Karamyshev and the Nikolaev NKVD
Marc Junge Translated by Aaron Hale-Dorrell and Caroline Cormier
In April and May 1939, three intelligence agents working under the codenames “Gerd,” “Dobrovolskii,” and “Ivanov” reported a dangerous plot among a group of inmates released from pretrial detention.
This information arrived at the Secret Political Department of the Nikolaev UNKVD. The main function of the Secret Political Department was to fight against political opponents including Trotskyites, Right Oppositionists, religious believers, and nationalists. The matter described by the agents was so explosive that the head of the Nikolaev UNKVD, I. T. Iurchenko, personally informed the Ukrainian republic NKVD in Kiev. He made this decision because the conspiracy had the potential to impact national defense since it involved individuals who occupied high posts in Shipbuilding Plant No. 200 in Nikolaev, which employed 9,000 workers. The leaders of the conspiracy in the shipyard had been arrested as a Trotskyite group by the Nikolaev UNKVD more than six months earlier on charges of sabotage for having caused a major fire in the shipyard that had nearly destroyed the entire plant.1In the summer of 1939, it was surprisingly not the supposedly highly dangerous Trotskyite conspiracy that was singled out. Rather, the handlers from the Nikolaev UKNVD Secret Political Department, namely those who had ordered agents “Gerd,” “Dobrovolskii,” and “Ivanov” to write the reports, were arrested instead. On 23 March 1941, they were tried for “abuse of power” and, more specifically, for “violating socialist legality” by the Military Tribunal for the NKVD Troops of the Kiev Military District. One was condemned to death, another to ten years, and the last to eight years. Petr Vasil’evich Karamyshev, who had been the head of the Nikolaev UNKVD until he was dismissed in January 1939, was also sentenced to death. A central allegation in the indictment against these officers of the Secret Political Department was that they had forced their agents to provide false information about a group of alleged Trotskyite conspirators to save their own skins.
Moreover, even before the indictment, they had used “unlawful measures” (i.e., torture) in interrogating prisoners and had also falsified files, evidence, and interrogation records. Similar cases were common throughout Ukraine and were also found across the Soviet Union following the 17 November directive of the Central Executive Committee and the All-Union Council of People’s Commissars, scaling back the Great Terror. Virtually everywhere, between 1938 and 1943, Chekists were convicted of violating socialist legality.How did it happen that those arrested were not the members of the would-be “counter-revolutionary Trotskyite sabotage organization” accused of planning a major act of sabotage in a war-industry enterprise, but the NKVD personnel who only a few months previously had been masters of others’ fates? Did the accusations of crude violations of “socialist legality,” outlined in the important 17 November 1938 directive, correspond to reality? Had they discredited Soviet power in what was essentially a correct and essential campaign? Or should the NKVD personnel be viewed primarily as scapegoats who were necessary to shield the party and the government from responsibility for the mass terror that had been carried out on a scale spanning the whole Soviet Union but which was halted by an order from Moscow in November 1938? Or, perhaps the main goal in the repression of the Chekists was the neutralization of the patronage network of the disgraced former All-Union People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Ezhov by his successor, Lavrentii Beria?