The Campaign to Restore “Socialist Legality” in Odessa Oblast

A key question in understanding the Beria purge is why certain NKVD workers were chosen for punishment in the campaign against “violations of socialist legality.” Some had drawn the negative attention of leaders and procurators by violating direct orders from Moscow—for example, substantially exceeding arrest quotas or continuing to mete out death sentences sanctioned by troikas even after this was categorically prohibited by the center.

Very few of these survivor-witnesses were the victims of the mass operations. Victims of the “kulak” and “national” operations and their relatives knew little about the investigations pertaining to their cases and the indictments promulgated against them. If those who avoided execution and were sent to the camps dared to complain, their complaints, as a rule, went unanswered. Moreover, Chief Procurator of the USSR Andrei Vyshinskii decreed on 17 April 1938 that procurators should reassess convictions in the mass operations only “in exceptional cases.” As such, the typical response to petitioners was that decisions were final and cases were not subject to re-examination.¹⁰

Consequently, there remained only one small group of victims of the Great Terror who wielded sufficient status, connections, and clout to protest their convictions. As a rule, they had spent some months in detention and were well versed in the nuances of investigation. The mass releases at the end of 1938 and in 1939 allowed them to seek justice against the Chekists who had tormented them.

According to the internal statistics of the NKVD, as of 17 November 1938, the organs of the Ukrainian republic NKVD had open cases against 15,143 detained suspects. Additionally, in accordance with the 26 November 1938 NKVD USSR Decree 00762 regulating the course of the implementation of the 17 November 1938 directive of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, cases for another 10,808 persons that had been transferred for sentencing to the troikas and Special Council (Osoboe soveshchanie) of the NKVD USSR were returned for further investigation. Thus, the Chekists were faced with the need to close out the investigations of nearly 26,000 people.¹¹ At the end of the 1938–1939 period, nearly 20 percent and even up to 30 percent of these victims in Ukraine were released, spared by the 17 November 1938 resolution. A significant portion of those freed were former members of the Communist Party.

We were able to examine the materials of three criminal case files for eight members of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD convicted of “violating socialist legality.” These cases included two chiefs of the Secret Political Department (SPO) of the Oblast UNKVD—V. F. Kaliuzhnyi and Gaponov—as well as six of their subordinates (D. B. Kordun, E. A. Abramovich, Ia. I. Berenzon, N. M. Tiagin, V. A. Mashkovskii, and A. E. Gnesin). Individual cases were opened against Kaliuzhnyi and Tiagin, while Kordun, Abramovich, Berenzon, Mashkovskii, and Gnesin were classified as defendants under the Gaponov case.

Fig. 2.2 V. F. Kaliuzhnyi, in 1938 chief of the Secret Political Department of the Odessa Oblast NKVD. Prison photo from 1939, HDA SBU, f. 5, spr. 38580, tom 1, ark. 22a. By exclusive permission of the State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine.

Of those Chekists who participated in the repression of party members and found themselves in the defendant’s chair, four out of these eight Odessa Chekists (Kordun, Abramovich, Berenzon, and Gnesin) were workers from the First Section of the SPO. Their duties included the operative “servicing” of individuals connected with the Communist Party. Seeming exceptions were Junior Lieutenant Mashkovskii, assistant to the chief of the Sixth (“Church [tserkovnyi]”) Section of the SPO, and Tiagin, the chief of the Second Section of the SPO, whose section was tasked primarily with the fight against SRs, Mensheviks, anarchists, members of the Bund, and Zionists.