“Either saints or scoundrels can serve in the organs.”
“Whoever becomes cruel and whose heart remains insensitive towards the prisoners must leave here. Here, as in no other place, you need to be kind and noble.”
Felix Dzerzhinsky
“The Cheka is terrifying because of the mercilessness of its repression and its complete impenetrability to anyone’s gaze.”
Nikolay Krylenko
“While incompetent and even simply ignorant in matters of production, technology, etc., authorities and investigators will rot in prisons of technicians and engineers on charges of some absurd crimes invented by ignorant people - “technical sabotage” or “economic espionage” “, foreign capital will not do any serious work in Russia... We will not establish a single serious concession or trading enterprise in Russia unless we give some specific guarantees against the arbitrariness of the Cheka.”
Leonid Krasin
“Our enemies created entire legends about the all-seeing eyes of the Cheka, about the omnipresent security officers. They imagined them as some kind of huge army. They did not understand what the strength of the Cheka was. And it consisted in the same thing as the strength of the Communist Party - in the complete trust of the working masses. “Our strength is in millions,” said Felix Edmundovich. The people believed the security officers and helped them in the fight against the enemies of the revolution. Dzerzhinsky’s assistants were not only security officers, but thousands of vigilant Soviet patriots.”
Fedor Fomin, “Notes of an old security officer”
“Dear Vladimir Ilyich! Maintaining good relations with Turkey is impossible as long as the current actions of the security officers on the Black Sea coast continue. A number of conflicts have already arisen with America, Germany and Persia because of this... The Black Sea security officers are quarreling us in turn with all the powers whose representatives fall into their area of operation. Cheka agents, vested with unlimited power, do not respect any rules.”
Letter from Georgy Chicherin to Vladimir Lenin
“Arrest the lousy security officers and bring the perpetrators to Moscow and shoot them.<…>We will always support you if Gorbunov manages to lead the Chekist bastard to execution.”
From Lenin's response to Chicherin
Certificate for the badge “Honored Worker of the NKVD”
“Blinded by the blossoming personality cult of Stalin, many organ workers began to lose their bearings and could not discern where the Leninist line ended and something completely alien to it began. Gradually, most of them fell under the influence of Yagoda and became obedient tools in his hands, carrying out tasks that deviated more and more from the Lenin-Dzerzhinsky line.”
“Gradually, I learned from my subordinates more and more details about the dirty deeds committed by employees of the Novosibirsk NKVD. In particular, that Gorbach ordered the arrest and execution as German spies of almost all former soldiers and officers who were held captive in Germany during the First World War (and there were about 25 thousand of them in the huge Novosibirsk region at that time). About the terrible torture and beatings that those arrested were subjected to during the investigation. I was also told that the former regional prosecutor, who arrived at the NKVD to check cases, was immediately arrested and committed suicide by jumping out of a window from the fifth floor.”
“Most of the old security officers were convinced that with the arrival of Yezhov in the NKVD, we would finally return to the traditions of Dzerzhinsky, we would get rid of the unhealthy atmosphere and careerist, degenerate and lipacious tendencies implanted in recent years in the organs by Yagoda. After all, Yezhov, as Secretary of the Central Committee, was close to Stalin, in whom we believed then, and we believed that the Central Committee would now have a firm and faithful hand in the organs. At the same time, most of us believed that Yagoda, as a good administrator and organizer, would restore order in the People’s Commissariat of Communications and bring great benefit there.
These hopes of yours were not destined to come true. Soon such a wave of repression began, to which not only the Trotskyists and Zinovievites were subjected, but also the NKVD workers who were poorly fighting them.”
Mikhail Shrader, “NKVD from the inside. Notes of a security officer"
Caricature of Yezhov. Boris Efimov, 1937
“Both in Soviet and modern times, it was possible to join the ranks of the “Chekists” only if you had excellent physical and mental health. This is no coincidence. In this profession, “professional benefit” and “professional harm” alternate every now and then, sometimes colliding with each other. With such conflicts you cannot do without good health.”
Evgeny Sapiro, “Treatise on Luck”
“I am still sure that among the security officers 20 percent are idiots, and the rest are just cynics.”
From an interview with Gabriel Superfin
In this article we will talk about what a cool head, a warm heart, and clean hands mean.
This is the motto of Russian officers, but if you dig deeper, then here lies the truth, which has been discussed more than once on the pages of this site.
A cool head is the mind, a hot heart is the soul, clean hands belong to the body. The great trinity, mind, soul and body, this expression of a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands rather characterizes the effective state of each trinity.
Let's take a closer look.
Cool head
To have a cool head means to have a sober mind that is free from emotions. This is balance, lack of panic at critical moments in life, cold calculation.
How to achieve this? You need to be able to develop a specific strategy for yourself that allows you to act in accordance with it in various stressful situations.
This strategy or system allows you to rely on it and not panic, since you already know how to act in various stressful situations.
This strategy is inside you and is brought to automaticity.
Warm heart
A warm heart still allows you to remain a person and not a robot. If we need a cool head in order not to give in to emotions, then we need a heart so that we can show love and kindness to all living things. It doesn't matter whether you help your grandmother cross the road or take in a stray kitten and take care of it. It's all kindness.
If everyone made at least one person happy for a minute every day, then life would be better.
Start with yourself. Believe me, the more people you make happy, the happier you will become. After all, this is all a boomerang. Don't hurt people, try to support them and help them.
If you put even one drop into the human spirit, that’s a huge shift.
Do good deeds and you yourself will become blissful. Do it and don’t expect anything in return, but everything will definitely come back, people like you will appear around you, who are also not averse to helping you when you need this help.
Clean hands
What does clean hands mean, it means not doing anything unnatural and anything that can denigrate you. Don't do any evil deeds. May your hands always be clean. Don't get them dirty and don't have anything to do with people who do.
Try to use your body and hands only for good deeds.
By combining all these three aspects - a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands, you will become a harmonious and self-sufficient person.
Check it out.
You can also ask all questions in the comments, which are located immediately below this article.
Even if you don’t have any questions, you are a dear reader, you can leave a positive review under this article in the comments, if you liked it, I, as the author, will be immensely grateful to you.
Original taken from nampuom_pycu in Felix Edmundovich Yozefovich, from the Dzerzhinovo estate, Oshmyany district, Vilna province.
Shirt guy.
Born on August 30 (September 11), 1877 on the Dzerzhinovo estate in the Oshmyany district of the Vilna province into a wealthy family. The fourth of eight children of the nobleman Edmund-Rufin Josefovich and Elena Ignatievna Yanushevskaya. Mother is Polish, father is Jewish. The history of the creation of this family is quite unusual: twenty-five-year-old home teacher Edmund Josefovich, who undertook to teach the exact sciences to the daughters of Professor Yanushevsky, seduced 14-year-old Elena. The pedophile and the student were quickly married and under the pretext “Elenina studies at one of the best European colleges” sent out of sight to Taganrog. Edmund got a job at a local gymnasium (where one of his students was Anton Chekhov). The children went... And the family soon returned to their homeland.
The future security officer was born like this. Pregnant Elena Ignatievna did not notice the open underground hatch and fell through. That same night a boy was born. The birth was difficult, but the baby was born wearing a shirt, so he was named Felix (“Happy”).
He was five years old when his father died of consumption, leaving his 32-year-old mother with eight children. According to Dzerzhinsky's biographers, as a child he was a child prodigy. Indeed: from the age of six I read in Polish, from seven – in Russian and Jewish. But Felix was an average student. I stayed in first grade for a second year. The future head of the Polish government Joseph (Józef) Pilsudski, who studied at the same gymnasium (in 1920, his “iron” classmate vowed to personally shoot “Pilsudski’s dog” after the capture of Warsaw) noted that “the high school student Dzerzhinsky is dull, mediocre, without any bright abilities.” Felix did well in only one subject - the Law of God, he even dreamed of becoming a priest, but soon "disappointed" in religion.
The mother raised the children in hostility to everything Russian and Orthodox, talking about Polish “patriots” who were hanged, shot or driven to Siberia. Dzerzhinsky later admitted: “Even as a boy, I dreamed of an invisibility hat and the destruction of all Muscovites.”
The Josefovich family tragedy was the death of Felix's 12-year-old sister Wanda, whom he accidentally shot with a hunting rifle.
In such families, they usually strive from childhood to study and knowledge, and then to open their own business. But Felix began to have romance novels early. Lost interest in studying. Once he insulted and publicly slapped a German language teacher, for which he was expelled from the gymnasium. He became close to criminals, participated in underground circles of Jewish youth, participated in fights, and posted anti-government leaflets around the city. In 1895 he joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic group.
Childhood is over.
Having read Marx.
After the death of his mother, Felix received 1000 rubles of inheritance and quickly drank them away in local pubs (he did not show up for the funeral, and in general did not remember either his mother or father, either in letters or verbally, as if they never existed at all), where for days with the same slackers who had read Marx, he discussed plans for building a society in which there was no need to work.
The husband of Aldona's elder sister, having learned about his brother-in-law's "tricks", kicked him out of the house, and Felix began the life of a professional revolutionary. He creates “boyuvki” - groups of armed youth (among his associates of that time, for example, the famous Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko). They incite workers to become armed, deal with strikebreakers, and organize terrorist attacks with dozens of victims. In the spring of 1897, Felix’s “military” crippled a group of workers who did not want to go on strike with iron rods, and he was forced to flee to Kovno (Kaunas).
...The Kovno police received an intelligence report about the appearance in the city of a suspicious young man in a black hat, always pulled low over his eyes, in a black suit. He was seen in a beer hall, where he treated workers from the Tillmans factory. During interrogation, they testified that the stranger was talking to them about starting a riot at the factory, and if they refused, he threatened to severely beat them.
On July 17, during his arrest, the young man identified himself as Edmund Zhebrovsky, but it soon became clear that he was the “pillar nobleman Dzerzhinsky.” (Later his nicknames: iron Felix, FD, red executioner, bloody; underground aliases: Jacek, Jakub, bookbinder, Frank, astronomer, Józef, Domanski.) Having failed to prove his personal participation in numerous bloody showdowns (his accomplices did not extradite him!), but still having spent a year in prison, he was exiled to the Vyatka province for three years. “Both in his views and in his behavior,” the gendarme colonel prophetically reported to the Vilna prosecutor, “he is a very dangerous person in the future, capable of all crimes.” Biographers, describing the next period of Dzerzhinsky’s life, get off with general phrases: “conducted explanatory work among the masses,” “ardently spoke at meetings.” If! He was a man of action. In 1904, in the city of Novo-Alexandria, he tried to raise an armed uprising, the signal for which would be a terrorist attack in a military unit. Felix planted dynamite in the officers' meeting, but at the last moment his assistant chickened out and did not detonate the bomb. I had to escape through the fence.
According to Felix’s militants, they mercilessly killed anyone suspected of having connections with the police: “We began to suspect Bloody, and he began to hide from us. We caught him and questioned him all night. Then the judges came. At dawn we took Bloody to the Powązki cemetery and shot him there.” One of Felix’s close associates, militant A. Petrenko, recalled: “There were no hunters to risk their lives in the face of militants who quickly dealt with suspects. The reprisal of traitors and secret agents was a matter of first necessity. Such episodes, which occurred almost daily, were surrounded by guarantees of the justice of the execution. The situation was such that now it was possible to condemn someone for these massacres” (RCKHIDNI, fund 76).
Dzerzhinsky dealt especially harshly with the so-called Black Hundreds. He once decided that the residents of house No. 29 on Tamke Street were preparing a pogrom against the Jews, and he sentenced everyone to death. He himself described this massacre in his newspaper “Chervonny Standart”: “Our comrades carried out this on November 24. 6 people entered the apartment in Tamka through the main entrance and 4 from the kitchen, demanding not to move. They were met with shooting; some of the gang tried to escape. There was no way to do anything other than decisively settle accounts with the criminals: time was running out, danger threatened our comrades. Six or seven leaders of the “Black Hundred” fell in the apartment on Tamka. (Same fund.)
And what’s interesting: Dzerzhinsky was arrested six times (both with a pistol in his hands and with a lot of one hundred percent physical evidence), but for some reason he was not tried, but was expelled administratively, as was done with cheap prostitutes and parasites. Why? There is evidence that the main reason is a weak witness base. His comrades killed witnesses to his crimes, and intimidated judges and prosecutors. According to Dzerzhinsky’s own recollections, he “bought off a bribe.” (Sverchkov D. Krasnaya nov. 1926. No. 9.) Where did he get that kind of money? And in general, how much money did he live on?
Party gold.
Judging by his expenses, Dzerzhinsky managed a lot of money. In photographs of those years he is in expensive, smart suits and patent leather shoes. He travels around European countries, lives in the best hotels and sanatoriums in Zakopane, Radom, St. Petersburg, Krakow, vacations in Germany, Italy, France, and maintains active correspondence with his mistresses. On May 8, 1903, he writes from Switzerland: “Again I’m in the mountains above Lake Geneva, breathing in clean air and eating great food.” Later he tells his sister from Berlin: “I traveled around the world. It’s been a month since I left Capri, I’ve been to the Italian and French Riviera, to Monte Carlo and even won 10 francs; then in Switzerland he admired the Alps, the mighty Jungfrau and other snowy colossi, burning with a glow at sunset. How beautiful the world is!” (Same fund, inventory 4, file 35.)
All this required enormous costs. In addition, huge sums were spent on salaries for the militants (Dzerzhinsky paid 50 rubles a month to each, while the average worker received 3 rubles), on the publication of newspapers, proclamations, leaflets, on the organization of congresses, the release of revolutionaries on bail, bribes to police officials , forgery of documents and much more. A quick glance at his expenses shows: hundreds of thousands of rubles annually. Who financed it?
According to one version, her enemies spared no money in organizing the unrest in Russia; according to another, the gold mine was the expropriation of the contents of banks, simply robbery...
The Iron Tailor and the Social Sexual.
When asked whether he was subjected to repression for revolutionary activities before the October Revolution, the “first security officer” wrote in the questionnaire: “He was arrested in 97, 900, 905, 906, 908 and 912, spent only 11 years in prison, including hard labor(8 plus 3), was in exile three times, always escaped.” But for what crimes - silence. It is known from books: on May 4, 1916, the Moscow Trial Chamber sentenced him to 6 years of hard labor. But not a word about the fact that under the tsarist regime only murderers were sentenced to hard labor...
The February Revolution found Dzerzhinsky in Butyrka prison. Like a child, he was happy that he had learned to sew on a sewing machine and even earned 9 rubles for the first time in his life by sewing clothes for his cellmates. In his free time, he played the fool and spied on women from the next cell through a hole in the wall. (“The women danced, put on lively pictures. Then they demanded the same from the men. We stood in such a place and in such a position that they could see...” Yu. Krasny-Rotstadt.)
On March 1, 1917, Felix was released. He came out of Butyrka barely alive - his cellmates, having caught him snitching on the prison warden, severely beat him. However, he did not return to Poland. I hung around Moscow for some time, and then left for Petrograd. What’s interesting: emerging from the dungeon with holes in his pockets and wearing a hat made of fish fur, he soon begins sending his mistress Sophia Mushkat to Switzerland 300 rubles a month to a credit bank in Zurich. And all correspondence and shipments are conducted through Germany, hostile to Russia!..
THIEF. (Great October Revolution).
Immediately after the February Revolution (as soon as it smelled like something was cooking!) political adventurers, international terrorists, swindlers and swindlers of all stripes came to Russia from all over the world. The July attempt to seize power by the Bolsheviks fails miserably. The 6th Congress of the Bolsheviks is meeting in August... Dzerzhinsky, who as a child dreamed of “killing all Muscovites,” suddenly decides to rid them of their exploiters. And although he was never a Bolshevik, he was immediately elected to the party’s Central Committee and a secret meeting was arranged with Lenin, who was hiding in Razliv.
Former political enemies (Bolsheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.) temporarily unite into a united front and, with common efforts, on November 7 (October 25, O.S.), they seize the captain's bridge of the Russian Empire. At first they swore that they came to power only before the congress of the Constituent Assembly, but as soon as the deputies arrived in Petrograd, they were simply dispersed. “There is no morality in politics,” Lenin said, “there is only expediency.”
Dzerzhinsky played an active role in the seizure of power. “Lenin has become completely insane, and if anyone has influence on him, it is only “Comrade Felix.” Dzerzhinsky is an even greater fanatic,” wrote People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin, “and, in essence, a cunning beast, intimidating Lenin with the counter-revolution and the fact that it will sweep away us all and him first of all. And Lenin, I was finally convinced of this, was a real coward, trembling for his own skin. And Dzerzhinsky plays on this string...”
After October, Lenin sent the always dirty, unshaven, constantly dissatisfied “Iron Felix” to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs as a person who knew the criminal world and prison life. There he sent everyone whose heads had already been cut by prison clippers...
On December 7, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars hastily created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. And although this commission is assigned the role of an investigative committee, the sanctions of its members are much broader: “Measures - confiscation, expulsion, deprivation of cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc.” According to Latsis (he headed the Cheka department for combating counter-revolution. - Ed.), “Felix Edmundovich himself asked for a job in the Cheka.” He quickly got into the swing of things, and while in December he himself often went on searches and arrests, at the beginning of 1918, having occupied a vast building with cellars and basements on Lubyanka, he began to personally form a team.
Mokrushnik No. 1.
The first statistically official victim of the Chekists is considered to be a certain Prince Eboli, who “on behalf of the Cheka robbed the bourgeoisie in restaurants.” With his execution, the countdown of victims of the totalitarian regime began. Under the verdict is the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
...A well-known fact. In 1918, at one of the meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, where the issue of supplies was discussed, Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky: “How many malicious counter-revolutionaries do we have in prisons?” The first security officer wrote on a piece of paper: “About 1500.” He did not know the exact number of those arrested - just anyone was put behind bars without any understanding. Vladimir Ilyich chuckled, put a cross next to the number and handed the piece of paper back. Felix Edmundovich left.
That same night, “about 1,500 malicious counter-revolutionaries” were put against the wall. Later, Lenin’s secretary Fotieva explained: “There was a misunderstanding. Vladimir Ilyich did not want to be shot at all. Dzerzhinsky did not understand him. Our leader usually puts a cross on the note as a sign that he has read it and taken note of it.”
In the morning, both pretended that nothing extraordinary had happened. The Council of People's Commissars discussed an extremely important issue: the long-awaited train with food was approaching Moscow.
Former Cheka commissioner V. Belyaev, who fled abroad, published the names of “counter-revolutionaries” in his book. “List of executed, starved, tortured, stabbed, strangled scientists and writers: Khristina Alchevskaya, Leonid Andreev, Konstantin Arsentiev, Val. Bianchi, Prof. Alexander Borozdin, Nikolai Velyaminov, Semyon Vengerov, Alexey and Nikolai Veselovsky, L. Vilkina - wife of N. Minsky, historian Vyazigin, prof. physicists Nikolai Gezehus, prof. Vladimir Gessen, astronomer Dm. Dubyago, prof. Mich. Dyakonov, geologist Alexander Inostrantsev, prof. economics Andrey Isaev, political economist Nikolai Kablukov, economist Alexander Kaufman, legal philosopher Bogdan Kostyakovsky, O. Lemm, fiction writer Dm. Lieven, historian Dmitry Kobeko, physicist A. Kolli, fiction writer S. Kondrushkin, historian Dm. Korsakov, prof. S. Kulakovsky, historian Iv. Luchitsky, historian I. Malinovsky, prof. V. Matveev, historian Pyotr Morozov, prof. Kazan University Darius Naguevsky, prof. Bor. Nikolsky, literary historian Dm. Ovsyannikov-Kulikovsky, prof. Joseph Pokrovsky, botanist V. Polovtsev, prof. D. Radlov, philosopher Vas. Rozanov, prof. O. Rosenberg, poet A. Roslavlev, prof. F. Rybakov, prof. A. Speransky, Kl. Timiryazev, prof. Tugan-Baranovsky, prof. B. Turaev, prof. K. Fochsh, prof. A. Shakhmatov... and many others, their names you, Lord, weigh.”
This was just the beginning. Soon even more famous people of Russia will be added to these names.
In the first years of working as an investigator, I managed to catch alive the first security officers demoted to police officers for sins. Old veterans would sometimes open up: “I remember that they caught several suspicious characters—even in the Cheka. They sit on a bench in the yard with the car engine running at full blast so that passers-by don’t hear the shots. The commissar approaches: you, bastard, are you going to confess? A bullet in the belly! They ask others: do you, bastards, have anything to confess to the Soviet authorities? Those on their knees... They even told stories that didn’t happen. And how the searches were carried out! We are approaching a house on Tverskoy Boulevard. Night. We surround. And all to the apartments... All the valuables to the office, the bourgeois to the basement in the Lubyanka!.. That was work! What about Dzerzhinsky? He did the shooting himself.”
In 1918, the Chekist detachments consisted of sailors and Latvians. One such sailor entered the chairman's office drunk. He made a remark, and the sailor responded with a three-story building. Dzerzhinsky pulled out a revolver and, having killed the sailor on the spot with several shots, immediately fell into an epileptic fit.
In the archives I dug up the minutes of one of the first meetings of the Cheka, dated February 26, 1918: “They listened to the action of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. They decided: Dzerzhinsky himself bears responsibility for the act. From now on, all decisions on issues of executions are decided in the Cheka, and decisions are considered positive with half the composition of the commission members, and not personally, as was the case with Dzerzhinsky’s act.” From the text of the resolution it is clear: Dzerzhinsky executed the executions personally. I was not able to find out the names of those executed and, apparently, no one will be able to, but one thing is clear - in those days it was an offense at the level of childish prank.
Felix and his team.
Yakov Peters, with a mane of black hair, a depressed nose, a large narrow-lipped mouth and dull eyes, became Dzerzhinsky’s faithful assistant and deputy. He flooded the Don, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Kronstadt, Tambov with blood. Another deputy, Martyn Sudrabs, is better known under the pseudonym Latsis. This pearl belongs to him: “The established customs of war... according to which prisoners are not shot and so on, all this is ridiculous. Killing all prisoners in battles against you is the law of civil war.” Latsis flooded Moscow, Kazan, and Ukraine with blood. Member of the Board of the Cheka, Alexander Eiduk, did not hide the fact that murder for him is a sexual ecstasy. Contemporaries remembered his pale face, broken hand and Mauser in the other. The head of the Special Department of the Cheka, Mikhail Kedrov, ended up in a madhouse already in the 1920s. Before that, he and his mistress Rebekah Meisel imprisoned children aged 8–14 years and shot them under the pretext of class struggle. The “plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka” Georgy Atarbekov was particularly cruel. In Pyatigorsk, with a detachment of security officers, he chopped up about a hundred captured hostages with swords, and personally stabbed General Ruzsky with a dagger. During the retreat from Armavir, he shot several thousand Georgians in the KGB basements - officers, doctors, nurses returning to their homeland after the war. When Wrangel’s detachment approached Ekaterinodar, he ordered about two thousand more prisoners, most of whom were not guilty of anything, to be put against the wall.
In Kharkov, the very name of security officer Sayenko brought horror. This puny, clearly mentally ill man with a nervously twitching cheek, full of drugs, ran around the prison on Kholodnaya Gora, covered in blood. When the whites entered Kharkov and dug up the corpses, most had broken ribs, broken legs, severed heads, and all showed signs of torture with a hot iron.
In Georgia, the commandant of the local “emergency” Shulman, a drug addict and homosexual, was distinguished by pathological cruelty. This is how an eyewitness describes the execution of 118 people: “The condemned were lined up in ranks. Shulman and his assistant, with revolvers in their hands, walked along the line, shooting the condemned in the forehead, stopping from time to time to load the revolver. Not everyone submissively stuck their heads out. Many fought, cried, screamed, begged for mercy. Sometimes Shulman’s bullet only wounded them; the wounded were immediately finished off with shots and bayonets, and the dead were thrown into a pit. This whole scene lasted at least three hours.”
And what were the atrocities of Aron Kogan (better known under the pseudonym Bela Kun), Unschlicht, the dwarf and sadist Deribas, Cheka investigators Mindlin and Baron Pilyar von Pilchau worth? Female security officers did not lag behind the men: in Crimea - Zemlyachka, in Ekaterinoslavl - Gromova, in Kiev - “Comrade Rose”, in Penza - Bosch, in Petrograd - Yakovleva and Stasova, in Odessa - Ostrovskaya. In the same Odessa, for example, the Hungarian Remover arbitrarily shot 80 arrested people. She was subsequently declared mentally ill due to sexual perversion.
Did Dzerzhinsky know about the atrocities committed in the name of the Soviet regime by his henchmen? Based on the analysis of hundreds of documents, he certainly knew and encouraged it.
It was he who signed most of the search and arrest warrants, his signature is on the verdicts, and he wrote the secret instructions on the total recruitment of secret agents and secret agents in all spheres of society. “We must always remember the methods of the Jesuits, who did not make noise throughout the entire square about their work and did not flaunt it,” taught “Iron Felix” in secret orders, “but were secretive people who knew about everything and only knew how to act...” The main direction of work He considers the security officers to be secret intelligence and demands that everyone recruit as many seksots as possible. “To acquire secret employees,” Dzerzhinsky teaches, “a constant and lengthy conversation with the arrested, as well as their relatives and friends is necessary... To be interested in complete rehabilitation in the presence of compromising material obtained through searches and intelligence information... To take advantage of troubles in the organization and quarrels between individuals... Interested financially."
What kind of provocations did he push his subordinates to with his instructions!
A White Guard detachment attacks Khmelnitsk. The Bolsheviks were arrested, they were led through the entire city, urged on by kicks and gun butts. The walls of the houses are covered with appeals calling to enroll in the White Guard... But in reality it turned out that all this was a provocation of the security officers who decided to identify the enemies of the Soviet regime. The communists paid with fake bruises, but those immediately identified by the entire list were put to waste.
The scale of repressions in 1918 alone is evidenced by official statistics published by the Cheka itself in those years: “245 uprisings were suppressed, 142 counter-revolutionary organizations were uncovered, 6,300 people were shot.” Of course, the security officers were clearly being modest here. According to calculations by independent sociologists, several million were actually killed.
Legends and myths of the USSR.
Much has been written about how Dzerzhinsky worked his ass off and, on principle, did not show himself to doctors. Allegedly, a question was even raised at the Politburo about the state of health of the chairman of the GPU. In fact, more than anything else in the world, Felix Edmundovich loved and valued his health. The archives contain hundreds of documents confirming this.
He found all kinds of diseases in himself: tuberculosis, bronchitis, trachoma, and stomach ulcers. Where he was treated, in what sanatoriums he did not rest. Having become the chairman of the Cheka-GPU, he traveled to the best holiday homes several times a year. Kremlin doctors constantly examine him: they find “bloating and recommend enemas,” but here is the conclusion about his next analysis: “spermatozoa were found in the morning urine of Comrade Dzerzhinsky...”. Every day he is given pine baths, and security officer Olga Grigorieva is personally responsible for ensuring that “the enemies of the proletariat do not mix poison into the water.”
According to his colleagues, Dzerzhinsky ate poorly and drank “empty boiling water or some kind of surrogate. Like everyone else..." (Chekist Jan Buikis), and he tried to give his daily ration of bread to a guard or to a mother with many children on the street.
“Felix Edmundovich sat bending over his papers. He cordially rose to meet the unexpected guests. On the edge of the table in front of him stood an unfinished glass of cold tea, and on a saucer a small piece of black bread.
- And what's that? – asked Sverdlov. - No appetite?
“I have an appetite, but there’s not enough bread in the republic,” Dzerzhinsky joked. “So we’re stretching out the rations for the whole day...”
I will quote only two documents. Here, for example, is what the Kremlin doctors recommended to Dzerzhinsky:
"1. White meat is allowed - chicken, turkey, hazel grouse, veal, fish;
2. Avoid black meat; 3. Greens and fruits; 4. All sorts of flour dishes; 5. Avoid mustard, pepper, hot spices.”
And here is the menu comrade. Dzerzhinsky:
“Monday.” Game consommé, fresh salmon, Polish cauliflower;
Tuesday Mushroom solyanka, veal cutlets, spinach with egg;
Wednesday. Asparagus soup, bully beef, Brussels sprouts;
Thursday Boyar stew, steamed sterlet, greens, peas;
Friday Puree from flowers cabbage, sturgeon, head waiter beans;
Saturday. Sterlet soup, turkey with pickles (apple, cherry, plum), mushrooms in sour cream;
Sunday Fresh mushroom soup, marengo chicken, asparagus.” (The fund is the same, inventory 4.)
Trotsky recalled that after the seizure of power, he and Lenin gorged themselves on chum salmon caviar, and that “it was not only in my memory that the first years of the revolution were colored by this constant caviar.”
Red terrorists.
In May 1918, 20-year-old Yakov Blyumkin joined the Cheka and was immediately entrusted with the leadership of the department for combating German espionage.
On July 6, Blyumkin and N. Andreev arrive at Denezhny Lane, where the German embassy was located, and present a mandate for the right to negotiate with the ambassador. On the paper are the signatures of Dzerzhinsky, Ksenofontov’s secretary, registration number, stamp and seal.
During the conversation, Blumkin shoots at the ambassador, explodes two grenades, and the “diplomats” themselves hide in the confusion. An unprecedented international scandal is breaking out. Dzerzhinsky, without blinking an eye, declares that his signature on the mandate was forged... But there is no doubt that everything was organized by him. Firstly, he is categorically against peace with Germany (large-scale operations were planned against Germany). Secondly, the Bolsheviks needed a reason to deal with the Socialist Revolutionaries (it was they who were declared the murderers of the ambassador). And thirdly, Yakov Blumkin was promoted for all these things.
On July 8, Pravda published a statement from Dzerzhinsky: “In view of the fact that I am undoubtedly one of the main witnesses in the case of the murder of the German envoy Count Mirbach, I do not consider it possible for myself to remain in the Cheka ... as its chairman, as well as take any part in the commission at all. I ask the Council of People's Commissars to release me."
No one investigated the murder, no handwriting examination was carried out regarding the authenticity of the signature, and yet the Central Committee of the Party removes him from office. True, not for long. Already on August 22, Felix “rises from the ashes” and takes his former chair. And on time. On the night of August 24-25, the Cheka arrested more than a hundred prominent figures of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, accusing them of counter-revolution and terrorism. In response, on August 30, Leonid Kanegisser kills the chairman of the Petrograd “chreka” Moisei Uritsky. Dzerzhinsky personally goes to Petrograd and orders the execution of 1,000 people in retaliation.
On August 30, Lenin was shot. The security officers blame the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan for the assassination attempt. Dzerzhinsky gives the go-ahead for mass slaughter in Moscow.
An excellent family man.
And now let’s dwell on a private moment in the life of a person “with clean hands and a warm heart.” At a time when the country is in the ring of the Civil War and the “Red Terror” has been declared, when concentration camps are being created at an accelerated pace, and a wave of general arrests has swept the state, Dzerzhinsky, under the fictitious name of Domansky, suddenly leaves abroad.
“At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, in October 1918, exhausted by inhuman stress, he left for Switzerland for several days, where his family was,” the Kremlin commandant, security officer P. Malkov, would later write.
Did Felix have a family? Indeed, at the end of August 1910, 33-year-old Felix made a voyage with 28-year-old Sophia Muskat to the famous resort of Zakopane. On November 28, Sophia left for Warsaw, and they did not meet again.
On June 23, 1911, her son Jan was born, whom she sent to an orphanage, as the child suffered from a mental disorder. The question arises: if they considered themselves husband and wife, why didn’t Muskat come to Russia, where the husband is far from the last person? Why did he go himself, risking falling into the clutches of the special services, foreign police or emigrants? The most amazing thing is that he is not going anywhere, but to Germany, where the public demanded immediate and severe punishment for the murderers of Mirbach and where, of course, no one believed in the fairy tale about the villainous Socialist Revolutionaries.
There have been no official announcements about Dzerzhinsky's upcoming tour. It is known, however, that with him was a member of the All-Russian Cheka Board and the secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee V. Avanesov, who could take “Comrade Domansky” under his protection in case of any complications.
At my request, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducted an inspection of the issuance of visas for leaving Russia in September - October 1918. There are no documents for the departure of Dzerzhinsky-Domansky and Avanesov. Therefore, the trip was illegal. For what purpose they left, one can only guess, but there is no doubt that they were not going on a pleasure trip and not empty-handed. After all, Soviet “lemons” were not accepted for payment abroad. Even for using the toilet you had to pay in foreign currency. Where did the security officers get it from?
In September 1918, a Soviet diplomatic mission was opened in Switzerland. A certain Brightman was appointed its first secretary. He places Sofya Muskat there, who takes her son Ian from the orphanage. Dzerzhinsky arrives in Switzerland and takes his family to the luxurious resort of Lugano, where he occupies the best hotel. In photographs of that time he is without a beard, in an expensive coat and suit, happy with life, the weather and his affairs. He left his soldier’s tunic and shabby overcoat in his office at Lubyanka.
So for what purpose did Dzerzhinsky travel abroad? Let's look at the facts. On November 5, the German government breaks off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia and expels the Soviet embassy from Berlin. On November 9, under the threat of killing his family, William II abdicated the throne. On November 11, the revolution in Austria-Hungary (led by Bela Kun) overthrows the Habsburg monarchy.
For actions incompatible with diplomacy, the Swiss government expels the Soviet diplomatic mission, and Sophia Mushkat and the Brightmans are searched. In a letter to one of Dzerzhinsky’s deputies, Ya. Berzin, who was the main executor of “revolutions” and political murders abroad, Lenin insists that foreign Zionists “Kater or Schneider from Zurich”, Noubaker from Geneva, leaders of the Italian mafia, living in Lugano (!), demands that they not spare gold for them and pay them “for work and travel generously”, “and give the Russian fools work, send clippings, not random numbers...”.
Isn't this the key to the solution?
Not having time to gain a foothold in power, the Bolsheviks exported the revolution abroad. To finance these revolutions, they could only give the loot - gold, jewelry, paintings by great masters. The transportation of all this could be entrusted only to the most “iron comrades”. As a result, almost the entire gold reserve of Russia was thrown down the drain in a short time. And accounts began to appear in banks in Europe and America: Trotsky – 1 million dollars and 90 million Swiss francs; Lenin – 75 million Swiss francs; Zinoviev – 80 million Swiss francs; Ganetsky – 60 million Swiss francs and 10 million dollars; Dzerzhinsky – 80 million Swiss francs.
By the way, from Dzerzhinsky’s published letters to his sister Aldona, who lived in Vienna with her millionaire husband, it is clear that he sent valuable things even to her.
Born in a shirt, Dzerzhinsky truly turned out to be a lucky man. He was lucky - he did not live to see his thirty-seventh year. Was not poisoned, shot, executed. He died of natural causes, not reaching his forty-ninth birthday, on July 20, 1926 at 16:40 in his Kremlin apartment. Within a few hours, the famous pathologist Abrikosov, in the presence of five other doctors, performed an autopsy on the body and determined that death occurred “from cardiac paralysis, which developed as a result of spasmodic closure of the lumen of the venous arteries.” (RCKHIDNI, fund 76, inventory 4, file 24.)
Well, Comrade Astakhov, you are an incorrigible KGB nit, so you entrust to the governors the fate of those dozens of children who have found parents and for whom trials are scheduled for January and February? But they are already accustomed to their mother and father, they have flown to them more than once across the ocean, the children count the days until they leave for their family (who can count), in the evenings they kiss their photographs, try to remember their smell, smelling the toys that were brought to them mom and dad from this distant America? They have never known parental affection, their mother did not take them to bed, did not breastfeed them, did not cuddle them, did not sing a lullaby, they do not even know what a pacifier is. Many were on the street only in the arms of these parents who appeared, as in a fairy tale. And before that, their entire short, unhappy life is a barracks. Are you going to come to them to announce that you and Uncle Putin did not allow them to live in a family with people who managed to love and accept them, with all their illnesses and difficult fates? Rooms with cheerful curtains have already been prepared and furnished for them, prostheses have already been ordered, boxes of medical nutrition are standing in the corridor, doctors who have studied their diagnoses are waiting for them, numerous relatives are waiting for them, already in balloons, with which they were supposed to arrive at the airport to meet, it is written: "Hello, Vanya!" "Hi, Nyusha!"
What would you tell these children if on the appointed day it is not their mother and father who come to them with a newly purchased stroller or wheelchair, but you, the security officer Astakhov? Or maybe you’ll lie to them, saying that your new dad and mom abandoned you? They changed their minds, they’ll take another, healthy one. What words will you find? This is your homeland, son, I don’t know another country like this, where people can breathe so freely? My heart would have broken if I had been sent there with this news. And your?
What did your Dzerzhinsky say about you and Putin? “Only a person with a cool head, a warm heart and clean hands can be a security officer.” It seems so? So: your hands are dirty, your heart is cold, and in your head you have a stinking mess instead of brains. As your greatest achievement, you present the news that, it turns out, those 14 hostages for whom trials took place in December, after consulting in your circle, you decided to release them. I remember these terrible footage from Dubrovka and Beslan, when child hostages, bending down, run out from the terrorists - because at some point the terrorists decided to release some portion for some reason of their own. And so they run, these little figures, through an empty space shot by snipers, and we think, will they make it? - Do you, Chekist creature, remember these shots? So: you and your Putin are exactly the same terrorists. And you captured not three hundred people, and not a thousand. And not even these orphans. You security officers with dirty hands and cold hearts have taken over all of Russia, you creatures.
Now go and sue me, offended virtue. Is there already such an article in your criminal code: “Slanderers of Russia”? Haven't entered it yet?
WARM HEART, COOL HEAD AND “CLEAN” HANDS
Mikhail Sokolov: We continue our series of programs dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Great Terror in the USSR. Today in our Moscow studio our guest from Novosibirsk is Alexey Teplyakov, candidate of historical sciences, author of the monograph "Machine of Terror: OGPU-NKVD of Siberia in 1929-1941"...
Alexey Georgievich, I would like to say that formally your story begins in 1929, the year of the great turning point, but, nevertheless, naturally, you know the previous period very well.
Can it be said that over the previous decade, Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, and the Bolshevik Party in general, created an ideal mechanism for the physical destruction of opponents of the Bolshevik dictatorship?
Alexey Teplyakov: In an absolutely amazing way, it took the Bolsheviks months rather than years to form this merciless and very effective punitive apparatus. They, without any prior experience, nevertheless created a very effective secret police, which only developed further.
Mikhail Sokolov: And what helped them, in fact, where did the personnel, the professionals come from? Or did Lenin's theory turn out to be very good in practice?
Alexey Teplyakov: Lenin’s theory superimposed on the peculiarities that existed in Russia. A very archaic population, agitated by the war, produced a huge number of people, incredibly simply ready to kill. They knew a great secret, incomprehensible to a normal person: that it is easy to kill.
And if the leadership consisted mainly of professional revolutionaries, in the Cheka in the center and locally, then the rest of the apparatus was filled from the pine forest. And this was, of course, the main problem - finding people who would be ready for anything, and at the same time would be at least slightly literate and at least somehow disciplined.
And there were big problems with discipline, and from the very beginning the Cheka organs were colossally criminalized. All the punishments that were given could not cleanse the organs, and from the very beginning they were formed according to the principle of mutual responsibility, which was based on a feeling of impunity. They punished those who did not hide their crimes well, those whose political sins were discovered. In general, the Chekist system was militarized, and the authorities appointed the culprit there.
Mikhail Sokolov: Where did the Bolsheviks find executioners for the OGPU Cheka?...
Alexey Teplyakov: ..After the First World War, the revolution, during the Civil War, a huge cadre of people was formed who went through the war. It was among them that ordinary employees were recruited, who, if they showed promise, were promoted. From the very beginning, the Cheka formed a tradition of baptism in blood. A newcomer not always, but as a rule, had to participate in executions.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: In general, was this a career moment? In your book, I see that not only full-time security officers, but also drivers and field service officers took part in the executions.
Was this a chance for them to advance, to make a career in the GPU?
Alexey Teplyakov: The fact is that commandants’ specialization in executions existed initially, but it was not designed for constant outbreaks of terror. And as soon as there were too many to shoot, the entire operational staff had to be involved, and when they, too, were literally choking in blood, the couriers, and even the drivers, in a word, everyone who served, who turned up, was involved.
The security officers themselves admitted that only barmaids did not participate in our torture investigation; the cleaning lady could interrogate.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: So this is like the so-called “fight against the kulaks”?
Alexey Teplyakov: Yes, but it was much wider, all the so-called “formers” were scooped up there. For example, in Siberia there was one of the first cases of percentage extermination, when the plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU Zakovsky gave direct instructions to shoot 10% of all priests. There were two thousand of them in Siberia. And now the task was completed.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: There is a standard idea that torture was used en masse by security officers only in 1937-38. As I understand it, you have enough evidence that this torture system worked from 1917 until the end of the Stalin era?
Alexey Teplyakov: Of course, there are a lot of factors about the torture investigation since 1918. And of course, Dzerzhinsky also knew about this. But as Felix Edmundovich himself said at the beginning of 1918 in front of his employees first, that everything is allowed to them to defend the revolution, and our principle is that the end justifies the means. And torture was extremely widespread, but the security officers, somehow until 1937, of course, were not very effective, but concealed this widespread use.
As one of the major figures in the KGB system explained: torture was used especially against those who, by all indicators, were already suicide bombers. And so they did not come to the surface, because the person was shot, and he usually did not have time to complain to anyone. And just in 1938, this security officer was imprisoned for protesting against such a widespread use of torture, because “this would expose our methods. But only those who will be shot should be tortured.”
Mikhail Sokolov: There is some strange duality here. On the one hand, they used racks, night interrogations, cold cells, some kind of glaciers, God knows what, on the other hand, periodically some security officers were punished for the same thing.
Alexey Teplyakov: Yes, you see, in this system there was a constant screening of those who could not be effective investigators. If a person was good at high-profile cases, he could commit some outrages with impunity on a fairly wide scale and be constantly covered up. And accordingly, an ineffective employee, including under the pretext that he beat someone, left traces or there was a complaint to the very top, and it reached him, he could be punished.
In general, the top officials demanded that there be confessions, that everyone sign them, and that there be no open torture. And the KGB authorities reported that “we, of course, are clearing our ranks, we are monitoring and generally working effectively and correctly.”
...
Mikhail Sokolov: Still, the question is about “fists and saboteurs,” why was this particular part of the population targeted? What was Stalin afraid of?
Alexey Teplyakov: You know, the Bolsheviks considered terror as a universal master key to all problems. This was from the very beginning; Lenin even told one of the American communists that a fierce class struggle and corresponding terror against the overthrown classes would last for 50-70 years. That is, he actually covered the entire Soviet period without knowing it.
And accordingly, in the 30s, this devastation associated with collectivization, super-industrialization, gave rise to a huge number of people who were thrown to the margins of life, joined the criminal environment, and the rampant crime rate was fantastic. It got to the point that workers in the suburbs took cattle home at night, because otherwise it would be stolen, and workers on the night shift did not risk returning home and spent the night in the workshops. They killed and robbed with terrible force. It is simply difficult for us to imagine the rampant crime; it was quite comparable to the level of the Civil War.
One of the goals is the destruction of all so-called socially harmful people and thus mitigating the criminal situation. In those so-called kulaks who dared to escape from exile, they fled in hundreds of thousands, scattered throughout the country, the leadership saw cadres of future rebel organizations. Finally, it was necessary to identify the so-called representatives of “harmful” nationalities, and Stalin directly said to the secretary of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks that “all these Germans, Poles, Latvians are treasonous nations subject to destruction, we must put them on their knees and shoot like crazy dogs"...
And thus, entire sections of the population were destroyed, starting with the so-called “formers,” who numbered in the millions 20 years after the revolution, and the remnants of all these defeated classes, coupled with representatives of those nationalities of the state who pursued a hostile policy towards the USSR. And finally, the nomenklatura, which, from Stalin’s point of view, has served its purpose and must be replaced...
But when terror began to unfold, having its inevitable logic to expand and expand, it was precisely at the expense of the criminal contingent that the security officers saved money, and as a result, of the 720 thousand executed in 1937-38, the criminal element accounted for hardly more than 10%. Moreover, among those executed there was a reduced percentage, because it was much more important to shoot the so-called kulaks.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: How did the security officers themselves feel in 1937-38? Did their leaders understand that they had no chance of saving themselves, since repression was removing layer after layer of the leadership?
Alexey Teplyakov: In 1937, there was a certain euphoria associated with the fact that a number of large security officers, relatively speaking, “Yagoda’s people,” were repressed, which created a colossal number of vacancies for active careerists. And they, receiving the highest orders and membership in the Supreme Council, felt, of course, comfortable for some time. But already in 1938 they began to be actively planted.
In the second half of 1938, of course, the feelings there were terrible, and these people tried to save their nervous system with active work and alcohol, but many committed suicide, and there were even two cases of escapes, when the head of the Far Eastern department of the NKVD Lishkov was able to escape through Manchuria to Japan, and the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Uspensky, hid throughout the country for almost six months. A whole team searched for him and finally caught him in the Urals.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: You published another work about the mechanism for executing sentences by security officers, simply about executions, of course, all this was a secret.
Can it be considered proven that the security officers not only killed people, but massively used torture before execution, raped women, looted, used strangulation, killed with crowbars, and were even the first to invent gas vans, like the Nazis, using exhaust gases to kill?
Alexey Teplyakov: That’s exactly how it was. The Bolsheviks turned the matter of capital punishment into a very cruel and carefully arranged secret murder. The number of sadistic methods of taking life, especially during the period of aggravation of terror, is simply terrifying.
In different regions, the examples are one more terrible than the other, when, say, in the Vologda region, it is unclear why security officers chop up those sentenced to death with axes, then drink, and the head of the regional department of the NKVD says: “What good fellows we are, having no such experience before, we chopped up the human body like a turnip.” .
In the Novosibirsk region, in one of the prisons, more than 600 people were strangled and about one and a half thousand were shot. Why were they strangled? At the trial, they vaguely said that there was such an order from above. One of the most disgusting KGB rituals was the almost always mandatory beating of prisoners before execution.
Mikhail Sokolov: Didn’t the concept of “criminal order” exist in the system?
Alexey Teplyakov: Absolutely...
Mikhail Sokolov: In Khrushchev’s time, the topic of denunciations was still promoted, they say, because of initiative slanderers there was such a scale of terror. Do you see this? It seemed to me that this was greatly exaggerated.
Alexey Teplyakov: The denunciation played a very important role, it’s just difficult to see it in the investigative file, usually it remained in the volume of operational materials, which is not shown to anyone...
As a result of the fact that we don’t do anything strictly within the framework of the instructions, quite often in investigative cases one can see the reasons why it arose, including denunciations. When there were outbreaks of terror, of course, the security officers worked, first of all, according to their so-called “accounts.”
Mikhail Sokolov: What is it?
These are lists of those people who are politically suspicious, disloyal, for whom something has been noticed either in terms of statements, or at least in terms of origin, their connections with some exposed enemies of the people. People who have already been convicted for political reasons, people who have connections with foreigners. There were 18 accounting categories in which those who passed were, to a certain extent, doomed.
Mikhail Sokolov: As I understand it, the people who worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) and then returned to the Soviet Union, almost all the men, were destroyed.
Alexey Teplyakov: Yes, it was one of the most brutal massacres, about 30 thousand were shot, and these were mostly specialists. From the point of view of the security officers, on the one hand, they were mostly “former”, and on the other hand, they were ready-made Japanese spies.
...
Mikhail Sokolov: About the number of victims of terror. I saw that the Stalinists are using certain figures from the report of Prosecutor Rudenko, that since the 1920s, 1,200,000 people were allegedly repressed and 600,000 were shot.
There are other estimates from the commission of the CPSU Central Committee led by Shatunovskaya: almost 12 million repressed and one and a half million executed.
How do you assess what was done by the Bolsheviks, Stalin, and so on with the population of the country?
Alexey Teplyakov: You see, those executed only for political reasons are one thing - that’s about a million people during all the years of Soviet power, to this we must add more than 150 thousand executed during the war - this is only in court, and 50 thousand, at least, on the field battle.
But we must take into account that during the Civil War and after the civil war in the first years of Soviet power there was a colossal number of extrajudicial killings, which were carried out not only and not even so much by security officers, but by the army, food detachments, and armed detachments of communists.
These are victims of the suppression of “rebellions,” when the West Siberian uprising alone led to the death of about 40 thousand peasants. And thus, of course, millions are added.
And the most massive death rate in Soviet times was, of course, the victims of hunger strikes - approximately 15 million people who died from terrible starvation from 1918 to the end of 1940. This cannot be discounted from the scales of history.
Mikhail Sokolov: Perhaps the last one. In my opinion, the elements of chekism are paranoia, spy mania, secrecy, and so on, they have been preserved in the modern state security system. What is your opinion?
Alexey Teplyakov: Unfortunately, they survived. And we see that the modern system of state security and police are the same structures closed from public opinion, in which the principle of protecting one’s own, mutual responsibility and, as far as can be judged, a very high level of intradepartmental crime, which is carefully hidden, come first.
Mikhail Sokolov.