Matvei S. Pogrebinsky (1892-1937) was a Russian revolutionary.
In the 1930s he was responsible for setting up many orphanages and communes for delinquent children, and was the man who founded the Bolshevo Commune. He was the inspiration for the very popular Soviet film, Putevka v Zhizn ("Path to Life") in 1931 . He was the head of the NKVD in the Gorky Oblast (Nizhny Novgorod) and in 1937 committed suicide in order to avoid "participation in lawlessness, as his suicide letter reveals."[1]
In 1954 the scholar Alexander Orlov explained Pogrebinsky's suicide in a similar fashion, "Squeezed between the relentless discipline of the party and pangs of conscience, Pogrebinsky saw in suicide the only way out".[citation needed] His suicide was similar to many officials during the Great Terror, as revolutionaries who could not deal with the terror of Stalinism saw suicide as the only escape.
Notes
↑ (Medvedev, Roy Alexander. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. 1989, Columbia University Press, Page 426)
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev thaw, de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sergei Mironovich Kirov was a Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary whose assassination led to the first Great Purge.
The Great Purge or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the party and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky nicknamed the Red Napoleon by foreign newspapers, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician.
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised arrests, show trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic events of the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the GULAG system, during which 12,000–25,000 laborers died.
Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, was a colonel in the Soviet secret police and NKVD Rezident in the Second Spanish Republic. In 1938, Orlov refused to return to the Soviet Union due to fears of execution, and instead fled with his family to the United States. He is mostly known for secretly transporting the entire Spanish gold reserves to the USSR in exchange for military aid for Spanish Republic and for his book, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes.
Jānis Rudzutaks was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician.
NKVD troika or Special troika, in Soviet history, were the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs made up of three officials who issued sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public and fair trial. The three members were judge and jury, though they themselves did not carry out the sentences they dealt. These commissions were employed as instruments of extrajudicial punishment introduced to supplement the Soviet legal system with a means for quick and secret execution or imprisonment. It began as an institution of the Cheka, then later became prominent again in the NKVD, when it was used during the Great Purge to execute many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. Defendants in the Troika's proceeding were typically not entitled to legal aid or the presumption of innocence. Convictions usually did not include information about the actual incriminating evidence and basically contained only information about indictment and sentencing. The outcome of such trials was often determined before it even began due to targeted numbers of citizens to be executed or imprisoned in Gulag prison camps.
Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir was a Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin, most commonly Alexander Barmine, was an officer in the Soviet Army and diplomat who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era for France and then United States, where he served the US government and also testified before congressional committees.
Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov (Russian: Арту́р Христиа́нович Арту́зов, was a leading figure in the Soviet international intelligence and counter-intelligence and security officer and spymaster of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
In July 2010, a mass grave was discovered next to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, containing the corpses of 80 military officers executed during the Red Terror of 1918–1921. By 2013 a total of 156 bodies had been found in the same location. At about the same time a mass grave from the Stalin period was discovered at the other end of the country in Vladivostok.
Aghasi Ghevondi Khanjian was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from May 1930 to July 1936.
Joseph Stalin started his career as a student radical, becoming an influential member and eventually the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He served as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953.
Arseny Borisovich Roginsky was a Soviet dissident and Russian historian. He was one of the founders of the International Historical and Civil Rights Society Memorial, and its head since 1998.
Gleb Ivanovich Bokii was a Ukrainian Communist political activist, revolutionary, and paranormal investigator in the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution of 1917, Bokii became a leading member of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, and later of the OGPU and NKVD.
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the time the three Moscow trials were given extravagant titles:
the "Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" ;
the "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" ; and
the "Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"".
Israel Pliner was a Soviet officer and high functionary of the Soviet secret police. Notable posts include deputy chief of the Gulag from 1935 to 1937 and chief administrator of the Gulag from 16 August 1937 to 16 November 1938.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov was a Soviet politician and member of the Cheka and OGPU. He was a key figure in the Red Terror, the Great Purge and dekulakization that saw millions of people executed and deported.
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