In September 1918, the decree "On the Red Terror" was proclaimed, which gave rise to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Russia. In essence, having legalized the methods of radical elimination of dissenters, the Bolsheviks untied the hands of outright sadists and mentally unhealthy people who took pleasure and moral satisfaction from the murders.
Strange as it may seem, the representatives of the fairer sex distinguished themselves with special diligence.
Varvara Yakovleva
During the Civil War, Yakovleva acted as deputy and then head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The daughter of a Moscow merchant, she showed striking rigidity even for her contemporaries. In the name of a "bright future" Yakovleva was ready to send as many "enemies of the revolution" as she liked without batting an eye. The exact number of her victims is unknown. According to historians, this woman personally killed several hundred "counter-revolutionaries."
Her active participation in mass repressions is confirmed by the execution lists of October-December 1918, published signed by Yakovleva herself. However, soon the "executioner of the revolution" was recalled from Petrograd on the personal order of Vladimir Lenin. The fact is that Yakovleva led a promiscuous sex life, changed gentlemen like gloves, so she turned into an easily accessible source of information for spies.
Evgeniya Bosh
"Distinguished" in the field of executions and Eugene Bosch. The daughter of a German immigrant and a Bessarabian noblewoman, she took an active part in revolutionary life since 1907. In 1918 Bosch became the head of the Penza committee of the party, its main task was to confiscate grain from the local peasantry.
In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch's cruelty in the suppression of peasant uprisings was recalled decades later. Those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people, she called "weak and soft", accused of sabotage.
Most historians researching the theme of the Red Terror believe that Bosch was mentally ill and herself provoked peasant demonstrations for subsequent demonstrative reprisals. Eyewitnesses recalled that in the village of Kuchki, a punitive woman without batting an eye shot one of the peasants, which caused a chain reaction of violence from the food detachments subordinate to her.
Vera Grebenshchikova
Odessa punitive Vera Grebenshchikova, nicknamed Dora, worked in the local "emergency department". According to some sources, she personally sent 400 people to the next world, according to others - 700. Most of the nobles, white officers, too wealthy, in her opinion, the bourgeois, as well as all those whom the woman executioner considered unreliable fell under the hot hand of Grebenshchikova ...
Dora liked more than just killing. She enjoyed the many hours of torture of the unfortunate, causing him unbearable pain. There is information that she tore off the skin from her victims, tore out their nails, and engaged in self-harm.
Grebenshchikova was helped in this "craft" by a prostitute named Alexandra - her intimate partner, whose age was 18 years. She has about 200 lives on her account.
Rose Schwartz
Lesbian love was also practiced by Rosa Schwartz - a Kiev prostitute who got into the Cheka from a denunciation of one of the clients. Together with her friend Vera Schwartz, she also loved to practice sadistic games.
The ladies wanted a thrill, so they came up with the most sophisticated ways to mock the "counter-revolutionary elements." Only after the victim was brought to an extreme degree of exhaustion was she killed.
Rebekah Maisel
In Vologda, one more “Valkyrie of the revolution”, Rebekah Eisel (Plastinina's pseudonym), was unrestrained. The husband of the woman executioner was Mikhail Kedrov, the head of the special department of the Cheka. Nervous, embittered by the whole world, they took out their complexes on others.
The Sweet Couple lived in a railway carriage near the station. Interrogations were also conducted there. They shot me a little further away - 50 meters from the carriage. Aysel personally killed at least a hundred people.
The executioner woman also managed to smuggle in Arkhangelsk. There she carried out the death sentence against 80 White Guards and 40 civilians suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. By her own order, the Chekists flooded a barge with 500 people on board.
Rosalia Zemlyachka
But in cruelty and ruthlessness there was no equal to Rosalia Zemlyachka. Coming from a family of merchants, in 1920 she received the post of the Crimean regional party committee, then she became a member of the local revolutionary committee.
This woman outlined her goals at once: speaking to members of the same party in December 1920, she said that the Crimea must be cleared of 300 thousand "White Guard elements." The purge began immediately. Mass executions of captured soldiers, Wrangel officers, members of their families and representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who failed to leave the peninsula, as well as “too wealthy” local residents - all this became a common occurrence in the life of Crimea in those terrible years.
In her opinion, it was unreasonable to spend ammunition on "enemies of the revolution"; therefore, those sentenced to death were drowned, tied to their feet with stones, loaded onto barges, and then drowned in the open sea. In this barbaric way, at least 50 thousand people were killed. All in all, under the leadership of Zemlyachka, about 100 thousand people were sent to the next world. However, the writer Ivan Shmelev, who was an eyewitness to the terrible events, stated that there were actually 120 thousand victims. It is noteworthy that the ashes of the punitive woman were buried in the Kremlin wall.
Antonina Makarova
Makarova (Tonka the machine gunner) - the executioner of the "Lokot Republic" - a collaborationist semi-autonomy during the Great Patriotic War. She was surrounded, she preferred to go to the service of the Germans as a policeman. I personally shot 200 people with a machine gun. After the war, Makarova, who got married and changed her last name to Ginzburg, was searched for for more than 30 years. Finally, in 1978, she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.
In fact, this woman's name was Antonina Makarovna Parfenova. She was born in 1921 in the village of Malaya Volkovka near Smolensk, where she went to school. The teacher incorrectly wrote down the name of the girl in the journal, who was embarrassed to give her name, and classmates shouted: "Yes, she is Makarov," meaning that Antonina is Makar's daughter. So Tonya Parfenova became Makarova. She graduated from high school and left for Moscow to go to college. But the war began. Tonya Makarova volunteered for the front.
But the nineteen-year-old nurse Makarova practically did not have time to serve her homeland: she got into the notorious Vyazemskaya operation - the battle near Moscow, in which the Soviet army suffered a crushing defeat. Of the entire unit, only Tonya and a soldier named Nikolai Fedchuk managed to survive and escape from captivity. For several months they wandered through the forests, trying to get to the native village of Fedchuk. Tonya had to become a soldier's "field wife", otherwise she would not have survived. However, as soon as Fedchuk got home, it turned out that he had a legal wife and lived here. Tonya went further alone and went to the village of Lokot, occupied by the German invaders. She decided to stay with the invaders: maybe she had no other choice, or maybe she was so tired of wandering through the forests that the ability to eat and sleep normally under the roof became a decisive argument.
Now Tonya had to be a "field wife" for many different men. In fact, Tonya was simply constantly raped, in return providing her with food and a roof over her head. But this did not last long. Once the soldiers gave the girl a drink, and then, drunk, put her to the Maxim machine gun and ordered to shoot at the prisoners. Tonya, who managed to pass not only nursing courses, but also machine gunners before the front, began to shoot. In front of her were not only men, but also women, old men, children, and the drunk Tonya did not miss. From that day on, she became a Tonka-machine-gunner, an executioner with an official salary of 30 marks.
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Historians claim that Tony's childhood idol was Anka the machine gunner, and Makarova, becoming an executioner, fulfilled her childhood dream: it doesn't matter that Anka shot enemies, and Tonya shot partisans, and at the same time women, children and the elderly. But it is quite possible that Makarova, who received an official position, a salary and her own bed, simply ceased to be the object of sexual violence. In any case, she did not refuse a new "job".
According to official data, Tonka the machine-gunner shot more than 1,500 people, but only 168 were able to restore the names and surnames. As an encouragement, Makarova was allowed to take away the belongings of the killed, which, however, had to be washed from blood and sewn bullet holes on them. Antonina fired at the condemned with a machine gun, and then had to finish off the survivors with pistol shots. However, several children managed to survive: they were too small in stature, and machine-gun bullets passed over their heads, and for some reason Makarova did not make control shots. The surviving children were taken out of the village along with the corpses, and partisans rescued them at the burial sites. So rumors about Tonka the machine-gunner as a cruel and bloodthirsty killer and traitor spread throughout the district. The partisans appointed a reward for her head, but they failed to get to Makarova. Until 1943, Antonina continued to shoot people.
And then Makarova was lucky: the Soviet army reached the Bryansk region, and Antonina would undoubtedly have died if she had not contracted syphilis from one of her lovers. The Germans sent her to the rear, where she ended up in a hospital under the guise of a Soviet nurse. Somehow, Antonina managed to get fake documents, and, having recovered, she got a job in a hospital as a nurse. There, in 1945, the wounded soldier Viktor Ginzburg fell in love with her. The young people got married, and Tonka the machine gunner disappeared forever. Instead, a military nurse Antonina Ginzburg appeared.
After the end of the war, Antonina and Viktor became an exemplary Soviet family: they moved to Belarus, to the city of Lepel, worked in a garment factory, raised two daughters, and even came to schools as honored front-line soldiers - to tell children about the war.
Meanwhile, the KGB continued to search for Tonka the machine gunner: the search continued for three decades, but the trail of the executioner woman was lost. Until one of Antonina's relatives applied for permission to travel abroad. For some reason, Antonina Makarova (Ginzburg) was on the list of relatives as the sister of citizen Parfenov. Investigators began to collect evidence and went on the trail of Tonka the machine gunner. Several surviving witnesses identified her, and Antonina was arrested on her way from work.
They say that during the trial, Makarova remained calm: she believed that, after years, she would be given a not very harsh sentence. In the meantime, the husband and daughters tried to secure her release: the authorities did not say what exactly Makarova was arrested for. As soon as the family found out what exactly their wife and mother would be tried for, they stopped trying to appeal the arrest and left Lepel.
Antonina Makarova was sentenced to be shot on November 20, 1978. She immediately filed several requests for clemency, but they were all rejected. On August 11, 1979, Tonka the machine gunner was shot.
Berta Borodkina
Berta Naumovna Borodkina, aka Iron Bella, was neither a ruthless killer nor an executioner. She was sentenced to capital punishment for systematic embezzlement of socialist property on an especially large scale.
Berta Borodkina was born in 1927. The girl did not like her own name, and she preferred to call herself Bella. She began her future dizzying career for a woman in the USSR as a barmaid and waitress in the Gelendzhik canteen. Soon, the girl with a tough character was transferred to the position of director of the canteen. Borodkina coped with her duties so well that she became an honored worker in trade and public catering of the RSFSR, and also headed the trust of restaurants and canteens in Gelendzhik.
In fact, this meant that in Iron Bella's restaurants, party and government officials received perfect service - not at their own expense, but at the expense of visitors to inexpensive cafes and canteens: underfilling, underweight, use of written-off products and banal shortcuts allowed Bella to free up dizzying sums. She spent them on bribes and service of the highest ranks.
The scale of these actions allows the Gelendzhik restaurant trust to be called a real mafia: each bartender, waiter and director of a cafe or canteen had to give Borodkina a certain amount every month, otherwise the employees were simply fired. At the same time, ties with officials for a long time allowed Berta Borodkina to feel completely unpunished - no sudden checks and audits, no attempts to catch the head of the restaurant trust in embezzlement. At this moment, Borodkina was called Iron Bella.
But in 1982, Berta Borodkina was arrested at the anonymous statement of a certain citizen who reported that pornographic films were shown to selected visitors in one of Borodkina's restaurants. This information, apparently, was not confirmed, but the investigation found out that during the years of the leadership of the trust, Borodkina stole more than a million rubles from the state - an absolutely incomprehensible amount at that time. During a search in Borodkina's house, they found furs, jewelry and huge amounts of money hidden in the most unexpected places: in heating radiators, in rolled-up cans and even in a pile of bricks near the house.
Borodkin was sentenced to death in the same 1982. Bertha's sister said that in prison the defendant was tortured with the use of psychotropic drugs. So Iron Bella broke down and began to confess. In August 1983, Berta Borodkina was shot.
Tamara Ivanyutina
Tamara Ivanyutina, nee Maslenko, was born in 1941 in Kiev, in a large family. From early childhood, parents taught Tamara and her five brothers and sisters that the most important thing in life is material security. In the Soviet years, trade and catering were considered the most "lucrative" places, and at first Tamara chose trade for herself. But I got caught in speculation and got a criminal record. It was almost impossible for a woman with a criminal record to get a job, so Ivanyutina got herself a fake work book and in 1986 got a job as a dishwasher at school number 16 in the Minsk district of Kiev. Later, she told the investigation that this work was necessary for her to provide livestock (chickens and pigs) with free food waste. But it turned out that Ivanyutina did not come to school for this.
On March 17 and 18, 1987, several students and school staff were hospitalized with signs of serious food poisoning. In the next few hours, two children and two adults died, another 9 people were in intensive care in serious condition. The version of an intestinal infection, which the doctors suspected, was ruled out: the victims began to lose hair. A criminal case was opened.
The investigation interviewed the victims, the survivors, and it turned out that they all had lunch the day before in the school cafeteria and ate buckwheat porridge with liver. A few hours later, everyone felt a rapidly developing malaise. An inspection was carried out at the school, it turned out that the nurse who was responsible for the quality of food in the canteen died 2 weeks ago, according to the official conclusion, from cardiovascular disease. The circumstances of this death aroused suspicion in the investigation, and it was decided to exhume the body. The examination found out that the nurse died from thallium poisoning. It is a highly toxic heavy metal, poisoning with which it causes damage to the nervous system and internal organs, as well as total alopecia (complete hair loss). The investigation immediately organized a search of all the employees of the school cafeteria and found in the house of Tamara Ivanyutina “a small but very heavy jar”. In the laboratory, it turned out that the jar contained "Clerici's liquid," a highly toxic thallium-based solution. This solution is used in some branches of geology, and the school dishwasher could not need it in any way.
Ivanyutina was arrested, and she wrote a confession: according to her, she wanted to "punish" the sixth graders, who allegedly refused to place tables and chairs in the dining room. But later, Ivanyutina said that she confessed to the murders under pressure from the investigation, and refused to give further evidence.
In the meantime, investigators found out that the poisoning of children and school employees was not the first murder on the account of Tamara Ivanyutina. Moreover, it turned out that Tamara Ivanyutina herself and her family members (sister and parents) have been using thallium for poisoning for 11 years since 1976. Moreover, both for selfish purposes, and in relation to people who, for some reason, simply did not like family members. They acquired the highly toxic liquid Clerici from a friend: the woman worked at the Geological Institute and was sure that she was selling thallium to her acquaintances for baiting rats. For all these years, she passed a poisonous substance to the Maslenko family at least 9 times. And they used it every time.
First, Tamara Ivanyutina poisoned her first husband in order to inherit the apartment. After she remarried, but the relationship with her father-in-law and mother-in-law did not work out, as a result, they died with an interval of 2 days. Ivanyutin herself poisoned her husband too, but with small portions of poison: the man began to get sick, and the killer hoped to soon become a widow and inherit a house and land. In addition, the episode of poisoning at school, it turns out, was not the first: earlier Ivanyutina poisoned the school party organizer Ekaterina Shcherban (the woman died), the chemistry teacher (survived) and two children - students of the first and fifth grade. The children annoyed Ivanyutina by asking her for leftover cutlets for their pets.
At the same time, Tamara's sister Nina Matsibor poisoned her husband in order to take possession of his apartment, and the parents of the women, Maslenko's wife, poisoned a neighbor in a communal apartment and a relative who reprimanded them. Tamara and Nina's father also poisoned his relative from Tula, having come to visit her. Also, family members poisoned neighboring pets.
Already under investigation, in the pre-trial detention center Tamara Ivanyutina explained her life principles to her cellmates as follows: “To achieve what you want, you do not need to write complaints, but be friends with everyone, treat them. But it is especially harmful to add poison to food. "
The court proved 40 episodes of poisoning committed by members of this family, of which 13 were fatal. When the verdict was announced, Tamara Ivanyutina refused to admit guilt and to apologize to the relatives of the victims. She was sentenced to death. Ivanyutina's sister Nina was sentenced to 15 years in prison, father and mother to 10 and 13 years, respectively. The Maslenko spouses died in prison, the further fate of Nina is not known.
Tamara Ivanyutina, who did not admit her guilt, tried to bribe the investigator by promising him "a lot of gold." After the verdict was announced, she was shot.
In September 1918, the decree "On the Red Terror" was proclaimed, which gave rise to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Russia. In essence, having legalized the methods of radical elimination of dissenters, the Bolsheviks untied the hands of both outspoken sadists and mentally unhealthy people who received pleasure and moral satisfaction from the murders.
Strange as it may seem, the representatives of the fairer sex distinguished themselves with special diligence.
Varvara Yakovleva
During the Civil War, Yakovleva acted as deputy and then head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The daughter of a Moscow merchant, she showed striking rigidity even for her contemporaries. In the name of a "bright future" Yakovleva was ready to send as many "enemies of the revolution" as she liked without batting an eye. The exact number of her victims is unknown. According to historians, this woman personally killed several hundred "counter-revolutionaries."
Her active participation in mass repressions is confirmed by the execution lists of October-December 1918, published signed by Yakovleva herself. However, soon the "executioner of the revolution" was recalled from Petrograd on the personal order of Vladimir Lenin. The fact is that Yakovleva led a promiscuous sex life, changed gentlemen like gloves, so she turned into an easily accessible source of information for spies.
Evgeniya Bosh
"Distinguished" in the field of executions and Eugene Bosch. The daughter of a German immigrant and a Bessarabian noblewoman, she took an active part in revolutionary life since 1907. In 1918 Bosch became the head of the Penza committee of the party, its main task was to confiscate grain from the local peasantry.
In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch's cruelty in the suppression of peasant uprisings was recalled decades later. Those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people, she called "weak and soft", accused of sabotage.
Most historians researching the theme of the Red Terror believe that Bosch was mentally ill and herself provoked peasant demonstrations for subsequent demonstrative reprisals. Eyewitnesses recalled that in the village of Kuchki, a punitive woman without batting an eye shot one of the peasants, which caused a chain reaction of violence from the food detachments subordinate to her.
Vera Grebenshchikova
Odessa punitive Vera Grebenshchikova, nicknamed Dora, worked in the local "emergency department". According to some reports, she personally sent 400 people to the next world, according to others - 700. Most of the nobles, white officers, too well-off, in her opinion, burghers, as well as all those whom the woman executioner considered unreliable fell under Grebenshchikova's hot hand ...
Dora liked more than just killing. She enjoyed the many hours of torture of the unfortunate, causing him unbearable pain. There is information that she tore off the skin from her victims, tore out their nails, and engaged in self-harm.
Assisted Grebenshchikova in this "craft" a prostitute named Alexandra - her sex partner, whose age was 18 years. She has about 200 lives on her account.
Rose Schwartz
Lesbian love was also practiced by Rosa Schwartz - a Kiev prostitute who got into the Cheka from a denunciation of one of the clients. Together with her friend Vera Schwartz, she also loved to practice sadistic games.
The ladies wanted a thrill, so they came up with the most sophisticated ways to mock the "counter-voluntary elements." Only after the victim was brought to an extreme degree of exhaustion was she killed.
Rebekah Maisel
In Vologda, one more “Valkyrie of the revolution”, Rebekah Eisel (Plastinina's pseudonym), was unrestrained. The husband of the woman executioner was Mikhail Kedrov, the head of the special department of the Cheka. Nervous, embittered by the whole world, they took out their complexes on others.
The Sweet Couple lived in a railway carriage near the station. Interrogations were also conducted there. They shot me a little further away - 50 meters from the carriage. Aysel personally killed at least a hundred people.
The executioner woman also managed to poke around in Arkhangelsk. There she carried out the death sentence against 80 White Guards and 40 civilians suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. By her own order, the Chekists flooded a barge with 500 people on board.
Rosalia Zemlyachka
But in cruelty and ruthlessness there was no equal to Rosalia Zemlyachka. Coming from a family of merchants, in 1920 she received the post of the Crimean regional party committee, then she became a member of the local revolutionary committee.
This woman outlined her goals at once: speaking to members of the same party in December 1920, she said that the Crimea must be cleared of 300 thousand "White Guard elements." The purge began immediately. Mass executions of captured soldiers, Wrangel officers, members of their families and representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who failed to leave the peninsula, as well as “too wealthy” local residents - all this became a common occurrence in the life of Crimea in those terrible years.
In her opinion, it was unreasonable to spend ammunition on "enemies of the revolution"; therefore, those sentenced to death were drowned, tied to their feet with stones, loaded onto barges, and then drowned in the open sea. At least 50 thousand people were killed in this barbaric way. In total, under the leadership of Zemlyachka, about 100 thousand people were sent to the next world. However, the writer Ivan Shmelev, who was an eyewitness to the terrible events, stated that there were actually 120 thousand victims. It is noteworthy that the ashes of the punisher are buried in the Kremlin wall.
Antonina Makarova
Makarova (Tonka the machine gunner) - the executioner of the "Lokot Republic" - a collaborationist semi-autonomy during the Great Patriotic War. She was surrounded, she preferred to go to the service of the Germans as a policeman. I personally shot 200 people with a machine gun. After the war, Makarova, who got married and changed her last name to Ginzburg, was searched for for more than 30 years. Finally, in 1978, she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.
The Great Patriotic War is one of the most difficult and contradictory pages in our history. This is both the great tragedy of our people, the pain that will not subside for a long time, and the history of the great heroism of the nation, which accomplished a real feat.
Soviet soldiers rushed into battle without hesitation, because they defended the main thing that a person has - their homeland. The memory of their heroism will remain for centuries.
But there are black pages in the history of the war, the stories of people who committed terrible deeds, for which there is and will not be an excuse.
The story that will be discussed struck me to the core ...
The story of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots, is another, dark side of the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War.
Tonka the machine-gunner, as she was called then, worked in the Soviet territory occupied by Nazi troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out the mass death sentences of the fascists to partisan families.
Twitching the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that then you suffer from remorse. That those you kill come in nightmares. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one, ”she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless identified and detained - 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punitive woman Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the depths of the FSB special guard. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who personally killed 1,500 people.
Thirty-three years after the Victory this woman was called Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the privileges required by status: an apartment, insignia for round dates and a scarce sausage in a grocery ration. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. Two grown daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: still, such a heroic fate: to walk the whole war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Konigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak at the lineup, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for feat. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to face death. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best ...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a string bag in her hands was walking down the street, when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: "You urgently need to go with us!" surrounded her, not giving an opportunity to escape.
"Do you guess why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some mistake,” the woman chuckled in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for over thirty years - now it's time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations ”.
“So, it’s not for nothing that the last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. - How long ago it was. As if not with me at all. Almost all my life has already passed. Well, write it down ... "
From the transcript of the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 78:
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - so many partisans could fit in a cell. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near some pit. The arrested were put in a chain facing the pit. One of the men was rolling out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead ... "
"Lead into nettles" - in Tony's jargon, it meant lead to execution. She herself died three times. For the first time in the fall of 1941, in a terrible "Vyazma cauldron", a young girl-sanitary instructor. Hitler's troops then attacked Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet generals threw their armies to death, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls perished in that Vyazma meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were captured. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. As well as helping a nurse to the dead ...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a fight in the forest. The air smelled of burnt flesh. An unknown soldier was lying nearby. “Hey, are you still safe? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk ”. “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul had been concussed, and only a human shell remained, but inside there was emptiness. She reached out to him, trembling: "Ma-a-amochka, how cold it is!" “Well, beautiful, don't cry. Let's get out together, ”Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
For three months, before the first snow, they wandered through the thickets together, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their ultimate goal, or where their enemies were, or where. They were starving, breaking the stolen loaves of bread for two. During the day they shied away from the military carts, and at night they warmed each other. Tonya washed both footcloths in cold water, cooked a simple dinner. Did she love Nikolai? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a hot iron, fear and cold from within.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. - There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I am the eldest, like Gorky's, early in the world. She grew such a beech, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, in the first grade, and forgot my last name. The teacher asks: "What is your name, girl?" And I know that Parfenova, but I'm afraid to say. Children from the back of the school scream: “Yes, she is Makarova, her father is Makar”. So they wrote me down alone in all the documents. After school she left for Moscow, then the war began. I was called up as a nurse. But my dream was different - I wanted to scribble on a machine gun, like Anka the machine gunner from “Chapaev”. Don't I look like her? When we get to ours, let's ask for a machine gun ... "
In January 1942, dirty and tattered, Tonya and Nikolai finally reached the village of Krasny Kolodets. And then they had to part forever. “You know, my home village is nearby. I am there now, I have a wife, children, ”Nikolai said goodbye to her. - I could not admit to you earlier, forgive me. Thanks for the company. Then get out somehow yourself. ” “Don't leave me, Kolya,” Tonya begged, hanging on top of him. However, Nikolai shook it off like ashes from a cigarette and left.
For several days Tonya begged around the huts, prayed for Christ, asked to stay. The compassionate housewives let her in at first, but after a few days they invariably refused the shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. “It hurts to look bad,” the women said. "He pesters our peasants, who are not at the front, climbs with them into the attic, asks to warm her up."
It is possible that Tonya at that moment was really moved by her mind. Perhaps she was finished off by Nikolai's betrayal, or she simply ran out of strength - one way or another, she only had physical needs: she wanted to eat, drink, wash herself with soap in a hot bath and sleep with someone, so as not to be alone in the cold darkness. She didn't want to be a heroine, she just wanted to survive. At any price.
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all of its inhabitants went to the partisans. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punishers were registered. The front line here ran in the middle of the outskirts. Somehow she wandered around the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend this night. People in uniform stopped her and asked in Russian: "Who is she?" “I'm Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow, ”the girl replied.
She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns to “love” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, and then shoved a machine gun into her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse the void inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.
“Makarova-Ginzburg told during interrogations that for the first time she was taken out to be shot by partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. - But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on a permanent basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred a woman to carry out the executions of partisans and their family members. Homeless and lonely Antonina was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work. "
“I didn’t know those I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes, you shoot, you come closer, and some still twitch. Then she again shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood hanging on their chests with the words “partisans” written on them. Some sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There were plenty of cartridges ... "
Former Redwell landlady Tony, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Elbow for salt. She was detained by policemen and taken to a local prison, attributing a connection with the partisans. “I am not a partisan. Just ask your Tonka-machine-gunner, ”the woman was frightened. Tonya looked at her attentively and chuckled: "Come on, I'll give you salt."
The tiny room where Antonina lived was in order. There was a machine gun, glistening with machine oil. Nearby, on a chair, clothes were piled neatly: smart dresses, skirts, white blouses with holes ricocheting in the back. And a washing trough on the floor.
“If I like the things of the condemned, then I take them off the dead, so why waste,” explained Tonya. - Once the teacher was shot, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was all stained with blood, I was afraid that I would not wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity ... So how much salt do you need? "
“I don’t want anything from you,” the woman backed away to the door. - Fear God, Tonya, he is there, he sees everything - there is so much blood on you, you can't wipe yourself off! ” “Well, since you're brave, why did you ask me for help when they were taking you to prison? - shouted Antonina after. - That would die like a hero! So, when the skin needs to be saved, then Tonkina's friendship is good? ”.
In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya lifted her nose, boasting that she was a Muscovite. With her roommate, the village headman's typist, she also did not open up, and she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the crease on her forehead that had cut through early, as if Tonya was thinking too much.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk, and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, shot cigarettes from the officers. And she didn’t think about those next 27, whom she was to execute in the morning. It's scary to kill only the first, the second, then, when the count goes to hundreds, it becomes just hard work.
Before dawn, when, after torture, the groans of the partisans sentenced to execution subsided, Tonya quietly climbed out of her bed and wandered for hours through the former stable, hastily converted into a prison, peering into the faces of those whom she was about to kill.
From the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 78:
“It seemed to me that the war would write off everything. I was just doing my job for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, a guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won't see you again, goodbye, sister! ..”
She was incredibly lucky. In the summer of 1943, when the fighting for the liberation of the Bryansk region began, Tony and several local prostitutes were diagnosed with a venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner.
From material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves in an unmarked field, where, according to the most conservative estimates, the remains of one and a half thousand people were buried. Only about two hundred people who were shot by Tonya were able to restore the passport data. The death of these people formed the basis for the accusation in absentia of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. They didn't know anything else about her ...
“Our employees have been conducting the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was involved in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s, told MK. - From time to time it fell into the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Tonka couldn't disappear without a trace ?! It is now possible to accuse the authorities of incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was going on with jewelry. During the post-war years, the KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and matched their age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But - it's useless. The real Tonka the machine-gunner has sunk into the water ... "
“Do not scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. - You know, I even feel sorry for her. This is all a war, damned, guilty, she broke her ... She had no choice - she could remain a man and then herself would be among those shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in the 41st year ”.
But it was impossible to just take and forget about her. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. - It just did not fit in my head, how many lives she took. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in dreams. Young, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not avert her eyes. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked to be sure to find her in order to end these nightmares. We understood that she could have married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "
However, none of the investigators had any idea that it was necessary to start looking for Antonina not with the Makarovs, but with the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who recorded her middle name as a surname, and allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retaliation for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfenov was going abroad. Filling out the application form for a foreign passport, he honestly listed the names of his brothers and sisters in a list, the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfenovs, and only one, for some reason, was Antonina Makarovna Makarova, married since 1945, Ginzburg, now living in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. Naturally, people from the KGB in civilian clothes were also present at the fateful meeting.
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a respected woman, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. - Therefore, our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, for a whole year they watched Antonina Ginzburg, brought there one by one surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every last one said the same thing - it was she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by the noticeable fold on her forehead - doubts disappeared ”.
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We did not confess to him what the accusation was against the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man would simply not survive it, ”the investigators said.
Viktor Ginzburg threw complaints at various organizations, claiming that he loved his wife very much, and even if she had committed some crime - for example, financial embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. And he also talked about how, as a wounded boy, in April 1945, he was lying in a hospital near Konigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse Tonechka, entered the room. Innocent, pure, as if not in a war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.
Antonina took her husband's surname, and after demobilization she went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, forgotten by God and people, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And he did not write any more complaints.
“The arrested husband from the pre-trial detention center did not convey a single line. And by the way, she didn’t write anything to the two daughters whom she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to see him, ”says investigator Leonid Savoskin. - When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped from a German hospital and got into our environment, straightened out other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but that was the worst thing. There was a feeling that she sincerely misunderstands: why was she imprisoned, what was SO terrible she had done? It was as if a bloc of some kind from the war stood in her head, so that she probably would not go crazy herself. She remembered everything, each of her executions, but she did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. Desire to survive? A moment's darkening? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She killed not only strangers, but her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. Psychological examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane. "
The investigators were very afraid of any excesses on the part of the accused: before, there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse. “You can't be constantly afraid,” she said. - The first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then calmed down. There are no such sins that a person would be tormented all his life. "
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she conducted the executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina just looked askance at them, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and what she killed ... For her it was a distant past, a different life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in a cell, to her jailers. - Now after the verdict I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will poke a finger at me. I think that I will be given probation for three years. For what more? Then you have to somehow reorganize life. And how much is your salary in the jail, girls? Maybe I can get a job with you - something familiar ... "
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was passed. The court's decision came as an absolute surprise even for the people who were investigating, not to mention the defendant herself. All of the 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg's petitions for clemency in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, 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 was involved. Never later were women in the USSR executed by court verdict.
WOMEN EXECUTIONERS
Until the 20th century, there were no female professional executioners in history, and only occasionally there were female serial killers and sadists. Landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, entered Russian history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs.
During her husband's life, she did not notice a particular inclination to violence, but soon after his death, she began to regularly beat the servants. The main reason for the punishment was dishonest attitude to work (washing floors or doing laundry). She struck the guilty peasant women with the first object that came to hand (most often it was a log). Then the guilty grooms were flogged and sometimes beaten to death. Saltychikha could pour boiling water over the victim 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 dragged 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. The victims, on her orders, were starved and tied naked in the cold. Saltychikha loved to kill brides who were going to get married in the near future. In November 1759, in the course of torture that lasted for almost a day, she killed a young servant Khrisanf Andreev, and in September 1761 Saltykova personally beat the boy Lukyan Mikheev. She also tried to kill the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, the poet's grandfather Fyodor Tyutchev. Land surveyor Tyutchev for a long time was in a love relationship with her, but decided to marry the girl Panyutina. Saltykova ordered her people to burn down 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 Oryol estate, Saltykova ordered her peasants to kill them, but the executors reported the order to Tyutchev (156).
Numerous complaints from peasants led only to severe punishments for the complainants, since Saltychikha had many influential relatives and was able 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 carried out in Saltychikha's Moscow house and her estate, hundreds of witnesses were interviewed, and accounting books containing information about bribes to officials were seized. Witnesses told about the killings, 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 from the house books of the suspect, compiled a list of 138 names of serfs, whose fate was to be clarified. According to official records, 50 people were considered "dead from disease", 72 people were "missing", 16 were considered "leaving for their husbands" or "on the run." Many suspicious death records have been identified. For example, a twenty-year-old girl might go to work as a servant and die a few weeks later. The groom Ermolai Ilyin, who filed a complaint against Saltychikha, died in a row three wives. 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 (no permission was obtained for torture), but she did not confess to anything. As a result of the investigation, Volkov came to the conclusion that Daria Saltykova was "undoubtedly guilty" of the death of 38 people and was "left in suspicion" of the guilt of 26 more people.
The trial lasted over three years. The judges found the accused "guilty without leniency" in thirty-eight proven murders and torture of courtyard people. By the decision of the Senate and Empress Catherine II, Saltykova was stripped 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 chief of the guard and a woman nun). She was also sentenced to serve for an hour a special "revolting show", during which the convict was to stand on the scaffold chained to a pillar with the inscription "tormentor and murderer" over her head.
The punishment was executed on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. In the Moscow Ivanovsky convent, where the convict arrived after being punished on Red Square, a special "penitential" cell was prepared for her. The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (2.1 meters). It was located below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of getting inside daylight. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only a candle stub was given to her during the meal. 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 church, 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 grating of her dungeon, swear, spit and stick a stick through the window that was open in the summer." After the death of the prisoner, her cell was converted into 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 attempt on Lenin's life at the Michelson plant. In 1908, being an anarchist, she made a bomb, which suddenly exploded in her hands. After this explosion, she almost went 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 in the wind. In Lenin, Professor Passoni describes her as crazy. During the Civil War in Ukraine, a gang of another passionary, anarchist Maruska Nikiforova, who sided with Batka Makhno, committed atrocities. Before the revolution, she was serving 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 from those who were previously 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, Evgeniya Shlikhter, Sofya Brichkina, Cecilia Zelikson, Zlata Rodomyslskaya, Klavdia Sverdlova, Nina Didrikil, Berta Slutskaya and many others undoubtedly contributed to the victory of the revolution, which led to the greatest calamities, 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, that is, they did not pass death sentences and did not personally kill in the basements of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD nobles, businessmen, professors, officers, priests and other representatives of "hostile" classes. However, some "Valkyries of the Revolution" skillfully combined party propaganda and "combat" work.
The most striking representative of this cohort is the prototype of the commissar in the "Optimistic Tragedy" Reisner Larisa Mikhailovna (1896-1926). She was born in Poland. Father is a professor, a German Jew, mother is a Russian noblewoman. She graduated from a gymnasium and a neuropsychiatric institute in St. Petersburg. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1918. During the Civil War, a soldier, 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 hand. The writer Lev Nikulin met with Reisner in the summer of 1918 in Moscow. According to him, Larisa chanted in a conversation: “We are shooting and will shoot counter-revolutionaries! We will! "
In May 1918, L. Reisner married Fyodor Raskolnikov, Deputy People's Commissar for Naval Affairs, and soon left with her husband, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, to Nizhny Novgorod. Now she is the flag secretary of the commander of the Volga military flotilla, the commissar of the reconnaissance detachment, the correspondent of 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. He and I are now great friends, I was appointed by order of the army as commissar of the intelligence department at headquarters (please do not confuse with espionage counterintelligence), 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, Larisa was described by another passionary, Elizaveta Drabkina: “A woman in a soldier's tunic and a wide plaid skirt, blue and blue, was galloping ahead on a black horse. Deftly holding onto the saddle, she boldly rushed across the plowed field. It was Larisa Reisner, the chief of army intelligence. The rider's pretty face burned with the wind. She had bright eyes, chestnut braids grabbed at the back of her head ran down from her temples, a severe wrinkle crossed her high, clean forehead. Larisa Reisner was accompanied by the 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 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 Elizabeth Poretski, the wife of intelligence officer Ignas Poretski, who knew Reisner intimately, writes in her book: “There were rumors that during her stay in Bukhara she had numerous contacts with the officers of the British army, with whom she went to the barracks naked, in the same fur coat. Larisa told me that the author of these inventions was Raskolnikov, who turned out to be insanely jealous and unbridledly cruel. She showed me the scar on my back from his whip. Although she was expelled from the party and the young woman's position 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, wrote poetry. The bullets that passed her at the front killed all those who loved her. The first - her lover in his youth, 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 Nice, France. Karl Radek, "conspirator and spy of all foreign intelligence services," also died in the dungeons of the NKVD. 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 said: "She should have died somewhere in the steppe, in the sea, in the mountains, with a tightly gripped rifle or Mauser." The life of this “Valkyrie of the Revolution” was very briefly and figuratively described by the talented journalist Mikhail Koltsov (Fridlyand), who knew her closely and was also shot: “The spring laid in the life of this happily gifted woman unfolded spaciously and beautifully ... From St. Petersburg literary and scientific salons - 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 deep jungles 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 the world, where the elements of struggle are bubbling - forward, forward, on a par with the revolutionary locomotive rushed the hot, indomitable horse of her life. "
Mokievskaya-Zubok Lyudmila Georgievna was also a militant and bright revolutionary, whose biography surprisingly resembles the biography of Larisa Reisner. She is a student of the same Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, which, "gave out" a whole constellation of revolutionaries and passionaries. Born in Odessa in 1895. Mother, Mokievskaya-Zubok Glafira Timofeevna, noblewoman, did not take part in political life. Father Bykhovsky Naum Yakovlevich. Jew, socialist-revolutionary since 1901, in 1917 - member of the Central Committee. He lived in Leningrad and Moscow. He worked in trade unions. Arrested in July 1937, shot in 1938. Mokievskaya-Zubok was the first and only commander in history and at the same time commissar of an armored train. In 1917, being a maximalist Socialist Revolutionary, Lyudmila came to Smolny and connected her life with the revolution. In December 1917, Podvoisky sent her to the Ukraine to get food, but she, under the name of a student Mokiyevsky Leonid Grigorievich, entered the Red Army and from February 25, 1918 became commander of the armored train "3rd Bryansk" and at the same time the commissar of the Bryansk combat detachment ... She is fighting the Germans and Ukrainians on the Kiev-Poltava-Kharkov line, then with the Krasnovites near Tsaritsyn, her train is involved in suppressing 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 assigned to the operational subordination of the 13th Army and fought in the Donbass on the De-Baltsevo-Kupyanka line. In the battle near Debaltseve 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 body of Lyudmila Mokievskaya was dug up and thrown into a dump in a ravine. They buried her again only after the re-arrival of the Reds (162: 59-63).
However, there was another, completely special category of overly active, and often simply mentally ill "revolutionaries" who left a truly terrible mark on the history of Russia. How many were there? We will probably never get an answer to this question. The communist press shyly avoided describing the "deeds" of such "heroines". Judging by the famous photograph of members of the Kherson Cheka, the ferocity of which is documented, where there are three women out of nine photographed employees, this type of "revolutionary" is not uncommon. What are their fates? Some of them were destroyed by the system they served, some committed suicide, and some of the most "honored" ones were buried in the best Moscow cemeteries. The ashes of some of them are even walled up in the Kremlin wall. The names of most of the executioners are still kept with seven seals as an important state secret. Let's name the names of at least some of these women, who especially distinguished themselves and left a bloody mark in the history of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. By what principle and how to rank them? It would be most correct according to the amount of blood shed by each of them, but how much was shed and who measured it? Who is the bloodiest of them all? How to calculate it? Most likely, this is our Countrywoman. Zalkind Rosalia Samoilovna (Zemlyachka) (1876-1947). Jewess. Born into the family of a merchant of the 1st guild. She studied at the Kiev women's gymnasium and the medical faculty of the Lyon University. She was engaged in revolutionary activities from 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 as a political worker 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 services in political education and increasing the combat capability of the 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 said: “There are 300 thousand bourgeoisie in Crimea now. This is the source of future speculation, espionage, and any help to the capitalists. But we are not afraid of them. We say that we will take them, distribute them, subjugate them, digest them. " When the victors, overwhelmed with celebration, invited Lev Davidovich Trotsky to chair the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic of Crimea, he replied: "I will then come to Crimea when not a single White Guard remains on its territory." “The war will continue as long as at least one white officer remains in the Red Crimea,” his deputy E.M. Sklyansky.
In 1920, the secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP (b) Zemlyachka, together with the leader of the emergency "troika" in 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 nobility who found themselves in Crimea, as well as local residents who belonged to the "exploiting classes." The victims of Zemlyachka and Kuna-Kogan were, first of all, the officers who surrendered, believing the widespread official appeal of Frunze, who promised those who surrender life and freedom. According to the latest data, about 100 thousand people were shot in Crimea. The writer Ivan Shmelev, an eyewitness to the events, names 120 thousand people shot. The countrywoman owns the phrase: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them - to drown them in the sea." Her accomplice Bela Kun said: "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 ..."
Given the special, truly brutal 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), county Cheka, TransChK, MorChK, headed by Jewish Chekists Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman, Tolmats, Udris and 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 behind a unique resolution: “I consider the activities of Comrade Evdokimov worthy of encouragement. Due to the special nature of this activity, it is not very convenient to carry out the awards in the usual manner ”. 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. the main executioner and investigator of the Crimean Cheka.
The result of his KGB career was the award of the Order of the Red Banner ... and a long stay in the clinic for the mentally ill. Not surprisingly, the renowned Arctic explorer disliked reminiscing about his past. The destruction of the unfortunate took nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned at sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time afterwards, through the clear sea water, the standing dead were visible in rows. They say that, tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at a machine gun. Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of stench from the decomposing corpses of those shot, which were not even buried in the ground. The pits behind the Vorontsov 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) 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 great booty. " ... During the first winter, 96 thousand people were shot out of the 800 thousand population of Crimea. The slaughter lasted for months. The 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 machine guns pounded at night,
Whistling like a scourge over 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 again.
Not a single mass grave of those years in the Crimea has yet been opened. In Soviet times, a ban was imposed on this topic. Rosalia Zemlyachka ruled in Crimea so that the Black Sea turned red with blood. Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like many other executioners of the Russian people, were buried in the Kremlin wall. We 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). Jewish woman, member of the CPSU (b). Nadezhda Ilyinichna was born in 1881 in Kiev in the family of a doctor. She graduated from the Yalta female 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, the right hand of Zemlyachka. She supervised executions in Sevastopol and Evpatoria. Russian historian and politician Sergei Petrovich Melgunov wrote that in the Crimea, the most actively executed in Sevastopol. In the book “Sevastopol Golgotha: 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 1,634 people (278 women). On November 30, the second list was published - 1202 executed people (88 women). According to the newspaper "Latest News" (No. 198), in the first week after the liberation of Sevastopol, 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 ranks, but also officials, as well as a large number of people with high social status. They were not only shot, but also drowned in the Sevastopol bays, having stones tied to their feet ”(ibid., P. 122).
And here are the recollections of an eyewitness given by the author: “Nakhimovsky Prospect is hung with the corpses of officers, soldiers and civilians arrested in the street and immediately executed without trial. The city died out, the population is hiding in cellars, in attics. All fences, walls of houses, telegraph and telephone poles, shop windows, signs - are pasted over with posters "death to traitors ...". Officers were always hung with shoulder straps. Most of the civilians hung out half-naked. They shot the sick and the wounded, young schoolgirls - sisters of mercy and employees of the Red Cross, zemstvo leaders and journalists, merchants and officials. In Sevastopol, about 500 port workers were executed for the fact that during the evacuation they ensured the loading of the Wrangel troops on the ships ”(ibid., P. 125). A. Chikin also cites testimony published in the Orthodox bulletin "Sergiev Posad": "... In Sevastopol, victims were tied up in groups, inflicted serious wounds on them with sabers and revolvers, and thrown half-dead into the sea. In the Sevastopol port there is a place where divers refused to go down: two of them, after being at the bottom of the sea, went crazy. When the third decided to jump into the water, he came out and said that he saw a whole crowd of drowned men tied with their feet to large stones. The flow of water set their hands in motion, 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 executions in Yevpatoria on January 18, 1918. The cruiser Rumania and the transport Truvor were in the roadstead. “The officers went out one by one, flexing their joints and greedily swallowing the fresh sea air. The executions began on both courts 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 on both ships, about 300 officers were destroyed. Some officers were burned alive in furnaces, and before the murder they tortured them for 15-20 minutes. Lips, genitals, and sometimes hands were cut off to the unfortunate and thrown into the water alive. The entire family of Colonel Seslavin was kneeling on the pier. The colonel did not immediately go to the bottom, and from the side of the ship he was shot by a sailor. Many were completely undressed, their hands tied and their heads pulled towards them, and thrown into the sea. The seriously wounded staff captain Novatsky, after being torn off the bloody bandages that had dried to his wounds, was burned alive in the furnace of the ship. From the shore, his wife and 12-year-old son watched his bullying, to whom she closed her eyes, and he howled wildly. The executions were supervised by a "thin, hair-cut 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. Having made so many efforts to consolidate communist power, Ostrovskaya, 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 crime family of the Yevpatoria Bolsheviks Nemichi played a big role in the fate of many executed in Crimea, which became a part of the judicial commission that met on Truvor in the days of the shootings. This commission was created by a revolutionary committee and dealt with the cases of those arrested. Its structure, along with the "revolutionary sailors", included Antonina Nemich, her partner 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 nature" and gave the go-ahead for execution. “Ladies” from the “Holy Family” encouraged the executioners and were themselves present at the executions. At one of the rallies, sailor Kulikov proudly said that he had thrown 60 people overboard into the sea with his own hand.
In March 1919, Nemichi and other organizers of the murders in the Yevpatoriya raid were shot by whites. After the final establishment of Soviet power in the Crimea, 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 the first monument was erected - a five-meter obelisk topped with a scarlet five-pointed star. Several decades later, in 1982, the monument was replaced by another. At its foot, you can still see fresh flowers. One of the streets in Evpatoria is named after the Nemichs.
Braude Vera Petrovna (1890-1961). Revolutionary Socialist Revolutionary. She was 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 on the investigative commission of the provincial tribunal, in the department for combating counter-revolution. From that moment on, all her further activities were associated 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 a search she personally undressed not only women, but also men. The Social Revolutionaries in exile who visited her for a personal search and interrogation wrote: “There is absolutely nothing human left in her. This is a machine doing its job coldly and soullessly, evenly and calmly ... And at times one had to be perplexed that this was a special kind of a sadistic woman, or simply a completely deadened human machine. At this time, lists of counter-revolutionaries who were shot were printed in Kazan almost every day. 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 herself from the persecuted fellow SRs, Braude wrote: “In further work as deputy. I fought mercilessly against the [social] - [revolutionaries of all kinds, participating in their arrests and executions, of the chairman] of the Cheka in Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk and Tomsk. In Siberia, a member of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, the well-known right-wing Frumkin, in spite of the Novosibirsk Gubernia Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), even tried to dismiss me from my job as chairman of the Cheka in Novosibirsk for shooting [socialist] - [revolutionaries], whom he considered "irreplaceable specialists." For the liquidation of the White Guard and Socialist-Revolutionary organizations in Siberia, V.P. Braude was awarded a weapon and a gold watch, and in 1934 she received the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She was repressed in 1938. Charged with being “a cadre socialist revolutionary; on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Left SRs, she made her way into the organs of the Cheka and the CPSU (b); informed the SRs about the work of the NKVD. " Released in 1946, Braude herself noted that she was convicted of “disagreeing with some of the so-called“ active ”methods of investigation.”
In a letter to V.M. She told Molotov from the Akmola camp with a request to investigate her case in detail 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: conveyor belt and methods of physical pressure, but under the leadership of Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, these methods were used only in relation to those enemies who [ontr] whose revolutionary activities were established by other methods of investigation and the fate of which, in the sense of applying the capital punishment to them, was already predetermined ... These measures were applied only to real enemies, who were then shot, and not released and did not return to common cells, where they could demonstrate in front of other arrested persons the methods of physical pressure applied to them. Thanks to the massive 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 and 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, since I was never guided by personal, material or careerist considerations, since ancient times I devoted myself entirely to work. " She was rehabilitated in 1956, reinstated in the party, as well as in the rank of major of state security. 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 parish school. In 1915 she left for Petrograd, established contacts with the Bolsheviks and became involved in party work. In 1918 she got to the Eastern Front, was appointed commissar of the detachment for suppressing the rebellion in the area of \u200b\u200bOsa, led the forced requisitions of food from the peasants and punitive operations. In 1919 she was sent to work in the state security agencies as the head of the information section of the Special Department of the Moscow Cheka. She worked in the Special Department of the Cheka of the Southern and Southwestern Fronts, in the Podolsk and Vinnitsa provincial Cheka, fought against peasant uprisings. Since 1921 - head of the Informative (agent) department of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission. From 1923 - head of the secret department in the representative office of the GPU in the North Caucasian region, from 1930 - in the central office of the OGPU in Moscow. During her work she was awarded numerous awards: the Order of the Red Banner, a personal Mauser, a gold watch from the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, a cigarette case, a horse, a certificate 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, she formed an armed detachment of the Cheka, which was located at the station Unecha (now in the Bryansk region). She commanded the Cheka at the border station Unecha, through which emigrant flows to the territory of Ukraine, controlled by the Germans under an agreement with Skoropadsky, went. Among those who left Russia that year were Arkady Averchenko and Nadezhda Teffi. And they too had to deal with Comrade Khaikina. The impressions were indelible. In "A friendly letter to Lenin from Arkady Averchenko," the humorist remembers Fruma with a "kind word": "At Unech your communists received me remarkably. True, the commandant of Unecha, the famous student comrade Khaikina, first wanted to shoot me. - For what? I asked. "Because you scolded the Bolsheviks in your feuilletons." And here is what Teffi writes: “The main person here is Commissioner X. A young girl, a student, or a telegraph operator, I don’t know. She's everything here. Crazy - as they say, an abnormal dog. The beast ... Everyone obeys her. She searches herself, judges herself, shoots herself: she sits on the porch, here she judges, here she shoots ”(167).
Khaikina was notable for her particular cruelty, she took a personal part in executions, torture and robberies. She burned alive an old general, who was trying to leave for Ukraine, who had kernels 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 were trying to drive through Unecha to Ukraine. Emigration documents 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 the Haidamaks, the revolutionary order in the posad was established by Shchors’s wife, Frum Khaikina (Shchors). She was a determined and courageous woman. She rode in a saddle on a horse, in a leather jacket and leather pants, 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 at Orekhovka, in a clearing behind the Gorsad. Several times the clearing was stained with the blood of 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 in those years the houses of the posad ended ... "
The German command, having heard enough terrible stories from those who came from the other side, sentenced this demonic woman to be hanged in absentia, but this did not come true (the revolution began in Germany). The demonic woman, just in case, changes her surname, now she is Rostov. She followed along with her husband's detachment and "cleaned" the "liberated" territories from the counter-revolutionary element. Carried out mass executions in Novozybkov and executions of insurgent soldiers of the Bohunsky regiment, commanded by Shchors. In 1940, after Stalin remembered about the Ukrainian Chapaev-Shchors and Dovzhenko, by his order, rented his famous militant, 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 Chechen Committee in Unecha. She was buried in Moscow.
Stasova Elena Dmitrievna (1873-1966). A well-known revolutionary (party nickname Comrade Absolute), was 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 "services" to the Russian people would require a separate big work. We will limit ourselves to listing her main party merits and state awards. She is 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 the 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 interested in the punitive activities of the honored revolutionary, which for obvious reasons is 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 PSChK at this time can be illustrated by the report of the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda on September 6, 1918, signed by the chairman of the PSChK Bokiy: “The Right Social Revolutionaries killed Uritsky and also wounded Comrade Lenin. In response, the Cheka decided to shoot a number of counter-revolutionaries. Only 512 counter-revolutionaries and White Guards were shot, 10 of them are right-wing Social Revolutionaries. " In the book "Heroic Symphony" P. Podlyashchuk wrote: "Stasova's work in the Cheka especially manifested her inherent integrity, scrupulousness towards the enemies of Soviet power. 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 charges. " Her "work" lasted seven months. In Petrograd, Stasova was also engaged in the recruitment of Red Army, mainly punitive, detachments of Austrians, Hungarians and Germans prisoners of war. 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 an expert in gold casting. Since 1904, a member of the RSDLP, a professional revolutionary. In March 1918. became a member of the collegium of the NKVD, since May - the head of the department for combating counter-revolution at the Cheka, since 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 entire history of the state security bodies to hold such a high post. After Lenin was wounded and the chairman of the Cheka Uritsky was murdered in August 1918, the "Red Terror" raged in St. Petersburg. Yakovleva's active participation in the terror is confirmed by the execution lists published with 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 "impeccable" lifestyle. Having become entangled in connections with the gentlemen, she "turned into a source of information for the White Guard organizations and foreign special 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 congresses of the party. She was arrested on September 12, 1937 on suspicion of participation in a terrorist Trotskyist organization, and on May 14, 1938, she was sentenced to imprisonment for a term of twenty years. She was shot on September 11, 1941 in the Medvedsky forest near Orel (168).
Bosh Evgenia Bogdanovna (Gotlibovna) (1879-1925) was born in the town of Ochakov, Kherson province, in the family of the German colonist Gottlib Maish, who had significant land plots in the Kherson region, and the Moldovan noblewoman Maria Krusser. For three years Evgenia attended the Voznesensk women's gymnasium. An active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Established Soviet power in Kiev, 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 step up the work on the withdrawal of grain from the peasantry. In the Penza province, they remembered for a long time the cruelty of E. Bosch, shown during the suppression of peasant uprisings in the districts. When the Penza communists - members of the gubernia executive committee - obstructed 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 went as an agitator for the food detachment. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, “... in the village of Kuchki, Bosh, during a rally in a village square, personally shot a peasant who refused to hand over bread. It was this act that angered the peasants and caused 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 grain confiscated from the peasants, but exchanged it for vodka. Committed suicide (169: 279-280).
Rozmirovich-Troyanovskaya Elena Fedorovna (1886-1953). An active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Eugenia Bosch's cousin. The wife of Nikolai Krylenko and Alexander Troyanovsky. The mother of the third wife V.V. Kuibysheva Galina Aleksandrovna Troyanovskaya. Graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Paris. In the party since 1904. She had the conspiratorial names Eugene, Tanya, Galina. I exposed the provocateur Roman Malinovsky. According to the personal characteristics of V.I. Lenin: "I testify, from the experience of me personally and the Central Committee of 1912-1913, that this worker is a very important and valuable for the party." In 1918-1922. was simultaneously the chairman of the Main Political Directorate of the People's Commissariat of Railways and the chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Supreme Tribunal at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. She held positions of responsibility in the People's Commissariat of Railways, the People's Commissariat of the RFI, the People's Commissariat of Communications. In 1935-1939. was the director of the State Library. Lenin, then an employee of the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences. 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 at the Cheka. Leads a bohemian life. In 1920 she met Sergei Yesenin, supposedly 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-historical journal by the fact that “Galina Arturovna was a secretary at 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, it is hereditary, because her mother also suffered from mental illness. Yesenin's life was cut short, or cut short, 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 Kiev 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 freed by Beria and reinstated in the state security organs. She worked as an operative of the Special Department and instructor of 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 daughter of a priest. At the age of seventeen she joined the RSDLP (b). She was engaged in propaganda activities in the Urals. In 1907 she was arrested and served four years in prison. From 1911 to 1919 she continued her underground work. In 1919 he started working in the Cheka in Moscow. 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 detention facilities of the OGPU-NKVD. During her work in the agencies, she was awarded with military weapons and twice with the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She is the only female Chekist who was awarded the rank of major (according to other sources, senior major) of the 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 forced labor camps and five years of disqualification. In her 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, met me here and 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, on the left leg of the deceased there is a plaque with the inscription (surname, name, patronymic), there is a post on the grave with the inscription "letter No. I-16". By the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of June 29, 1957, she was rehabilitated (173).
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author Ignatov Vladimir DmitrievichEXECUTORS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA The Russian rulers also personally put to death recalcitrant subjects. Thus, in 1076, the Novgorod prince personally killed the sorcerer who agitated the people against the bishop. Izyaslav, expelled by the people of Kiev, upon his return in 1069, “excised those like
From the book Executioners and Executions in the History of Russia and the USSR author Ignatov Vladimir DmitrievichSTALIN'S EXECUTIONERS-STAKHANOVS Among the multitude of domestic executioners there were real masters, Stalinist executioners-Stakhanovites, whose equal can hardly be found in human history. The main contender for this title, in our opinion, is Blokhin Vasily Mikhailovich.
From the book Executioners and Executions in the History of Russia and the USSR author Ignatov Vladimir DmitrievichWOMEN EXECUTIONERS Until the 20th century, there were no professional women executioners in history, and only occasionally there were female serial killers and sadists. Landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova entered Russian history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs, according to
From the book Why Jews Don't Like Stalin author Rabinovich Yakov IosifovichVictims and Executioners First: the memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of the victims. About the victims, but not about the crime. It is not reflected as a memory of a crime, there is no consensus on this score.