signal service (sistema oblastnoi sviazi).

The harsh posture taken by party authorities in examining his personnel file played a negative role in deciding Gaponov’s fate. As an individual unwilling to acknowledge his complicity in the liquidation of “faithful Communists,” he was expelled from the party on 24 July 1940 for violations of legality and for not being forthright in discussing his “mistakes.”⁶³ On 16 January 1941, Gaponov was arrested under statute 206 of the Criminal Code and detained for over a year. At the beginning of July 1941, the Military Tribunal for Kiev Military District NKVD Troops held a preliminary sitting devoted to the case, but due to the war, it was put on hold and Gaponov was sent to a prison in Tomsk.⁶⁴ There, he was able to exploit the appointment to head of the Novosibirsk Oblast UNKVD of L.

Gaponov was freed on 14 March 1942 at the initiative of the Novosibirsk Oblast UNKVD. Immediately after his release, he began to petition for reinstatement in operative work. By 19 March, a resolution from Malinin had already appeared in response to Gaponov’s appeals, stating, “It is necessary to collect all materials and come to a decision on the matter of rehabilitation.” That same day, Gaponov was hired to work in the Administration of Reform Labor Camps and Colonies (UITLK) of the Novosibirsk Oblast NKVD, where he was charged with organizing the search for escaped inmates. Seven of his old Odessa colleagues promised Moscow that Gaponov was a responsible and faithful Chekist.⁶⁶

Nevertheless, the military procurators in Novosibirsk were not ready to come to terms with the suspension of the case against Gaponov. On 17 December 1942, they ordered that he be detained once more. The Military Tribunal of Western Siberian District NKVD Troops in Tomsk could not, however, begin examining the case of Gaponov, Kordun, Abramovich, Berenzon, Mashkovskii, and Gnesin on 25 January 1943 as scheduled because Gaponov was, from autumn 1942, deployed as an active agent of the UNKVD. Berenzon was transferred from Tomsk to Reform Labor Colony (ITK) No. 6 and was likewise not delivered for the session. The case was briefly paused, although the procurators soon succeeded in bringing Gaponov and Berenzon into court. The indictment against them underscored their use of “medieval” and “inquisitorial” torture. Gaponov and his accomplices denied the testimony of witnesses and stressed their loyalty to the NKVD and Soviet power.⁶⁷ During the war years, judges generally sent convicted Chekists to the front, and so it was in this case. Having received lengthy sentences on 26 April 1943, the defendants were immediately amnestied and sent into active military duty.

Over the course of his entire Chekist career, Gaponov demonstrated behavior typical of workers in the organs of state security. Perceiving his role as a warrior of the “party’s leading armed detachment” operating at the front lines of the battle against the class enemy—and, simultaneously, as a vulnerable, expendable cog of the great punitive machine—contributed to the characteristic deformations of Gaponov’s professional identity. These included above all the absence of hesitation regarding the infallibility of “the organs” (i.e., the NKVD), cruelty, careerism, and confidence that his victims should have no rights even after release and rehabilitation.

Gaponov’s profile is typical for his generation of NKVD workers, by whose hands Stalin carried out the Great Terror. His socialization coincided with the years of the civil war. He had grown up and come into adulthood in the Soviet secret police, which shaped him in its own image. As a result, he became not only an obedient executor of criminal orders “from above,” but also made his own active contributions to mass repression. He was the archetypal Chekist leader of the Great Terror—a quick rise through the ranks, an abrupt fall from the height of power, and, ultimately, survival in the postwar Soviet Union.