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Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky

There were a lot of strange, strange and mysterious things in the life of this man. Even the date of his birth is shrouded in mystery: in all official publications it appears that he was born on August 31, 1874. In the autobiography, with his own handwriting, the day of another September 1 is indicated.

Menzhinsky Vyacheslav Rudolfovich (19.08.1874 - 10.05.1934) is a Soviet party and statesman. He was born into a noble family of a teacher of the Cadet Corps. He received a wonderful secondary education, taking a great interest in literature and languages (he had 16 foreign languages at the end of his life), in 1898 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. In 1895 he joined the revolutionary movement. Since 1898 he worked in the evening and Sunday schools for workers, in 1902 he joined the RSDLP. After the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (1903), he joined the Bolshevik faction. Conducted illegal party work in St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl. In 1906 he was arrested, fled abroad. During emigration he lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, in America, participated in the work of foreign organizations of the RSDLP, and collaborated in the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary.

Returned to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917, supported the course of V.I.Lenin to an armed uprising. Menzhinsky was a participant in the October Revolution. After the victory - the People's Commissar of Finance. With his participation, the banks were nationalized and the banking officials sabotaged. In the years 1918-1919. as Consul General was sent to Berlin.

The reasons for his coming to the Cheka are among the riddles. There were few among the Bolsheviks: a hereditary nobleman, the son of a teacher, a graduate of the Faculty of Law of Petrograd University, a polyglot who knew sixteen (!) Languages, (Last, Farsi, he learned specially to read Khayyam in the original.) And at the same time a professional revolutionary, underground, member of the party since 1902. It was these people who were needed in the Cheka.

Since 1919 he was in the apparatus of the Cheka, where he held positions of deputy. chief and chief of the Special and Secret - Political Departments of the Cheka. In 1923 he became the first deputy F.E. Dzerzhinsky, while taking into account that Dzerzhinsky was engaged in work in the Supreme Economic Council, all the leadership of the Cheka was concentrated in the hands of Menzhinsky. He played a huge role in the formation and development of Soviet intelligence, turning it into one of the most powerful intelligence services in the world. After the death of F.E. Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky was head of the Cheka, which by that time was called the OGPU.

To the surprise of many, this intellectual in a pince-nez not only managed to gain a foothold in the special services and make a good career. He was a born counterintelligence agent. It was under his direct leadership of the KRO of the GPU that he conducted his first brilliant operations: "Trust", "Syndicate-2", when the largest anti-Soviet centers were completely routed, and their leaders Savinkov and Reilly were entrapped in Russia and arrested. Foreign intelligence hardly recovered from the shock: who would have thought that the secret police, only yesterday formed of tramps, not only capable of action, but also on the head superior to the vaunted "Intelligence Service" and "Defensive".

The counter-intelligence doctrine, created by Menzhinsky, for a long time, until the very beginning of the purges, gave abundant shoots. Even his view of Chekist work was very different from the generally accepted one. Menzhinsky believed that the emphasis should not be on the number of exposed "enemies", but on the quality.

"The intellectual" and the least odious figure. Nevertheless, he was one of the main organizers of mass shootings and extrajudicial repression in the country. For the period in which V.R. Menzhinsky held the post of chairman of the OGPU, the so-called "great turning point" - the political course of I.V. Stalin, which consisted in the liquidation of the NEP, the complete collectivization of the peasantry, the transition to accelerated industrialization. This policy was carried out through mass repression against the broad strata of the country's population, primarily against the peasantry. Those that did not agree to join the collective farms "voluntarily" were subject to "liquidation as a class," which in practice meant confiscation of property, forced relocation to uninhabited areas with harsh living conditions, imprisonment in forced labor camps, and often physical extermination. In implementing this policy, the OGPU was assigned the role of the chief performer, and Menzhinsky vigorously set about carrying it out.

With the active assistance of his deputy G.G. Yagoda prepared the first falsified political processes from the beginning to the end-the Shakhtinskoye affair (the "wrecking organization of bourgeois specialists in the Shakhty district of the Donbass" in 1928), the case of the Industrial Party (1930), the Work of the Peasant Party (1930), the case "The Union Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP Mensheviks (1931).

For the period of Menzhinsky's chairmanship in the OGPU, the beginning of the unique activity of repressive bodies in the world practice - the organization of special facilities, in which the concluded scientists engineers created samples of new technology.

Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky were similar not only surnames and Polish origin. They were united by a huge capacity for work, bordering on insanity, absolute asceticism. Subsequently, in the medical report of death, it will be said that he daily smoked 60-75 (!) Cigarettes. All this coupled with the frantic pace of work could not but affect the health of Menzhinsky. Beginning with the 25th year, angina began to progress inexorably. Periodically, he could not even get off the couch and take visitors lying down. Few people know that Menzhinsky was married three times. From his first wife, Julia, he had three children. From the second, to Maria, the son of Dodik.

V.R. Menzhinsky established a kind of record of the length of his tenure as head of the special services of the Stalin era - 8 years. Menzhinsky on the 10th of May 1934. The ashes of Menzhinsky are buried in the Kremlin wall. In the same year, the OGPU was transformed into the GUGB of the NKVD of the USSR.