Pertsov and the NKVD in Kharkov and Odessa

Vadym Zolotar’ov Translated by Simon Belokowsky

NKVD investigators David Pertsov, Ivan Kriukov, Iakov Sereda, and Aleksei Kopaev were imprisoned for “violations of socialist legality” against their own (former) NKVD colleagues.

David Aronovich Pertsov was born into the family of a Jewish shoemaker in the town of Aleksandriia (an uezd or county seat of the former Kherson Gubernia) on 30 May 1909.¹ He had two brothers, Savelii and Ruvim (Robert), who, in the mid-1930s, served in the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast UNKVD, as well as a sister, Ol’ga, married to the NKVD agent Isaak Shapiro.² Pertsov began his working career on 15 February 1925 in the city of Ekaterinoslav at the Ukrainian Meatpacking and Slaughterhouse where he spent four years, moving up from the positions of butcher’s apprentice and butcher’s assistant to butcher. Not only did the difficult work of slaughter and meat-carving temper the young Pertsov physically, it also engrained within him a certain cruelty and habituated him to a bloody environment. Alongside his work, Pertsov simultaneously studied at a trade school where he received a general education completed in 1928. In March 1929, he found a job at the Dnepropetrovsk Okrug Audit Commission (revizionnaia komissiia) where, over the course of nine months, he worked as an inspector, senior inspector, and deputy commercial agent.³ The Audit Commission worked in close coordination with the security police staff.

From 15 December 1929, Pertsov began his service as an auxiliary plenipotentiary of the Information Department of the Dnepropetrovsk Okrug GPU, where he gained his first experience in intelligence-gathering.⁴ On 15 September 1930, he was appointed assistant plenipotentiary of the Secret Department of the Zaporozhe City GPU, before being transferred on 20 November to the role of plenipotentiary in the Zaporozhe GPU Special Department, where he immediately joined the investigation of the “Spring” case.⁵ In 1931, he became assistant plenipotentiary of the Zaporozhe GPU Secret Political Department and was a participant in the falsification of a case against a local cell of the so-called Laboring Peasants’ Party, in connection with which twelve people were convicted.⁶ During the course of that investigation, the Chekists liberally applied measures of psychological and physical coercion: beatings, forced standing for long periods, the dangling of a high-powered electric lamp in front of victims’ eyes for days on end, and nonstop, days-long interrogations.⁷

On 1 March 1932, Pertsov was appointed operative plenipotentiary of the Special Department of the 23rd Zaporozhe Aviation Brigade; on August 23 he was transferred to Kharkov to the position of plenipotentiary of the Second Section of the Special Department of the Ukrainian republic GPU and the Ukrainian Military Okrug.⁸ Pertsov’s move to the capital of Soviet Ukraine was connected with a change in the leadership of the Special Department of the Ukrainian republic GPU, taken up in June 1932 by Goma Leoniuk who had earlier hired Pertsov to work in the organs of the GPU and knew all about his “successes” in Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhe. On 17 August 1933, Pertsov was appointed plenipotentiary of the Third Section of the Foreign Department of the Ukrainian republic GPU and, on 1 December, assistant chief of the Third Section of the Foreign Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD.⁹ On 9 January 1936, he was promoted to the rank of Junior Lieutenant of State Security.¹⁰

Following the disbanding of the Foreign Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD in early 1938, Pertsov was appointed assistant to the chief of the Fourth (Central European) Section of the Third (Counterespionage) Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD.

On 2 August 1937, Pertsov, together with the new chief of the Third Department, Vladimir Styrne, interrogated a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who served as the director of the party press. They were able to elicit the following testimony: “I became so entwined with Ukrainian nationalists that when Kost’-Kotko and Ialovoi suggested to me, a Jewish man, to enter into a Ukrainian nationalist organization I interpreted this as my being put forth as ‘savior’ of the Ukrainian people. This appealed to my ambitions. Without hesitation, I agreed to participate in the organization.”¹² The interrogation of a member of the Ukrainian Central Committee was a testament to the trust placed in Pertsov by the new People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs in Ukraine, Izrail’ Leplevskii.

Fig. 4.1 D. A. Pertsov, from April 1938 deputy and then head of the Kharkov Oblast NKVD. Photo from 1938, HDA SBU, f. 12, spr. 31602, chastina 5, ark. 5 (convert). By exclusive permission of the State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine.

On 8 August 1937, Pertsov was appointed assistant to the chief of the Fourth (Secret-Political) Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD.¹³ As the position of deputy chief of the department was vacant, Pertsov in effect assumed the second highest position in the department under the chief of this branch, Matvei Gerzon, his former colleague from Dnepropetrovsk. Gerzon would later indicate that “our selection of new cadres for managing positions was undertaken on the principle of...

Personal loyalty meant obtaining results at any cost. The manner in which Pertsov achieved this was later recalled by the personnel clerk of the Council of People’s Commissars of Ukraine, Dmitrii Konovalov, from whom evidence was demanded about an underground Ukrainian nationalist organization allegedly led by his late superior, Afanasii Liubchenko. Late one night, Konovalov was brought to a specially outfitted room on the premises of the Personnel Department where Pertsov, together with his underlings, awaited him. According to Konovalov, “they all pounced on me like animals, knocked me to the ground, took to twisting my arms, pulled my fatigues over my head and, having torn off my pants and drawers, splayed me out on a specially purposed table on which they beat me with rulers and bottles until I began to lose consciousness. Following this torture, they threw me into a corner and took to pouring the liquid from a spittoon into my mouth, washing away the blood that I was choking on. Failing to get any information out of me, I was carried on a stretcher to the NKVD internal prison and thrown onto a bare cement floor.”¹⁵ The investigators took turns with Konovalov, pinned a fascist swastika to his sleeve, and pressured him to give the testimony demanded by Pertsov.¹⁶

Leplevskii took a liking to Pertsov’s shock work in annihilating “rightists, Trotskyites, [and] Ukrainian nationalists.” On 17 November 1937, Pertsov was awarded an early military promotion to Senior Lieutenant of State Security.¹⁷ On 19 December 1937, another significant event occurred in the life of Pertsov: he was awarded the Order of the Red Star “for his exemplary and selfless execution of government assignments.”¹⁸

On 27 January 1938, Aleksandr Uspenskii became the new head of the Ukrainian republic NKVD and immediately implemented a number of personnel changes in the Commissariat including the appointment of the chief of the Fourth Department of the NKVD, Aron Khatanever, as Acting Deputy Commissar of the Ukrainian republic NKVD for Personnel Coordination (sovmestitel’stvo).¹⁹ By virtue of Khatanever’s transfer, the bulk of the work involved in the management of the Fourth Department fell upon Pertsov’s shoulders.

A new direction in the work of the Secret Political Departments of the various arms of the NKVD was the fight against the “antisoviet Zionist underground.” As of 22 February 1938, 437 “active participants of a Zionist organization” had been arrested in Ukraine and, by the beginning of March, subordinates of Khatanever and Pertsov had “liquidated” 15 local Zionist committees and detained 607 people.²¹ In pursuit of the necessary results, the chief of the Fourth Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD and his deputy engaged in the falsification of interrogations, about which NKVD operative Lazar’ Shirin later testified: “Khatanever, Pertsov... on their own volition inserted facts to which the accused did not speak.”²²

One of the major directions of Uspenskii’s work was yet another purge of the Ukrainian NKVD, conducted on the direct orders of Ezhov.²³ Already by the end of February 1938, the contingent of staff arrested among the ranks of the Ukrainian NKVD amounted to 79 people: 11 in the central apparatus and 68 among the oblasts.²⁴ Between 15 February and 5 April, 554 people were dismissed from the Ukrainian republic NKVD, 154 of whom were arrested.²⁵ As of 1 April, 105 people from the staff of the Worker-Peasant Police Directorate of the Ukrainian republic NKVD were under arrest and 700 had been fired.²⁶ On 3 March 1938, Uspenskii reported to Moscow that there were 203 arrests among the command-political staff (komandno-politicheskii sostav) of the Internal and Border Guard Directorate of NKVD in Ukraine.²⁷

Traditionally, investigations of NKVD staff were placed in the domain of a special plenipotentiary, but over the course of 1937 and 1938, when the volume of arrested staff grew by orders of magnitude, special groups were formed from members of various departments.

The special investigative group began its work on 21 February 1938. Sergei Smirnov, the head of the Third Department of the Kharkov UNKVD, would later recount the particulars of its organization: “A few days after a meeting with Ezhov, I was called by telephone to Pertsov’s office.... Upon my arrival, several [of my] colleagues were already assembled.... Pertsov informed us that per Uspenskii’s decree a special investigative group was to be formed to conduct investigations into the cases of NKVD staff.... At this same point, Pertsov invited us to come the following morning not to the [NKVD offices] but to premises designated specially for the group’s work in the new [NKVD] building, presently occupied by the Council of People’s Commissars of Ukraine.”²⁹ Entrance to the premises on Sadovaia Street was permitted only to members of the special investigative group; other staff were barred from entry. All detained NKVD staff were now held in this newly outfitted prison.³⁰

The search for incriminatory evidence regarding NKVD officials was conducted by inspectors of the Personnel Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, after which the inspectors reported to Uspenskii who would then decide the fate of the “suspect employee” [podozritel’nyi sotrudnik].³¹ On a number of such reports, Uspenskii wrote, “arrest and unravel” [arrestovat’ i razmotat’].³²

According to Smirnov, Pertsov, on the basis of these incriminatory materials, gave commands to investigators regarding the direction interrogations of detained Chekists should take. If, for example, a report or other materials indicated that the detained had relatives living abroad, Pertsov would suggest an interrogation premised on espionage. If the materials indicated a connection between the accused and Trotskyists, it would be suggested to ground the interrogation around Trotskyist activities. From the very outset and until the conclusion of the group’s work, Pertsov systematically passed between investigators’ offices and took part in interrogations. Starting roughly with the second day of the group’s work, investigators began to apply “physical measures of influence”—that is, torture. These measures were sanctioned by Pertsov and always with reference to directives from the head of Ukrainian republic NKVD or his deputy, Aleksandr Radzivilovskii.³³

Those among the victims of these interrogations who were lucky enough to survive later testified to Pertsov’s personal participation. One of these victims, the former chief of the Poltava Oblast UNKVD, Andrian Peters, wrote that Pertsov on more than one occasion entered the office of the investigator assigned to his interrogation and demanded a confession; “in response to my appeals for a declaration of what exactly I was accused of, Pertsov would respond ‘write [your] confession. You will be shot in any case, you’ll be torn to shreds against a wall, but you will give us information.’... Pertsov refused my demand for a piece of paper to write a petition to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and gave me a deadline of 7 March for my confession, threatening to ‘tear’ me to shreds should I refuse.”³⁴

The former operative plenipotentiary of the Fourth Department of the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD, Zinovii Babushkin testified that “after being beaten by investigators, I was lying on the floor. At this point, Pertsov entered the room, and I addressed him with a request to hear me out. Instead of this, he ordered that I be lifted off the ground. As I could neither sit nor stand, these so-called investigators positioned me to stand by a chair, and Pertsov picked up a club and with the words, ‘I’ll hear you out’ began beating me.... After several days, unable to tolerate the beatings, I was forced to give Pertsov testimony against myself.”³⁵

The later account of the prison chief and official executioner, Ivan Nagornyi, sheds further light on the situation at the special prison on Sadovaia Street. He said, “Doing my rounds of the cells as head of the prison, I saw detainees delivered from interrogations by the operative-investigatory group in a difficult state on account of beatings. Moreover, walking through the corridor along which detainees were interrogated, on multiple occasions I heard detainees’ screams in investigators’ offices.... That detainees were brutally beaten by this investigatory group is evidenced by the cases where detainees, having returned from interrogation, died literally in a matter of hours, never mind that certain detainees were unable to walk back from interrogations on their own.”³⁶

Among those detainees Nagornyi mentioned as having died during investigation were the Chief of the Lokhvytsa District Department of the Poltava Oblast UNKVD, Ivan Taruts, the Chief of the Administrative-Economic (administrativno-khoziaistvennyi) Department of the Ukrainian Police, Vladimir Antonovich, the Chief of the Resettlement Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, Mikhail Shor, and the Buildings Manager of the Administrative Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, Mikhail Frenkel’.³⁷

Pertsov was directly involved in the death of Frenkel’. Babushkin recalled that Frenkel’ was brought back from his first interrogation having been beaten to the point of unconsciousness. When he came to, Frenkel’ recounted to his cellmate that Pertsov had beaten him during interrogation, in the course of which he had broken his wrists as he defended his upper legs, while taking blows from the stick-wielding chief of the investigatory group. Frenkel’ was brought to his cell from his second interrogation on 8 March 1938 in such a condition that he labored to breathe, could barely speak, and after a short period of time began to lose consciousness, letting out screams in the throes of his pre-death agony. He was carried out of the cell with almost no sign of life and did not return.³⁸ Pertsov categorically refused to allow Frenkel’ any kind of medical attention. Frenkel’ died without regaining consciousness. On the basis of an order from the Deputy People’s Commissar Razdilovskii, a death certificate was compiled without the participation of a doctor, and his corpse was buried.³⁹

On 4 April 1938, Uspenskii signed a decree appointing Pertsov to be acting deputy chief of the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD.⁴⁰ The reasons for Pertsov’s transfer to Kharkov are not entirely clear, but there are at least two possible explanations. First, Grigorii Teleshev, appointed on 3 March 1938 as chief of the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD (previously serving as chief of the Tambov Oblast UNKVD), had never worked in Ukraine and lacked local know-how.⁴¹ Second, Pertsov, having served as one of the leaders of the Secret Political Department under Leplevskii, may have failed to meet expectations (ne obespechil nuzhnuiu liniiu) in the unraveling of cases under investigation and was thus sent off to the provinces.⁴²

Familiarizing Pertsov with the operations of the UNKVD, Teleshev indicated that his staff was penetrated to a significant degree by Trotskyists, Zionists, and other suspect elements, that he had already arrested a whole series of employees suspected of Trotskyist activity, and that it was necessary to uncover a Trotskyist group among the NKVD staff in Kharkov. For this purpose he had organized a special investigatory group headed by Ivan Kriukov, whom he personally trusted and knew from previous work.⁴³ Commenting on Teleshev’s decision, Pertsov noted entirely correctly that the investigation of cases of NKVD staff was always handled solely by the staff of the Special Plenipotentiary (osoboupolnomochenyi) of the NKVD headed by Grigorii Mordukhovich, “but Teleshev did not consider it possible to entrust this investigation to him and created an investigatory group.... Teleshev indicated that he had selected trustworthy workers for the group. I believed Teleshev that [those] selected by him were in fact experienced workers worthy of trust.”⁴⁴

Once ten cases had accumulated, Kriukov told the chief of the NKVD Administration that “the work is difficult and I am not physically in condition to manage it on my own.” Subsequently, Teleshev subordinated to him the former chief of the Miropol District Department of the NKVD, Iakov Petrovich Sereda, who had been working on an investigation in Kharkov for several months.⁴⁵ Sereda not only had an unimpeachable reputation, but he had worked throughout his entire Chekist career on the periphery and did not have any connections within the local NKVD Administration. Thus, Teleshev summoned Sereda, telling him that within the organs of the NKVD a major counterrevolutionary organization had been uncovered, in response to which special operative-investigatory groups had been created, and ordered him to work in the group under Ivan Kriukov. Teleshev added a warning that “an enemy having managed to penetrate the [security] organs was an enemy within, and so it [was] necessary to work actively and hold all [information] in confidence.”⁴⁶

Aleksei Pavlovich Kopaev, a former Communist Party organizer at the A-7 Shop of the Stalin Plant in Kharkov, was mobilized on 31 March 1938 to work for the NKVD. He joined Sereda in the special investigatory group.⁴⁷ Later he would declare that he recoiled from the very start at the humiliations and beatings of detainees under interrogation. Kopaev spoke out about his displeasure to a colleague, who then immediately reported the conversation to the chief of the Kharkov UNKVD. Teleshev summoned the new recruit and pronounced that “You were sent here to work not whine, and if you are going to go easy on the enemy [liberal’nichat’ s vragami], then there is no place for you, not in the NKVD and not in the Party either.... Following such a telling off I [Kopaev] was forced to come to peace with the circumstances around me.”⁴⁸

At the end of the hallway on the fourth floor of the Kharkov UNKVD building, three rooms were cordoned off as the offices of the special investigatory group. At Kriukov’s suggestion they were separated from other offices by a special partition with passage categorically denied to other staff.⁴⁹ According to Mordukhovich, the group “immediately established extreme secrecy and I was not even allowed behind the partition and if I did enter once or twice then the case files laying on the table were immediately covered up and I... was not apprised of the work of the investigatory group.”⁵⁰

The cases of detained Chekists were under the special control of Teleshev, who would occasionally include particularly trusted figures in their interrogations. The first interrogations of Evdokim Glebov, the chief of the Chuguev District Department of the NKVD, were conducted by Sergei Moskalev, Inspector under the Kharkov UNKVD, who had come with Teleshev from Tambov. Moskalev declared to one detainee that “Teleshev has his orders from Ezhov such that if enemies of the people like you are not disarmed then in the UNKVD a special troika is to be established headed by Teleshev, and this troika is already functioning and you’re going to be shot. All of this depends on us!”⁵¹

A few days after his arrival in Kharkov, Pertsov carried out a series of operational meetings in the various departments. He lambasted Fifth Department special plenipotentiary Petr Bol’shunov, who had inserted an ill-considered phrase into the transcript of an interrogation. The party organizer of the UNKVD party organization, Chief of the First (German) Section of the Third Department Grigorii Dresher, decided to have a conversation with Pertsov about Bol’shunov, stating “that Bolshunov did not deserve such slander.”⁵² In Dresher’s words, “Pertsov sharply interrupted me, saying ‘You’ve come to teach me morals have you? If that’s all, then away with you.’ I noted that I did not expect such an attitude toward a well-intentioned person to which Pertsov retorted, ‘And I, then, will try to keep an eye out for you, maybe I could teach you a thing or two’ ” [ne pridëtsia li mne koi chemu pouchit’ vas].⁵³ It is worth noting that Bol’shunov’s colleagues recalled him as having “fairly widely applied measures of physical coercion to detainees.”⁵⁴

A few days after this conversation, Pertsov, at an operational meeting of the Third Department, declared that following the departure of the official German representative from Kharkov, there undoubtedly remained an extralegal German consul.⁵⁵ He added that fascist assault squads (shturmovye otriady) planted by German agents had been uncovered in a series of oblasts and that without question analogous groups existed in Kharkov and the surrounding districts where there were high concentrations of Germans, though local Chekists had not exposed them yet. Dresher, chief of the First (German) Section, declared that there was no informational basis for the uncovering of such formations in Kharkov Oblast, as no one apprehended on the basis of the division’s work had said anything about assault squads. Indignant, Petr Barbarov, Chief of the Third Department, began to interrupt his subordinate. Pertsov remained silent all the while, writing something down, and asked that the speaker not be interrupted.⁵⁶ Dresher reminded his listeners that mass operations had been underway for nine months, over the course of which all actionable information had been exhausted; on the basis of the German section’s work, approximately 1,560 people had already been arrested.⁵⁷

In their own comments, Pertsov and Barbarov noted the presence of German settlements in Kharkov Oblast. For them, the underlying question was not whether the Germans had been crushed, but instead whether the Germans were exploiting counterrevolutionary elements among various other nationalities, including Ukrainians, among whom it would be possible to create assault squads.⁵⁸ But Dresher held steadfastly to his point of view, “so long as there are no adequate prospects, especially within the oblast, for the uncovering of underground assault squads.” A discussion ensued during which Pertsov pulled answers out of Dresher like teeth (“bukval’no vytiagival otvety u Dreshera”). At the end of the meeting, Pertsov and Barbarov set a goal for the counterespionage agents to uncover underground command structures, assault squads, and extralegal consulates in the oblast.⁵⁹

Pertsov was outraged by Dresher’s insubordination and summoned Vul’f Skralivetskii, an operative plenipotentiary, to obtain incriminatory material on Dresher. Skralivetskii refused. Following this, Pertsov ceased acknowledging Skralivetskii and was soon able to engineer his dismissal.⁶⁰ In fairness, in 1935, Skralivetskii—then serving as chief of the Second Sector of the Economic Department of the Kharkov Oblast UNKVD—had been slated for dismissal on account of his non-party status. However, the leadership at that time had kept him on in his role “as [a] particularly valuable” cadre, although he was formally classed among the supporting auxiliary (neoperativnye) departments and did not have any special title or assignment.⁶¹ Skralivetskii was distinguished by a particular cruelty and sadism during interrogations, beating confessions out of detainees and leading dozens of innocent people to their deaths.⁶²

More accommodating to the collection of incriminatory material on Dresher was Barbarov, with whom Pertsov had served in the Foreign Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD. They became friendly in Kharkov and even visited each other at home.⁶³ Viktor Rybalkin—assistant to the Chief of the Third Department of the UNKVD and a confidant of Teleshev, having worked with him in Stalingrad and Tambov—also joined in the discrediting of Dresher. On 16 April, Barbarov and Rybalkin submitted a report on the “political infirmness of Dresher” to the Chief of the Kharkov UNKVD, who turned to Uspenskii for a warrant for Dresher’s arrest, which took place on 21 April.⁶⁴

Among other duties in Kharkov, Pertsov was responsible for the interrogations of detained NKVD cadres. He later recalled that at the end of April, Teleshev came to his office and stated that he had intended to personally interrogate and “lay into Shchegolevskii” (the former head of a sector within the UNKVD) for his refusal to give a correct confession, but that, as chief, he did not have the time for this. Pertsov remembered that

he ask[ed] me to summon Shchegolevskii and interrogate him using measures of physical coercion as Shchegolevskii was concealing the presence of a Trotskyist-Zionist organization within the UNKVD. I remember that Teleshev put it that way. Kriukov talked to him and it was impossible to get anything out of Shchegolevskii the easy way. Kriukov... had a measure of disdain for me and [consequently] I do not know anything about his investigation of the Shchegolevskii case as he did not brief me. As directed by Teleshev, I summoned Shchegolevskii who came together with Kriukov and offered that he should confess. Measures of physical coercion were applied to Shchegolevskii by Kriukov and myself. The interrogation lasted 30 minutes after which Kriukov left with him. I reported to Teleshev this interrogation’s fruitlessness.⁶⁵

Zinovii Shchegolevskii later narrated the details of this interrogation:

At 1 a.m. on 14 April, on the fifth floor, I was summoned to Pertsov’s room (a lounge). After 10 minutes, Pertsov came in. Pertsov addressed me, stating that I was hardly the leader of a Ukrainian Zionist Center but [the leader] of the Zionist Center in Kharkov, and that a whole slew of evidence incriminates me in this matter [and] that I must confess. I responded to Pertsov that I was innocent [and] that he knows me as a colleague and decent person since 1932. At this, Pertsov knocked me from my chair with a blow and began kicking me while Kriukov took a club from the windowsill and beat me with it.... Pertsov kicked me all over my body with his boots and when I became sick from the blows, Pertsov grabbed me by my head and began shoving my face into the vomit.⁶⁶

Following this interrogation, Pertsov interrogated Shchegolevskii several more times, in reference to which the latter recalled, “On 8 June instead of the chief of the UNKVD, Pertsov came. I declared that I would not sign a false transcript [of the interrogation]. Pertsov spat in my face, declaring that they would bring me to such a state that I would sign anything put in front of me, and left.”⁶⁷

On 30 April 1938, Teleshev unexpectedly left for Kiev and was quickly appointed First Secretary of the Odessa Oblast Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Pertsov effectively became the head of the UNKVD, though he formally remained in the role of deputy chief. Under Pertsov’s leadership, the UNKVD continued dismantling the so-called Polish Military Organization. Pertsov demanded that only ethnic Poles be arrested in the course of this operation and sanctioned the arrest of members of other nationalities only in those instances where evidence “very firmly” held them to be participants in Polish espionage or counterrevolutionary groups.⁶⁸ The course of the earlier stages of the Polish operation in Kharkov was later recounted by Dresher. According to Dresher, in April 1938, the Chief of the Second (Polish) Section of the Third Department, Rafail Aizenberg, went around the city with a group of workers arresting people on the street, at establishments, and in residential buildings without any kind of basis, subjected them to beatings on the same day, obtained confessions, and convicted them basically on the following day. “I myself was a witness to this and Aizenberg told me about it.”⁶⁹

It was possibly for this reason that Pertsov attempted to bring relative order to the implementation of the Polish operation, although the attempt did not last long. In mid-March 1938, having learned through telephone conversations about the arrest of seven hundred people in Kiev as part of the Polish operation, he ordered Barbarov to “immediately launch a wide-reaching operation against the Poles” [po poliakam]. The chief of the Third Department knew well that he lacked materials sufficient for the arrest of a large number of people, but notwithstanding this he announced to his subordinates, “It is necessary to arrest several hundred people.” For the task of preparing arrest warrants, the Third Department employed an inexperienced assistant operative plenipotentiary, Kagan, who over the course of several days provided to Nikolai Pogrebnyi, the new chief of the Polish Section, writs for [the arrest of] between 200 and 250 people.⁷⁰

The new stage of the Polish operation began under new management. On 20 May 1938, Captain of State Security Grigorii Kobyzev became the new chief of the Kharkov UNKVD. He was formerly the chief of the Personnel Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, who until 1937 led the Personnel Department of the Sokol’niki District Communist Party Committee in Moscow and viewed himself as a “party worker” [partrabotnik].⁷¹ The chiefs of the oblast UNKVD administrations in Ukraine noted his “particular closeness to Uspenskii,” while Kharkov Chekists remarked upon his “careerist orientation” and inclination “to be a showman” [pokazat’ tovar litsom].⁷²

The former assistant head of the Third Department of the UNKVD, Boris Polishchuk, who had fallen into the hands of his former colleagues, later testified to Kobyzev’s “showmanship” in Kharkov:

All though May, June, and part of July [1938], the constant screams in the night from the internal prison of the UNKVD could be heard from the UNKVD Administration building, one could hear how the “fight” [boi] was going. The entire situation psychologically conditioned [nastraivala] one in such a way that you waited and desired only one thing—a swift death, and you did everything that was wanted of you, awaiting the promised execution.⁷³

At one Party meeting, Grigorii Perevolchanskii, assistant to a section chief of the Third Department of the UNKVD, who had been mobilized to work within the organs of State Security by the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party in March 1938, reported that when he addressed his direct superior Dresher—who had at that point turned out to have been an “enemy of the people”—with respect to a certain question he received the response that “You would only understand a stick over the head” [Vam nuzhno govorit’ palkoi po golove, togda poimëte]. In response to this, UNKVD chief Kobyzev retorted that “Dresher deserves to get one in the face for that.” He then phoned Pertsov who recalled, “Kobyzev called me on the telephone and suggested that we should interrogate Dresher together. I accompanied him to Kriukov’s room where we interrogated Dresher, applying physical measures of persuasion.”⁷⁴

In Dresher’s recounting, the details of this interrogation were as follows:

From about ten at night to five in the morning Ivan Kriukov, lying on a couch, cursed at me, offering up for my pleasure the inhuman shouts of beaten [NKVD] workers emanating from the two opposite rooms where Sereda and Kopaev were conducting interrogations. Around six in the morning when the staff of the administration had already dispersed, Kriukov came into the room along with Pertsov and Kobyzev. Sereda was also in the room, having remained at Kriukov’s suggestion. Kobyzev sat on the couch. Pertsov came up to me and asked whether I was going to give information about treason in the UNKVD. I declared to him that I would not do so either now or in the future. Following this, Pertsov began to torture me, his fists punching me in the face, neck, and chest and his legs, or rather his boots, kicking me in the stomach. I leaned on the wall to keep myself from falling. Pertsov shouted to Sereda to bring a club. Sereda quickly brought a thick round club from his office. Pertsov kept hitting me with the club in the head, face, and torso. Telling Pertsov to knock me over, Sereda took me by the hair and pulled me down. Following this, Pertsov, Sereda, Ivan Kriukov, and Kobyzev proceeded to stomp on me lying on the ground, at which point I rolled toward the couch. I began to lose consciousness as Pertsov and Kobyzev walked out ordering: “Beat him with death blows until he gives information, don’t let him downstairs, don’t give him food or drink.”⁷⁵

Pertsov also initiated the beating of detained NKVD operatives himself. When he was unsatisfied with the responses of the detained Chekist Sandler, he declared that “he had barely gotten it, [and that they] needed to give it [to him] such that his ribs would poke out,” demanding information on the counterrevolutionary sabotage efforts ordered by Polish, German, and English security services. In order to get this information, Kriukov ordered Sereda to beat Sandler with the wooden stick that members of the investigatory group had fondly named the “Roly-Poly” or the “Oaken Interrogator.”⁷⁶

In June, relations between the chief of the UNKVD and his deputy became tense. Pertsov recalled:

Kobyzev and I began to diverge on a number of matters concerning active investigatory work, including the cases of [NKVD] staff. I considered it imperative to conduct operations more carefully, while Kobyzev felt that mistakes might be resolved over the course of investigation.... My disagreement with Kobyzev regarding the cases of [NKVD] staff resulted in the following: considering it possible, just as he did, that there existed a Trotskyist group or organization among the workers of the UNKVD.... At the same time I felt and told him that insofar as their testimony about membership in an organization of Trotskyist employees was unsupported by incriminatory material some skepticism was warranted and we should not rush with arrests without adequate scrutiny. Kobyzev found in this sentiment of mine an attempt to defend such people. Meanwhile, he, as always, referred to his experience resolving cases in Moscow.⁷⁷

According to Pertsov, Sereda suggested that he arrest Solomon Reznikov, a deputy section chief within the Third Department; Anatolii Burkser, an operative plenipotentiary of the same section; as well as Mikhail Livshits, an operative plenipotentiary of the Fifth Department.⁷⁸ (The last of these “was known [among his colleagues] in the Special Department as one of the investigators who applied coercive measures toward the majority of his detainees.”⁷⁹) Pertsov looked over the materials and came to the conclusion that he did not have grounds to arrest them. Sereda remained unfazed and passed the materials on to Kobyzev, who spoke to Pertsov in a brusque manner about his disagreement with the latter’s defense of the suspects.⁸⁰ Even so, no one among this threesome was arrested. Meanwhile, according to Livshits, Sereda was “rude and impertinent with his colleagues,” for which reason the former challenged his candidacy in the Party Committee election. Pertsov came to Sereda’s defense and gave Livshits a dressing-down, but, regardless, Sereda did not make it onto the Committee.⁸¹

Pertsov also doubted the guilt of the seasoned senior section chief of the Third Department of the UNKVD, Ivan Avdeev. He spoke with the staff of the Personnel Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD regarding the arrested Avdeev and, upon failing to receive confirmatory incriminatory material, personally interrogated him and decided to release him. Approaching Kobyzev with this suggestion, his superior did not hear him out, but instead bluntly said that it was necessary to uncover the counterrevolutionary underground among the staff rather than be so quick to release detainees. Pertsov persisted in his opinion, to which Kobyzev declared that he would take over the matter. Shortly thereafter, Avdeev was freed and appointed an inspector subordinated to the chief of the UNKVD.⁸²

According to Pertsov, “As a result of Kobyzev’s choice of approach and my disagreement with him, he dismissed me from my position in Kharkov. The rectitude of my allegations against Kobyzev was later confirmed.”⁸³ Pertsov departed from Kharkov in July 1938. By all accounts, he had not lost Uspenskii’s trust. Moreover, his brother-in-law, Isaak Shapiro, was at that point Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian republic NKVD for Auxiliary Departments (neoperativnye otdely).⁸⁴ Pertsov was soon appointed to a position in Odessa as Chief of the Naval Department of the NKVD. Notably, this appointment was not formalized through personnel decrees of NKVD USSR, NKVD Ukraine, or the Kharkov UNKVD. It is also not recorded in his personnel file.

Pertsov was relatively at ease in Odessa. Pavel Kiselev, his former chief at the Third Sector of the Foreign Department of the Ukrainian republic NKVD, was serving as the chief of the UNKVD and Grigorii Teleshev as the First Secretary of the Odessa Oblast Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party.⁸⁵ It is entirely possible that it was Teleshev who facilitated Pertsov’s transfer to Odessa.

Pertsov took to his work in the Naval Department with his inherently cruel manner, which later prompted his onetime subordinate, Girshman, to say, “there’s a rotten smell in the department; Uspenskii’s henchman Pertsov summoned [some] young fellows and reduced them to tears.”⁸⁶ The Chief of the Eleventh (Seaborne) Department of the Odessa UNKVD, Semen Karutskii, testified that as a rule those arrested by Pertsov’s subordinates were detained for extra-statutory periods, without petitions for extensions of their detention. Charges were never filed on time, and everything was done at the close of the investigation.⁸⁷

When he was working in Odessa, Pertsov attempted to purchase property confiscated in Kharkov for 1,200 to 1,300 rubles, but in fact valued at between 15,000 to 18,000 rubles; however, the intervention of Assistant Chief of the Kharkov UNKVD, Vladimir Demin, and Kharkov NKVD Inspector Nikolai Kriukov spoiled this illicit deal. Kriukov later stated that Pertsov “acted like a petty haggler attempting to take for himself as much as he could from the staff expense accounts, which aroused more than just my own indignation.”⁸⁸

Pertsov notably feuded with Kriukov, whom he appointed Inspector of the UNKVD in May 1938. The issue was that, aside from his proper responsibilities, Pertsov tasked Kriukov with visiting the canteen to pick up foodstuffs, which aroused the latter’s fervent protest leading him to bring “to Pertsov the matter of categorically freeing [him] from such a distinguished mission as it conflicted with the responsibilities accruing to an inspector subordinated to the management.” Pertsov was forced to find a new inspector, which fell to one Bol’shunov who, following earlier excoriations, was obedient and accommodating.⁸⁹

A sharp turn in Pertsov’s fate was brought about by the flight of People’s Commissar Uspenskii. On the evening of 14 November 1938, Uspenskii disappeared after leaving the following note on his office desk: “Farewell my dear comrades! Should it be necessary, search for my corpse in the Dnepr. This as it’s surer to shoot oneself and [go] into the water... without a misfire.”⁹⁰ No one believed that Uspenskii had committed suicide and an immediate search began. Members of his inner circle were arrested for “abetting” his flight. On 16 November 1938, Pertsov himself was arrested.⁹¹ He was immediately sent to Moscow as a “participant in a counterrevolutionary Right-Trotskyist organization and antisoviet conspiracy in the Ukrainian republic NKVD.”⁹² There, according to family lore, the new People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Beria, personally participated in his interrogation.⁹³

The details of the investigation of Pertsov conducted at the Lubyanka in Moscow are presently impossible to establish, as his criminal case file is held by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and is inaccessible to Ukrainian (and other) researchers. We can, however, obtain a sense of the contours of his time there from his own statement to the procurator Pankrat’ev, which indicated that he was accused of aiding Uspenskii in his escape. Pertsov said:

Two scoundrels revealed themselves in the persons of Iaraliants, the First Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs in Ukraine, and Tushev, the Chief of Uspenskii’s secretariat, who gave testimony against me in my presence at a face-to-face deposition. Iaraliants and Tushev testified that Uspenskii had for precisely that purpose nominated and eventually transferred me to Odessa—seeing as how I knew the border—so that I would lay a path for him to cross it, which I, as they declared in my presence at the face-to-face deposition, carried out.... They were believed and not me. After the face-to-face depositions it was demanded of me that I name the country and by which steamboat—Soviet or foreign—I had illegally sent Uspenskii over the border. I was cruelly tortured. My calves and heels were beaten with a rubber club. I urinated blood, partially lost my sight, but did not satisfy this brazen accusation. When Uspenskii was caught, the deposition transcripts disappeared from my file, but I was not released from custody.⁹⁴

Themselves under arrest, Kobyzev and the Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD of Moldavia, Nikolai Malyshev, accused Pertsov at a face-to-face deposition of participating in conspiratorial activity, but, according to Pertsov, their “testimonies were so dishonest that neither of them could answer a single one of the questions that I posed to them. I exposed Kobyzev’s deceit to such a degree that he refused to testify in person against me in front of the Military Collegium.”⁹⁵

On 15 August 1939, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR tried Pertsov.⁹⁶ He was accused of having

subjected workers of the Oblast NKVD apparatus, leaders from the Party, Soviet, and economic organizations—citizens guilty of no crime against Soviet power—to persecution. Under the guise of waging battle against counterrevolutionary elements [he] applied perverse methods of investigation, contrived fake counterrevolutionary structures, and shrouded from detection actual enemies of the people.⁹⁷

Pertsov was convicted according to statute 206-17 (a) of the criminal code of the Ukrainian SSR and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, without a forfeiture of privileges and without the initiation of a motion to strip him of either the Order of the Red Star or the special title of Senior Lieutenant of State Security.⁹⁸ He served his sentence in the NKVD’s Northeastern Labor Camp in the city of Magadan in Khabarovsk Krai.

While Pertsov was being dealt with in Moscow, investigators in Kharkov were hot on the trail of his illicit collaborators. On 22 March 1939, Iakov Sereda, Chief of the First Sector of the Special Department of the NKVD of the Kharkov Oblast Military District, was detained. On 2 April 1939, a general meeting of the Communist Party organization of the Kharkov UNKVD issued Barbarov a strict reprimand with a notation to the effect in his personnel file that he, “to the benefit of the enemy of the people Pertsov, drafted a report serving as the basis for the arrest of Dresher, thus helping Pertsov dispense with Dresher and... blindly trusting Pertsov, executed his treacherous orders.” Three days later, the bureau of the Kaganov District Committee of the Communist Party endorsed this decision, reprimanding Barbarov for the “dampening of Bolshevik vigilance manifested in [his] servility to Pertsov (subsequently) arrested by the organs of the NKVD.”⁹⁹

Ivan Kriukov was arrested on 17 November 1939. He had been veritably showered in honors after Pertsov’s departure, receiving the title of Senior Lieutenant of State Security, the Badge of Honored Worker of the Cheka-GPU (XV), and appointment as head of the newly created Eighth (Industrial) Department of the Kharkov UNKVD. At the end of October 1938, he was sent to Odessa where, owing to the favor of the First Secretary of the Oblast Committee of the Party, Teleshev, he was in short order appointed acting Oblast Procurator. On 26 December 1939, Kopaev, then serving as Chief of the Grun’ District Department of the Sumy NKVD, was arrested. He would write in a letter to the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, that the

former Secretary of the party oblast committee, Osipov, declared at an operational meeting that “It is better to beat an enemy well and later answer for having beaten him rather than to leave him untouched and bear guilt before the Party.” So I was taught from my very first days of work. I beat those for whom there was a sanction. In the presence of the Chief of the Fourth Department, Ginesin, I beat section chiefs and others.¹⁰⁰

In the course of the investigation of the cases against Sereda and Kopaev, “new circumstances” were “uncovered” and it was decided that it was necessary to continue the investigation of Pertsov. In April 1940, Pertsov was brought back to Kharkov where new charges were levied against him, largely pertaining to the beatings of NKVD cadres. Pertsov declared to his interrogator, Deputy Chief of the Investigatory Section of the Kharkov NKVD Mikhail Kuznetsov, that

in the Dresher case I was in agreement with Teleshev and Kobyzev, suspecting him to be an agent of German intelligence on the basis of Barbarov and Rybalkin’s reports.... My fault here is that I trusted Barbarov and Rybalkin and failed to personally check the [underlying] materials, to which I testified before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.¹⁰¹

Sereda echoed the version of events according to which Pertsov had not been the instigator of Dresher’s arrest: “Materials concerning Dresher were collated under the direction of Teleshev and the employees of the Third Department, Rybalkin and, allegedly, Barbarov.”¹⁰²

Interestingly, over the course of the second investigation, questions concerning “violations of socialist legality” in regard to ordinary Soviet citizens were generally not posed to Pertsov. However, he did state that

I was aware of the massive baseless arrests. [Cases were based] solely on the confessions of the arrested in the Radio Committee case, in the Partisans case; I knew that physical measures of influence were being applied but did not take measures to stop them, for which I was convicted by the Military Collegium. Yes, in order to make judgments about the correctness of the arrests and beatings one ought to have personally studied the materials regarding the arrested. Both I and Kobyzev limited ourselves to the information provided by investigators and endorsed their opinions regarding the framing of crimes as counterrevolutionary, as enemies of the people, and from this everything else followed. I do not deny that I myself beat four people as enemies of the people—we beat them in a group, we used a club also.¹⁰³

At its 27–30 September 1940 session, the Military Tribunal of Kharkov Military District convicted Ivan Kriukov, Iakov Sereda, and Aleksei Kopaev under statute 206-17 (a) and sentenced them to four years’ imprisonment.

A 12 December 1940 decree of the Supreme Court of the USSR canceled Pertsov’s conviction and sentence, and his case was remanded to be investigated anew.¹⁰⁴ Unfortunately, the Ukrainian archives do not contain the case file for the third investigation of Pertsov, only the verdict. The case was tried from 5 to 6 June 1941 by the military tribunal in Kiev. The verdict read:

the preliminary and judicial investigation established that PERTSOV, working in the organs of the NKVD, was closely connected with the previously unmasked enemy of the people USPENSKII and was moved [up] through the ranks by the latter.

The unmasked and convicted enemy of the people USPENSKII, knowing of PERTSOV’s proximity to LEPLEVSKII, decided to use PERTSOV for conducting his treacherous activity. For this purpose USPENSKII first promoted PERTSOV and then tasked him to lead an investigatory group created by him—by USPENSKII—among the purposes of which was to stymie the best Chekist cadres by means of mass and baseless arrests and ensuing convictions of NKVD staff, who stood in the way of USPENSKII’s implementation of his treacherous activities.

Leading a special operational-investigatory group, PERTSOV, directly and through his subordinates, countenanced perverse methods of investigation against detained NKVD staff against whom there was no incriminatory material and... forced them with the use of physical measures of persuasion to give knowingly false confessions about belonging to counterrevolutionary groups.

Over the course of the existence of this group, i.e., from 21 February to 30 April 1938, 241 NKVD employees were arrested and, as a result of the application of physical measures of persuasion by investigators of the investigatory group chaired by PERTSOV and by him directly, some detainees were not able to tolerate the torture and died during interrogations (Frenkel’, Shor, Taruts, et al.)¹⁰⁵

The “best Chekist cadres... who stood in the way of Uspenskii’s implementation of his treacherous activities” had, it must not be forgotten, actively engaged in the same measures under the previous leadership, namely, Leplevskii’s. Over the last two months of 1937 alone, the troika of the Poltava UNKVD under the leadership of Peters had convicted 4,087 people, 1,279 of whom were sentenced to capital punishment.¹⁰⁶

The sentencing document read further:

Promoted in April 1938 to the post of Deputy Chair of the Kharkov UNKVD, upon his arrival in Kharkov, PERTSOV subsequently headed up a special operational-investigatory group which was organized on the example [of the one in] Kiev.

This group arrested 18 members of the NKVD staff who had worked 15 to 18 years within [the security] organs and under the direct management of PERTSOV likewise applied perverse methods of investigation, producing information about their participation in counterrevolutionary organizations even though the investigatory group did not possess any incriminatory materials regarding these employees.

Each of these 18 people was freed after a lengthy period of detention and their cases closed on the basis of the absence of any crime.

Thus, under the guise of waging battle against counterrevolution and by applying perverse methods of investigation, the investigatory group headed by PERTSOV artificially manufactured nonexistent counterrevolutionary groups.¹⁰⁷

Unlike most Chekists sentenced at this time, Pertsov was charged with “counterrevolutionary crimes” (Article 54-17 of the Ukrainian criminal code) for his participation in a “counterrevolutionary conspiracy” supposedly led by Uspenskii. The sentence read:

David Aronovich PERTSOV on the basis of statute 54.7 and 27.1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR [is sentenced] to imprisonment in a labor camp for a term of 15 years with a forfeiture of rights according to points (a), (b), and (v) of statute 29 of the Criminal Codex of the Ukrainian SSR for three years and, likewise, to relieve him of the title of Senior Lieutenant of State Security.¹⁰⁸

Pertsov served his sentenced in the Southern Ural NKVD camp. On 21 July 1945, on the basis of his highly productive output and excellent behavior, his sentence was commuted by six months. He was, however, not fated to see freedom. On 28 April 1948, he died at his place of confinement.¹⁰⁹ According to his relatives, Pertsov perished in a logging accident.¹¹⁰ Notes

RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History). (All-Soviet [Bolshevik] Communist Party Registration Form No. 2323823).

HDA SBU Kharkiv (Kharkiv Sectoral Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine), os. spr. 9918, ark. 49.

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 99. (All-Soviet [Bolshevik] Communist Party Registration Form No. 2323823.)

HDA SBU Kharkiv, os. spr. 9918, ark. 63.

HDA SBU Kharkiv, os. spr. 9918, ark. 17, 63. The so-called Spring case targeted a supposed “all-union counterrevolutionary military officers’ organization” within the Red Army. In Dnepropetrovsk Oblast alone, 558 people were arrested and, among those, 21 were shot. HDA SBU, f. 6, d. 67093 fp (fond prekrashchennykh del), tom, l. 9.

“Sprava ‘Ukrains’koi filii Trudovoi selians’koi partii,’” in Reabilitovani istoriieiu, ed. T. F. Grigor’iev and V. I. Ocheretianko (Kyiv: AN Ukraini, 2010), 20. The fictive “Laboring Peasants’ Party” was supposedly preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet Union and consisted mainly of agricultural specialists and scholars as well as more prosperous peasants.

“Sprava ‘Ukraïns’koï filiï,’ ” 280–81.

HDA SBU Kharkiv, os. spr. 9918, ark. 63.

HDA SBU Kharkiv, os. spr. 9918, ark. 63.

“Prikaz NKVD SSSR po lichnomu sostava No. 18 ot 9 fevralia 1936, A GUVD U KhO (Archive of the Main Administration of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in Kharkov Oblast), Kollektsiia dokumentov NKVD SSSR za 1936, tom 1, ark 114.

HDA SBU, f. 13, spr. 408, tom 1, ark. 92.

O. G. Musienko, ed., Z porohu smerti: pys’mennyky Ukraïny—zhertvy stalins’kykh represii (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1991), 291–93.

“Prikaz NKVD Ukraina po lichnomu sostavu No. 308 ot 8 avgusta 1937,” A GUVD U KhO, Kollektsiia prikazov NKVD Ukraina po l/s za 1937, tom 2, ark. 61.

“Prikaz NKVD Ukraina po lichnomu sostavu No. 308 ot 8 avgusta 1937,” A GUVD U KhO, Kollektsiia prikazov NKVD Ukraina po l/s za 1937, tom 2, ark. 61–64.

“Protokol dopytu Dmytra Vasyl’ovycha Konovalova, 1956 VII.6,” Nashe mynule 1, no. 6 (1993): 61–62.

Reabilitovani istoriieiu. Kyivs’ka oblast’ (Kyiv: Osnova, 2011), 3:394.

“Prikaz NKVD SSSR po lichnomu sostavu No. 2227 ot 17 noiabria 1937,” A GUVD U KhO, Kollektsiia prikazov NKVD SSSR za 1937, tom 4, l. 205.

Pravda, 20 December 1937, 3.

“Prikaz NKVD Ukraina po lichnomu sostavu No. 43 ot 3 fevralia 1938,” A GUVD U KhO, Kollektsiia prikazov NKVD Ukraina po l/s za 1938, tom 1, ark. 18.

“Prikaz NKVD Ukraina po lichnomu sostavu No. 117 ot 4 aprelia 1938,” A GUVD U KhO, Kollektsiia prikazov NKVD Ukraina po l/s za 1937, tom 1, ark. 79.

HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 31, spr. 81, ark. 91.

O. Loshyts’kyi, “‘Laboratoriia’: Novye dokumenty i svidetel’stva o massovykh repressiiakh 1937–1938 godov na Vinnichine,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, nos. 1–2 (1998): 215.

TsDAHO (Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine), f. 1, op. 1, spr. 544, ark. 476.

HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 32, spr. 71, ark.3.

V. V. Chentsov, Tragicheskie sud’by: politicheskie repressii protiv nemetskogo naseleniia Ukrainy v 1920–1930-e gody (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), 107.

S. M. Bohunov, “Chystky chekists’kykh kadriv v Ukraini v period ‘iezhovshchyny,’” in Ukraina v dobu “velykoho teroru 1936–1937,” ed. Yuri Shapoval et al. (Kyiv: Lybid, 2009), 47.

HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 31, spr. 6, ark. 44–45.

“Vytiah iz protokolu No. 8 zahal’nykh partiinykh zboriv partorhanizatsiï UDB NKVS URSR 10-11 bereznia 1938 r.,” in Ukraïna v dobu “velykoho teroru” 1936–1938 roky, 257–58.

HDA SBU, f. 6, d. 49855 fp., tom 1, ark. 65.

HDA SBU, f. 6, d. 49855 fp., tom 1, ark. 67.

“Stenograma vystupiv po zvitnii dopovidi partiinoho komitetu NKVS URSR, 10 hrudnia 1938 r.,” Ukraïna v dobu “velykoho teroru,” 299.

HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 3, spr. 95, ark. 5.

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