I want information about women executioners of the VChK OGPU. The most cruel female executioners in the history of Russia: who are they? The merciless fury of the Red Terror: a revolutionary nicknamed the Demon

A beautiful Jewess from the "noble maidens"

February 1897. The small town of Novozybkov, Chernihiv province (now the Bryansk region). There is a new addition to the Jewish family of the local official Khaikin. A girl was born, who, without deviating from customs, was given the name Fruma.

Her childhood and youth were no different from other students from poor, but decent families. Two classes of home education, as it should be, with cutting and sewing and other feminine tricks that every self-respecting future homemaker should know.

Then an educational institution for noble maidens, where serious professions were not taught, but dances, noble manners, music and the law of God were present in the compulsory program. It was rumored that the older Fruma Khaikin, who was angular in childhood, became, the more she turned into a real beauty. Plus, upbringing and manners - all this allowed the family to hope for a good groom. In the understanding of old-fashioned parents, a good groom did not have to be very rich (but definitely not poor). The main thing is that he be educated and noble.

Side by side with "Comrade Mauser"

The revolution of the 17th brought confusion to all sections of the population of Russia, but the middle and prosperous classes had difficulty adapting to the new realities, in which yesterday's loafers became representatives of the new government. However, yesterday's course student Fruma Khaikina suddenly felt herself in this seething post-revolutionary whirlpool, like a fish in water.

Having joined the Bolsheviks immediately after the October events, already at the beginning of 1918, Fruma surfaced in the village of Unecha (now the regional center of the Bryansk region) - but not so simply, but at the head of a combat detachment of Chinese and Kazakhs, former railway workers, and now Cheka fighters.

The commissar had a specific task - to restore order in the entrusted territory with an “iron hand”, as well as to monitor counter-revolutionary agitation, the local bourgeoisie, unreliable counter-revolutionary elements, kulaks, speculators and other enemies of the Soviet regime.

Fruma took on the task with passion and even some kind of ecstasy. Its motley, with difficulty speaking Russian "Sonder-team" inspired wild horror in the inhabitants of Unecha. But even more people were afraid of their "leather" commander. In a leather jacket, leather pants, with an eternal Mauser and with her narrow-eyed retinue, she walked through the impoverished streets of the village, looking for the enemies of the revolution.

In her understanding, one could become an enemy behind a sidelong glance - that means a hidden enemy. And then Fruma pulled out a Mauser from her holster and shot - at a 70-year-old old man, at a woman tired of work, at a kid ... And when she got tired, she sat on the steps of the porch of the local Cheka and ordered her subordinates, who consisted mostly of Chinese, to drag to her to all those who "do not like it." And then she ruled both the court and the tribunal.

He fought in the tsarist army, and now you are sitting at home, you are not helping the revolution - against the wall. He kept a shop here - bourgeois, against the wall. A snap of the finger of this thin, barely twenty girl, and the Chinese dragged the poor fellow to the wooden wall of the building and ... execution on the spot.

And a recent female student, who had been studying noble manners for more than one year, at that very time, right behind the porch, lowered her pants, sat down and ... relieved herself. Then she returned to her place, straightening her pants on the go, and shouted: “Lead the next one!”. She was openly called the executioner, and she seemed to be proud of this nickname.

Married to... the new order

They say that in the few months that Fruma Khaikina managed to manage in Unecha, there were about two hundred “enemies of the revolution” on her personal account alone, of which eighty percent never even held a weapon in their hands. Which of the old men, woman and children are warriors?

But in addition to restoring order in a single settlement, one should not forget that a civil war was in full swing. Performing individual combat missions, in the spring of 1918, a large partisan detachment arrived in Unecha in the recent past of the tsarist officer, and now the red commander Nikolai Shchors.

These two met. And it spun, it started. They didn’t even notice how people around were whispering - they say, the “commissar” and “commander” twist love in front of everyone. They were so lost in feelings that they overlooked the rebellion in the Bogunsky regiment, the formation of which Shchors was engaged in at that time. The rebels defeated the Cheka, occupied the headquarters of the regiment, seized the telegraph office, destroyed the railway line and sent a dispatch to the Germans with a request to occupy Unecha. Both Shchors and Fruma barely escaped, slipping out of the village at the very last moment.

This story brought them together even more. I’ll kill, of course, later the Reds recaptured from the rebels, but this was no longer interesting for Shors and Fruma. In the autumn of 1918, they got married and Fruma, who took her husband's surname, was henceforth not only his "front-line wife", but also according to her passport.

Nikolai Shchors, as an experienced commander, was thrown to plug many front-line "holes" and everywhere Fruma Shchors was hand in hand with him, performing marital duties at night, and during the day playing the role of an employee of the Cheka in her husband's divisions. They say that Shchors himself often had to save his fighters from the lawlessness of the commissar. Like, there are not enough people at the front - there’s no need for everyone indiscriminately immediately to the wall ...

Limiting itself in the fight against enemies on the front line, Fruma Shchors later recouped in the settlements liberated by the Reds. Even many years later, the inhabitants of Klintsy (also modern Bryansk region) recalled how this "scorcher" rode through the streets on horseback, in her unchanged leather pants, with a Mauser on her side, pointing with a whip at the villagers she did not like, whom the Red Army soldiers who were with her dragged to the nearest fence and shot right in front of relatives and children.

Often, the commissar herself discharged her favorite Mauser at the next enemy - right at a gallop and without aiming. Almost always hit.

The image of the widow Shchors

There are still legends about how Nikolai Shchors died after all. It is only known for certain that he died during the battle with the Petliurists on August 30, 1919 on the territory of the modern Zhytomyr region (Ukraine). It was even rumored that one of his deputies could have shot him. Either he aimed at the place of the commander, or to stop the terror by the Shchorsov spouses, or he was simply a traitor.

However, with the death of her husband, the war ended for Fruma Shchors. She took the body of the deceased commander and took him to Samara to be buried far away. And here, too, there was a place for rumors. Fruma herself said about the burial place of Nikolai Shchors that she wanted to save his body from the desecration of the White Guards, people said that she knew the true reason for the death of her husband, but for some reason not only did not announce it, but even took the body away thousands of miles to no one has found any endings in this story.

Where did her ambition, her iron character and her recent bloodthirstiness go? Taking the neutral name of Rostov, Fruma went to study as a technician. And then she switched to Soviet restoration projects, taking part in many construction projects of the GOELRO system at Moscow aircraft factories.

She seemed to have returned to the past, living quietly and imperceptibly, she did not boast of her military past, she tried not to talk about her husband. So she would have lived modestly for herself, if not for Stalin with his “canonization”. According to the leader, each republic of the USSR needed its own "root" hero. Here they remembered the already half-forgotten Nikolai Shchors.

Before his death, he did not stay as a red commander even for a couple of years, but the Soviet propaganda machine could give odds to anyone. And soon Nikolai Shchors in monuments, street names of Ukrainian (and not only) cities, schools and stadiums. A very significant role in promoting the "heroization" of Shchors was played by his widow. To some extent, not of their own free will - or rather, not on their own initiative.

First, the party decided to make her husband a national hero, then pulled her out of oblivion. Who, if not a faithful comrade-in-arms of the red divisional commander, should popularize his image?

And now Fruma Rostova is already traveling around the cities and villages with stories about the "commander Shchors" - she performs at factories and factories, in schools and parks. In the end, the work of the "widow of Shchors" carried away. In fact, Fruma has become an integral part of the "brand" called "Shchors".

Dovzhenko is making a film about Shchors - she is a consultant. An opera of the same name is being staged - it is a constant participant in rehearsals. And, of course, the collection "The Legendary Divisional Commander" did not do without her memoirs. True, in them she preferred not to mention her "exploits", all thoughts put into lines, exclusively about the "red commander".

For such a stormy campaigning life, the “leather commissar” was rewarded with a tori. First, through her efforts, she “earned” her husband the name of a Soviet hero, and only then the name of Shchors worked for her. She was given an apartment with high ceilings in the "house on the embankment" exclusively as the widow of a civil war hero.

Fruma-Khaikin-Shchors-Rostova died quietly and imperceptibly at almost eighty. It was 1977 outside. A little shriveled old Jewish woman, about whom if someone told her neighbors how famously she once galloped on a horse, shooting on the go exactly at the heads of the "enemies of the revolution", they would never have believed.

In fact, until the end of her days, she lived inconspicuously. With the exception of two years of "bloody" commissariat in a distant war and an already bloodless period with the popularization of the name of a person who managed to live next to less than a year. And with his name - all his life.

The merciless fury of the Red Terror: a revolutionary nicknamed the Demon

The name of Rozalia Zemlyachka was well known in the Soviet years: an active public figure, ideologist, holder of the Order of the Red Banner... She took part in the revolution of 1905-1907, but she became truly "famous" during the years of the Red Terror in Crimea. Even in her youth, having chosen the pseudonym Demon for herself, Rosalia fully justified him with her deeds, having sentenced tens of thousands of people to death.

Zemlyachka was actively engaged in party work, conducted conspiratorial activities. Rosalia was especially merciless in the position of the regional party committee in the Crimea. Arriving there to restore order, she tortured a huge number of people who seemed to her traitors.

The ideology of terror called for learning to hate and forget about love for one's neighbor, the Zemlyachka mastered this lesson like no one else. They feared her, they trembled before her, because any word could lead to a death sentence. At first, she gave orders for the execution of thousands of Crimeans, then ordered the drowning of unfortunate people, throwing them alive from the barges. Death followed her wherever she went.

Such cruelty was to the liking of Lenin, by his order he awarded her the Order of the Red Banner. And it was the first precedent when a woman received such a high award. At the initiative of the Zemlyachka, not only mass executions were carried out, but also the terror of the population, people died of hunger, since the special squads took away everything - both food and things.

Until the end of her life, Zemlyachka remained faithful to the cause of the party. After the Civil War, she held high party positions, during the war years she was deputy chairman of the Party Control Committee under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

She died at the age of 70, her ashes are still in the Kremlin wall. Despite the cruelty and atrocities, Zemlyachka remained a bright memory in the Soviet and post-Soviet years, it was not for nothing that the streets in many Russian cities bore her name.

Rozalia Zemlyachka - Russian revolutionary who sentenced tens of thousands of Crimeans to death

The role of Rosalia Zemlyachka, a Russian revolutionary, in the film Mikhalkov was played by Miriam Sekhon

Despite the fact that the Bolsheviks, it would seem, shot thousands of people with impunity without trial or investigation, punishment nevertheless overtook them. So, Countess Yakovleva-Turner took revenge on the Bolsheviks for the shot fiancé.

As a result of a mother's denunciation of her daughter, the Chekists exposed the fascist organization of seventh graders. And who and by what right today justifies the executioners

« And if you know about all this, then you yourself should be shot!»*

Lyubov Rubtsova was born into a family of Bolsheviks who organized the first collective farm in the village of Drokino, now a suburb of Krasnoyarsk. Parents were transferred to Kansk. In the spring of 1938, Lyuba is 15 years old, she is a seventh grader, participates in amateur performances, writes poetry.

One day, the mother, while cleaning the room, discovers under the mattress of her daughter a pack of handwritten counter-revolutionary leaflets. The mother declares her daughter to the NKVD. According to another version, the communist Darya Dmitrievna Rubtsova took the leaflets to the city committee of the party - "to consult."

_______________
*From a letter from a political prisoner to Joseph Stalin

We are all in the same house

The daughter was arrested on April 7, 1938. They are accused of attempting to create a fascist organization and drawing up a program for it, slandering the leaders of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government. Lyubov Grigoryevna will be released 18 years later, on October 29, 1955. She will return to Kansk and live with her mother. She won't get married, she won't have children. She will die in 1966 - at the age of 44, torn by the camps.

Rubtsov, daughter and mother

Before that, he still has time to move to Krasnoyarsk. More precisely - on a sofa in a book publishing house (there was nowhere to stop), to release three modest collections of poems in it. In them - and about the mother, and about the Motherland. “…always with you. / Mom and Motherland ... / Only in separation / we will know how warm their hands are ”(“ Like the sky ”).

Recently, schoolchildren Grigory Panchuk (Kansk Naval Cadet Corps, leader N. Khorets, teacher of Russian language and literature), Anna Chervyakova (school No. 88 in Krasnoyarsk, leader L. Lineitseva, also a philologist) have made excellent research works about the fate of Rubtsova. It is understandable when children restore the history of their kind or write about great countrymen. But what is the story of Rubtsova - she did not become great, her poems are forgotten - today attracts teenagers so much? I have no explanation.

Unless they feel that this story is about them. About the fact that we live like Lyubov Grigorievna with her mother. In one house.

They feel it in all those absurd or quite dramatic conflicts between them, suddenly leaning into politics today, and adults. Often family.

Rubtsova's story is not unique. Of course, it cannot be called ordinary, but what new things do we learn about ourselves when we dive into the details of today's affairs - Varvara Karaulova or Pavel Grib? In the details of how the closest relatives hide the names of the fallen soldiers or completely refuse them - for payments or simply by shouting from above?

But there is no need for broad projections on the motherland, on the state. For him, we are not relatives, and you can ask anyone there.

"... in order to establish fascism in the USSR"

From a letter from the regional prosecutor to the regional committee of the CPSU (b) dated July 14, 1938:

“[...] by the NKVD bodies of the Kansk region in April 1938 in the mountains. Kanske was opened k.r. a group of 7th grade students, which included the following individuals:
1. Rubtsova Lyubov Grigorievna, born in 1922,
2. Zinina Anna Aleksandrovna, born in 1923,
3. Ufaev Nikolai Vladimirovich, born in 1924.

[…] In March 1938, Rubtsova and Zinina set themselves the task of creating in the mountains. Kanske among the student youth, a fascist organization, which was supposed to fight against the Soviet system in order to overthrow it and establish fascism in the USSR. […] Rubtsova and Zinina began to produce leaflets with a pronounced red. content that they intended to paste on the mountains. Kansk on the night of May 1, 1938

During the search, 20 items were seized from them. k.r. leaflets and 180 pcs. prepared forms. For the manufacture and sticking of k.r. leaflets Rubtsov and Zinin recruited a 6th grade student N.N. Ufaev, the son of an employee, who agreed to stick them in the mountains. Kansk on the night of May 1, 1938. leaflets. […] Their counter-revolutionary activities were revealed at the request of the mother of one of the accused, who discovered that her daughter had a short-term identity. leaflets.

All those accused of the crime committed by them pleaded guilty. For which they were put on trial under Art. 58-10-11 of the Criminal Code. The indictment was approved by the regional prosecutor's office on July 10 of this year. and the case was sent for consideration to the special board of the Krasnoyarsk regional court.

From the memoirs of Zinina it is clear that the pioneers were outraged by the arrests of school teachers - the philologist Pyotr Kronin (he also led the literary circle where Rubtsova studied) and the geographer Leonid Beloglazov. The leaflets were signed as follows: "Committee for the Association of Lenin's Supporters" and they intended to paste them on the buildings of the NKVD and party organs.

The regional court will sentence Zinina and Rubtsova to 7 and 10 years in the camps, respectively, and to 5 years of disqualification each; against Kolya Ufaev, the case will be closed a year later due to lack of evidence. On August 20, 1939, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR will uphold the verdict, excluding an additional measure of punishment - loss of rights.

One stroke: three days after the verdict on the case of creating a fascist organization among young students, Stalin will offer a toast to Hitler's health - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact will be signed in the Kremlin.

Further, the fates of Rubtsova and Zinina will diverge, but will duplicate each other. Both will make an escape. Rubtsova - from the Aban colony in September 1939 (she will be caught in two days and added to the term of a year and a half), Zinina - from the juvenile colony will try, seeking justice, to get to Moscow. Then from the Penza prison, all in the same search, she will write a letter to Stalin (“And if you know about all this, then you yourself should be shot!”), And soon she will be transferred to an internal prison, and the military tribunal of the Volga Military District on March 9, 1941 sentenced to the highest degree. April 12, 1941 will announce the replacement of execution by ten years in the camp. Then Karlag, a penal camp on Balkhash ...

"Refuse"

Both Rubtsova and Zinina will become masons, foremen. Thousands of miles apart, but at adjacent sites. Rubtsova - at the NKVD refinery in Krasnoyarsk, and Zinina - at the Dzhezkazgan mines and factories.

The brigades of Rubtsova and Zinina will break out into the front lines. By the November 1945 order for the refinery of the NKVD, prisoners who systematically overfulfilled production targets and behaved well in everyday life were ordered - by the 28th anniversary of October - "to issue food parcels and uniforms for the 1st period of wear."

In 1948, Rubtsova was transferred to logging in Dolgiy Most (Abansky district). In the fall of 1949, the term expired, but Rubtsova was not released, she was sent into exile in the village of Zaimka, Boguchansky District. A well-known case: "They gave three, served five, released ahead of schedule."

She has a steam burn of the chest, tuberculosis and heart disease. She is 27 years old, and she is disabled at death.

Mother, Darya Dmitrievna, writes in the spring of 1950 to the head of the regional department of the MGB. She asks to transfer her daughter from the regions of the Far North under the supervision of the family, emphasizing that she, her mother, is a member of the CPSU (b) and "agrees to take her under personal responsibility." Then Lyubov also writes a statement: about 60-degree frosts, about the impossibility for her, the patient, to do the work that is here, asks to be transferred south. “[…] Proximity to my family and favorable climatic and material conditions will help me to stand firmly on my feet and feel like a normal full-fledged person who can keep up with the motherland, and give all my strength to the motherland, which is holding out its hand to me.”

On the statements of the mother and daughter - in pencil: "Refuse."

Statement by L. Rubtsova addressed to the head of the Ministry of State Security of the Krasnoyarsk Territory with the resolution “Refuse”

And yet, then she was transferred - south of Boguchan, but north of her native Kansk - to Aban, then to Ustyansk.

On October 1, 1955, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR cancels the verdict, Rubtsova and Zinina are rehabilitated:

“[...] It is clear from the materials of the case that Rubtsova, being a student of the 7th grade of a secondary school, after reading a number of books, for example, The Gadfly, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, decided to become a heroine and stand out from the general masses of people. Believing that it would not be possible for her to become a positive hero, since she ran away from home twice, Rubtsova decided to become a negative “hero” […] her influence, a number of anonymous letters and anti-Soviet leaflets […]. It has not been proven that Rubtsova and Zinina were guided by counter-revolutionary motives. Their actions were the result of their misperception of works of fiction and superficial comprehension of the events of the surrounding reality.

A month later, Love is released. There will be no more intersections in their destinies with Zinina, who is one-of-a-kind - she will become the mother of four sons, a member of the city committee and a deputy of the City Council (from the memoirs of Ruth Tamarina, published by the Sakharov Center), and Rubtsova will remain lonely, will embroider to help her mother, and at 44 will die. No, nevertheless, in the end, they will coincide in that both will write poetry. And both will be working correspondents, cooperating with local newspapers.

The smell of today

In July 1938, the indictment of the fascist organization of seventh-graders was approved by the regional prosecutor Ephraim Lyuboshevsky. Once again: girls aged 14 and 15 were arrested. The Kraisud soldered them 7 and 10 years in the camps and 5 years of disqualification.

Moreover, the decree of April 7, 1935 introduced the criminal liability of children aged 12 to 16 for a strictly limited list of crimes that could not be expanded; the political Article 58 could not apply to them; to their parents, please. But the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, having slightly corrected the verdict, will leave it in force.

A letter from the prosecutor Luboshevsky has been preserved: he reports the case of Rubtsova to the regional committee of the CPSU (b). And on it - indicative marks. It is no longer possible to understand who, in front of the “secret” stamp, added with a pencil “Owls.” - "Soviet secret." Either the prosecutor himself, or in the regional committee. Nevertheless, such socialist legitimacy could not but embarrass the Bolsheviks, they hid it, hid themselves, their role in this mechanism.

Luboshevsky himself - for a completely different reason - would be arrested a couple of months later, on September 11, 1938. Along with him, a dozen prosecutors and judges. Everyone is charged with the same 58th. The trial of the prosecutor will take place almost simultaneously with the trial of the schoolgirls, and Lyuboshevsky will also be sentenced to 10 years in the camps. However, after 2.5 years he will be released and then, in February 1942, he will be completely rehabilitated, in 1950 he will successfully head the regional bar association.

Elena Pimonenko, senior assistant to the regional prosecutor, will write in 2009 in Krasnoyarsk Rabochy about Lyuboshevsky and other prosecutors and judges taken in the fall of the 38th: “In fact, their fault was that they refused to “fabricate” criminal cases and accuse in the commission of counter-revolutionary crimes of innocent people.

Ephraim Lyuboshevsky and Lyubov Rubtsova now side by side in the lists of victims of Stalinist repressions.

Lyuba's mother, communist Darya Dmitrievna Rubtsova, director of the Masloprom base in Kansk, will live a long, full life. Will die in 1980.

The prosecutor's office already in our time found an opportunity for the rehabilitation of Andrei Alekseev, who served as the head of the Minusinsk operative sector of the NKVD. Under his direct supervision in Minusinsk in 1937-38, at least 4,500 people were shot (these are the data of various researchers). For the last 4 months of the 37th and 38th, the execution of 3579 prisoners was documented. Alekseev himself, turning to Yezhov, said that he had honestly worked for 17 years in the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, and in 1937 alone he personally arrested 2,300 Trotskyists, and shot more than 1,500 of them.

Under the leadership and with the direct participation of Alekseev, on August 5, 1938, 309 people were shot “in one sitting”. They write that Sardion Nadaraya set a record - five thousand killed per night, but there is no evidence for this; the main executioner of the Lubyanka, Vasily Blokhin, ordered that no more than 250 people be delivered to his team for execution at a time. Thus, the Minusinsk people came out victorious in the socialist competition, the Stakhanovist movement then boomed and developed in all sectors.

Yes, the butcher Alekseev (he finished off with a crowbar, saving cartridges) a little later was also taken. On October 22, 1938, the Special Meeting dismissed him and three other employees - from that firing squad - from the bodies "for discrediting the rank of NKVD employees" and sent them to camps. Already on January 9, 1941, by the decision of the same Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR, Alekseev was released on parole, and in August 1943 the conviction was removed.

And in our time - and rehabilitated. Why not, given the tone and smell of today?

The Krasnoyarsk "Memorial" nevertheless did not allow Alekseev to appear in the martyrology, on the pages of the multi-volume Books of Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions.

And Luboshevsky is there.

It's all about the nuances, apparently. This figure is more complex than the absolute villain Alekseev. And Darya Dmitrievna, too, yes, a difficult, dramatic figure.

Education through execution

There and then, where and when Rubtsova was buried at a logging site, in the village of Dolgiy Most, Abansky district, Anatoly Safonov was born in 1945, the future colonel general, in the 90s the first deputy director of the FSB, acting. director of the FSB, at the beginning of the 2000s, deputy minister of foreign affairs, from 2004 to 2011 - special presidential envoy for international cooperation in the fight against terrorism and transnational organized crime, since 2012 - vice president of CJSC Rusatom Overseas, "daughters » Rosatom State Corporation.

At the collapse of the USSR, in 1988-1992, Safonov headed the Krasnoyarsk department of the KGB. Not so long ago, being in a small homeland, an honorary citizen of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Safonov will remember:

In the late 80s, it was decided urgently, in a year and a half, to rehabilitate those who were convicted in the era of the Great Terror out of court - by “twos”, “threes”, tribunals. And in the Krasnoyarsk Territory alone, there are several tens of thousands of them. Huge arrays were reviewed. He signed everything himself, looked, read: the head of the department had to personally look through, then the prosecutor signed.

And we saw how everything is connected - someone's feat and someone's baseness. When a wife, for good purposes, so that her husband does not go to the left, wrote a letter - educate her husband. And two pages later - the sentence was carried out. That's what they brought up.

I know that this woman is still alive, the children do not know what she wrote. Children write to us: tell me, who betrayed their father? Mother raised us two, she is a holy person for us, tell the truth - because she is crying today. Here's the truth. Can it be told?

The question has been asked. Need to answer.

How mythological is Dovlatov's story about four million denunciations? Is this the equalization of the people and the authorities, the executioners with the victims? (Safonov's story is her paraphrase.) Clearly, this is an exaggeration. But how much? Nobody knows. The archives, having opened slightly in the early 90s, slammed shut.

All serious historians say that the role of denunciations in Stalin's internal terror is incredibly exaggerated in the mass consciousness. And there was no general denunciation, and the NKVD did not need it at all. Another thing is that Stalinist propaganda needed this myth, it lowered down the feeling of mutual responsibility, knitted the people with them, forcing family members to publicly refuse each other and applaud the executions.

The insignificant rest of the executioners

This myth is also needed by today's propaganda - in order not to open the archives. Say, we care about you, we protect your personal secrets. The tale of four million denunciations is a fabulous absolute, from the Chamber of Weights and Measures. Because it is not permissible to know the truth on this issue. This myth will be cherished forever, it is inexcusable by definition - because of its content, which is unacceptable to disclose. The authorities need him in order to prove to us: we and they are flesh from flesh.

But I remember this story - the mother and daughter of the Rubtsovs - precisely because it touches. And the stories of those families that today hide the names of fallen soldiers for payments also evoke a response. Because in reality we are different, not what the state wants us to be. If they were, it wouldn't matter.

There were no millions. And about those who denounced, people themselves guessed - for the most part. Lyubov Rubtsova knew everything about the role of her mother in her life.

The state security agencies are not hiding the names of the scammers. The authorities hide the names of their own employees who killed thousands of innocent people. And, consigning to oblivion both saints and scoundrels, they create the illusion of a united Russia. “Where everyone is etched by one world, but what kind of world is there - completely outskirts, where thick dirt is stored for future use, stuffed into the mouth.”

And what, should we rot in this swamp, in the gloom, in the net, where everything is mixed up, millstones with grain, people with cannibals, and no guidelines, no consensus on the main values, no light?

Therefore, the archives slammed shut, and Yuri Dmitriev was in the dock - he dug up the execution ditches and the names of the killers.

“Let us be generous, we will not shoot them, we will not fill them with salt water, sprinkle them with bedbugs, bridle them into a “swallow”, keep them on a sleepless stand for a week, nor beat them with boots, nor with rubber clubs, nor squeeze their skulls with an iron ring , nor cram them into the cell like luggage, so that they lie one on top of the other - none of what they did! But before our country and before our children, we are obliged to find everyone. Remember Solzhenitsyn? About "generations of slobbers"?

Why do we protect someone - the heirs of the executioners - an insignificant peace, thereby tearing out "all the foundations of justice" from under our children? Are we silent about the monstrous trauma that does not let the country go? “Young people learn that meanness is never punished on earth, but always brings prosperity. And it would be uncomfortable and scary to live in such a country!”

How to close our past

Archives are closed. After August 1991, they opened slightly, and we are still chewing on what we managed to look at then. Already from the mid-90s they slammed shut again. 20 years ago, in September 1997, Vladimir Sirotinin, the first chairman of Memorial in Krasnoyarsk, told me:

Now, referring to the law on archives, we are not allowed to study archival and investigative cases. They can only be issued to the most repressed or to his relatives. Or you need a power of attorney from them. The problem, for example, is now with access to the former party archive. Its director believes that any mention of repression refers to the facts of personal life, and does not issue such documents. Here, when deciding to declassify funds, they suddenly found out that in order to remove the “secret” stamp, the materials discovered in 1991 must be classified again. And they kept it secret. Yes, they left it. And to work with them now you need permission.

The State Archives also closes previously opened funds, and it is precisely those where there may be information about repressions. The documentation of the military tribunal of the 94th division quartered in Krasnoyarsk ended up in the State Archives. In 1991 it was declassified. Now closed again. And this is not archival investigative work. They stopped giving other materials, where something is said about specific people.

There is an archive in the regional department of the FSB. All their general documentation (NKVD orders, execution limits, etc.) is declassified by law. Started to work. The order is this: when you get acquainted with the documents, the security officer sits opposite and watches you. Soon they told me: we do not have a free employee that would sit with you.

By law, every citizen can freely get acquainted with archival materials. But in reality, the first thing you will be asked for is a letter from the organization. The form is as follows: “please allow” ... Someone must definitely recommend you. I ask you to give me the materials, in response I hear: why do you need this? The archives were subordinate to the NKVD, the psychology, apparently, has been preserved since those times: to give documents as little as possible.

If only I were interested in the fulfillment of the five-year plans! The director of the party archive gladly gives me documents if they are about spring sowing or fodder.

“The task is not to show the names of the enkavedeshniki”

Sirotinin is no more. 20 years later, I ask the same questions to the current chairman of the Krasnoyarsk "Memorial" Alexei Babiy:

If 75 years have not passed, access is closed, referring to the law on personal data. But, say, 80 years have passed since the Great Terror! And there is a departmental instruction in this regard, and in this case they refer to it.

Relatives are now allowed to get acquainted with the case, regardless of whether 75 years have passed (but only if the person has been rehabilitated), copies of some pages are made (they are not allowed to shoot anything themselves), and they are given an archival certificate. Non-relatives can get acquainted with the case if 75 years have passed, but they are not given any copies and are not allowed to retake. In any case, information about third parties - employees of the NKVD and other defendants in the case is closed.

Actually, the main task is precisely not to show the names of the enkavedeshniki. As a result, it is often impossible to understand the essence of the matter from documents where the names of investigators and informers are closed, and at the same time the plot.

And why does Denis Karagodin succeed? It is clear that he was investigating the case of his great-grandfather. But now he has posted full copies of the archival investigation file of Nikolai Klyuev with the names of all his killers - employees of the NKVD and the prosecutor's office.

How Karagodin manages to do his job, I do not really understand. According to Klyuev, for example, he had to unstick pieces of paper in the archive and investigation file, with which the names are stuck. How he did it, if the employee was sitting opposite, I don’t know. But in different archives are treated differently. They just complained to me about the Khakassian Republican Archive - they say they generally refused to give cases. And in the Sverdlovsk archive, they say, the file was copied completely.

The main problem is that you can not reshoot. Well, Sergei Prudovsky now needs to process the protocols of the "two" on the "Harbinsk" in the Omsk FSB. There, if you copy by hand, you have to live for six months. And you can redo it in a couple of weeks.

About requests to remove information about repressed relatives from the “memorial” site: are people again afraid of something or are they ashamed of their executed grandparents?

Relatives withdraw the materials that they have given. They have a right to it, although there is nothing good in it. Or. One relative gave the information, and other relatives demanded that it be removed. They argued that "grandmother was against" that this page of her biography was published somewhere.

Afterword

Closing the archives does not save the country and the nation. On the contrary, it destroys them. By closing the archives, the state will continue to manage our past. So, to mine our future.

What did the pupil of the cadet corps Panchuk and the schoolgirl Chervyakova take out of the fate of Rubtsova? That she repented for the mistakes of her youth and glorified the cause of Lenin in verse? And her mother, who surrendered her daughter, was proud of her loyalty to the cause of the party? (Judging by her statements-complaints, she did not agree with only one thing - she believed that such a long imprisonment was not required for the re-education of her daughter.)

Archives are required by law to be publicly available. We need accurate documentary knowledge about ourselves. And only this can prevent the opportunistic rewriting of history by the regime and warn prosecutors-investigators-judges from turning into executioners.

And children should know that everything comes through the mists of time, all the faces and all the faces, all the dirt, all the blood and all the nobility. That human deeds are recorded forever and indestructible.

Cover doc. editions of Y. Naumov "Chekist. Pages from the life of the deputy chairman of the Kazan gubcheka V.P. Braude" - M., 1963. Artist V. Tanasevich.

Zworykin B., Chekist. Drawing from the book "History of the Soviets", Paris, 1922

Dora Evlinskaya, under 20 years old, a female executioner who executed 400 officers in the Odessa Cheka with her own hands

Woman executioner - Varvara Grebennikova (Nemich). In January 1920, she sentenced officers and the "bourgeoisie" to death on board the steamer "Romania. Executed by whites

Executioner woman. Participant of the "St. Bartholomew's Night" in Evpatoria and executions in "Romania". Executed by whites

Other photographs of red fanatics from the times of the Russian-Soviet (for the communists - "Civil") war: http://swolkov.ru/doc/kt/f13-1.htm; http://swolkov.ru/doc/kt/f13-3.htm ;

1. First published: Nesterovich-Berg M. L. In the fight against the Bolsheviks. - Paris, 1931 - p. 208–209. /G. Kyiv, summer 1919 / "One of the military, who held a high post, suggested that I go with them to inspect the emergency room. It was located in a mansion on Lipki, along Sadovaya Street. A certain Jewess Roza became famous for cruelty here, despite her twenty years, the former head of the emergency. (...)

Hooks were driven everywhere into the walls of the room, and on these hooks, as in butcher shops, hung human corpses, the corpses of officers, sometimes mutilated with delusional ingenuity: “epaulettes” were carved on the shoulders, crosses on the chest, some of the skin was completely torn off, - one bloody carcass hung on a hook. Immediately on the tables stood a glass jar and in it, in alcohol, the severed head of some man of about thirty, of extraordinary beauty ...

With us were the French, the British and the Americans. We experienced horror. Everything was described and photographed."

2. K. Alinin. "Cheka". Personal memories of the Odessa emergency. With portraits of victims of the Cheka. - Odessa, 1919.

"As I said, "amateurs" - employees of the Cheka - also took part in the executions. Among them, Abash mentioned some girl, an employee of the emergency, about 17 years old. She was distinguished by terrible cruelty and mockery of her victims. [Abash is a Latvian sailor, an employee of the Cheka.]

3. First published: Archive of the Russian Revolution. T. II. - Berlin, 1922 - p. 194–226. /G. Riga, January-March 1919 / "At this time, instead of the expected watchmen, four Latvian women with guns entered the cell. "How many of you are here," asked the first who entered, still quite a young girl in a huge black hat with ostrich feathers, fashionable She wore a short velvet suit and fishnet stockings. she pointed with a gun at Rolf, who was lying under his overcoat. Daisy replied that he was very sick. “Well, so much the better, we have less work to do.” She went on. "(...)" Rumors of mass executions are confirmed by eyewitness accounts. the majority refused to shoot. This "sacred duty" was assumed by Latvian women. I think this is the only example in the history of the world."

4. “An interesting example is given in her memoirs by the writer Teffi; In 1918, in the town of Unecha, where the border checkpoint was located, the entire city was terrified by a commissar who walked around with two revolvers and a saber and personally "filtered" outgoing refugees, deciding who to let through and who to shoot. Moreover, she was reputed to be honest and ideological, she did not take bribes, and the things of the dead were disgustedly inferior to her subordinates. But she carried out the sentences herself. And Teffi suddenly recognized in her a village woman-dishwasher, once quiet and downtrodden, but distinguished by one oddity - she always volunteered to help the cook slaughter chickens. "No one asked - she went with her hunting, she never missed it." http://www.gramotey.com/?open_file=1269008064

5. “More than 300 people were seized in Evpatoria. and subjected to painful executions that took place on the ships "Truvor" and "Romania" under the direction and with the direct participation of Commissioner Antonina Nimich. The victim was dragged out of the hold onto the deck, undressed, cut off his nose, ears, genitals, chopped off his arms and legs, and only after that they threw him into the sea. (...) Evgenia Bosch, who raged in Penza, was forced to withdraw during the war, the doctors recognized her as a sexual psychopath. Obvious shifts on the same ground were observed in other leading workers - Concordia Gromova, Rosalia Zalkind (Countrymen) - one of the leaders of the genocide on the Don. (...) There was a commissar Nesterenko who forced soldiers to rape women and girls in her presence. (...) In Moscow, their own monsters were operating - (...) the Latvian investigator Braude, who loved to personally search the arrested, undressed both women and men, and at the same time climbed into the most intimate places. And she also loved to shoot herself. (...) In Rybinsk, the Chekist "comrade Zina" committed atrocities. (...) Kedrov's wife, the former paramedic Rebekah Plastinina (Meisel), was also clearly abnormal. In Vologda, she conducted interrogations in her living car, and from there came the screams of the tortured, who were then shot right there near the car, and in this city she personally executed more than 100 people. (...) / in Kholmogory / His wife Rebekah Plastinina also committed atrocities - she personally shot 87 officers and 33 civilians, sank a barge with 500 refugees and soldiers, committed reprisals in the Solovetsky Monastery, after which the corpses of drowned monks came across in the fishermen's net. And even when a commission was sent from Moscow under the leadership of the executioner Eiduk and took away some of the arrested for interrogation to the Cheka, she managed to get them back and destroyed them. (...) / in Odessa / There was also a young woman Vera Grebennyukova, nicknamed "comrade Dora", she committed atrocities during interrogations, pulled out her hair, cut her ears, fingers, limbs. And according to rumors, in two and a half months one shot 700 people. (...) and an ugly Latvian named "Pug", who walked in short pants with two revolvers behind her belt - her "personal record" was 52 people. overnight. (...) In Yekaterinburg ... Latvian Shtalberg, in Baku ... "comrade Lyuba". (...) And in Kyiv, a Hungarian Remover was arrested - for ... unauthorized executions. She selected simply suspects, witnesses called to the Cheka, who came with the petitions of the relatives of the arrested, who had the misfortune to excite her, took them to the basement, undressed and killed. She was recognized as mentally ill, but this was discovered when she had already managed to kill 80 people. - and before, in the general stream of the condemned, they did not even notice. (...) » http://www.gramotey.com/?open_file=1269008064

6. In his Notes, the son of Gorky’s literary friend N. G. Mikhailovsky, recalls a conversation with a young security officer: “... this nineteen-year-old Jewess, who arranged everything, frankly explained why all the Chekas are in the hands of the Jews. “These Russians are soft-bodied Slavs and constantly talk about the end of terror and emergency situations,” she told me: “If only they are allowed into the emergency department for prominent posts, then everything will collapse, softness will begin, Slavic slovenliness and nothing will remain of terror. We Jews will show no mercy, and we know that as soon as terror ceases, there will be no trace of communism and communists. That is why we allow Russians to any places, but not to the emergency room ... ”For all the moral disgust ... I could not disagree with her that not only Russian girls, but also Russian men - the military could not be compared with her in her bloody trade. Jewish, or rather, all-Semitic Assyrovilonian cruelty was the core of Soviet terror...” http://stihiya.org/likbez_67.html

7. "Transferred to Moscow, Peters, among other assistants who had the Latvian Krause, literally covered the whole city with blood. It is impossible to convey everything that is known about this woman-beast and her sadism. It was said that she was terrifying with her very appearance, that she trembled with her unnatural excitement ... She mocked her victims, invented the most cruel types of torment mainly in the genital area and stopped them only after complete exhaustion and the onset of sexual reaction... The objects of her torment were mainly young men, and no pen was in able to convey what this Satanist performed with her victims, what operations she performed on them ... Suffice it to say that such operations lasted for hours and she stopped them only after the young people writhing in suffering turned into bloody corpses with eyes frozen in horror ..." http://www.uznai-pravdu.ru/viewtopic.php?p=698

8. "In Kyiv, the emergency was in the power of the Latvian Latsis. His assistants were Avdokhin, "Comrade Vera", Rosa Schwartz and other girls. the girls mentioned above were different. In one of the cellars of the emergency, a kind of theater was arranged, where chairs were placed for lovers of bloody spectacles, and on the stage, i.e. on the stage, executions were carried out. After each successful shot, shouts of "bravo", "encore" were heard. "And the executioners were brought glasses of champagne. Rosa Schwartz personally killed several hundred people, previously squeezed into a box, on the upper platform of which a hole was made for the head. But shooting at a target was only a piece of fun for these girls and did not excite their already dulled nerves. They demanded more acute sensations, and for this purpose Rosa and "Comrade Vera" gouged out their eyes with needles, or burned them out with cigarettes, or hammered thin nails under their nails. nails." http://www.biglib.com.ua/read.php?pg_which=72&dir=0015&a...

9./1918 / "If we talk about the January events in Evpatoria, then the main organizers and creators of terror in this seaside city were sisters - Antonina, Varvara and Yulia Nemich. This is confirmed by numerous testimonies, including Soviet ones. In March Nemichi and other organizers of the murders on the Evpatoria roadstead were shot by the Whites in 1919. After the final establishment of Soviet power in the Crimea, in 1921, the remains of the sisters and other executed Bolsheviks were buried with honors in a mass grave in the center of the city, over which in 1926 erected the first monument - a five-meter obelisk crowned with a scarlet five-pointed star. A few decades later, in 1982, the monument was replaced by another. At its foot, you can still see fresh flowers. (In any case, this was the case in the fall of the past, 2011). Also one of the city streets is named in honor of the Nemichs in Evpatoria. http://rys-arhipelag.ucoz.ru/publ/dmitrij_sokolov_tovarishh_nina/29-1-0-3710

Now I raise the question about the alleged "equivalence" and "reciprocity" of terror during the years of the Russian-Soviet war: How many ladies performed executioner duties in the troops of the White Movement?

Please, comrades, "Soviet patriots", give the names and surnames of these "White Guard" female executioners, as I cited for the "red" women-Chekists.

Which of you will tell me exactly how the "bloody anti-communists" from among the White Guard ladies mocked the captured Bolsheviks and ordinary Red Army men? - if he can, of course ...

By purchasing products called "Providence", you change your image and dependence on the thoughts of the infidels in vain foreign clothes with incomprehensible names and meanings.

By purchasing products called "Providence", you acquire smart work in the service of the Providence of God.

Rosalia Zemlyachka (Demon)
Jewish. Surname on the father-Zalkind
(So ​​much hatred and anger towards white officers, their wives and children. Did Rozalia Zemlyachka hate smart, intelligent Russians? And her task was to exterminate her best people on Russian soil?)

Fury of the Red Terror

Soviet power, established in the Crimea after the departure of the Wrangel troops, marked its rule with one of the most terrible tragedies of our time: in a relatively short period, a huge number of former White Army soldiers who believed in the new government and did not leave their homeland were exterminated in the most cruel way. This cruelty also had a feminine face...

What is "friends of the people"?

Sometimes the Zemlyachka was asked: how did she, a girl from a bourgeois family, become a revolutionary? Who led her, a young schoolgirl with curly black hair and gray curious eyes, to hatred towards representatives of the class from which she herself was?

She was born in 1876. The enterprising man Samuil Markovich Zalkind owned an excellent profitable house in Kyiv, and his haberdashery shop was considered one of the best and largest in the city. He wanted to bring children into people and brought them out - they learned and became engineers and lawyers. But, alas, they did not think quite the way their father wanted. They saw the benefit of their native country in the revolution, even in its extreme and most ugly forms. All the children of Samuil Zalkind were in the royal prisons. So the merchant of the first guild, Zalkind, every now and then was forced to make a deposit, taking bail first one, then another son ...

Cruel Rose named Countrywoman.

But most of all in the family they loved Rosa. She was the most capable, the most impatient, the most perceptive, and (even the brothers admitted it) the most intelligent.
In 1894, after graduating from high school, Rosa entered the University of Lyon for a course in medical sciences. In France.
A student friend gave her to read Vladimir Ulyanov's brochure "What are" friends of the people ...". And soon Rosa Zalkind joined the Kiev Social Democratic organization, becoming a professional revolutionary. And a year later, Zemlyachka (that was now her revolutionary pseudonym) was arrested.
She failed to escape prison. The prison was replaced by a link to Siberia. In exile, Zemlyachka got married and acquired another surname - Berlin. She fled from exile alone, her husband remained in Siberia and soon died. Later, she herself could not really determine the reason for her marriage: either it was sympathy for a comrade-in-arms, or she wanted to support a weaker comrade
Time spent in prisons made her violent, sometimes to the point of pathology. The new party nickname - Demon - suited her perfectly.
Upon returning to Russia in 1905participated in the organization of the turmoil of 1905, in the December battles in Moscow. She gained her first experience of shooting at the tsarist troops, which turned out to be very popular later, in the Crimea, during the executions of Wrangel officers. After the victory of the revolution, the leadership of the party entrusted her with a very responsible job ...

The demon broke free.

In 1920, the Wrangel army left the Crimea, but tens of thousands of soldiers and officers did not want to leave their native land, especially since Frunze in leaflets promised life and freedom to those who remained. Many remained.

On Lenin's instructions, two "Iron Bolsheviks" were sent to the Crimea "to restore order" with practically unlimited powers, fanatically devoted to the Soviet regime and equally hating its enemies: Rozalia Zemlyachka, who became secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the Hungarian Cominternist Bela Kun, who was appointed special commissioner for the Crimea. 35-year-old Kun, a former prisoner of war officer of the Austro-Hungarian army, managed by that time to proclaim the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was drowned in blood, after which he came to "make a revolution" in Russia.

The Crimea was handed over to Bela Kun and Rozalia Samuilovna. The triumphant winners invited Leon Trotsky to the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic of Crimea, but he replied: "I will come to the Crimea when there is not a single White Guard left on its territory." The Crimean leaders took this not as a hint, but as an order and a guide to action. Bela Kun and Zemlyachka came up with a brilliant move to destroy not only the prisoners, but also those who were at large. An order was issued: all former servicemen of the tsarist and White armies must register - name, rank, address. For evading registration - execution. There was only no notice that those who came to register would also be shot...

Red terror in Crimea, 1920-1921

With the help of this truly diabolical trick, an additional tens of thousands of people were identified. They were taken to their home addresses one by one at night and shot without any trial - according to registration lists. The senseless bloody destruction of all those who laid down their arms and remained on their native land began. And now the numbers are called different: seven, thirty, and even seventy thousand. But even if there are seven, shooting so many thousands is work. This is where the pathological cruelty, accumulated for years before in Rosalia Salkind, manifested itself. The demon broke free. It was Zemlyachka who said: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them, drown them in the sea."

The destruction took on nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned in the sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time later, through the clear sea water, the dead standing in rows could be seen. They say that tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at the machine gun...
Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of a stench from the decaying corpses of the executed, who were not even buried in the ground. The pits behind the Vorontsovsky Garden and the greenhouses in the Krymtaev estate were full of the corpses of the executed, lightly sprinkled with earth, and the cadets of the cavalry school (future red commanders) drove a mile and a half from their barracks, to knock out gold teeth from the mouths of the executed with stones, and this hunt always gave great booty.

Memorial plaque in memory of the massacres in the Crimea in 1920-1921.

... During the first winter, 96 thousand people out of 800 thousand of the Crimean population were shot. The slaughter went on for months. On November 28, Izvestia of the Provisional Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee published the first list of the executed - 1634 people, on November 30 the second list - 1202 people. In a week alone in Sevastopol, Bela Kun shot more than 8,000 people, and such executions took place throughout the Crimea, machine guns worked day and night. Rozalia Zemlyachka ruled the Crimea in such a way that the Black Sea turned red with blood.
The terrible massacre of officers under the leadership of Zemlyachka made many shudder. Also, without trial or investigation, women, children, and the elderly were shot. The massacres received such a wide response that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee created a special commission to investigate. And then all the "particularly distinguished" commandants of the cities presented telegrams from Bela Kun and Rozalia Zemlyachka in their defense, inciting massacres, and reporting on the number of innocent victims. In the end, this not at all "sweet couple" had to be removed from the Crimea ...

She deified Lenin all her life and even wrote the extremely tendentious Memoirs of V. I. Lenin. Always and with everyone she was dry and withdrawn and, one might say, completely devoid of personal life. Many considered her indifferent, and most were afraid and hated. One of the veterans of the party, "the last of the Mohicans" of the pre-revolutionary RSDLP, talking about the Bolshevik Rozalia Zemlyachka, who for many years led the bodies of party and Soviet control, assessed one of her qualities as follows: .

Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like those of many other executioners of her own people, are buried in the Kremlin wall...

PS Columnist for the weekly "Kommersant. Power" Yevgeny Zhirnov, studying the history of the so-called Russian Party, got to the bottom of the fact that the famous Soviet writer Leonid Leonov (author of the novel "Russian Forest") served under Zemlyachka in the newspaper of the 18th army. And, says Zhirnov, "far from being a young lady, every night she chose a partner for the night from the Red Army. And Leonov seemed to have to hide from her all the time." This is what "lack of privacy" means...

http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/bahit/post292919132/
The famous red and proletarian poet Demyan Bedny wrote about her:

From office supplies and hibernation
To fully protect yourself
Portrait of Comrade Zemlyachka
Hang it on the wall, mate!

Then wandering around the office,
Pray that you've found out by now
Countrywoman only in the portrait,
A hundred times worse than the original!

Even the head of the Cheka, F.E. Dzerzhinsky eventually admitted that he and other leaders of his department “made a big mistake.
Crimea was the main nest of the White Guard, and in order to ruin this nest,
we sent comrades there with absolutely extraordinary powers. But we
could not think that they are using these powers in THIS way”

Until the 20th century, there were no women professional executioners in history, and only occasionally women were serial killers and sadists. The landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, entered Russian history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs.

During the life of her husband, she did not notice a particular propensity for violence, but soon after his death she began to regularly beat the servants. The main reason for punishment was an unfair attitude to work (washing floors or laundry). She struck the guilty peasant women with the first object that came to hand (most often it was a log). The offenders were then flogged by grooms and sometimes beaten to death. Saltychikha could douse the victim with boiling water or singe her hair on her head. She used hot curling irons for torture, with which she grabbed the victim by the ears. She often pulled people by the hair and hit their heads hard against the wall. According to witnesses, many of those killed by her did not have hair on their heads. Victims, on her orders, were starved and tied naked in the cold. Saltychikha loved to kill brides who were about to get married in the near future. In November 1759, during a torture that lasted almost a day, she killed a young servant, Khrisanf Andreev, and in September 1761, Saltykova killed the boy Lukyan Mikheev with her own hands. She also tried to kill the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Land surveyor Tyutchev was in a love relationship with her for a long time, but decided to marry the girl Panyutina. Saltykova ordered her people to burn Panyutina's house and gave sulfur, gunpowder and tow for this. But the serfs were afraid. When Tyutchev and Panyutina got married and went to their Orel estate, Saltykova ordered her peasants to kill them, but the executors reported the order to Tyutchev (156).

Numerous complaints from the peasants only led to severe punishments for the complainants, since Saltychikha had many influential relatives and she managed to bribe officials. But two peasants, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, in 1762 managed to convey a complaint to Catherine I, who had just ascended the throne.

During the investigation, which lasted six years, searches were made in the Moscow house of Saltychikha and her estate, hundreds of witnesses were interviewed, and account books containing information about bribes to officials were confiscated. Witnesses spoke about the killings, gave the dates and names of the victims. From their testimony it followed that Saltykova had killed 75 people, mostly women and girls.

The investigator in the case of the widow Saltykova, court adviser Volkov, based on the data of the suspect's house books, compiled a list of 138 surnames of serfs, whose fate was to be ascertained. According to official records, 50 people were considered "dead from diseases", 72 people were "missing without a trace", 16 were considered "left to her husband" or "gone on the run." Many suspicious death records have been identified. For example, a twenty-year-old girl could go to work as a servant and die within a few weeks. The groom Yermolai Ilyin, who filed a complaint against Saltychikha, had three wives died in a row. Some peasant women were allegedly released to their native villages, after which they either immediately died or disappeared without a trace.

Saltychikha was taken into custody. During interrogations, the threat of torture was used (permission for torture was not obtained), but she did not confess to anything. As a result of the investigation, Volkov came to the conclusion that Daria Saltykova was “undoubtedly guilty” in the death of 38 people and “left in suspicion” regarding the guilt in the death of another 26 people.

The litigation lasted over three years. The judges found the accused "guilty without leniency" of thirty-eight proven murders and torture of courtyard people. By the decision of the Senate and Empress Catherine II, Saltykova was deprived of her noble rank and sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only with the head of the guard and a woman nun). She was also sentenced to serve for an hour a special "reproachful spectacle", during which the condemned woman was to stand on a scaffold chained to a pole with the inscription "torturer and murderer" above her head.

The punishment was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. In the Moscow Ivanovo convent, where the convict arrived after being punished on Red Square, a special “repentant” cell was prepared for her. The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (2.1 meters). It was below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of daylight getting inside. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only at the time of eating she was given a candle stub. Saltychikha was not allowed to walk, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence. On major church holidays, she was taken out of prison and brought to a small window in the wall of the temple, through which she could listen to the liturgy. The strict regime of detention lasted 11 years, after which it was weakened: the convict was transferred to a stone annex to the temple with a window. Visitors to the temple were allowed to look out the window and even talk to the prisoner. According to the historian, “Saltykov, when it happened, the curious would gather at the window behind the iron bars of her dungeon, curse, spit and stick a stick through the window open in the summer.” After the death of a prisoner, her cell was adapted as a sacristy. She spent thirty-three years in prison and died on November 27, 1801. She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where all her relatives were buried (157).

Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan became famous for her assassination attempt on Lenin at the Michelson factory. In 1908, as an anarchist, she was making a bomb that suddenly exploded in her hands. After this explosion, she was almost blind. Half-blind, she shot at Lenin from two steps - she missed once, and twice wounded him in the arm. She was shot four days later, and the corpse was burned and scattered to the wind. In Lenin, Professor Passoni describes her as crazy. During the Civil War in Ukraine, a gang of another passionary, the anarchist Maruska Nikiforova, who sided with Makhno, was atrocious. Before the revolution, she served a twenty-year term in hard labor. The Whites eventually caught and shot her. It turned out that she is a hermaphrodite, i.e. not a man or a woman, but one of those who used to be called witches.

In addition to Marusya Nikiforova and Fanny Kaplan, there were many other women who influenced the outcome of the bloody October coup. The activities of such revolutionaries as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Alexandra Kollontai (Domontovich), Inessa Armand, Serafima Gopner,

Maria Aveide, Lyudmila Stal, Evgenia Shlikhter, Sofia Brichkina, Cecilia Zelikson, Zlata Rodomyslskaya, Claudia Sverdlova, Nina Didrikil, Berta Slutskaya and many others, certainly contributed to the victory of the revolution, which led to the greatest disasters, the destruction or expulsion of the best sons and daughters of Russia. The activities of most of these "fiery revolutionaries" were mainly limited to "party work" and there is no direct blood on them, i.e. they did not pass death sentences and did not personally kill nobles, entrepreneurs, professors, officers, priests and other representatives of the “hostile” classes in the basements of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD. However, some "Valkyries of the Revolution" skillfully combined agitation-party and "combat" work.

The most prominent representative of this cohort is Larisa Mikhailovna Reisner (1896-1926), the prototype of the commissar in Optimistic Tragedy. Born in Poland. Father professor, German Jew, mother Russian noblewoman. She graduated from a gymnasium and a psycho-neurological institute in St. Petersburg. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1918. During the Civil War, a fighter, political worker of the Red Army, commissar of the Baltic Fleet and the Volga Flotilla. Contemporaries remembered her giving orders to revolutionary sailors in an elegant naval overcoat or leather jacket, with a revolver in her hand. The writer Lev Nikulin met with Reisner in the summer of 1918 in Moscow. According to him, Larisa minted in a conversation: “We shoot and will shoot counter-revolutionaries! We will!”

In May 1918, L. Reisner marries Fyodor Raskolnikov, deputy people's commissar for maritime affairs, and soon leaves with her husband, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, for Nizhny Novgorod. Now she is the flag secretary of the commander of the Volga military flotilla, the commissar of the reconnaissance detachment, a correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper, where her essays Letters from the Front are published. In a letter to her parents, she writes: “Trotsky summoned me to his place, I told him a lot of interesting things. We are now great friends, I was appointed by order of the army the commissar of the intelligence department at the headquarters (please do not confuse it with espionage counterintelligence), I recruited and armed thirty Magyars for bold assignments, got them horses, weapons, and from time to time I go with them on reconnaissance . I speak German with them. In this role, another passionary, Elizaveta Drabkina, described Larisa: “Ahead, a woman in a soldier’s tunic and a wide checkered skirt, blue and light blue, galloped ahead on a black horse. Deftly holding on in the saddle, she boldly rushed across the plowed field. It was Larisa Reisner, head of army intelligence. The rider's pretty face burned with the wind. She had bright eyes, chestnut braids caught at the back of her head ran from her temples, a severe wrinkle crossed her high, clean forehead. Larisa Reisner was accompanied by soldiers of the reconnaissance company of the International Battalion.

After heroic deeds on the Volga, Reisner, together with her husband, who commanded the Baltic Fleet, worked in Petrograd. When Raskolnikov was appointed as a diplomatic representative in Afghanistan, she left with him, however, leaving him, she returned to Russia. Upon her return from Central Asia, Larisa Reisner was expelled from the party for "behavior unworthy of a communist." As Elisabeth Poretsky, the wife of intelligence officer Ignas Poretsky, who knew Reisner closely, writes in her book: “There were rumors that during her stay in Bukhara she had numerous connections with British army officers, on a date with whom she went to the barracks naked, in one fur coat. Larisa told me that the author of these inventions was Raskolnikov, who turned out to be insanely jealous and unbridled cruel. She showed me the scar on her back, left from his blow with a whip. Although she was expelled from the party and the position of the young woman remained unclear, she was not deprived of the opportunity to travel abroad due to her relationship with Radek...” (161: 70). Reisner became the wife of another revolutionary, Karl Radek, with whom she tried to kindle the fire of the "proletarian" revolution in Germany. She wrote several books and wrote poetry. The bullets that passed her on the fronts killed all those who loved her. The first - her beloved in his youth, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot in the Cheka. Raskolnikov in 1938 was declared an "enemy of the people", became a defector and was liquidated by the NKVD in French Nice. He died in the dungeons of the NKVD and Karl Radek - "a conspirator and spy of all foreign intelligence services." One can only guess what fate awaited her, if not for illness and death.

Reisner died of typhoid fever at the age of thirty. She was buried at the "communards' site" at the Vagankovsky cemetery. One of the obituaries read: "She would have to die somewhere in the steppe, in the sea, in the mountains, with a rifle or a Mauser tightly clenched." The life of this “Valkyrie of the Revolution” was very briefly and figuratively described by the talented journalist Mikhail Koltsov (Fridland), who knew her closely and was also shot: “The spring laid in the life of this happily gifted woman unfolded spaciously and beautifully ... From the St. to the lower reaches of the Volga, enveloped in fire and death, then to the Red Fleet, then - through the Central Asian deserts - into the dense jungle of Afghanistan, from there - to the barricades of the Hamburg uprising, from there - to coal mines, to oil fields, to all peaks, to all rapids and nooks and crannies world, where the element of struggle bubbles - forward, forward, on a par with the revolutionary locomotive rushed the hot indomitable steed of her life.

The same fighting and bright revolutionary was Mokievskaya-Zubok Lyudmila Georgievna, whose biography surprisingly resembles the biography of Larisa Reisner. She is a student of the same St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, which, "issued" a whole constellation of revolutionaries and passionaries. Born in Odessa in 1895. Mother, Mokievskaya-Zubok Glafira Timofeevna, a noblewoman, did not take part in political life. Father Bykhovsky Naum Yakovlevich. Jew, socialist-revolutionary since 1901, in 1917 - member of the Central Committee. Lived in Leningrad and Moscow. Worked in trade unions. Arrested in July 1937, shot in 1938. Mokievskaya-Zubok was the first and only commander and at the same time commissar of an armored train in history. In 1917, being a Maximalist Social Revolutionary, Lyudmila came to Smolny and connected her life with the revolution. In December 1917, Podvoisky sent her to Ukraine to get food, but under the name of the student Mokievsky Leonid Grigoryevich, she joined the Red Army and from February 25, 1918, became the commander of the armored train "3rd Bryansk" and at the same time the commissar of the Bryansk combat detachment . She is fighting with the Germans and Ukrainians on the Kyiv-Poltava-Kharkov line, then with the Krasnovites near Tsaritsyn, her train is involved in the suppression of the Yaroslavl rebellion. At the end of 1918, the armored train arrives at the Sormovo plant for repairs, where Lyudmila receives another armored train - "Power to the Soviets" and is appointed its commander and commissar. The armored train was placed under operational control of the 13th Army and fought in the Donbass on the Debaltsevo-Kupyanka line. In the battle near Debaltsevo on March 9, 1919, Mokievskaya died at the age of twenty-three. She was buried in Kupyansk with a large crowd of people, the funeral was captured on film. After the arrival of the whites in Kupyansk, the corpse of Lyudmila Mokievskaya was dug up and thrown into a dump in a ravine. They buried her again only after the second arrival of the Reds (162: 59-63).

However, there was another, very special category of overly active, and often just mentally ill "revolutionaries" who left a truly terrible mark on the history of Russia. Were there many? We will probably never get an answer to this question. The communist press shyly avoided describing the "exploits" of such "heroines". Judging by the well-known photo of members of the Kherson Cheka, the ferocity of which is documented, where out of nine photographed employees there are three women, this type of "revolutionaries" is not uncommon. What are their fates? Some of them were destroyed by the system they served, some committed suicide, and some, the most "deserved", were buried in the best Moscow cemeteries. The ashes of some of them are immured even in the Kremlin wall. The names of most executioners are still kept under seven seals as an important state secret. Let us name at least some of these women, who especially distinguished themselves and left a bloody trail in the history of the Russian revolution and the Civil War. By what principle and how to rank them? It would be most correct by the amount of blood shed by each of them, but how much was shed and who measured it? Which one is the bloodiest? How to calculate it? Most likely, this is our Countrywoman with you. Zalkind Rosalia Samoilovna (Countrywoman) (1876-1947). Jewish. Born in the family of a merchant of the 1st guild. She studied at the Kiev Women's Gymnasium and the Medical Faculty of the University of Lyon. She has been engaged in revolutionary activities since the age of 17 (and what did she lack?). Prominent Soviet statesman and party leader, party member since 1896, active participant in the revolution of 1905-1907. and the October armed uprising. Party aliases (nicknames) Demon, Zemlyachka.

During the Civil War in political work in the Red Army. Member of the Central Committee of the party in 1939, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR since 1937. In 1921 she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner - "for merits in political education and increasing the combat capability of Red Army units." She was the first woman to receive such an award. For what "merits" the order was received, it will be clear from the further description of her "exploits". Later she was awarded two Orders of Lenin.

Speaking on December 6, 1920, at a meeting of the Moscow party activists, Vladimir Ilyich declared: “Now there are 300,000 bourgeoisie in the Crimea. This is the source of future speculation, espionage, all kinds of assistance to the capitalists. But we are not afraid of them. We say that we will take them, distribute them, subdue them, digest them.” When the triumphant victors invited Lev Davidovich Trotsky to chair the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic of Crimea, he replied: “I will come to the Crimea when there is not a single White Guard left on its territory.” “The war will continue as long as at least one white officer remains in the Red Crimea,” Trotsky’s deputy E.M. Sklyansky.

In 1920, the secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP(b) Zemlyachka, together with the head of the emergency "troika" for the Crimea, Georgy Pyatakov, and the chairman of the revolutionary committee, "specially authorized" Bela Kun (Aron Kogan, who had previously flooded Hungary with blood), began to "digest" the Crimean bourgeoisie: organized mass executions of captured soldiers and officers of the army P.N. Wrangel, members of their families, representatives of the intelligentsia and the nobility who ended up in the Crimea, as well as local residents who belonged to the "exploiting classes". First of all, the victims of Zemlyachka and Kuna-Kogan were officers who surrendered, believing in the widespread official appeal of Frunze, who promised those who surrendered life and freedom. According to the latest data, about 100 thousand people were shot in Crimea. An eyewitness to the events, writer Ivan Shmelev, names 120,000 people who were shot. The countrywoman owns the phrase: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them - drown them in the sea." Her accomplice Bela Kun declared: “Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counter-revolutionary will jump out, and since Crimea is three years behind in its revolutionary development, we will quickly move it to the general revolutionary level of Russia ...”

Considering the special, truly atrocious nature of the crime, let us dwell on the activities of Rosalia Zalkind in more detail. Mass repressions under the leadership of Zemlyachka were carried out by the Crimean Extraordinary Commission (KrymChK), district Cheka, TransChK, MorChK, headed by Jewish Chekists Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman, Tolmats, Udris and the Pole Redens (163: 682-693).

The activities of the special departments of the 4th and 6th armies were led by Efim Evdokimov. In just a few months, he "managed" to destroy 12 thousand "White Guard elements", including 30 governors, 150 generals and more than 300 colonels. For his bloody "exploits" he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, however, without a public announcement of this. On the award list of Evdokimov, the commander of the Southern Front M.V. Frunze left a unique resolution: “I consider Comrade Evdokimov's activity to be commendable. Due to the special nature of this activity, it is not very convenient to carry out the awards in the usual way. The famous polar explorer, twice Hero of the Soviet Union and holder of eight Orders of Lenin, Doctor of Geography, honorary citizen of the city of Sevastopol, Rear Admiral Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, who “worked” in the period under review as a commandant, i.e. chief executioner, and investigator of the Crimean Cheka.

The result of his Chekist career was the awarding of the Order of the Red Banner ... and a long stay in a clinic for the mentally ill. No wonder the famed Arctic explorer didn't like to reminisce about his past. The destruction of the unfortunate took on nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned in the sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time later, through the clear sea water, the dead standing in rows could be seen. They say that, tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at the machine gun. Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of stench from the decomposing corpses of the executed, who were not even buried in the ground. Pits behind the Vorontsovsky garden and greenhouses on the estate

Krymtaev were full of the corpses of the executed, lightly sprinkled with earth, and the cadets of the cavalry school (future red commanders) traveled a mile and a half from their barracks to knock out gold teeth from the mouths of the executed with stones, and this hunt always gave a lot of booty. During the first winter, 96,000 people out of 800,000 of the Crimean population were shot. The slaughter went on for months. Executions went all over the Crimea, machine guns worked day and night.

Poems about the tragic massacre in the Crimea, written by the eyewitness of those events, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, burn with horror from everything that happened there:

The east wind howled through the broken windows

And at night machine guns pounded,

Whistling like a scourge on the meat of naked male and female bodies...

Winter was Holy Week that year,

And red May merged with bloody Easter,

But that spring Christ did not rise.

Not a single mass grave of those years in Crimea has been opened to this day. In Soviet times, this topic was banned. Rozalia Zemlyachka ruled the Crimea in such a way that the Black Sea turned red with blood. Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like those of many other executioners of the Russian people, were buried in the Kremlin wall. One can only add that Pyatakov, Bela Kun, Evdokimov, Redens, Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman and many other executioners did not escape retribution. They were shot in 1937-1940.

Ostrovskaya Nadezhda Ilyinichna (1881-1937). Jewess, member of the CPSU (b). Nadezhda Ilyinichna was born in 1881 in Kyiv in the family of a doctor. She graduated from the Yalta Women's Gymnasium, in 1901 she joined the Bolshevik Party. She took an active part in the events of the revolution of 1905-1907. in Crimea. In 1917-1918. Chairman of the Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, Zemlyachka's right hand. Supervised executions in Sevastopol and Evpatoria. Russian historian and politician Sergei Petrovich Melgunov wrote that in the Crimea, the executions were most active in Sevastopol. In the book “Sevastopol Golgotha: the life and death of the officer corps of Imperial Russia”, Arkady Mikhailovich Chikin, referring to documents and testimonies, says: “On November 29, 1920, in Sevastopol, on the pages of the Izvestia of the Provisional Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, the first list of executed people was published. Their number was 1634 people (278 women). On November 30, the second list was published - 1202 executed people (88 women). According to the publication Latest News (No. 198), in the first week after the liberation of Sevastopol alone, more than 8,000 people were shot. The total number of those executed in Sevastopol and Balaklava is about 29 thousand people. Among these unfortunates were not only military officials, but also officials, as well as a large number of people who had a high social status. They were not only shot, but also drowned in the bays of Sevastopol, with stones tied to their feet” (ibid., p. 122).

And here are the recollections of an eyewitness cited by the author: “Nakhimovsky Prospekt is hung with the corpses of officers, soldiers and civilians arrested on the street and immediately hastily executed without trial. The city has died out, the population is hiding in the cellars, in the attics. All fences, walls of houses, telegraph and telephone poles, shop windows, signboards are pasted over with posters “death to traitors ...”. Officers were hung with epaulettes. Most of the civilians hung around half-dressed. They shot the sick and the wounded, young schoolgirls - sisters of mercy and employees of the Red Cross, zemstvo figures and journalists, merchants and officials. In Sevastopol, about 500 port workers were executed for the fact that during the evacuation they ensured that Wrangel troops were loaded onto ships” (ibid., p. 125). A. Chikin also cites a testimony published in the Orthodox bulletin “Sergiev Posad”: “... In Sevastopol, the victims were tied up in groups, inflicted severe wounds on them with sabers and revolvers, and half-dead thrown into the sea. In the port of Sevastopol there is a place where divers refused to go down: two of them went crazy after they had been at the bottom of the sea. When the third decided to jump into the water, he went out and said that he had seen a whole crowd of drowned men tied with their feet to large stones. Their hands were set in motion by the flow of water, their hair was disheveled. Among these corpses, a priest in a cassock with wide sleeves raised his hands, as if making a terrible speech.

The book also describes the executions in Evpatoria on January 18, 1918. The cruiser "Romania" and the transport "Truvor" were on the roadstead. “The officers went out one by one, stretching their joints and greedily swallowing the fresh sea air. In both courts, the executions began at the same time. The sun was shining, and the crowd of relatives, wives and children crowded on the pier, could see everything. And I saw. But their despair, their pleas for mercy only amused the sailors.” For two days of executions, about 300 officers were destroyed on both ships. Some officers were burned alive in furnaces, and tortured for 15-20 minutes before being killed. The unfortunate people cut off their lips, genitals, sometimes their hands, and threw them into the water alive. The whole family of Colonel Seslavin was kneeling on the pier. The colonel did not immediately go to the bottom, and a sailor shot him from the side of the ship. Many were completely undressed, their hands were tied and their heads were pulled towards them, and they were thrown into the sea. The seriously wounded staff captain Nowatsky, after the bloody bandages dried to the wounds were torn off from him, was burned alive in the furnace of the ship. From the shore, his wife and 12-year-old son watched him being bullied, to whom she closed her eyes, and he howled wildly. The executions were supervised by a "thin short-haired lady" teacher Nadezhda Ostrovskaya. Unfortunately, there is no information about the revolutionary awards of this executioner in a skirt. True, in Evpatoria a street is not named after her. She was shot on November 4, 1937 in the Sandarmokh tract. Ostrovskaya, who had made so much effort to consolidate communist power, like many other party functionaries, was destroyed by the very system in the creation of which she was once involved. Fighting against officers, nobles and other "enemy elements", Ostrovskaya could hardly imagine that years later she would share their fate.

The fate of many of those executed in Crimea was played by the criminal family of Evpatoria Bolsheviks, the Nemichs, who were wholly part of the judicial commission that sat on Truvor during the executions. This commission was created by the revolutionary committee and dealt with the cases of those arrested. Along with the "revolutionary sailors", it included Antonina Nemich, her cohabitant Feoktist Andriadi, Yulia Matveeva (nee Nemich), her husband Vasily Matveev and Varvara Grebennikova (nee Nemich). This "holy family" determined the "degree of counter-revolutionary and bourgeois" and gave the green light to the execution. "Ladies" from the "holy family" encouraged the sailors-executioners and were themselves present at the executions. Sailor Kulikov at one of the rallies proudly said that he himself threw 60 people overboard into the sea.

In March 1919, Nemichi and other organizers of the murders on the Evpatoria roadstead were shot by the Whites. After the final establishment of Soviet power in Crimea, the remains of the sisters and other executed Bolsheviks were buried with honors in a mass grave in the city center, over which the first monument was erected in 1926 - a five-meter obelisk crowned with a scarlet five-pointed star. A few decades later, in 1982, the monument was replaced by another. At its foot and now you can see fresh flowers. One of the streets in Evpatoria is named after the Nemichs.

Braude Vera Petrovna (1890-1961). Revolutionary Socialist-Revolutionary. Born in Kazan. At the end of 1917, by decision of the Presidium of the Kazan Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, she was sent to work in the investigative commission of the provincial tribunal, in the department for combating counter-revolution. From that moment on, all her further activities are connected with the Cheka. In September 1918 she joined the CPSU(b). She worked in the Cheka in Kazan. With her own hands she shot the “White Guard bastard”, during the search she personally undressed not only women, but also men. The Socialist-Revolutionaries in emigration, who visited her for a personal search and interrogation, wrote: “There was absolutely nothing human left in her. This is a machine that does its job coldly and soullessly, evenly and calmly ... And at times one had to be perplexed that this was a special kind of sadistic woman, or just a completely soulless human machine. At that time, lists of counter-revolutionaries being shot were printed almost daily in Kazan. Vera Braud was spoken of in whispers and with horror (164).

During the Civil War, she continued to work in the Cheka of the Eastern Front. Denying her fellow Socialist-Revolutionaries who were persecuted, Braude wrote: “In further work as deputy. Chairman] of the gubchek in Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, I fought mercilessly against social [social] - [revolutionaries of all kinds, participating in their arrests and executions. In Siberia, a member of the Sibrevkom, the well-known right-wing Frumkin, in spite of the Novosibirsk Provincial Committee of the CPSU (b), even tried to remove me from the post of chairman] of the Cheka in Novosibirsk for the executions of social [social] [revolutionaries] ditch, whom he considered “irreplaceable specialists.” For the liquidation of the White Guard and Social Revolutionary organizations in Siberia, V.P. Braude was awarded weapons and a gold watch, and in 1934 she received the badge "Honorary Chekist". She was repressed in 1938. She was charged with being a career SR; on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Left Social Revolutionaries, she made her way to the bodies of the Cheka and the CPSU (b); informed the Socialist-Revolutionaries about the work of the NKVD. She was released in 1946. Braude herself noted that she was convicted for "disagreeing with some of the so-called" active "methods of investigation."

In a letter to V.M. Molotov from the Akmola camp with a request to look into her case, she detailed her understanding of the methods of conducting the investigation. V.P. Braude wrote: “I myself have always believed that all means are good with enemies, and according to my orders, active methods of investigation were used on the Eastern Front: a conveyor belt and methods of physical influence, but under the leadership of Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, these methods were used only in relation to those enemies who [counter] whose revolutionary activity was established by other methods of investigation and whose fate, in the sense of applying capital punishment to them, was already a foregone conclusion ... These measures were applied only to real enemies, who were then shot, and were not released and did not return to common cells, where they could demonstrate to other detainees the methods of physical coercion used against them. Thanks to the mass application of these measures not in serious cases, often as the only method of investigation, and at the personal discretion of the investigator ... these methods turned out to be compromised, deciphered. Braude also recalled: “I did not have a gap between political and personal life. Everyone who knew me personally considered me a narrow fanatic, perhaps I was one, since I was never guided by personal, material or careeristic considerations, since long ago I devoted myself entirely to work. Rehabilitated in 1956, reinstated in the party, as well as in the rank of major of state security. She received a decent personal pension (165).

Grundman Elsa Ulrikhovna - Bloody Elsa (1891-1931). Latvian. Born into a peasant family, she graduated from three classes of a parochial school. In 1915 she left for Petrograd, established contacts with the Bolsheviks and joined the party work. In 1918, she got to the Eastern Front, was appointed commissar of the detachment to suppress the rebellion in the area of ​​​​the city of Osa, led the forced requisitions of food from the peasants and punitive operations. In 1919, she was sent to work in the state security organs as the head of the information department of the Special Department of the Moscow Cheka. She worked in the Special Department of the Cheka of the Southern and South-Western Fronts, in the Podolsk and Vinnitsa provincial Cheka, fought against peasant uprisings. Since 1921 - head of the Informative (undercover) department of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission. Since 1923, he was the head of the secret department in the representative office of the GPU in the North Caucasus region, since 1930, in the central office of the OGPU in Moscow. During her work, she received numerous awards: the Order of the Red Banner, a personalized Mauser, a gold watch from the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, a cigarette case, a horse, a diploma and a gold watch from the OGPU Collegium. She became the first woman to be awarded the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She shot herself on March 30, 1931 (166:132-141).

Khaikina (Shchors) Fruma Efimovna (1897-1977). In the camp of the Bolsheviks since 1917. In the winter of 1917/18, from the Chinese and Kazakhs hired by the Provisional Government for the construction of railways, an armed detachment of the Cheka was formed, which was located at the Unecha station (now in the Bryansk region). She commanded the Cheka at the Unecha border station, through which emigrant flows went to the territory of Ukraine, controlled by the Germans under an agreement with Skoropadsky. Among those who left Russia that year were Arkady Averchenko and Nadezhda Teffi. And they also had to deal with Comrade Khaikina. The impressions were indelible. In “A Friendly Letter to Lenin from Arkady Averchenko,” the humorist commemorates Frum with a “kind word”: “At Unecha, your communists received me wonderfully. True, the commandant of Unechi, the famous student comrade Khaikin, at first wanted to shoot me. - For what? I asked. “Because you scolded the Bolsheviks in your feuilletons.” And here is what Teffi writes: “Here the main person is Commissar X. A young girl, a student, or a telegraph operator, I don’t know. She's everything here. Crazy - as they say, a crazy dog. Beast... Everyone obeys her. She searches herself, judges herself, shoots herself: she sits on the porch, here she judges, and here she shoots” (167).

Khaikina was particularly cruel, she personally took part in executions, torture and robberies. She burned alive an old general who was trying to leave for Ukraine, who was found to have Kerenki sewn into stripes. They beat him with rifle butts for a long time, and then, when they were tired, they simply doused him with kerosene and burned him. Without trial or investigation, she shot about 200 officers who tried to pass through Unecha to Ukraine. Documents for emigration did not help them. In the book “My Klintsy” (authors P. Khramchenko, R. Perekrestov) there is the following passage: “... after the liberation of Klintsy from the Germans and Gaidamaks, the revolutionary order in the township was established by Shchors's wife, Fruma Khaykina (Shchors). She was a determined and courageous woman. She rode in the saddle on a horse, in a leather jacket and leather trousers, with a Mauser on her side, which she used on occasion. She was called in Klintsy “Khaya in leather pants”. In the coming days, under her command, everyone who collaborated with the Haidamaks or sympathized with them, as well as former members of the Union of the Russian People, was identified and shot in Orekhovka, in a clearing behind the City Garden. Several times the glade was stained with the blood of the enemies of the people. The whole family was destroyed, even teenagers were not spared. The bodies of the executed people were buried to the left of the road to Vyunka, where tenement houses ended in those years...”

The German command, having heard enough terrible stories from those who came from the other side, sentenced this demonic woman in absentia to hang, but this did not come true (a revolution began in Germany). The demonic woman changes her surname just in case, now she is Rostova. She followed along with her husband's detachment and "cleansed" the "liberated" territories from the counter-revolutionary element. Carried out mass executions in Novozybkovo and executions of the rebel soldiers of the Bogunsky regiment, commanded by Shchors. In 1940, after Stalin remembered the Ukrainian Chapaev-Shchors and Dovzhenko took off his famous militant by his order, Shchors's wife, as the widow of a Civil War hero, received an apartment in the "government house" on the embankment. After that, and until her death, she worked mainly as the "widow of Shchors", carefully hiding her maiden name, under which she led the emergency in Unecha. Buried in Moscow.

Stasova Elena Dmitrievna (1873-1966). A well-known revolutionary (party nickname Comrade Absolute), repeatedly arrested by the tsarist government, Lenin's closest ally. In 1900, Lenin wrote: “In case of my failure, my heir is Elena Dmitrievna Stasova. A very energetic, dedicated person." Stasova is the author of the memoirs "Pages of Life and Struggle". To describe her "merits" to the Russian people would require a separate large work. We will limit ourselves to listing her main party merits and state awards. She was a delegate to seven party congresses, including the twenty-second, was a member of the Central Committee, Central Control Commission, All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Central Executive Committee of the USSR, was awarded four Orders of Lenin, medals, she was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. We are also interested in the punitive activities of the honored revolutionary, for obvious reasons, not advertised by the Bolsheviks.

In August 1918, during the period of the "Red Terror", Stasova was a member of the Presidium of the Petrograd Cheka. The “efficiency” of the work of the PChK at that time can be illustrated by the report of the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda on September 6, 1918, signed by the chairman of the PChK, Bokiy: “The right SRs killed Uritsky and also wounded Comrade Lenin. In response to this, the Cheka decided to shoot a number of counter-revolutionaries. A total of 512 counter-revolutionaries and White Guards were shot, of which 10 were right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries.” In the book “Bogatyr Symphony”, P. Podlyashchuk wrote: “The work of Stasova in the Cheka especially manifested her inherent principles, scrupulousness towards the enemies of the Soviet regime. She was merciless to traitors, marauders and self-seekers. She signed sentences with a firm hand when she was convinced of the absolute correctness of the accusations. Her "work" lasted seven months. In Petrograd, Stasova was also engaged in recruiting Red Army, mostly punitive, detachments from captured Austrians, Hungarians and Germans. So there is a lot of blood on the hands of this fiery revolutionary. Her ashes are buried in the Kremlin wall.

Yakovleva Varvara Nikolaevna (1885-1941) was born into a bourgeois family. Father is a goldsmith. Since 1904, a member of the RSDLP, a professional revolutionary. In March 1918 became a member of the board of the NKVD, from May - head of the department for combating counter-revolution under the Cheka, from June of the same year - a member of the board of the Cheka, and in September 1918 - January 1919. - Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka. Yakovleva became the only woman in the history of the state security agencies to hold such a high post. After Lenin was wounded and the chairman of the Cheka, Uritsky, was assassinated in August 1918, the “Red Terror” raged in St. Petersburg. The active participation of Yakovleva in terror is confirmed by the execution lists published under her signature in October - December 1918 in the newspaper Petrogradskaya Pravda. Yakovleva was recalled from St. Petersburg on the direct orders of Lenin. The reason for the recall was her "not perfect" lifestyle. Entangled in ties with the gentlemen, she "turned into a source of information for the White Guard organizations and foreign intelligence services." After 1919, she worked in various positions: secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b), secretary of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), minister of finance of the RSFSR and others, was a delegate to the VII, X, XI, XV, XVI and XVII party congresses. Arrested September 12, 1937 on suspicion of participation in a terrorist Trotskyist organization and May 14, 1938 sentenced to twenty years in prison. She was shot on September 11, 1941 in the Medvedsky forest near Orel (168).

Bosch Evgenia Bogdanovna (Gotlibovna) (1879-1925) was born in the city of Ochakov, Kherson province, in the family of a German colonist Gottlieb Maysh, who had significant land in the Kherson region, and a Moldavian noblewoman, Maria Krusser. For three years, Evgenia attended the Voznesenskaya Women's Gymnasium. Active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. She established Soviet power in Kyiv, and then fled with the Kiev Bolsheviks to Kharkov. At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, Bosch was sent to Penza, where she headed the provincial committee of the RKL (b). In this region, according to V.I. Lenin, "a firm hand was needed" to intensify work to seize grain from the peasantry. In the Penza province, the cruelty of E. Bosch, shown during the suppression of peasant uprisings in the counties, was remembered for a long time. When the Penza communists - members of the provincial executive committee - prevented her attempts to arrange mass reprisals against the peasants, E. Bosch in a telegram addressed to Lenin accused them of "excessive softness and sabotage." Researchers are inclined to believe that E. Bosch, being a "mentally unbalanced person", herself provoked peasant unrest in the Penza district, where she traveled as an agitator of the food detachment. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, “... in the village of Kuchki, Bosch, during a rally in the village square, personally shot a peasant who refused to hand over bread. It was this act that angered the peasants and set off a chain reaction of violence.” Bosch's cruelty towards the peasantry was combined with her inability to stop the abuses of her food detachments, many of whom did not hand over the bread seized from the peasants, but exchanged it for vodka. Committed suicide (169: 279-280).

Rozmirovich-Troyanovskaya Elena Fedorovna (1886-1953). Active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Cousin of Eugenia Bosch. Wife of Nikolai Krylenko and Alexander Troyanovsky. The mother of the third wife V.V. Kuibyshev Galina Alexandrovna Troyanovskaya. Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris. In the party since 1904. She had the secret names of Evgenia, Tanya, Galina. She exposed the provocateur Roman Malinovsky. According to the personal characteristics of V.I. Lenin: "I testify, from my personal experience and the Central Committee of 1912-1913, that this worker is very important and valuable for the party." In 1918-1922. was simultaneously the chairman of the Main Political Directorate of the NKPS and the chairman of the investigative committee of the Supreme Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. She held responsible positions in the NKPS, the People's Commissariat of the RCT, the People's Commissariat of Communications. In 1935-1939. was director of the State Library. Lenin, then an employee of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. She was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery (170).

Benislavskaya Galina Arturovna (1897-1926), party member since 1919 Since that time, she has been working in the Special Interdepartmental Commission under the Cheka. Leading a bohemian life. In 1920, she met Sergei Yesenin, allegedly fell in love with him, and for some time the poet and his sisters lived in her room. According to other sources, she was "assigned" to him by the Cheka for observation. This version was supported by F. Morozov in a literary and historical journal by the fact that "Galina Arturovna was a secretary under the" gray cardinal of the Cheka-NKVD Yakov Agranov, who was a friend of the poet "". Many other authors also agreed that Benislavskaya was friends with the poet at the direction of Agranov. Galina Arturovna was treated in the clinic for a "nervous disease"; apparently, this is hereditary, tk. her mother also suffered from mental illness. Yesenin's life was cut short, or it was cut off, on December 27, 1925. Benislavskaya shot herself at the poet's grave on December 3, 1926, almost a year after his death. What was it? Love? Remorse? Who knows (171:101-116).

Sobol Raisa Romanovna (1904-1988) was born in Kyiv in the family of the director of a large plant. In 1921-1923. studied at the law faculty of Kharkov University, worked in the criminal investigation department. Since 1925, a member of the CPSU (b), since 1926 - work in the economic, and then in the foreign department of the OGPU. In 1938, according to the testimony of her convicted husband, with whom she lived for thirteen years, she was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. At the request of Sudoplatov, in 1941 she was released by Beria and reinstated in the state security agencies. She worked as an operative of the Special Department and an instructor in the intelligence department. In 1946, she retired and began her literary career under the pseudonym Irina Guro. She was awarded an order and medals (172:118).

Andreeva-Gorbunova Alexandra Azarovna (1988-1951). The priest's daughter. At the age of seventeen she joined the RSDLP(b). Engaged in propaganda activities in the Urals. In 1907 she was arrested and served four years in prison. From 1911 to 1919 she continued underground work. In 1919, in Moscow, he went to work in the Cheka. Since 1921, assistant to the head of the Secret Department of the Cheka for investigation, then deputy head of the Secret Department of the OGPU. In addition, she was in charge of the work of the pre-trial detention centers of the OPTU-NKVD. During her work in the authorities, she was awarded military weapons and twice the badge of "Honorary Chekist". She is the only Chekist woman who was awarded the rank of major (according to other sources, senior major) of state security, corresponding to the army rank of general. In 1938, she was dismissed due to illness, but at the end of the year she was arrested on suspicion of “sabotage” and sentenced to fifteen years in labor camps and five years of disenfranchisement. In statements addressed to Beria, she wrote: “It’s hard for me in the camp - a Chekist who worked for eighteen years to fight the political enemies of the Soviet regime. Members of anti-Soviet political parties, and especially Trotskyists, who knew me from my work in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, having met me here, created an intolerable situation for me. She died in the Inta ITL in 1951. The last document in her personal file read: “The corpse, delivered to the place of burial, is dressed in underwear, laid in a wooden coffin, a plaque with the inscription (last name, first name, patronymic) is tied to the left leg of the deceased, a column with the inscription "letter No. I-16" was placed on the grave. By the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of June 29, 1957, she was rehabilitated (173).

Gerasimova Marianna Anatolyevna (1901-1944) was born in the family of a journalist in Saratov. At the age of 18 she joined the RSDLP (b), at the age of 25 she joined the OGPU. Since 1931, head of the Secret Political Department (undercover work in a creative environment). She was the first wife of the famous writer Libedinsky, and her sister was the wife of Alexander Fadeev. At the end of 1934, Gerasimova was fired from the NKVD. She is "on a disability pension following a brain disease". In 1939 she was arrested and sentenced to five years in the camps. The appeals of her husband to Stalin and Fadeev to Beria did not help, and she served her term. Fadeev recalled: “She, who interrogated herself, conducted business herself and sent her to the camps, now suddenly ended up there. She could only imagine this in a bad dream. By the way, in the camp, our heroine worked not at a logging site, but at a pharmacy warehouse. After her return, she was forbidden to live in Moscow and was assigned Alexandrov as her place of residence. In December 1944, she committed suicide by hanging herself in the toilet "because of a mental disorder" (174:153-160).

Fortus Maria Alexandrovna (1900-1980) was born in Kherson in the family of a bank employee. At the age of seventeen she joined the Bolshevik Party. Since 1919, he has been working in the Cheka: first in Kherson, "famous" for its particular cruelty, then in Mariupol, Elisavetgrad and Odessa. In 1922, for health reasons, she resigned from the Cheka, moved to Moscow, where she married a Spanish revolutionary, with whom she left for Spain. Conducted underground work in Barcelona, ​​worked as a translator for K.A. Meretskova, lost her husband and son in Spain. During the war, she was a commissar in the partisan detachment of Medvedev, led the reconnaissance detachment of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. She was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, and medals. Military rank of Colonel. After the end of the war, she was engaged in the search for valuables of the Third Reich to be sent to the USSR (175).

Kaganova Emma (1905-1988). Jewess, wife of the famous Chekist, colleague of Lavrenty Beria Pavel Sudoplatov. Worked in the Cheka, GPU,

OGPU, NKVD in Odessa, Kharkov and Moscow, where, according to her husband, she "supervised the activities of informers among the creative intelligentsia." It would be interesting to know how many souls of the “creative intelligentsia” sent to the other world this “ideal of a real woman”? There are two executioners in the family, and all the closest relatives are executioners, judging by the memoirs of the head of the family. Isn't it too much? (176).

Yezerskaya-Wolf Romana Davydovna (1899-1937). Jewish. Party member since 1917. Born in Warsaw. Since 1921, in the Cheka, he was the secretary of the presidium of the Cheka, a member of the collegium of the GPU, authorized by the legal department. She was fired from the GPU for supporting the Trotskyist opposition. Then, in underground work in Poland, he was the secretary of the district committee of the CPT. Arrested. She was shot by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court on December 1937 (177: 76).

Ratner Berta Aronovna (1896-1980). Jewish. Just like Larisa Reisner and Lyudmila Mokievskaya, she studied at the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute. Party member since 1916. Member of the October uprising. Member of the Central Committee of the Party, in 1919 a member of the Presidium of the Petrograd Cheka, then at party work. Repressed and rehabilitated. She died in Moscow and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery (178: 274).

Tyltyn (Shul) Maria Yurievna (1896-1934). Latvian. Member of the Communist Party since 1919. She spoke German, English, French. Secret employee, authorized by the special department of the VUCHK in Kyiv (March-October 1919), secret employee of the special department of the 12th Army (October 1919 - January 1921). Head of the Register Sector of the RVSR Field Headquarters (1920-1921). Typist, cryptographer at the USSR embassy in Czechoslovakia (September 1922 - 1923), assistant to the resident in France (1923-1926), who was her husband A.M. Tyltyn. Worked in Germany (1926-1927), US Resident Assistant (1927-1930). Head of the sector of the 2nd department of the Republic of Uzbekistan of the headquarters of the Red Army (June 1930 - February 1931), illegal resident in France and Finland (1931-1933). She was awarded the Order of the Red Banner "for exceptional deeds, personal heroism and courage" (1933). Arrested in Finland as a result of treason, together with the group she leads (about 30 people). Sentenced to 8 years in prison. Died in custody (179).

Pilatskaya Olga Vladimirovna (1884-1937). Member of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party since 1904. Born in Moscow. She graduated from the Ermolo-Mariinsky Women's College. Participant of the December armed uprising of 1905 in Moscow, member of the City District Committee of the RSDLP. In 1909-1910. member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Together with her husband V.M. Zagorsky (Lubotsky) worked in the Bolshevik organization in Leipzig, met with V.I. Lenin. Since 1914

worked in Moscow. After the February Revolution of 1917, the party organizer of the City District of Moscow, in the October days - a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the district. In 1918-1922 - Member of the Moscow Provincial Cheka. From 1922 on party work in Ukraine. Delegate of the XV-XVII congresses of the CPSU (b), the VI Congress of the Comintern. Member of the Soviet delegation at the Anti-War Women's Congress in Paris (1934). Member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the Presidium of the VUTsIK. Repressed. Shot (180).

Maisel Rebekka Akibovna (after Plastinin's first husband). Jewish. She worked as a paramedic in the Tver province. Bolshevik. The second wife of the famous Chekist-sadist M.S. Kedrov, who was shot in 1941. Maisel is a member of the Vologda provincial party committee and the provincial executive committee, an investigator of the Arkhangelsk Cheka. In Vologda, the Kedrovs lived in a carriage near the station: interrogations took place in the carriages, and executions took place near them. According to the testimony of a prominent Russian public figure E.D. Kuskova (“Latest News”, No. 731), during interrogations, Rebekah beat the accused, stamped her feet, screamed frantically and gave orders: “To be shot, to be shot, to the wall!” In the spring and summer of 1920, Rebekah, together with her husband Kedrov, led the massacre in the Solovetsky Monastery. She insists on the return of all those arrested by the Eiduk commission from Moscow, and all of them are taken in groups by steamer to Kholmogory, where, undressed, they are killed on barges and drowned in the sea. In Arkhangelsk, Meisel shot 87 officers and 33 inhabitants with her own hands, sank a barge with 500 refugees and soldiers of Miller's army. The famous Russian writer Vasily Belov notes that Rebekah, “this executioner in a skirt, was not inferior to her husband in cruelty and even surpassed him” (181: 22). In the summer of 1920, Meisel took part in the brutal suppression of the peasant uprising in the Shenkur district. Even in their own environment, Plastinina's activities were criticized. In June 1920, she was removed from the provincial executive committee. At the II Arkhangelsk provincial conference of the Bolsheviks, it was noted: "Comrade Plastinina is a sick, nervous man ..." (182).

Gelberg Sofa Nukhimovna (Red Sonya, Bloody Sonya). Jewish. The commander of the "flying" requisition detachment, consisting of revolutionary sailors, anarchists and Magyars. Operated since the spring of 1918 in the villages of the Tambov province. Coming to the village, she began to liquidate the “rich”, officers, priests, schoolchildren and created councils mainly from drunkards and lumpen, because the working peasants did not want to go there. Apparently, she was not quite mentally normal, as she loved to enjoy the torment of her victims, mocking them and personally shooting them in front of their wives and children. The Blood Sony squad was destroyed by the peasants. She was captured and, by the verdict of the peasants of several villages, impaled, where she died for three days (183:46).

Bak Maria Arkadievna (? -1938). Jewish. Revolutionary. Officer of the Cheka. The sister of the Chekists Solomon and Boris Bakov, who were shot in 1937-1938, and the wife of the famous Chekist B.D. Berman, head of the 3rd department of the NKVD, who was shot in 1938. She was shot, like her sister, Galina Arkadyevna (184: 106-108).

Gertner Sofia Oskarovna. Until recently, the name of this truly bloody woman was known only to a narrow circle of "specialists". A wide circle of readers of the weekly "Arguments and Facts" became aware of the name of this "glorious" Chekist woman after a question from a curious reader JI. Vereiskaya: "Is it known who was the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB?" Correspondent Stoyanovskaya asked E. Lukin, Head of the Public Relations Department of the Directorate of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, to answer this question. Comrade Lukin said that in the Chekist environment, Gertner Sofya Oskarovna, who served in 1930-1938, is considered the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB. an investigator of the Leningrad Department of the NKVD and who had the nickname Sonya the Golden Leg among colleagues and prisoners. Sonya's first mentor was Yakov Mekler, a Leningrad Chekist, who was nicknamed the Butcher for especially brutal methods of interrogation. Gertner invented her own method of torture: she ordered the interrogated to be tied by the hands and feet to the table and beat the genitals several times with a shoe with all her might, without any hassle knocking out "information about espionage activities." For successful work Gertner in 1937 was awarded a nominal gold watch. Repressed during the time of Lavrenty Beria. She died in Leningrad in 1982 on a well-deserved pension at the age of 78. Was it not Sonya the Golden Leg that Yaroslav Vasilievich Smelyakov had in mind when he wrote the famous poem "Jew"? After all, it was during her “work activity” that he was repressed.

Antonina Makarovna Makarova (married Ginzburg), nicknamed Tonka the machine gunner (1921-1979) - the executioner of the collaborationist "Lokot Republic" during the Great Patriotic War. Shot from a machine gun more than 200 people.

In 1941, during the Great Patriotic War, being a nurse, at the age of 20 she was surrounded and ended up in the occupied territory. Finding herself in a hopeless situation, she chose to survive, voluntarily entered the service of the auxiliary police and became the executioner of the Lokotsky district. Makarova executed death sentences for criminals and Soviet partisans fighting against the army of the Lokot Republic. At the end of the war, she got a job in a hospital, married a front-line soldier V.S. Ginzburg and changed her surname.

The search case of Antonina Makarova was conducted by KGB officers for more than thirty years. Over the years, about 250 women were tested throughout the Soviet Union, bearing her name, patronymic and surname and suitable for age. The search was delayed due to the fact that she was nee Parfenova, but was mistakenly recorded as Makarova. Her real name became known when one of the brothers, who lived in Tyumen, filled out in 1976 a questionnaire for traveling abroad, in which he named her among his relatives. Makarova was arrested in the summer of 1978 in Lepel (Belarusian SSR), convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to death by the Bryansk Regional Court on November 20, 1978. Her request for clemency was rejected, and on August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out. In the USSR, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War and the only one in which a woman punisher appeared. After the execution of Antonina Makarova, women in the USSR were no longer executed by court order (185: 264).

Along with the "famous" female executioners who left a "noticeable mark" in the memory of the people, hundreds of their lesser-known girlfriends remain in the shadows. In the book of S.P. Melgunov "Red Terror in Russia" named the names of some sadistic women. Terrible stories of eyewitnesses and accidentally surviving witnesses are given about “comrade Lyuba” from Baku, who was shot for her atrocities. In Kyiv, under the leadership of the well-known executioner Latsis and his assistants, about fifty “cheaters” “worked”, in which many female executioners committed atrocities. Rosa (Eda) Schwartz, a former actress of the Jewish theater, then a prostitute, who began her career in the Cheka with a denunciation of a client, and ended up participating in mass executions, is a characteristic type of a Chekist woman.

In Kyiv, in January 1922, the Chekist Hungarian Remover was arrested. She was accused of unauthorized execution of 80 arrested people, mostly young people. Remover was declared mentally ill on the basis of sexual psychopathy. The investigation established that Remover personally shot not only suspects, but also witnesses called to the Cheka and who had the misfortune to arouse her sick sensuality.

There is a known case when, after the retreat of the Reds from Kyiv, a Chekist woman was identified on the street and torn to pieces by a crowd. In the eighteenth year, a female executioner Vera Grebenyukova (Dora) committed atrocities in Odessa. In Odessa, another heroine who shot fifty-two people “became famous”: “The chief executioner was a Latvian woman with an animal-like face; the prisoners called her “pug”. This sadistic woman wore short trousers and always had two revolvers behind her belt ... ”Rybinsk had its own animal in the guise of a woman - a certain Zina. There were those in Moscow

Yekaterinoslav and many other cities. S.S. Maslov described a female executioner whom he himself saw: “She regularly appeared in the central prison hospital in Moscow (1919) with a cigarette in her mouth, with a whip in her hands and a revolver without a holster in her belt. In the chambers from which the prisoners were taken for execution, she always appeared herself. When the sick, stricken with terror, slowly gathered up their belongings, said goodbye to their comrades, or began to cry with some kind of terrible howl, she rudely shouted at them, and sometimes, like dogs, beat them with a whip. It was a young woman ... about twenty or twenty-two years old.

Unfortunately, not only employees of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB performed executioner work. If you wish, you can find ladies with executioner inclinations among other departments. This is eloquently evidenced, for example, by the following act of execution dated October 15, 1935: Dementiev prison ... carried out the sentence of July 28, 1935 on the execution of Frolov Ivan Kondratievich ”(186).

The people's judge of the city of Kemerovo T.K. also acted as an executioner. Kalashnikova, who, together with two security officers and the acting city prosecutor, on May 28, 1935, participated in the execution of two criminals, and on August 12, 1935, one. If you can, forgive them all, Lord.

Gelberg Sofa Nukhimovna (Red Sonya, Bloody Sonya). Jewish. The commander of the "flying" requisition detachment, consisting of revolutionary sailors, anarchists and Magyars. Operated since the spring of 1918 in the villages of the Tambov province. Coming to the village, she began to liquidate the “rich”, officers, priests, schoolchildren and created councils mainly from drunkards and lumpen, because the working peasants did not want to go there. Apparently, she was not quite mentally normal, as she loved to enjoy the torment of her victims, mocking them and personally shooting them in front of their wives and children. The Blood Sony squad was destroyed by the peasants. She was captured and, by the verdict of the peasants of several villages, impaled, where she died for three days (183:46).

Bak Maria Arkadievna (? -1938). Jewish. Revolutionary. Officer of the Cheka. The sister of the Chekists Solomon and Boris Bakov, who were shot in 1937-1938, and the wife of the famous Chekist B.D. Berman, head of the 3rd department of the NKVD, who was shot in 1938. She was shot, like her sister, Galina Arkadyevna (184: 106-108).

Gertner Sofia Oskarovna. Until recently, the name of this truly bloody woman was known only to a narrow circle of "specialists". A wide circle of readers of the weekly "Arguments and Facts" became aware of the name of this "glorious" Chekist woman after a question from a curious reader JI. Vereiskaya: "Is it known who was the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB?" Correspondent Sto-yanovskaya asked the head of the public relations department of the Department of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region E. Lukin to answer this question. Comrade Lukin said that in the Chekist environment, Gertner Sofya Oskarovna, who served in 1930-1938, is considered the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB. an investigator of the Leningrad Department of the NKVD and who had the nickname Sonya the Golden Leg among colleagues and prisoners. Sonya's first mentor was Yakov Mekler, a Leningrad Chekist, who was nicknamed the Butcher for especially brutal methods of interrogation. Gertner invented her own method of torture: she ordered the interrogated to be tied by the hands and feet to the table and beat the genitals several times with a shoe with all her might, without any hassle knocking out "information about espionage activities." For successful work Gertner in 1937 was awarded a nominal gold watch. Repressed during the time of Lavrenty Beria. She died in Leningrad in 1982 on a well-deserved pension at the age of 78. Was it not Sonya the Golden Leg that Yaroslav Vasilievich Smelyakov had in mind when he wrote the famous poem "Jew"? After all, it was during her “work activity” that he was repressed.

Antonina Makarovna Makarova (married Ginzburg), nicknamed Tonka the machine gunner (1921-1979) - the executioner of the collaborationist "Lokot Republic" during the Great Patriotic War. Shot from a machine gun more than 200 people.

In 1941, during the Great Patriotic War, being a nurse, at the age of 20 she was surrounded and ended up in the occupied territory. Finding herself in a hopeless situation, she chose to survive, voluntarily entered the service of the auxiliary police and became the executioner of the Lokotsky district. Makarova executed death sentences for criminals and Soviet partisans fighting against the army of the Lokot Republic. At the end of the war, she got a job in a hospital, married a front-line soldier B.C. Ginzburg and changed her surname.

The search case of Antonina Makarova was conducted by KGB officers for more than thirty years. Over the years, about 250 women were tested throughout the Soviet Union, bearing her name, patronymic and surname and suitable for age. The search was delayed due to the fact that she was nee Parfenova, but was mistakenly recorded as Makarova. Her real name became known when one of the brothers, who lived in Tyumen, filled out in 1976 a questionnaire for traveling abroad, in which he named her among his relatives. Makarova was arrested in the summer of 1978 in Lepel (Belarusian SSR), convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to death by the Bryansk Regional Court on November 20, 1978. Her request for clemency was rejected, and on August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out. In the USSR, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War and the only one in which a woman punisher appeared. After the execution of Antonina Makarova, women in the USSR were no longer executed by court order (185: 264).

Along with the "famous" female executioners who left a "noticeable mark" in the memory of the people, hundreds of their lesser-known girlfriends remain in the shadows. In the book of S.P. Melgunov "Red Terror in Russia" named the names of some sadistic women. Terrible stories of eyewitnesses and accidentally surviving witnesses are given about “comrade Lyuba” from Baku, who was shot for her atrocities. In Kyiv, under the leadership of the well-known executioner Latsis and his assistants, about fifty “cheaters” “worked”, in which many female executioners committed atrocities. Rosa (Eda) Schwartz, a former actress of the Jewish theater, then a prostitute, who began her career in the Cheka with a denunciation of a client, and ended up participating in mass executions, is a characteristic type of a Chekist woman.

In Kyiv, in January 1922, the Chekist Hungarian Remover was arrested. She was accused of unauthorized execution of 80 arrested people, mostly young people. Remover was declared mentally ill on the basis of sexual psychopathy. The investigation established that Remover personally shot not only suspects, but also witnesses called to the Cheka and who had the misfortune to arouse her sick sensuality.

There is a known case when, after the retreat of the Reds from Kyiv, a Chekist woman was identified on the street and torn to pieces by a crowd. In the eighteenth year, a female executioner Vera Grebenyukova (Dora) committed atrocities in Odessa. In Odessa, another heroine who shot fifty-two people “became famous”: “The chief executioner was a Latvian woman with an animal-like face; the prisoners called her “pug”. This sadistic woman wore short trousers and always had two revolvers behind her belt ... ”Rybinsk had its own animal in the guise of a woman - a certain Zina. There were such people in Moscow, Yekaterinoslav and many other cities. S.S. Maslov described a female executioner whom he himself saw: “She regularly appeared in the central prison hospital in Moscow (1919) with a cigarette in her mouth, with a whip in her hands and a revolver without a holster in her belt. In the chambers from which the prisoners were taken for execution, she always appeared herself. When the sick, stricken with terror, slowly gathered up their belongings, said goodbye to their comrades, or began to cry with some kind of terrible howl, she rudely shouted at them, and sometimes, like dogs, beat them with a whip. It was a young woman ... about twenty or twenty-two years old.

Unfortunately, not only employees of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB performed executioner work. If you wish, you can find ladies with executioner inclinations among other departments. This is eloquently evidenced, for example, by the following act of execution dated October 15, 1935: Dementiev prison ... carried out the sentence of July 28, 1935 on the execution of Frolov Ivan Kondratievich ”(186).

The people's judge of the city of Kemerovo T.K. also acted as an executioner. Kalashnikova, who, together with two security officers and the acting city prosecutor, on May 28, 1935, participated in the execution of two criminals, and on August 12, 1935, one. If you can, forgive them all, Lord.

Executioners-Scientists, or "Science in the NKVD"

One of the most sinister divisions of the OGPU-NKVD-MGB was the toxicological laboratory (laboratory for the use of poisons and drugs). It was created in 1921 under the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V.I. Lenin, long before Yezhov and Beria, and was called the "Special Cabinet". It is possible that Lenin asked Stalin to get him the poison from the stocks of this laboratory - "office". Poisons and drugs began to be used in the OGPU in 1926 at the direction of People's Commissar Menzhinsky. The laboratory began to serve a secret group headed by the former SR militant Yakov Serebryansky. The "Yasha Group", created to carry out terrorist acts abroad, was directly subordinate to the people's commissar and existed until 1938.

WOMEN Executioners

Until the 20th century, there were no women professional executioners in history, and only occasionally women were serial killers and sadists. The landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, entered Russian history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs.

During the life of her husband, she did not notice a particular propensity for violence, but soon after his death she began to regularly beat the servants. The main reason for punishment was an unfair attitude to work (washing floors or laundry). She struck the guilty peasant women with the first object that came to hand (most often it was a log). The offenders were then flogged by grooms and sometimes beaten to death. Saltychikha could douse the victim with boiling water or singe her hair on her head. She used hot curling irons for torture, with which she grabbed the victim by the ears. She often pulled people by the hair and hit their heads hard against the wall. According to witnesses, many of those killed by her did not have hair on their heads. Victims, on her orders, were starved and tied naked in the cold. Saltychikha loved to kill brides who were about to get married in the near future. In November 1759, during a torture that lasted almost a day, she killed a young servant, Khrisanf Andreev, and in September 1761, Saltykova killed the boy Lukyan Mikheev with her own hands. She also tried to kill the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Land surveyor Tyutchev was in a love relationship with her for a long time, but decided to marry the girl Panyutina. Saltykova ordered her people to burn Panyutina's house and gave sulfur, gunpowder and tow for this. But the serfs were afraid. When Tyutchev and Panyutina got married and went to their Orel estate, Saltykova ordered her peasants to kill them, but the executors reported the order to Tyutchev (156).

Numerous complaints from the peasants only led to severe punishments for the complainants, since Saltychikha had many influential relatives and she managed to bribe officials. But two peasants, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, in 1762 managed to convey a complaint to Catherine I, who had just ascended the throne.

During the investigation, which lasted six years, searches were made in the Moscow house of Saltychikha and her estate, hundreds of witnesses were interviewed, and account books containing information about bribes to officials were confiscated. Witnesses spoke about the killings, gave the dates and names of the victims. From their testimony it followed that Saltykova had killed 75 people, mostly women and girls.

The investigator in the case of the widow Saltykova, court adviser Volkov, based on the data of the suspect's house books, compiled a list of 138 surnames of serfs, whose fate was to be ascertained. According to official records, 50 people were considered "dead from diseases", 72 people were "missing without a trace", 16 were considered "left to her husband" or "gone on the run." Many suspicious death records have been identified. For example, a twenty-year-old girl could go to work as a servant and die within a few weeks. The groom Yermolai Ilyin, who filed a complaint against Saltychikha, had three wives died in a row. Some peasant women were allegedly released to their native villages, after which they either immediately died or disappeared without a trace.

Saltychikha was taken into custody. During interrogations, the threat of torture was used (permission for torture was not obtained), but she did not confess to anything. As a result of the investigation, Volkov came to the conclusion that Daria Saltykova was “undoubtedly guilty” in the death of 38 people and “left in suspicion” regarding the guilt in the death of another 26 people.

The litigation lasted over three years. The judges found the accused "guilty without leniency" of thirty-eight proven murders and torture of courtyard people. By the decision of the Senate and Empress Catherine II, Saltykova was deprived of her noble rank and sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only with the head of the guard and a woman nun). She was also sentenced to serve for an hour a special "reproachful spectacle", during which the condemned woman was to stand on a scaffold chained to a pole with the inscription "torturer and murderer" above her head.

The punishment was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. In the Moscow Ivanovo convent, where the convict arrived after being punished on Red Square, a special “repentant” cell was prepared for her. The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (2.1 meters). It was below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of daylight getting inside. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only at the time of eating she was given a candle stub. Saltychikha was not allowed to walk, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence. On major church holidays, she was taken out of prison and brought to a small window in the wall of the temple, through which she could listen to the liturgy. The strict regime of detention lasted 11 years, after which it was weakened: the convict was transferred to a stone annex to the temple with a window. Visitors to the temple were allowed to look out the window and even talk to the prisoner. According to the historian, “Saltykov, when it happened, the curious would gather at the window behind the iron bars of her dungeon, curse, spit and stick a stick through the window open in the summer.” After the death of a prisoner, her cell was adapted as a sacristy. She spent thirty-three years in prison and died on November 27, 1801. She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where all her relatives were buried (157).

Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan became famous for her assassination attempt on Lenin at the Michelson factory. In 1908, as an anarchist, she was making a bomb that suddenly exploded in her hands. After this explosion, she was almost blind. Half-blind, she shot at Lenin from two steps - she missed once, and twice wounded him in the arm. She was shot four days later, and the corpse was burned and scattered to the wind. In Lenin, Professor Passoni describes her as crazy. During the Civil War in Ukraine, a gang of another passionary, the anarchist Maruska Nikiforova, who sided with Makhno, was atrocious. Before the revolution, she served a twenty-year term in hard labor. The Whites eventually caught and shot her. It turned out that she is a hermaphrodite, i.e. not a man or a woman, but one of those who used to be called witches.

In addition to Marusya Nikiforova and Fanny Kaplan, there were many other women who influenced the outcome of the bloody October coup. The activities of such revolutionaries as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Alexandra Kollontai (Domontovich), Inessa Armand, Serafima Gopner, Maria Aveide, Lyudmila Stal, Evgenia Shlikhter, Sofia Brichkina, Cecilia Zelikson, Zlata Rodomyslskaya, Claudia Sverdlova, Nina Didrikil, Berta Slutskaya and many others, certainly contributed to the victory of the revolution, which led to the greatest disasters, the destruction or expulsion of the best sons and daughters of Russia. The activities of most of these "fiery revolutionaries" were mainly limited to "party work" and there is no direct blood on them, i.e. they did not pass death sentences and did not personally kill nobles, entrepreneurs, professors, officers, priests and other representatives of the “hostile” classes in the basements of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD. However, some "Valkyries of the Revolution" skillfully combined agitation-party and "combat" work.

The most prominent representative of this cohort is Larisa Mikhailovna Reisner (1896-1926), the prototype of the commissar in Optimistic Tragedy. Born in Poland. Father professor, German Jew, mother Russian noblewoman. She graduated from a gymnasium and a psycho-neurological institute in St. Petersburg. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1918. During the Civil War, a fighter, political worker of the Red Army, commissar of the Baltic Fleet and the Volga Flotilla. Contemporaries remembered her giving orders to revolutionary sailors in an elegant naval overcoat or leather jacket, with a revolver in her hand. The writer Lev Nikulin met with Reisner in the summer of 1918 in Moscow. According to him, Larisa minted in a conversation: “We shoot and will shoot counter-revolutionaries! We will!”

In May 1918, L. Reisner marries Fyodor Raskolnikov, deputy people's commissar for maritime affairs, and soon leaves with her husband, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, for Nizhny Novgorod. Now she is the flag secretary of the commander of the Volga military flotilla, the commissar of the reconnaissance detachment, a correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper, where her essays Letters from the Front are published. In a letter to her parents, she writes: “Trotsky summoned me to his place, I told him a lot of interesting things. We are now great friends, I was appointed by order of the army the commissar of the intelligence department at the headquarters (please do not confuse it with espionage counterintelligence), I recruited and armed thirty Magyars for bold assignments, got them horses, weapons, and from time to time I go with them on reconnaissance . I speak German with them. In this role, another passionary, Elizaveta Drabkina, described Larisa: “Ahead, a woman in a soldier’s tunic and a wide checkered skirt, blue and light blue, galloped ahead on a black horse. Deftly holding on in the saddle, she boldly rushed across the plowed field. It was Larisa Reisner, head of army intelligence. The rider's pretty face burned with the wind. She had bright eyes, chestnut braids caught at the back of her head ran from her temples, a severe wrinkle crossed her high, clean forehead. Larisa Reisner was accompanied by soldiers of the reconnaissance company of the International Battalion.

After heroic deeds on the Volga, Reisner, together with her husband, who commanded the Baltic Fleet, worked in Petrograd. When Raskolnikov was appointed as a diplomatic representative in Afghanistan, she left with him, however, leaving him, she returned to Russia. Upon her return from Central Asia, Larisa Reisner was expelled from the party for "behavior unworthy of a communist." As Elisabeth Poretsky, the wife of intelligence officer Ignas Poretsky, who knew Reisner closely, writes in her book: “There were rumors that during her stay in Bukhara she had numerous connections with British army officers, on a date with whom she went to the barracks naked, in one fur coat. Larisa told me that the author of these inventions was Raskolnikov, who turned out to be insanely jealous and unbridled cruel. She showed me the scar on her back, left from his blow with a whip. Although she was expelled from the party and the position of the young woman remained unclear, she was not deprived of the opportunity to travel abroad due to her relationship with Radek...” (161: 70). Reisner became the wife of another revolutionary, Karl Radek, with whom she tried to kindle the fire of the "proletarian" revolution in Germany. She wrote several books and wrote poetry. The bullets that passed her on the fronts killed all those who loved her. The first - her beloved in his youth, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot in the Cheka. Raskolnikov in 1938 was declared an "enemy of the people", became a defector and was liquidated by the NKVD in French Nice. He died in the dungeons of the NKVD and Karl Radek - "a conspirator and spy of all foreign intelligence services." One can only guess what fate awaited her, if not for illness and death.

Reisner died of typhoid fever at the age of thirty. She was buried at the "communards' site" at the Vagankovsky cemetery. One of the obituaries read: "She would have to die somewhere in the steppe, in the sea, in the mountains, with a rifle or a Mauser tightly clenched." The life of this “Valkyrie of the Revolution” was very briefly and figuratively described by the talented journalist Mikhail Koltsov (Fridland), who knew her closely and was also shot: “The spring laid in the life of this happily gifted woman unfolded spaciously and beautifully ... From the St. to the lower reaches of the Volga, enveloped in fire and death, then to the Red Fleet, then - through the Central Asian deserts - into the dense jungle of Afghanistan, from there - to the barricades of the Hamburg uprising, from there - to coal mines, to oil fields, to all peaks, to all rapids and nooks and crannies world, where the element of struggle bubbles - forward, forward, on a par with the revolutionary locomotive rushed the hot indomitable steed of her life.

Mokievskaya-Zubok Lyudmila Georgievna was the same fighting and bright revolutionary, whose biography surprisingly resembles the biography of Larisa Reisner. She is a student of the same St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, which, "issued" a whole constellation of revolutionaries and passionaries. Born in Odessa in 1895. Mother, Mokievskaya-Zubok Glafira Timofeevna, a noblewoman, did not take part in political life. Father Bykhovsky Naum Yakovlevich. Jew, socialist-revolutionary since 1901, in 1917 - member of the Central Committee. Lived in Leningrad and Moscow. Worked in trade unions. Arrested in July 1937, shot in 1938. Mokievskaya-Zubok was the first and only commander and at the same time commissar of an armored train in history. In 1917, being a Maximalist Social Revolutionary, Lyudmila came to Smolny and connected her life with the revolution. In December 1917, Podvoisky sent her to Ukraine to get food, but under the name of the student Mokievsky Leonid Grigorievich, she joined the Red Army and from February 25, 1918 became the commander of the 3rd Bryansk armored train and at the same time the commissar of the Bryansk combat detachment . She is fighting with the Germans and Ukrainians on the Kyiv-Poltava-Kharkov line, then with the Krasnovites near Tsaritsyn, her train is involved in the suppression of the Yaroslavl rebellion. At the end of 1918, the armored train arrives at the Sormovo plant for repairs, where Lyudmila receives another armored train - "Power to the Soviets" and is appointed its commander and commissar. The armored train was given operational control to the 13th Army and fought in the Donbass on the De-Baltsevo-Kupyanka line. In the battle near Debaltsevo on March 9, 1919, Mokievskaya died at the age of twenty-three. She was buried in Kupyansk with a large crowd of people, the funeral was captured on film. After the arrival of the whites in Kupyansk, the corpse of Lyudmila Mokievskaya was dug up and thrown into a dump in a ravine. They buried her again only after the second arrival of the Reds (162: 59-63).

However, there was another, very special category of overly active, and often just mentally ill "revolutionaries" who left a truly terrible mark on the history of Russia. Were there many? We will probably never get an answer to this question. The communist press shyly avoided describing the "exploits" of such "heroines". Judging by the well-known photo of members of the Kherson Cheka, the ferocity of which is documented, where out of nine photographed employees there are three women, this type of "revolutionaries" is not uncommon. What are their fates? Some of them were destroyed by the system they served, some committed suicide, and some, the most "deserved", were buried in the best Moscow cemeteries. The ashes of some of them are immured even in the Kremlin wall. The names of most executioners are still kept under seven seals as an important state secret. Let us name at least some of these women, who especially distinguished themselves and left a bloody trail in the history of the Russian revolution and the Civil War. By what principle and how to rank them? It would be most correct by the amount of blood shed by each of them, but how much was shed and who measured it? Which one is the bloodiest? How to calculate it? Most likely, this is our Countrywoman with you. Zalkind Rosalia Samoilovna (Countrywoman) (1876-1947). Jewish. Born in the family of a merchant of the 1st guild. She studied at the Kiev Women's Gymnasium and the Medical Faculty of the University of Lyon. She has been engaged in revolutionary activities since the age of 17 (and what did she lack?). Prominent Soviet statesman and party leader, party member since 1896, active participant in the revolution of 1905-1907. and the October armed uprising. Party aliases (nicknames) Demon, Zemlyachka.

During the Civil War in political work in the Red Army. Member of the Central Committee of the party since 1939, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR since 1937. In 1921 she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner - "for merits in political education and increasing the combat capability of Red Army units." She was the first woman to receive such an award. For what "merits" the order was received, it will be clear from the further description of her "exploits". Later she was awarded two Orders of Lenin.

Speaking on December 6, 1920, at a meeting of the Moscow party activists, Vladimir Ilyich declared: “Now there are 300,000 bourgeoisie in the Crimea. This is the source of future speculation, espionage, all kinds of assistance to the capitalists. But we are not afraid of them. We say that we will take them, distribute them, subdue them, digest them.” When the triumphant victors invited Lev Davidovich Trotsky to chair the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic of Crimea, he replied: “I will come to the Crimea when there is not a single White Guard left on its territory.” “The war will continue as long as at least one white officer remains in the Red Crimea,” Trotsky’s deputy E.M. Sklyansky.

In 1920, the secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP(b) Zemlyachka, together with the head of the emergency "troika" for the Crimea, Georgy Pyatakov, and the chairman of the revolutionary committee, "specially authorized" Bela Kun (Aron Kogan, who had previously flooded Hungary with blood), began to "digest" the Crimean bourgeoisie: organized mass executions of captured soldiers and officers of the army P.N. Wrangel, members of their families, representatives of the intelligentsia and the nobility who ended up in the Crimea, as well as local residents who belonged to the "exploiting classes". First of all, the victims of Zemlyachka and Kuna-Kogan were officers who surrendered, believing in the widespread official appeal of Frunze, who promised those who surrendered life and freedom. According to the latest data, about 100 thousand people were shot in Crimea. An eyewitness to the events, writer Ivan Shmelev, names 120,000 people who were shot. The countrywoman owns the phrase: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them - drown them in the sea." Her accomplice Bela Kun declared: “Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counter-revolutionary will jump out, and since Crimea is three years behind in its revolutionary development, we will quickly move it to the general revolutionary level of Russia ...”

Considering the special, truly atrocious nature of the crime, let us dwell on the activities of Rosalia Zalkind in more detail. Mass repressions under the leadership of Zemlyachka were carried out by the Crimean Extraordinary Commission (KrymChK), district Cheka, TransChK, MorChK, headed by Jewish Chekists Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman, Tolmats, Udris and the Pole Redens (163: 682-693).

The activities of the special departments of the 4th and 6th armies were led by Efim Evdokimov. In just a few months, he "managed" to destroy 12 thousand "White Guard elements", including 30 governors, 150 generals and more than 300 colonels. For his bloody "exploits" he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, however, without a public announcement of this. On the award list of Evdokimov, the commander of the Southern Front M.V. Frunze left a unique resolution: “I consider Comrade Evdokimov's activity to be commendable. Due to the special nature of this activity, it is not very convenient to carry out the awards in the usual way. The famous polar explorer, twice Hero of the Soviet Union and holder of eight Orders of Lenin, Doctor of Geography, honorary citizen of the city of Sevastopol, Rear Admiral Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, who “worked” in the period under review as a commandant, i.e. chief executioner, and investigator of the Crimean Cheka.

The result of his Chekist career was the awarding of the Order of the Red Banner ... and a long stay in a clinic for the mentally ill. No wonder the famed Arctic explorer didn't like to reminisce about his past. The destruction of the unfortunate took on nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned in the sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time later, through the clear sea water, the dead standing in rows could be seen. They say that, tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at the machine gun. Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of stench from the decomposing corpses of the executed, who were not even buried in the ground. The pits behind the Vorontsovsky garden and the greenhouses on the Krymtaev estate were full of the corpses of the executed, lightly sprinkled with earth, and the cadets of the cavalry school (future red commanders) traveled a mile and a half from their barracks to knock out gold teeth from the mouths of the executed with stones, and this hunt always gave a lot of booty. . During the first winter, 96,000 people out of 800,000 of the Crimean population were shot. The slaughter went on for months. Executions went all over the Crimea, machine guns worked day and night.

Poems about the tragic massacre in the Crimea, written by the eyewitness of those events, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, burn with horror from everything that happened there:

The east wind howled through the broken windows

And at night machine guns pounded,

Whistling like a whip on the meat of the naked

Male and female bodies...

Winter was Holy Week that year,

And red May merged with bloody Easter,

But that spring Christ did not rise.

Not a single mass grave of those years in Crimea has been opened to this day. In Soviet times, this topic was banned. Rozalia Zemlyachka ruled the Crimea in such a way that the Black Sea turned red with blood. Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like those of many other executioners of the Russian people, were buried in the Kremlin wall. One can only add that Pyatakov, Bela Kun, Evdokimov, Redens, Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman and many other executioners did not escape retribution. They were shot in 1937-1940.

Ostrovskaya Nadezhda Ilyinichna (1881-1937). Jewess, member of the CPSU (b). Nadezhda Ilyinichna was born in 1881 in Kyiv in the family of a doctor. She graduated from the Yalta Women's Gymnasium, in 1901 she joined the Bolshevik Party. She took an active part in the events of the revolution of 1905-1907. in Crimea. In 1917-1918. Chairman of the Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, Zemlyachka's right hand. Supervised executions in Sevastopol and Evpatoria. Russian historian and politician Sergei Petrovich Melgunov wrote that in the Crimea, the executions were most active in Sevastopol. In the book “Sevastopol Golgotha: the life and death of the officer corps of Imperial Russia”, Arkady Mikhailovich Chikin, referring to documents and testimonies, says: “On November 29, 1920, in Sevastopol, on the pages of the Izvestia of the Provisional Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, the first list of executed people was published. Their number was 1634 people (278 women). On November 30, the second list was published - 1202 executed people (88 women). According to the publication Latest News (No. 198), in the first week after the liberation of Sevastopol alone, more than 8,000 people were shot. The total number of those executed in Sevastopol and Balaklava is about 29 thousand people. Among these unfortunates were not only military officials, but also officials, as well as a large number of people who had a high social status. They were not only shot, but also drowned in the bays of Sevastopol, with stones tied to their feet” (ibid., p. 122).

And here are the recollections of an eyewitness cited by the author: “Nakhimovsky Prospekt is hung with the corpses of officers, soldiers and civilians arrested on the street and immediately hastily executed without trial. The city has died out, the population is hiding in the cellars, in the attics. All fences, walls of houses, telegraph and telephone poles, shop windows, signboards are pasted over with posters “death to traitors ...”. Officers were hung with epaulettes. Most of the civilians hung around half-dressed. They shot the sick and the wounded, young schoolgirls - sisters of mercy and employees of the Red Cross, zemstvo figures and journalists, merchants and officials. In Sevastopol, about 500 port workers were executed for the fact that during the evacuation they ensured that Wrangel troops were loaded onto ships” (ibid., p. 125). A. Chikin also cites a testimony published in the Orthodox bulletin “Sergiev Posad”: “... In Sevastopol, the victims were tied up in groups, inflicted severe wounds on them with sabers and revolvers, and half-dead thrown into the sea. In the port of Sevastopol there is a place where divers refused to go down: two of them went crazy after they had been at the bottom of the sea. When the third decided to jump into the water, he went out and said that he had seen a whole crowd of drowned men tied with their feet to large stones. Their hands were set in motion by the flow of water, their hair was disheveled. Among these corpses, a priest in a cassock with wide sleeves raised his hands, as if making a terrible speech.

The book also describes the executions in Evpatoria on January 18, 1918. The cruiser "Romania" and the transport "Truvor" were on the roadstead. “The officers went out one by one, stretching their joints and greedily swallowing the fresh sea air. In both courts, the executions began at the same time. The sun was shining, and the crowd of relatives, wives and children crowded on the pier, could see everything. And I saw. But their despair, their pleas for mercy only amused the sailors.” For two days of executions, about 300 officers were destroyed on both ships. Some officers were burned alive in furnaces, and tortured for 15-20 minutes before being killed. The unfortunate people cut off their lips, genitals, sometimes their hands, and threw them into the water alive. The whole family of Colonel Seslavin was kneeling on the pier. The colonel did not immediately go to the bottom, and a sailor shot him from the side of the ship. Many were completely undressed, their hands were tied and their heads were pulled towards them, and they were thrown into the sea. The seriously wounded staff captain Nowatsky, after the bloody bandages dried to the wounds were torn off from him, was burned alive in the furnace of the ship. From the shore, his wife and 12-year-old son watched him being bullied, to whom she closed her eyes, and he howled wildly. The executions were supervised by a "thin short-haired lady" teacher Nadezhda Ostrovskaya. Unfortunately, there is no information about the revolutionary awards of this executioner in a skirt. True, in Evpatoria a street is not named after her. She was shot on November 4, 1937 in the Sandarmokh tract. Ostrovskaya, who had made so much effort to consolidate communist power, like many other party functionaries, was destroyed by the very system in the creation of which she was once involved. Fighting against officers, nobles and other "enemy elements", Ostrovskaya could hardly imagine that years later she would share their fate.

The fate of many of those executed in Crimea was played by the criminal family of Evpatoria Bolsheviks, the Nemichs, who were wholly part of the judicial commission that sat on Truvor during the executions. This commission was created by the revolutionary committee and dealt with the cases of those arrested. Along with the "revolutionary sailors", it included Antonina Nemich, her cohabitant Feoktist Andriadi, Yulia Matveeva (nee Nemich), her husband Vasily Matveev and Varvara Grebennikova (nee Nemich). This "holy family" determined the "degree of counter-revolutionary and bourgeois" and gave the green light to the execution. "Ladies" from the "holy family" encouraged the sailors-executioners and were themselves present at the executions. Sailor Kulikov at one of the rallies proudly said that he himself threw 60 people overboard into the sea.

In March 1919, Nemichi and other organizers of the murders on the Evpatoria roadstead were shot by the Whites. After the final establishment of Soviet power in Crimea, the remains of the sisters and other executed Bolsheviks were buried with honors in a mass grave in the city center, over which the first monument was erected in 1926 - a five-meter obelisk crowned with a scarlet five-pointed star. A few decades later, in 1982, the monument was replaced by another. At its foot and now you can see fresh flowers. One of the streets in Evpatoria is named after the Nemichs.

Braude Vera Petrovna (1890-1961). Revolutionary Socialist-Revolutionary. Born in Kazan. At the end of 1917, by decision of the Presidium of the Kazan Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, she was sent to work in the investigative commission of the provincial tribunal, in the department for combating counter-revolution. From that moment on, all her further activities are connected with the Cheka. In September 1918 she joined the CPSU(b). She worked in the Cheka in Kazan. With her own hands she shot the “White Guard bastard”, during the search she personally undressed not only women, but also men. The Socialist-Revolutionaries in emigration, who visited her for a personal search and interrogation, wrote: “There was absolutely nothing human left in her. This is a machine that does its job coldly and soullessly, evenly and calmly ... And at times one had to be perplexed that this was a special kind of sadistic woman, or just a completely soulless human machine. At that time, lists of counter-revolutionaries being shot were printed almost daily in Kazan. Vera Braud was spoken of in whispers and with horror (164).

During the Civil War, she continued to work in the Cheka of the Eastern Front. Denying her fellow Socialist-Revolutionaries who were persecuted, Braude wrote: “In further work as deputy. Chairman] of the gubchek in Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, I fought mercilessly against social [social] - [revolutionaries of all kinds, participating in their arrests and executions. In Siberia, a member of the Sibrevkom, the well-known right-wing Frumkin, in spite of the Novosibirsk Provincial Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, even tried to remove me from my job as chairman of the Cheka in Novosibirsk for shooting down social [social]-[revolutionary] ditch, whom he considered “irreplaceable specialists.” For the liquidation of the White Guard and Social Revolutionary organizations in Siberia, V.P. Braude was awarded weapons and a gold watch, and in 1934 she received the badge "Honorary Chekist". She was repressed in 1938. She was charged with being a career SR; on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Left Social Revolutionaries, she made her way to the bodies of the Cheka and the CPSU (b); informed the Socialist-Revolutionaries about the work of the NKVD. She was released in 1946. Braude herself noted that she was convicted for "disagreeing with some of the so-called" active "methods of investigation."

In a letter to V.M. Molotov from the Akmola camp with a request to look into her case, she detailed her understanding of the methods of conducting the investigation. V.P. Braude wrote: “I myself have always believed that all means are good with enemies, and according to my orders, active methods of investigation were used on the Eastern Front: a conveyor belt and methods of physical influence, but under the leadership of Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, these methods were used only in relation to those enemies who [counter] whose revolutionary activity was established by other methods of investigation and whose fate, in the sense of applying capital punishment to them, was already a foregone conclusion ... These measures were applied only to real enemies, who were then shot, and were not released and did not return to common cells, where they could demonstrate to other detainees the methods of physical coercion used against them. Thanks to the mass application of these measures not in serious cases, often as the only method of investigation, and at the personal discretion of the investigator ... these methods turned out to be compromised, deciphered. Braude also recalled: “I did not have a gap between political and personal life. Everyone who knew me personally considered me a narrow fanatic, perhaps I was one, since I was never guided by personal, material or careeristic considerations, since long ago I devoted myself entirely to work. Rehabilitated in 1956, reinstated in the party, as well as in the rank of major of state security. She received a decent personal pension (165).

Grundman Elsa Ulrikhovna - Bloody Elsa (1891-1931). Latvian. Born into a peasant family, she graduated from three classes of a parochial school. In 1915 she left for Petrograd, established contacts with the Bolsheviks and joined the party work. In 1918, she got to the Eastern Front, was appointed commissar of the detachment to suppress the rebellion in the area of ​​​​the city of Osa, led the forced requisitions of food from the peasants and punitive operations. In 1919, she was sent to work in the state security organs as the head of the information department of the Special Department of the Moscow Cheka. She worked in the Special Department of the Cheka of the Southern and South-Western Fronts, in the Podolsk and Vinnitsa provincial Cheka, fought against peasant uprisings. Since 1921 - head of the Informative (undercover) department of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission. Since 1923, he was the head of the secret department in the representative office of the GPU in the North Caucasus region, since 1930, in the central office of the OGPU in Moscow. During her work, she received numerous awards: the Order of the Red Banner, a personalized Mauser, a gold watch from the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, a cigarette case, a horse, a diploma and a gold watch from the OGPU Collegium. She became the first woman to be awarded the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She shot herself on March 30, 1931 (166:132-141).

Khaikina (Shchors) Fruma Efimovna (1897-1977). In the camp of the Bolsheviks since 1917. In the winter of 1917/18, from the Chinese and Kazakhs hired by the Provisional Government for the construction of railways, an armed detachment of the Cheka was formed, which was located at the Unecha station (now in the Bryansk region). She commanded the Cheka at the Unecha border station, through which emigrant flows went to the territory of Ukraine, controlled by the Germans under an agreement with Skoropadsky. Among those who left Russia that year were Arkady Averchenko and Nadezhda Teffi. And they also had to deal with Comrade Khaikina. The impressions were indelible. In “A Friendly Letter to Lenin from Arkady Averchenko,” the humorist commemorates Frum with a “kind word”: “At Unecha, your communists received me wonderfully. True, the commandant of Unechi, the famous student comrade Khaikin, at first wanted to shoot me. - For what? I asked. “Because you scolded the Bolsheviks in your feuilletons.” And here is what Teffi writes: “Here the main person is Commissar X. A young girl, a student, or a telegraph operator, I don’t know. She's everything here. Crazy - as they say, a crazy dog. Beast... Everyone obeys her. She searches herself, judges herself, shoots herself: she sits on the porch, here she judges, and here she shoots” (167).

Khaikina was particularly cruel, she personally took part in executions, torture and robberies. She burned alive an old general who was trying to leave for Ukraine, who was found to have Kerenki sewn into stripes. They beat him with rifle butts for a long time, and then, when they were tired, they simply doused him with kerosene and burned him. Without trial or investigation, she shot about 200 officers who tried to pass through Unecha to Ukraine. Documents for emigration did not help them. In the book “My Klintsy” (authors P. Khramchenko, R. Perekrestov) there is the following passage: “... after the liberation of Klintsy from the Germans and Gaidamaks, the revolutionary order in the township was established by Shchors's wife, Fruma Khaykina (Shchors). She was a determined and courageous woman. She rode in the saddle on a horse, in a leather jacket and leather trousers, with a Mauser on her side, which she used on occasion. She was called in Klintsy “Khaya in leather pants”. In the coming days, under her command, everyone who collaborated with the Haidamaks or sympathized with them, as well as former members of the Union of the Russian People, was identified and shot in Orekhovka, in a clearing behind the City Garden. Several times the glade was stained with the blood of the enemies of the people. The whole family was destroyed, even teenagers were not spared. The bodies of the executed people were buried to the left of the road to Vyunka, where tenement houses ended in those years...”

The German command, having heard enough terrible stories from those who came from the other side, sentenced this demonic woman in absentia to hang, but this did not come true (a revolution began in Germany). The demonic woman changes her surname just in case, now she is Rostova. She followed along with her husband's detachment and "cleansed" the "liberated" territories from the counter-revolutionary element. Carried out mass executions in Novozybkovo and executions of the rebel soldiers of the Bogunsky regiment, commanded by Shchors. In 1940, after Stalin remembered the Ukrainian Chapaev-Shchors and Dovzhenko shot his famous militant by his order, Shchors's wife, as the widow of a Civil War hero, received an apartment in the "government house" on the embankment. After that, and until her death, she worked mainly as the "widow of Shchors", carefully hiding her maiden name, under which she led the emergency in Unecha. Buried in Moscow.

Stasova Elena Dmitrievna (1873-1966). A well-known revolutionary (party nickname Comrade Absolute), repeatedly arrested by the tsarist government, Lenin's closest ally. In 1900, Lenin wrote: “In case of my failure, my heir is Elena Dmitrievna Stasova. A very energetic, dedicated person." Stasova is the author of the memoirs "Pages of Life and Struggle". To describe her "merits" to the Russian people would require a separate large work. We will limit ourselves to listing her main party merits and state awards. She was a delegate to seven party congresses, including the twenty-second, was a member of the Central Committee, Central Control Commission, All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Central Executive Committee of the USSR, was awarded four Orders of Lenin, medals, she was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. We are also interested in the punitive activities of the honored revolutionary, for obvious reasons, not advertised by the Bolsheviks.

In August 1918, during the period of the "Red Terror", Stasova was a member of the Presidium of the Petrograd Cheka. The “efficiency” of the work of the PChK at that time can be illustrated by the report of the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda on September 6, 1918, signed by the chairman of the PChK, Bokiy: “The right SRs killed Uritsky and also wounded Comrade Lenin. In response to this, the Cheka decided to shoot a number of counter-revolutionaries. A total of 512 counter-revolutionaries and White Guards were shot, of which 10 were right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries.” In the book “Bogatyr Symphony”, P. Podlyashchuk wrote: “The work of Stasova in the Cheka especially manifested her inherent principles, scrupulousness towards the enemies of the Soviet regime. She was merciless to traitors, marauders and self-seekers. She signed sentences with a firm hand when she was convinced of the absolute correctness of the accusations. Her "work" lasted seven months. In Petrograd, Stasova was also engaged in recruiting Red Army, mostly punitive, detachments from captured Austrians, Hungarians and Germans. So there is a lot of blood on the hands of this fiery revolutionary. Her ashes are buried in the Kremlin wall.

Yakovleva Varvara Nikolaevna (1885-1941) was born into a bourgeois family. Father is a goldsmith. Since 1904, a member of the RSDLP, a professional revolutionary. In March 1918 became a member of the board of the NKVD, from May - head of the department for combating counter-revolution under the Cheka, from June of the same year - a member of the board of the Cheka, and in September 1918 - January 1919. - Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka. Yakovleva became the only woman in the history of the state security agencies to hold such a high post. After Lenin was wounded and the chairman of the Cheka, Uritsky, was assassinated in August 1918, the “Red Terror” raged in St. Petersburg. The active participation of Yakovleva in terror is confirmed by the execution lists published under her signature in October - December 1918 in the newspaper Petrogradskaya Pravda. Yakovleva was recalled from St. Petersburg on the direct orders of Lenin. The reason for the recall was her "not perfect" lifestyle. Entangled in ties with the gentlemen, she "turned into a source of information for the White Guard organizations and foreign intelligence services." After 1919, she worked in various positions: secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b), secretary of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), minister of finance of the RSFSR and others, was a delegate to the VII, X, XI, XIV, XVI and XVII party congresses. Arrested September 12, 1937 on suspicion of participation in a terrorist Trotskyist organization and May 14, 1938 sentenced to twenty years in prison. She was shot on September 11, 1941 in the Medvedsky forest near Orel (168).

Bosch Evgenia Bogdanovna (Gotlibovna) (1879-1925) was born in the city of Ochakov, Kherson province, in the family of a German colonist Gottlieb Maysh, who had significant land in the Kherson region, and a Moldavian noblewoman, Maria Krusser. For three years, Evgenia attended the Voznesenskaya Women's Gymnasium. Active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. She established Soviet power in Kyiv, and then fled with the Kiev Bolsheviks to Kharkov. At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, Bosch was sent to Penza, where she headed the provincial committee of the RCP (b). In this region, according to V.I. Lenin, "a firm hand was needed" to intensify work to seize grain from the peasantry. In the Penza province, the cruelty of E. Bosch, shown during the suppression of peasant uprisings in the counties, was remembered for a long time. When the Penza communists - members of the provincial executive committee - prevented her attempts to arrange mass reprisals against the peasants, E. Bosch in a telegram addressed to Lenin accused them of "excessive softness and sabotage." Researchers are inclined to believe that E. Bosch, being a "mentally unbalanced person", herself provoked peasant unrest in the Penza district, where she traveled as an agitator of the food detachment. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, “... in the village of Kuchki, Bosch, during a rally in the village square, personally shot a peasant who refused to hand over bread. It was this act that angered the peasants and set off a chain reaction of violence.” Bosch's cruelty towards the peasantry was combined with her inability to stop the abuses of her food detachments, many of whom did not hand over the bread seized from the peasants, but exchanged it for vodka. Committed suicide (169: 279-280).

Rozmirovich-Troyanovskaya Elena Fedorovna (1886-1953). Active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Cousin of Eugenia Bosch. Wife of Nikolai Krylenko and Alexander Troyanovsky. The mother of the third wife V.V. Kuibyshev Galina Alexandrovna Troyanovskaya. Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris. In the party since 1904. She had the secret names of Evgenia, Tanya, Galina. She exposed the provocateur Roman Malinovsky. According to the personal characteristics of V.I. Lenin: "I testify, from my personal experience and the Central Committee of 1912-1913, that this worker is very important and valuable for the party." In 1918-1922. was simultaneously the chairman of the Main Political Directorate of the NKPS and the chairman of the investigative committee of the Supreme Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. She held responsible positions in the NKPS, the People's Commissariat of the RCT, the People's Commissariat of Communications. In 1935-1939. was director of the State Library. Lenin, then an employee of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. She was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery (170).

Benislavskaya Galina Arturovna (1897-1926), party member since 1919 Since that time, she has been working in the Special Interdepartmental Commission under the Cheka. Leading a bohemian life. In 1920, she met Sergei Yesenin, allegedly fell in love with him, and for some time the poet and his sisters lived in her room. According to other sources, she was "assigned" to him by the Cheka for observation. This version was supported by F. Morozov in a literary and historical journal by the fact that "Galina Arturovna was a secretary under the" gray cardinal of the Cheka-NKVD Yakov Agranov, who was a friend of the poet "". Many other authors also agreed that Benislavskaya was friends with the poet at the direction of Agranov. Galina Arturovna was treated in the clinic for a "nervous disease"; apparently, this is hereditary, tk. her mother also suffered from mental illness. Yesenin's life was cut short, or it was cut off, on December 27, 1925. Benislavskaya shot herself at the poet's grave on December 3, 1926, almost a year after his death. What was it? Love? Remorse? Who knows (171:101-116).

Sobol Raisa Romanovna (1904-1988) was born in Kyiv in the family of the director of a large plant. In 1921-1923. studied at the law faculty of Kharkov University, worked in the criminal investigation department. Since 1925, a member of the CPSU (b), since 1926 - work in the economic, and then in the foreign department of the OGPU. In 1938, according to the testimony of her convicted husband, with whom she lived for thirteen years, she was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. At the request of Sudoplatov, in 1941 she was released by Beria and reinstated in the state security agencies. She worked as an operative of the Special Department and an instructor in the intelligence department. In 1946, she retired and began her literary career under the pseudonym Irina Guro. She was awarded an order and medals (172:118).

Andreeva-Gorbunova Alexandra Azarovna (1988-1951). The priest's daughter. At the age of seventeen she joined the RSDLP(b). Engaged in propaganda activities in the Urals. In 1907 she was arrested and served four years in prison. From 1911 to 1919 she continued underground work. In 1919, in Moscow, he went to work in the Cheka. Since 1921, assistant to the head of the Secret Department of the Cheka for investigation, then deputy head of the Secret Department of the OGPU. In addition, she was in charge of the work of the pre-trial detention centers of the OGPU-NKVD. During her work in the authorities, she was awarded military weapons and twice the badge of "Honorary Chekist". She is the only Chekist woman who was awarded the rank of major (according to other sources, senior major) of state security, corresponding to the army rank of general. In 1938, she was dismissed due to illness, but at the end of the year she was arrested on suspicion of "sabotage" and sentenced to fifteen years in labor camps and five years of disqualification. In statements addressed to Beria, she wrote: “It’s hard for me in the camp - a Chekist who worked for eighteen years to fight the political enemies of the Soviet regime. Members of anti-Soviet political parties, and especially Trotskyists, who knew me from my work in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, having met me here, created an intolerable situation for me. She died in Inta HTJI in 1951. The last document in her personal file read: “The corpse, delivered to the place of burial, is dressed in underwear, laid in a wooden coffin, a plaque with the inscription (last name, first name, patronymic) is tied to the left leg of the deceased, a column with the inscription "letter No. I-16" was placed on the grave. By the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of June 29, 1957, she was rehabilitated (173).

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