Cleaning the inside of the NKVD 1937-1938

During the first Moscow process, the Commissar of Internal Affairs and the head of the General Directorate of State Security (GUGB) was Heinrich Yagoda . He actively participated in the investigation into the murder of Kirov , which formed the basis of the trial.

The trial took place in August 1936, and in September Yagoda was moved to the post of People's Commissar of Communications, April 4, 1937 arrested. In February 1938, he appeared at the Third Moscow Trial , where he was accused of collaborating with foreign intelligence services and killing Maxim Gorky. As the historian M. S. Voslensky points out, the mechanics of terror were such that Yagoda, the main organizer of the First Moscow Process , turned out to be the defendant in the third.

According to the recollections of the Soviet intelligence defender A. Orlov , Yagoda in 1936 did not foresee his early shift, “in the spring [of 1936] he received the rank of general commissioner of state security equal to the marshal’s and the new military uniform, invented specially for him”.

On September 26, 1936, Yezhov was appointed the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs instead of Yagoda, under whose leadership the Second and Third Moscow Trials were held, and the “Case of the Military”. The Soviet official propaganda associated the purge of 1937-1938, first of all, with the name of Yezhov (the so-called Yezhovshchina). During this period, 2,273 NKVD employees were dismissed.

April 5, 1937 Yagoda was arrested ^{[Note. 1]} . In February 1938, in the indicative Third Moscow trial , he was accused of the murder of Maxim Gorky , as well as of Kuibyshev and Menzhinsky and the “Trotsky plot” ^{[Note. 2]} .

In 1937–1938, such NKVD officers as the former “right hand” of Yagoda, Y.S. Agranov , one of the organizers of the “ philosophical steamer, ” P. Bulanov , A.Ya. Lurie , accused of training, were arrested and shot . G. Ye. Prokofiev , F. I. Eikhmans , L. M. Zakovsky , the organizer of the Spring case I. M. Leplevsky , the chief of Stalin’s defense , K. V. Pauker , one of the organizers of the Kirov stream » G. A. Molchanov , V. A. Balitsky , Z. B. Katsnelson , S. G. Firin , L. B. Zalin , S. M. Shpigelglas , Head of Canal Construction Moscow - Volga M. Berman and other workers of the NKVD, who themselves were directly involved in the conduct of mass terror.

The arrest of the chief of Stalin’s security, KV Pauker , remains unclear; according to contemporaries, the relationship of Stalin with Pauker was confidential. For his faithful service, Stalin rewarded Pauker with the Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner, and two cars, Cadillac and Lincoln. In 1938, at the Third Moscow trial, Pauker was declared a German spy. In July 1937, the guard of Stalin was headed by I. Dagin , soon also arrested. Dagin was shot in February 1940, N. Vlasik became the new chief of Stalin’s guard, this time until the spring of 1952.

On May 4, 1937, the Yagoda nominee was arrested, one of the organizers of the First Moscow process of the People's Commissar of Belarus G. Molchanov . He forced defendant Holtzman to “confess” that he allegedly met in 1932 with L. Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov , at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen , while in fact this hotel was demolished in 1917, and the secretary Molchanov confused her with the Bristol Hotel in Oslo ^[2] . In addition, Lev Sedov himself was at that time a student at the Higher Technical School in Berlin, and at the time of the “meeting” in Copenhagen he actually passed the exams in Berlin.

On November 15, 1937, one of the oldest security officers, Boky G. I. , a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and even a member of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class , was shot.

The executed founders of the Cheka

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  Boky G. I. , the first head of the GPU Special Department . Shot on November 15, 1937.

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  Unshlicht I.S. , security officer from December 1917. Shot July 29, 1938

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  Peters J. Kh. , Deputy chairman of the Cheka since December 1917. Shot on April 25, 1938.

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  Belenky A. Ya. , Security officer from December 1917, member of the first composition of the board of the Cheka. He was arrested in May 1938, shot on October 16, 1941.

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  Trilisser MA , one of the founders of the Foreign Department (INO) of the GPU. Arrested on November 23, 1938, shot on February 2, 1940.

As noted in his work “1937. Great cleaning. The NKVD against the Cheka, Mikhail Tumshis and Alexander Papchinsky, during the purge of the NKVD were shot including the main organizer of the notorious “ Shakhtyna case ” Evdokimov Ye.G. , during interrogation, “recognized” in cooperation with intelligence agencies of four states.

It is also significant that the public prosecutors Osadchiy and Shein in the case of the Industrial Party, who had spoken in the Shakhty case, were already accused. Finally, in 1938, N. Krylenko was shot . In 1930, he acted as the state prosecutor at the trial of the Industrial Party .

The former head of the NKVD Main Directorate and the right hand of Yezhov arrested in conducting terror , MP P. Frinovsky, was arrested during interrogation and showed that all the underground terrorist conspiracies “opened” by the KGB officers were in fact falsified by systematic beating of defendants in order to get confessions from them.

Since the beginning of terror, on July 4, 1937, the head of the NKVD of the Kharkiv region, Mazo S. S. , shot himself . On July 8, 1937, the deputy police officer V. Kursky shot himself dead . On February 17, 1938, under mysterious circumstances, he died right in the office of the head of the Main State Security Department of the NKVD, promoted by Yagoda Slutsky A. A. , one of the organizers of the special operations of the NKVD abroad. On May 13, 1938, the head of the NKVD department for the Moscow region, V.A. Karutsky , shot himself .

In the course of the Great Terror, the NKVD, in the first place, cleaned up:

• the Bolsheviks with the pre-revolutionary partstage (their share fell from 20.83% in 1934 to 4% on September 1, 1938 ) ^[3] , replaced by the communists recruited according to the “ Lenin call-up ” (the share of those who joined the party in 1925-1928 increased from 1% to 66%, 1929 - 1932 from 0% to 38% over the same period). The share of persons of 1895 and earlier years of birth dropped from 56.25% to 4.95%, while the share of persons born in 1901-1905, on the contrary, increased from 6.25% to 46.15%, persons born in 1906-10 - from 0% to 29.12% ^[3] ;
• Persons with a non-communist past (former Socialist-Revolutionaries , Mensheviks , Anarchists , Borotbists , etc.): their share fell from 31.25% in total on July 1, 1934 to 0.65% on July 1, 1938 ^[3] . At the end of the terror, the only member of the NKVD leadership with a non-communist past was Beria L.P. himself, who in his youth was associated with the Azerbaijani nationalist Musavat party;
• the share of workers (from 23.96% to 28.67%) and peasants (from 17.71% to 30%) increased, the share of employees (from 25% to 18%), as well as “landlords, traders, small entrepreneurs and craftsmen "(from 28.13% to 12%) ^[3] . The total share of workers and peasants in the leadership of the NKVD increased from 42% in 1934 to 60% on September 1, 1938 and to 80% by 1939;
• over the same period, July 1, 1934 — September 1, 1938, the share of Russians (from 31.25% to 56.67%) and Ukrainians (from 5.21% to 6.67%, as of July 1, 1939 to 12.42%) increased ), the proportion of Jews decreased (from 38.54% to 21.33%, as of July 1, 1939 to 3.92%; according to the memoirs of N. Khrushchev and the son of Beria L. P. Beria S. L. , mass cleaning NKVD from Jews took place already in 1939 after the termination of the main wave of terror), Latvians (from 7.29% to 0%) and Poles (from 4.17% to 0.67%, as of July 1, 1939 to 0%) ^[3] . Also from the NKVD were cleaned all the polled Germans. In addition, with the appointment of Beria, the share of Georgians doubled (from 3.33% on September 1, 1938 to 6.98% on January 1, 1940 );
• The NKVD bodies of the period of 1934-1938 are also characterized by a very high percentage of people who had only primary education: 40.63% as of July 10, 1934, 42.67% as of September 1, 1938. At the end of the main wave of terror, the number of such employees began to decline, falling by February 26, 1941 to 19.23%, the number of persons with higher education in the NKVD from 1938 to 1941 increased from 10% to 34.07% ^[3] .
• Another feature of the NKVD senior officials was an unusually high percentage of people whose childhood was unfavorable (exclusion from school, single-parent family, vagrancy, etc.); in 1934, such persons were up to 5-6%. In 1937, this figure rose to 8%, in 1938 to 12.7%. At the end of the main wave of terror, the number of such persons by 1940 again fell to 6% ^[3] .

There are at least three main “waves” of mass personnel changes in the NKVD. The first was associated with the appointment of July 10, 1934 as the people's commissar of internal affairs, G. G. Yagoda , who actually headed this institution earlier.

The second “wave” began with the appointment of N.I. Ezhov on September 26, 1936, who began, at least in the summer of 1937, massively cleaned out of the NKVD staff appointed by his predecessor and set up his own nominees in key positions under the pretext of fighting “conspirators” who killed S. M. Kirov on December 1, 1934. Researcher Leonid Naumov calls the first “Yezhov group”, who came to the NKVD, M. I. Litvin (shot himself in 1939), I. I. Shapiro , V. E. Tsesarsky , S. B. Zhukovsky In general, in his people's commissariat Yezhov relied on the "clans" of the so-called "North Caucasians" (the KGB, who served in the North Caucasus during the Civil War) and the "Turkestans" (the KGB, who served in Siberia during the Civil War, and then transferred to Central Asia). Since Yezhov relied heavily on personnel from the North Caucasus, the cleaning of the NKVD there was minimal; by his own admission of Yezhov himself, “Everywhere I cleaned the security officers. I didn’t clean them only in Moscow, Leningrad and in the North Caucasus ... ”.

According to the testimony of the former Chekist M. P. Schrader , the former nominee of Yagoda Frinovsky after his fall readily “ran over” to the side of Yezhov, and volunteered to arrest the Yagoda ^[4] . According to other testimonies, Ya. S. Agranov also “ran over” to the side of Yezhov .

On the whole, at first, Yezhov's nominees did not differ in any way from the Yagoda nominees in terms of their social origin, national composition, educational level, and party membership.

"People of Yezhov":

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  Frinovsky M.P. (shot 1940)

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  Zakovsky L. M. (shot 1938)

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  G. Lyushkov (fled 1938, died 1945)

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  Mironov S. N. (shot 1940)

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  Evdokimov E.G. (shot 1940)

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  Litvin M. I. (shot 1939)

The third and last “wave” began already after the Great Terror held mainly by Ezhov, with the appointment of Beria L. P. on November 25, 1938. In the first years of Beria’s work as Commissar, the scale of state terror was drastically reduced, a mass purge of the NKVD from Ezhov’s appointees who had actively participated in the Great Terror was held (including those who had been repressed by MP Yezhov and E. Evdokimov ), the repressed were partially rehabilitated in 1937–1938 persons.

In his commissariat, Beria initially tried to rely on his former colleagues from Georgia. As a result, the share of Georgians in the leadership of the NKVD increased from 3.33% on September 1, 1938 to 6.98% on January 1, 1940 .

Researcher Boris Sokolov calls the first “people of Beria”, introduced by him into the top leadership of the NKVD, the following persons:

• Kobulov B. Z. , a former deputy of Georgian authorities, and his brother Kobulov A. Z .;
• Goglidze S.A. , former Commissar of Georgia
• A. Rapava , former chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Abkhazia
• V. N. Merkulov , former head of the industrial and transport department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia
• Dekanozov V. G. , former head of the State Planning Committee of Georgia

All these persons were shot after the fall of Beria himself.

"People of Beria":

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  Kobulov B. Z. (shot in 1953)

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  Goglidze S.A. (shot 1953)

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  Rapava A.N. (shot 1955)

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  V. N. Merkulov (shot in 1953)

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  Dekanozov V. G. (shot 1953)

The purge of the NKVD was accompanied by a series of maneuvers designed to “lull the vigilance” of the Chekists themselves. In 1935, the highest special titles of “ state security commissioners ” were introduced. Of the 37 top security officers who had these ranks in 1935, by 1941 only two survived.

In parallel with the beginning of the purge in the summer of 1937, a number of top awards “fell down” on the NKVD officers, including many orders of Lenin. In addition, against the background of the cleansing, there was an entire campaign of praises addressed to the Chekists and the People's Commissar Yezhova personally. The arrests of the highest ranks of the NKVD in some cases were carried out under the guise of calls to Moscow "for promotion".

To destroy the staff of Yezhov who had already come forward during the purge of the NKVD, the NKVD itself underwent a complex reorganization, transfers were widely practiced before arrests to various support posts; so, M. Frinovsky was transferred to the post of People's Commissar of the USSR Navy, Zakovsky L. M. to the post of head of construction of the Kuibyshev hydroelectric complex . In general, the cleaning of the NKVD was accompanied by continuous personnel movements. The resignation of the People's Commissar Yezhov had the character of a complex multi-way combination: on April 8, 1938, he was appointed part-time Commissar of Water Transport of the USSR, while remaining the Commissar of Internal Affairs. On November 23, Yezhov himself resigned from the post of Commissar of Justice, which was already accepted on November 25. The excuse for the resignation was the flight of the Plenipotentiary of the NKVD in the Far East, G. S. S. Lyushkov, who was waiting for his arrest , and Ouspensky A. I., People's Commissar of Ukraine .

In the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) about the resignation of Yezhov from the post of Commissar of Education did not indicate anything about the future arrest: it was mentioned only about his "painful condition, which does not give an opportunity to supervise simultaneously two large drug commissariats. The arrest followed only in April 1939. Shortly before Yezhov’s resignation, his wife Khayutina Ye. S. died under unexplained circumstances .

In parallel with the gradual fall of Yezhov, the rise of Beria also took place in stages, in August 1938 transferred from Georgia to the center. On August 22, he was appointed the first deputy head of the parliament, on September 8 by the head of the 1st NKVD department, on September 29 by the head of the State security department of the NKVD, and finally, on November 25 by the people's commissar of internal affairs of the USSR.

Stalin began to widely use the method of transferring objectionable persons to auxiliary posts during the struggle for power in the 1920s. After the long-term resignation from key posts of the Commissariat of Defense and the Pre-Revolutionary Military Council, Stalin’s main opponent, Stalin, was appointed to the auxiliary position of the chairman of the concession committee, one of his supporters Muralov N. I. was transferred from Moscow to the North Caucasus Military District. "Zinovievist" Sokolnikov G. Ya. Was transferred from the post of Narkomfin to the post of deputy chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee, and the transfer of opposition members by ambassadors abroad was practiced.

The purge atmosphere in the NKVD was able to create an opportunity for the deputy heads of departments and department heads to quickly advance, destroying, including physically, their own heads ^[3] . Another method of destroying "welded" KGB "clans" was the transfer of executives from one region of the USSR to another.

According to the researcher L. A. Naumov , the cleaning of the NKVD apparatus in the field began in July 1937 from Ukraine. Balitsky V.A., formerly served in Ukraine by the Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR , was moved to the Far East to carry out cleansing there, but a month later he himself was repressed there. Already on July 17, 1937, Balitsky "confessed" to the organization of the "anti-Soviet Trotsky-fascist conspiracy," and testified at a number of his former employees in Ukraine.

The cleaning of personnel of Balitsky was headed by the new People's Commissar of Ukraine and the former deputy of Balitsky , I. Leplevsky , who in April 1938 himself was repressed. Ouspensky A.I. , who initiated the cleansing of the NKVD of Ukraine already from "the people of Leplevsky", became the new Commissar of Ukraine. Ouspensky himself, waiting for his arrest, imitated suicide in November 1938 ^[5] , and fled to Voronezh. In April 1939, he was arrested in the Chelyabinsk region, and soon "confessed" to the organization of a "counter-revolutionary conspiracy" and spying for Germany. In 1940, Uspensky was shot; in addition, his wife was shot.

The All-Union search of the fugitive Commissar Ouspensky was taken under control personally by Stalin. During the search, the wife of Ouspensky was arrested, and one of his relatives, waiting for his arrest, hanged himself. On November 16, 1938, Khrushchev N. S. personally authorized the arrest of the head of the Zhytomyr Regional Department of the NKVD, GM Vyatkin ^[6] , as he had not prevented escape. During the interrogation, Vyatkin testified that he had confirmed the shooting of four thousand people, including minor children and pregnant women, in the Zhytomyr Region, and he himself was shot in February 1939 .

One of the active participants in the Great Terror, the main organizer of the mass repressions of ethnic Koreans and other repressions along the “national lines” G. S. S., was sent to purge the Far East from Ukraine. Lyushkov “opened up” a “right-Trotsky plot” in the Far East, including by arresting his predecessor Deribas T.D. In 1938, he himself, waiting for his arrest, fled to Japan, where he died in 1945. In turn, the flight of Lyushkov was a convenient excuse for a whole wave of new purges in the Far East. Finally, Lyushkov's flight became a pretext for the removal of Yezhov himself.

As Mikhail Tumshis and Alexander Papchinsky point out in their work, Chekists from Leningrad, Moscow, Vologda, Kuibyshev and Chelyabinsk arrived in Khabarovsk to purge the local NKVD. The first deputy head of the Frinsky MP (personally repressed himself) arrived at the place, stating that “the cities of the Far East are littered with counterrevolutionary, and the NKVD organs with a socially alien element ...

Mironov S.N. was transferred from Dnepropetrovsk to Western Siberia, where he began to repress "Polish spies" ^[2] , and he himself was arrested by Beria on January 6, 1939. The declassified Polish archives now convincingly show that in the 1930s, in fact, there were no Polish residencies in Western Siberia at all.

Gorbach G.F. and Valukhin K.N. were sent to purge Omsk from the North Caucasus, subsequently also repressed (Gorbach was accused of “preparing a coup d’état”). One of the pretexts for the shooting of Gorbach was a scandalous case, when the collective farmer Grigory Chazov sentenced to execution due to the negligence of the perpetrators was left to lie alive in a pit with other people shot, after which he was able to reach the reception room of Kalinin M.I. in Moscow.

For the purge of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a member of the Politburo A.Andreev was sent from Moscow , A.A. Zhdanov was sent to purge Bashkiria , where he “discovered” even two “conspiracies”: “Trotsky-Bukharin” and “bourgeois-nationalist”. Mikoyan A.S. and Malenkov G.M. , Kaganovich L.M. carried out a purge in four regions of the USSR for cleansing Armenia from the center, and cleared the railways as a commissar of communications.

Foreign department

The destruction of the leadership of the Foreign Department (INO) of the NKVD was often carried out secretly, without trial or investigation. In particular, the head of the NKVD INO, A. A. Slutsky, was killed right in the office of the chief of the State Security Directorate of the NKVD, MP P. Frinovsky (February 17, 1938). The purpose of secretive murders was to prevent panic and desertion among the foreign agents of the NKVD ^[7] . However, it was not possible to hide the scale of the “purge” and many agents chose to remain in the West. In particular, the “ defectors ” were:

• I. S. Reiss - agent of the NKVD INO in Paris. At the beginning of 1937 he refused to go on a call to Moscow. Appeared in French newspapers with an open letter denouncing Stalin's policies. July 17, 1937 killed in Switzerland by the NKVD agent S. M. Spiegelglass .
• A. M. Orlov is a resident of the NKVD INO in Madrid. In July 1938 did not appear at the meeting with Spiegelglass in Antwerp ^{[Approx. 3]} . Assigning 60 thousand dollars from the operational means of the NKVD, Orlov, along with his wife and daughter, secretly moved to France, and from there to the United States.

Cases in which NKVD officers refused to take part in reprisals against innocent people were very rare, since such a refusal meant a deadly threat to the NKVD officer himself. However, such cases are known.

Thus, PF Kolomiets, deputy head of the Special Department of the GUGB NKVD of the Siberian Military District, faced with mass arrests and executions of servicemen, on December 7, 1937, sent by air mail a letter to Ezhov asking to send a commission to reveal the distortions in the investigation. Upon learning that, contrary to his opinion, the guard of Legalov was shot on charges of mythical arson, Kolomiyts told the Deputy Chief of UNKVD, I. A. Maltsev, about his report. Soon Kolomiyts went to the head of the department Gorbach and refused to be responsible for the department. On December 23, he was arrested and tortured. In March 1938, he was forced to write: “... For the last 6-7 years, I did not take part in mass operations, in so-called shock investigative work ... I was boiled in my own juice and therefore was deprived of acquiring that positive experience ... Bodies and workers of the OGPU-NKVD [...] In some cases I examined certain phenomena of practical KGB work on the implementation of the punitive policy of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet government from the point of view of false, rotten morality. ” Kolomiyts was sentenced to 20 years in the camps, but in 1940 he was rehabilitated.

Mobilized in the NKVD in the midst of terror, a young employee of the operative of the Siblag Sadovskiy wrote a letter to Stalin protesting against torture and falsification. He was immediately arrested, tortured and in the fall of 1938 he was shot.

The head of the ACT and a member of the troika of the NKVD TatASSR Ya. Ya. Vevers in November 1937 ordered the arrest of his subordinate S. A. Auhadeev, who refused to take part in the executions. Auhadeev received five years for "anti-Soviet agitation", but in 1939 his case was dismissed.

The deputy chief of the Blagoveshchensk RO of the UNKVD Regional Directorate for the Altai Territory, M. Seifulin, was, according to one of his colleagues, disagree "with the arrests and methods of investigation at that time, he shot himself in the spring of 1938" The head of one of the RO of the NKVD of the Kursk region, D. Shchekin, on August 4, 1938, committed suicide, and before that he visited the families of the arrested and drank with them.

In September 1937, the referent for the investigative proceedings of the Voronezh Oblast UNKVD, Gudnev, without a report to the head of the department, released four people arrested for "disruptive campaigning against the Central Committee and publishing illegal literature." After that, he disappeared, and with him disappeared and those released by him. Before this, Gudnev destroyed the cases in which he was being arrested threatened with execution ^[8] .

With a total list of state security organs about 25 thousand people. On March 1, 1937, between 1937 and 1938, 2,273 NKVD officers were cleaned and arrested; in 1939, 937 NKVD officers were repressed by Beria. In 1939, Beria fired 7,372 people from service.

The Memorial Society questions the number of 20 thousand repressed ^{[ clarify ]} , and indicates that this number includes, in addition to the security officers themselves, also police officers, fire brigade, registry offices and other institutions in the NKVD system.

Of the 322 chiefs of the republican NKVD, the NKVD edges and regions and subdivisions of the central apparatus, who held these posts at different points in the period from July 1934 to September 1938, 241 people were arrested (almost 75%). Of the 37 people who bore the title of state security commissioner in 1935, only two survived.

"Struggle of Generations"

Famous historian Mikhail Voslensky ^{[Approx. 4]} sees the reasons for the “purge” of the NKVD personnel in the struggle for power of two generations of the Soviet nomenklatura ^[9] . Voslensky believes that by the mid-1930s, two leading groups had formed in the CPSU (B.) , Which the researcher conditionally calls Leninist and Stalinist . The first held their posts according to the right of members of the Leninist party with pre-revolutionary experience, the second consisted of promoted activists of the 20s, selected on the basis of loyalty to Stalin ^[9] . By the mid-1930s, the share of Stalinists in the party apparatus grew significantly, but there were still a lot of Leninists, which led to intense intergenerational rivalry ^{[Note. 5]} . The goal of the “purges” of 1936-1938, according to Voslensky, was the elimination of “Leninists” from the leadership of the USSR, including the leadership of the NKVD ^{[Comm. 6]} .

Voslensky indicates that, beginning in the 1920s, Stalin sought to concentrate the work of recruiting leading cadres in his hands ^{. 7]} . By the mid-1930s, Stalin's appointees held many leadership positions in middle and top management in all areas. However, many senior positions, including in the OGPU / NKVD, were occupied by people not obliged to Stalin for their careers. According to Voslensky, the murder of Kirov and the following “ Great Terror ” allowed Stalin to get rid of the remnants of the “Leninist Guard”, including in the NKVD, and establish a regime of absolute personal power based on the nominees of the 20s ^[9] .

Clan Fighting

L. А. Naumov ^{[Approx. 8]} believes that the fundamental changes in the leadership of the NKVD were not the result of Stalin’s deliberate policy, but were the result of a spontaneous struggle between the “clans” in the NKVD: “Yagoda people”, “Yezhov people”, “Ukrainians” (Chekists serving in Ukraine), “North Caucasians”, “Turkestans” and others. As a result of the mutual destruction of these clans, according to the researcher, a massive promotion of new cadres with “blank questionnaires” took place, in which there was no compromising evidence ^[2] .

• Nomenclature. The ruling class of the Soviet Union , the paper version - for example, Voslensky, MS . Nomenclature . - M .: Zakharov, 2005. - 640 p. - ISBN 5-8159-0499-6 .
• Donald Rayfield. Stalin and his henchmen = Eng. Stalin and his hangmen . - M .: New Literary Review , 2008. - 500 p. - 1 5 thousand copies. - ISBN 978-5-86793-651-8 .
• Baberovski Y. The enemy is everywhere. Stalinism in the Caucasus. - M .: Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN) , Foundation “ Presidential Center B. N. Yeltsin ”, 2010. - p. 757-758. - ISBN 978-5-8243-1435-9 .