Database with data of 40 thousand NKVD employees. Shortly before this, Tomsk resident Denis Karagodin published his investigation into the people involved in the execution of his great-grandfather Stepan during the Great Terror. One of them turned out to be Nikolai Zyryanov, an employee of the Tomsk city department of the NKVD. Zyryanov’s granddaughter Yulia wrote Denis a letter in which she repented for her grandfather’s actions. The reaction to these publications was mixed. Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov is a “sensitive” topic, and the descendants of the security officers wrote an open letter to Vladimir Putin asking him to close access to the base for fear of retaliation. Lenta.ru asked people whose relatives worked in the NKVD to talk about how they feel about public discussion of the role of their ancestors in the events of 80 years ago.

“Try and figure it out!”

Yuri Vasiliev, lives and works in Latvia. Grandfather Yakov Vasiliev served during the war in the NKVD troops, and later worked in the police in Riga.

This digging in the past is like digging through dirty laundry; you are definitely not interested in looking for clean laundry! And now for me there is no need for this either. Grandfather lived well, raised two children, and died in 1981, I was only seven years old.

In my opinion, a discussion about people who worked in the NKVD is not necessary. Whoever remembers the old, look out. You have a lot of forces in Russia now who want to rock the country with these and other unnecessary things. If any of the victims want to seek the truth, let them look for it themselves and sue. But the culprits cannot be found, and there were none; the system is to blame. And it’s not that she’s to blame, it was and couldn’t have been any other way in order to save the country.

Alexey Ivanov (name and surname have been changed). One of the grandfathers served in the NKVD troops.

I support the dissemination of any information about the history of Russia, including the full opening of the archives of the twentieth century. It may make sense not to open 80-year-old archives to give the people mentioned in them the opportunity to die in peace, but after this period, all archives need to be opened and published every year.

In the twentieth century, crimes were committed against the Russian people and humanity in Russia. Some people do not want the people to know the truth, but this is in the interests of the people. The people have the right to know their history, and hiding this information is a crime against them.

As for the relatives of criminals, they are not responsible for their ancestors. Everyone should be judged only for their own deeds.

In Russian, the word "repentance" (from the name of the biblical Cain) is an inaccurate translation of the Greek Christian and ancient term "matanaia", which literally means "change of mind" or can be conventionally rendered by the word "change of mind".

In the original sense of the word “change the mind,” all of us, residents of Russia, need to determine our attitude to the events of history. And, seeing the good deeds of our ancestors, we also see their evil deeds. Call crimes crimes, condemn them rather than justify them, and say that we do not agree with these actions. As the German people did after 1945, by the way.

As for the apologies of the descendants of the executioners to the descendants of the victims, I think this is an extremely positive and Christian phenomenon. You just need to better define the subtle differences between repentance in the sense of a change of mind and repentance when you seem to apologize for the sins of another person as if they were your own. It would probably be better to say “my condolences” or something like that. This is also a subtle ethical and philosophical question.

Tatyana Zheltok, lives in Poland. His great-uncle is NKVD Colonel Alexander Rabtsevich, his younger brother Mikhail Rabtsevich is a KGB colonel (later general).

The public discussion is already making people dizzy from the growing force of its inadequacy. Living and remembering is very important, but I don't see the right healthy opportunity for public discussion. The energy nightmare that such debates produce is dangerous in many ways.

I believe that finding out who is to blame will lead nowhere. It is not that simple. War is not red and white, but much more complex. People can't sort things out in their families.

Photo: Georgy Petrusov / RIA Novosti

We must live today! Live and remember the past, but do not live in the past. I am not a person of the past, and this digging will not cure people (and, judging by what is happening, the majority need to be treated for grievances and bitterness). Here in Poland they have been looking for those responsible for the crash of Kaczynski’s plane near Smolensk for six years now. Do you think it’s possible to find someone to blame for the terrible events of history that we know so little about?

My relatives worked in the NKVD and the KGB in another area - foreign intelligence and diplomatic relations. I wouldn’t even know what to tell you if my relatives had anything to do with this nightmare! I probably couldn't have such relatives.

And how many people who did not work in these bodies are to blame for the fate of those repressed? Someone simply informed, and there were an awful lot of them too. Just try and figure it out! Terrible, indescribable milestones in history. Horror.

“A person is responsible only for himself”

Seraphim Orekhanov. Great-great-grandfather worked as the head of the investigative unit of the Moscow department of the NKVD in 1935-1939. Orekhanov discovered him on Memorial’s lists.

Lenta.ru: Are you sure that the person you found in the Memorial database is really your great-great-grandfather?

Seraphim Orekhanov: I’m sure, because I knew that he existed, I knew his name and patronymic, I knew that he worked in the NKVD. I didn’t know only his position and rank - now I know.

What did you previously know about your grandfather? What did his parents say about him?

I know the history of my family quite well, and although it was four generations ago, I know the house on Lubyanka where he lived, I know that he had a severe, hot-tempered disposition - not surprising - and I even know the place in the Novodevichy cemetery where he is buried. We didn’t discuss it much at home, but as an adult, my father began to talk more about his family. Her story is as interesting and as tragic as the story of any other family that happened to live in the twentieth century in Russia. It’s unlikely that anyone but us needs the details of this story.

Has your attitude towards your great-great-grandfather changed?

I didn’t have any special relationship with him: I didn’t even have any photographs of him. I am sure that all NKVD employees are exactly the same victims of this system as those whom they sent to camps or shot. Many of them ended their lives in the same ditches as their victims, and those who escaped this, at best, drank themselves to death. I saw an interview with one of the executioners who shot people at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. Already in the nineties, he, being a very old man, complains that “they didn’t crush the reptile” and that the repressions were insufficient. Isn't this a miserable man?

I’ve heard about the upcoming publication for a long time, I kept wanting to stop by the Memorial office and ask to look at their data, but I never got around to it. In any case, this did not come as a surprise to me: I entered the base knowing that I would find my great-great-grandfather. I think the publication of these lists is an excellent reason to start a conversation about the Great Terror, about Stalin and about the Russian twentieth century in general. Not in the discourse of relations between the authorities and the people, but in the discourse of family stories, which, it seems to me, is a much more suitable basis for the formation of a healthy sense of history instead of endless debates about the “strong hand”, “the price of victory” and other abstractions.

Have you ever thought about the need for public discussion of this page of our history and is it worth starting now?

Of course it's worth it. I grew up in a circle in which the attitude towards Stalinism, and indeed everything Soviet, was quite clear: it was a disaster, the worst thing that could happen to Russia, the most terrible period in our history, a huge step back. And, in general, I had no reason not to share these views.

On the other hand, the Soviet experiment of the early 1920s was the greatest of utopias and perhaps the greatest moment in Russian cultural history. This has all been said many times, but I would really like the discussion of the Soviet legacy - and the Great Terror as its central part - to be more specific. So that the destinies of people, not ideas, are discussed.

Is this a reproach to whom?

It is clear that this applies primarily to the conventionally patriotic camp, which is inclined to neglect details, but conventional liberals often sin in the same way. For example, from time to time there is a proposal to demolish the Mausoleum. Guys, well, actually this is Shchusev, taking and demolishing a work of art, whether we like it or not, for anti-Bolshevik purposes - this is Bolshevism.

And it also seems important that the discussion of the Soviet be separated from the Great Patriotic War: after all, the war did not exactly radically change the nature of the Stalinist regime. By making the conversation about the Second World War a central part of the debate about the Soviet, we are simply trying to avoid discussing things that are much more complex, but also much more concerning to us all.

Should the state pursue policies that condemn people (not just leaders) who took part in repression?

It seems to me that our history is already too much monopolized by the state. I think that no special politics is needed here, but things like the story of Denis Karagodin, or the “Last Address” campaign, or the publication of personal testimonies of people who experienced all this in the “Lived” project are needed. When history is under the control of the state, it inevitably becomes, firstly, the history of power, and secondly, an abstraction that can be argued about until you are hoarse, but which has very little connection with our lives.

Is public repentance necessary on the part of the descendants of NKVD workers, or should the discussion be conducted impersonally?

Of course not. I don't believe in collective responsibility. Its place is in the Old Testament. No one should be responsible for the sins of others - neither in the metaphysical sense, nor in the legal sense. I wrote about this in my

The Memorial movement published on its website a directory “Personnel composition of state security bodies of the USSR. 1935-1939", with data on 39,950 NKVD employees working in state security agencies. And the descendants of the security officers began to ask Putin to close access to the Memorial base...

The database is located at nkvd.memo.ru and is implemented as a wiki site. You can search for personalities both alphabetically and by place of service, titles and awards, as well as by the “repressed” category. The card also indicates, depending on the completeness of information about a particular person, the start and end dates of the service.

The main source for the base were orders from the NKVD regarding personnel - for example, on the assignment of special ranks or on dismissal. “The information from the orders is supplemented by biographical data from other sources - first of all, about those killed and missing during the Great Patriotic War, as well as about those subjected to repression,” Memorial reported.

The reference book will be useful to those interested in Soviet history. Thus, in particular, with the help of the directory it will be possible to attribute many state security employees of the era of the Great Terror, hitherto known only by last name […] - from signatures in investigative files or from mentions in memoir texts. The appearance of the reference book is a significant step towards a more in-depth and accurate understanding of the tragic history of our country in the 30s of the twentieth century.
“The directory contains the numbers and dates of orders for the assignment of special ranks and dismissal from the NKVD, information about the position held at the time of dismissal, as well as information about state awards received,” says a commentary on the organization’s website.

Directory “Personnel composition of state security bodies of the USSR. 1935-1939" was first released on CD in May 2016. It contains information from orders on the assignment of special ranks, supplemented by data on those killed during the Great Patriotic War and those repressed. The directory is compiled by researcher Andrey Zhukov. As reported, it took him 15 years to compile the database.

It is curious that on the first day the website of the human rights organization Memorial, where more than 40 thousand dossiers of NKVD officers from the Great Terror era were published, temporarily suspended its work due to high traffic. This was reported when trying to access the resource: “The server cannot cope with the load, and we are forced to stop it until approximately 16:00 Moscow time for technical work.”
And yet, the site’s work was restored. Many people found it interesting to look at the dossier of Stalin’s executioners...

Descendants of security officers ask Putin to close access to the Memorial base

The descendants of security officers who worked during the years of the “Great Terror” are asking to close access to the database of the human rights society “Memorial”, which published information about 40 thousand NKVD employees who received special ranks of the state security system. The site has already fallen several times under hacker attacks.

Komsomolskaya Pravda claims that the descendants of NKVD employees and “a few of those who were on the list and are still alive” demand in an open letter to President Vladimir Putin that access be closed. There are no direct quotes from the letter, but the newspaper claims that the signatories “are driven by fear, because children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren may take revenge for their repressed ancestors.”
The descendants of the executioners and guards shit themselves. Although no one is going to take revenge on them...

Information about tens of thousands of Soviet state security employees appeared on the organization’s website against the backdrop of

Thorough work by Andrei Zhukov “Personnel composition of state security bodies of the USSR. 1935-1939" (nkvd.memo.ru) contains brief information about more than 40,000 NKVD employees who received special ranks of the state security system. These “awards” were awarded for the persecution of “enemies of the people,” and the vast majority of those “awarded” were related to the organization and execution of repression. The source of the information in the directory was NKVD orders on personnel, indicating the numbers and dates of assignment of special ranks, positions held or dismissal from the NKVD. They are supplemented by biographical data from other sources - primarily from documents of victims of repression. Andrei Zhukov's directory was published in May of this year on CD. By the time the electronic version appeared, information had already been added to 4,500 biographical certificates. The creators of the project are confident that Internet users will also actively participate in the process of studying and adding to the history of the era of the Great Terror.

Jan Rachinsky

Member of the Board of the Memorial Association

— A reference book about the security officers of the era of the Great Terror is the work of an independent researcher Andrei Nikolaevich Zhukov. For more than 15 years, he painstakingly collected information and compiled card files when there were no computers and databases. Ultimately, he set himself the task of collecting information about everyone who received the special state security ranks introduced in 1935, shortly before the Great Terror. These were not only employees of the Main Directorate of State Security, but representatives of other structures for the prosecution of so-called “enemies of the people.”

The directory covers the period from 35 to 41 and contains the names of more than 40,000 people, the main creators and perpetrators of the Great Terror. But not only them. Almost all the executioners are in this directory, but everyone who is there is an executioner.

This is a huge undertaking and a starting point for refinement and further research. The directory helps to find a specific person and associate him with specific events described in memoirs or archival documents, where sometimes initials were not even indicated.

I consider the main idea of ​​this project to be a reminder of everyone’s personal responsibility for their actions. And the message for the future - hopes of keeping crimes secret - is not justified. For me, an important task has long been the desire to make people think about the terrible history that our country went through in the 20th century.

The response was very great. For many years, the conversation was mainly about victims of repression. We are, of course, far from naming all their names, but a lot of work has been done, and it does not stop. And it so happened that there were victims of crimes, but it was as if there were no criminals. There were reference books by Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov about the leaders who directed and commanded the process, but no one knew the performers. Now we know and can find out even more. Many people feel this need - to know not only the victims, but also those who caused this suffering. Of course, there is practically no one to punish, but the fact that the figures and deeds are named accordingly is extremely important.

We were counting on this response, but did not even suspect its scale. Within a few hours of the directory’s operation, users had already appeared on the Internet, actively making suggestions and clarifications from published sources or family archives. This once again confirms that the reference book is a starting point for further work.

The website of the international “Memorial” “History Lessons” - about the appearance of a new disc - in response to the often repeated rhetorical exclamation: “if there are victims, then there must also be executioners?” About 40,000 certificates on the personnel of the NKVD are precisely those people who were the perpetrators, full-fledged authors of the mass political repressions of the late 30s. “Personnel composition of state security agencies of the USSR 1935-1939” today is the most complete list of NKVD employees during the Great Terror. One of the project leaders, co-chairman of the Moscow Memorial, Jan Rachinsky, talks about the database, which took 15 years to compile.

- Tell me, what exactly is on this disk?
- This is a reference book on the personnel composition of the state security agencies, not the NKVD as a whole, because the NKVD included firefighters, border guards, and a whole range of other services, namely state security agencies, those people who had special ranks introduced at the end of 1935. These are precisely those who carried out the Great Terror, because the disc covers the period 1935-1939.
- Does this cover the entire pyramid of the NKVD hierarchy or are some individual ranks, say, represented there in more or less detail?
- In principle, everyone who had special ranks of state security officers is included, from sergeant to general commissioner, all ranks without exception. Of course, there may be some omissions for various reasons: either due to the fatigue of the compiler, there may be random omissions, or because some of the orders were not published, had a stamp and were not accessible. But there are very few of them. At least 90% of the staff is represented here.

- How and where were these names and data on them obtained?
- The compiler of this reference book, Andrei Nikolaevich Zhukov, has been studying this topic for many years. At first he was interested in the repressions against the security officers, which are talked about a lot and which, as it turns out from this code, are very much exaggerated. But then he, as a person with a collecting streak, began to collect not only the repressed, but everyone, just to understand how this correlated with the total number, and in general he worked on a lot of sources. At first these were open sources - well, conditionally open, you couldn’t call them easily accessible. Also, at one time, Nikita Petrov worked on newspaper publications and partly on various propaganda books, but then the archives were slightly opened.
The first, of course, is personnel orders, orders for personnel of the NKVD - many volumes have been published. They exist in the original source and there are printed collections reproduced that were sent to departments, just so that they could also be compared locally.
- That is, in other words, there is no consolidated list of NKVD employees?
- No.
- It sounds like a paradox, isn’t careful accounting of one’s personnel a natural part of the life of any law enforcement agency, and even more so the NKVD?
- The NKVD personnel department may have some kind of file cabinets, most likely, as well as personal files of employees that are absolutely inaccessible today, so we have to turn to such sources. I had to look through the orders in a row. Basically, orders of two types are used: orders on assigning ranks and orders on dismissal. Bringing all this together was in itself a non-trivial task - after all, in orders for conferring ranks there is a surname, name and patronymic, and in orders for dismissal there is a position from which the security officer is dismissed, but, as a rule, there is no name and patronymic, only initials. And with such a huge volume - over 40,000 characters - naturally, there are a lot of namesakes, and up to a dozen full namesakes
The second source is also seriously well-researched - this is the fund of the awards department of the Presidium of the Supreme Council, which was reviewed and where security officers were also identified. I already had to look through this all the time. Naturally, not everything has been revealed, but, nevertheless, there are a lot of these awards, and they were one of the important sources of biographical information. It is especially significant here that when awarding the Order of Lenin, the candidate filled out a questionnaire with basic biographical information, so the date and place of birth and other minimal information could be taken from there. Of course, this is only a starting point, this is the first step, very important and perhaps the most difficult.
- Tell us more about Andrei Nikolaevich, who, in fact, collected all this data. After all, as far as I know, this work took him about 15 years.
- It all started in the pre-computer era. The first version of his work was large notebooks, these extracts were then transferred to cards and from the cards he entered it into the computer in the form of a text file with many conventional abbreviations, which then needed to be deciphered, had to be checked carefully, because with such a volume of manual writing typos are inevitable. In general, this is a colossal amount of work, it’s even unclear how one person could handle it. He is not limited only to security officers, he has collected quite a lot of information on repressions in the army, he has very extensive information on this topic, but it still applies to those who were repressed and to the top of the command staff, if we talk about those who were not repressed.
- You said that Zhukov was initially interested in the topic of repression among NKVD employees - is this somehow reflected in the database?
- The database contains information about repressions, but there is currently no special section of this kind - repressed employees - it will probably appear in the online version. This is partly due to the fact that this information is incomplete. In the service regulations there was a special article on dismissal 38 “b”, which meant dismissal due to arrest, that is, we already know that the person was arrested, but for a large number of those dismissed in this way we have no information, what exactly next followed because most, a noticeable part, let’s say, of the arrested NKVD employees were subsequently released. Even of those who were convicted at the beginning of the war, in the first year and a half, many were released and sent to the front, and some were left in the rear to continue working. We also know such examples. Therefore, information about repression is not yet complete enough to be presented as a separate category. Our technical role - mine and not only mine - was to bring this into a form convenient for use. This is the first version, it will be improved on the Internet.
- That is, your “function” was to turn this into a database.
- Yes, process it in such a way that it acquires a certain unified structure, functionally similar to Wikipedia.
- Is there any preliminary release date for the online version?
- We want to do this by the end of the year, since there will still be additions - it is now obvious that there will be quite a lot of them.
- How is the entry in this database arranged? Does each name have a certain set of additional information?
- Yes, each name has a set of information, in the preface it is written what the maximum it can be, but for many - for a good half - it comes down to a single record of assignment of the rank - sergeant or junior lieutenant, and we have nothing more about the person today We don’t know the day. But, nevertheless, this is at least a name and patronymic, and often also a connection to the region. This makes it possible to identify these employees, investigators, who often appear only with their last name, and nothing else is known; this is some next step towards identification. Today we have a systematization there alphabetically, by rank, by awards and by region - these are four such sections. And, in fact, when this appears on the Internet, it will become possible to add information there from a wide variety of sources, to link there both fragments of memories and some pieces of subsequent investigations into the activities of this or that character.
- That is, a kind of “Open List”?
- This is somewhat different, because here we have a closed list, that is, we more or less already know the heroes, who may be added a little, but the list of personalities itself is close to exhaustion. But you can add a lot for each person.

https://www.site/2016-11-24/dvizhenie_memorial_opublikovalo_bazu_dannyh_na_pochti_40_tys_sotrudnikov_nkvd

The era of the Great Terror

The Memorial movement published a database of almost 40 thousand NKVD employees

The Memorial movement on its official website has opened access to Andrei Zhukov’s database “Personnel composition of state security bodies of the USSR. 1935-1939”, which provides brief information about 39 thousand 950 NKVD employees. As stated in the project description, the reference book will be useful to those interested in Soviet history.

“So, in particular, with the help of the directory it will be possible to attribute many state security employees of the era of the Great Terror, hitherto known only by last name (as a rule, without even indicating the first and patronymic) - from signatures in investigative files or from mentions in memoir texts. The appearance of the reference book is a significant step towards a more in-depth and accurate understanding of the tragic history of our country in the 30s of the twentieth century,” Memorial notes.

The directory provides data on NKVD employees who received special ranks of the state security system from the moment of their introduction in 1935 until the beginning of 1941. The main source of information was the orders of the NKVD of the USSR regarding personnel. The directory contains the numbers and dates of orders for the assignment of special ranks and dismissal from the NKVD, information about the position held at the time of dismissal, as well as information about received state awards and the awarding of the “Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU” badges.

Information from the orders is supplemented by biographical data from other sources - first of all, about those killed and missing in action during the Great Patriotic War, as well as about those subjected to repression.