Nogtev, Alexander Petrovich

Born in the family of a rural teacher in the city of Gorodets on the Volga. Father, Petr Nikandrovich Nogtev, came from a peasant family, founded a railway school, taught in Kovrov and Vladimir . He was associated with the organization "Narodnaya Volya". The family brought up eight children. Graduate of the Kherson Naval College. He was a sailor of the merchant fleet. During the First World War he served in the Baltic Fleet. In 1917, the assistant captain on the ship "Alexander Nevsky" on the Volga. He joined the CPSU (b) in 1918. In August 1918, Lenin was sent to the city of Kotlas as the leader of a group of demolition men with the goal of creating an artificial fence on the channel of the Northern Dvina in order to impede the movement of enemy ships along the river ^[1] . From September 1918 - May 1919 - Chief Inspector of Ship Security ^[1] . In 1919, the commissar of the Special Unit in Samara on the Eastern Front. He commanded the Special Unit of the 4th Army of the Turkestan Front. Later he participated in battles on the Northern Front, and then in military operations against the Ural Cossack Army.

Head of the Solovetsky Camp

Since 1921, an employee of the Cheka. The first head of USLON , he became at least twice from October 3, 1923, that is, from the time the Solovetsky camp was formed to November 13, 1925 ^[2] , when he was replaced by F. I. Eichmans , and again from May 20, 1929 to May 19, 1930. He suffered from alcoholism, had sadistic tendencies ^[3] .

According to the recollections of prisoners:

"In addition to his inexorable cruelty, Nogtev is famous in Solovki for his impenetrable stupidity and drunken brawls. In his very face there is something absolutely brutal. In the camp he is called the" Executioner ". ^[4] "

“General Staff Colonel Duller throws a bag over his shoulder with a measured throw and walks in an equally measured clear step to Nogtev’s booth. <...> He reaches almost to the window and suddenly falls face down. The bag rolls to the side, the gray lamb’s hat, on which you can still see the stripes from the protracted galloons, to another. At first we did not hear the shot and understood what had happened, only seeing the carbine in the hands of Nogtev. <...> The roll-call continued.

There were no more shots. Later we learned that the same thing happened at the receptions of almost every batch. Nogtev personally killed one or two arrivals of his own choice. He did this not because of personal cruelty, no, he was rather good-natured in hops. But with these shots he strove to catch fear at the new arrivals at once, to instill in them a consciousness of complete lack of rights, hopelessness, to stem the root of the possibility of a protest attempt, to restrain their will, to establish complete automatic submission to the “Solovetsky law”.

More often than not, he killed officers, but it happened that both priests and felons who accidentally attracted his attention by anything ^[5] . "

After Solovki, arrest

In the spring of 1930, he retired, from 1932 managing the Mosgortop Trust, then acting chief Glavles People's Commissar of the forest industry of the USSR. In 1937 ^[6] . He was arrested by the NKVD and on May 4, 1939, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to imprisonment for 15 years ^[7] with the defeat of political rights for 5 years and confiscation of property. He was accused of having belonged to the anti-Soviet sabotage and sabotage, terrorist and right-wing terrorist organization in the People’s Commissariat since 1936, as well as for the fact that in 1936-1937. he thwarted the harvesting plan, which made it difficult to provide Moscow with firewood, did not take out the wood and put it under damage, as a result of which, for 8 months of 1937, Mosgortop paid 888 thousand rubles for car downtime. He served time in Norillag . While in the camp, he was a witness in the camp case of astronomer and mathematician N. A. Kozyrev :

I immediately saw the instinct of the old Chekist - the enemy is in front of me ^[8] .

Shortly after the war, on the protest of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of August 4, 1945, the Military Collegium excluded accusations of anti-Soviet activity from the sentence, re-qualified as accusations of negligence, reducing the sentence to 7 years without losing rights and confiscating property ^[9] . But he did not have time to register in Moscow ^[10] , when he died on April 23, 1947. He was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow.

On November 18, 1955, by a decision of the Plenum of the Supreme Court, the sentence was canceled and the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

• Order of the Red Banner No. 225, Order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic No. 225 of May 4, 1920:

  “In the middle of June 1919, being the head of the combat vanguard that covered the right flank of the army, he not only prevented the enemy from crossing the left bank of the Volga, but he successfully repelled any attempt for this crossing, and took military booty.”

  “... When the enemy retreated to Kamyshin, the named comrade with his detachment, pursuing his units crossing the left bank of the Volga, inflicted a heavy defeat on them, forcing them to cross to the right bank, and the detachment took machine guns, rifles and prisoners. In fulfilling the task of mastering Guryev and liquidating the Ural Front, comrade Nogtev, acting with a detachment on the extreme right flank of the army as a side vanguard, brilliantly fulfilled his task on December 12, 1919 and, quickly taking control of the Talovka Kirghiz region, defeated units of the 6th Ural Division of the enemy and allocated reconnaissance units to the area of ​​Lake Aral- Soor, which fully provided the units of the 450th Regiment and the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Division and made it possible for them to fulfill the tasks assigned to them with great success. ”

• Report of the Head of USLON Comrade Nogtev at a meeting of workers in Kemi and Art. Kemi. (Magazine "Solovetsky Islands", 1930, No. 2-3. S. 55-60.

• Alexander Nogtev: the first commandant of the Solovetsky camp
• Nogtev Alexander Petrovich - Archive of Alexander N. Yakovlev ...
• Internal troops. Story in faces
• RGVA, f. 4, op. 3, d. 98, l. 390, 390 about.