Mashkovskii and Tiagin: Random Selections or a Conscious Targeting of Scapegoats?
Why, then, did Mashkovskii and Tiagin find themselves in the company of their colleagues from the First (“Party”) Section of the SPO? Mashkovskii “managed the section on clergy” (otdelenie po tserkovnikam).
From 1 January 1938, he independently led investigations into 138 people; by October this figure had reached 180, all of whom were convicted.12 Tiagin, a worker in the security organs from 1923, was by 1937 “leading work on fighting the German counterrevolution and managing the work of peripheral organs along this line of investigation.” Under the direct leadership of Tiagin, 545 people were arrested, all of whom were convicted by the troika, and 374 of them were sentenced to death.13 In 1938, serving as the chief of the Second Section of SPO, Tiagin, it was said, “personally uncovered underground counterrevolutionary committees of Zionist spies, Menshevik terrorist spies, and Dashnak terrorist spies.” Seventy-one “Zionists” were convicted, 21 “Mensheviks,” and 34 “Dashnaks.” Aside from this, an “anarchist organization was uncovered and liquidated” per Tiagin’s efforts, consisting of 13 persons, all of whom were convicted.14Had Mashkovskii and Tiagin’s activity over 1937 and 1938 been limited solely to clergy, sectarians, German counterrevolutionaries, Dashnaks, and anarchists, then it is likely that they would have escaped Beria’s purge and continued their careers in the organs of state security. To their misfortune, those they had persecuted included former Communists who would be released in 1939.
Mashkovskii was drawn into interrogations in the so-called KPK case in which highly placed Communists—members of the Party Control Commission (KPK) of the Central Committee of the Odessa Oblast Communist Party—were arrested and convicted. The reasons Tiagin ended up in the defendant’s chair are less straightforward.
Tiagin was arrested on 19 April 1939 on the basis of accusations that he had exposed NKVD methods and fabricated cases. Aside from this, Tiagin personally conducted and completed an investigation into a supposed “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist-terrorist group of seven people existing within the oblast UNKVD.” This label cloaked repression targeted specifically at Jewish Chekists, overrepresented at that time in the Ukrainian NKVD.15Nevertheless, Tiagin did engage with members of the Communist Party and state in repressive campaigns. In 1938, there was a shift in the epicenter of repression in Ukraine away from punitive actions targeting kulaks and criminals and toward “other antisoviet elements” including members of antisoviet political parties, mainly moribund (e.g., SRs, Mensheviks, anarchists, Zionists, and the Bund). The arrests of members of these groups in June and July 1938 merged with the waves of repression against Odessa Communists. Some of those prosecuted in these fabricated cases were freed in 1939. They proceeded to bring accusations against Odessa Oblast UNKVD workers, including Tiagin.16 Thus, Mashkovskii and Tiagin found themselves under judicial scrutiny as former representatives of the Soviet and Communist Party elite leveled charges of violations of socialist legality against them.