INFAMOUS RUSSIAN EXECUTIONERS
The hierarchy of the Russian Regime since the Bolshevik Revolution is rife with executioners, particularly if light is shed on the hierarchy of the Russian regime with Joseph Vissarionovich STALIN as head of state. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria and Vasily Mikhailovich Blohkin his principal henchmen, come prominently to mind.
Hitler appears as a kitten compared to the silent deadly predator Stalin, who led the Soviet Union with millions of deaths throughout his oppressive leadership from 1924 until his death in 1953, for almost 3 decades. Anyone who knows a little of Soviet history will know what a terror Stalin was.
One of his two most notorious henchmen is Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953). The most feared man in Russia. Beria was an executioner and a serial rapist, who abused the state apparatus for his personal benefit. He was the most influential of Stalin’s secret police chiefs of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 to 1945, and of the MVD from 1946 to 1953.
Lavrentiey Pavlovich Beria
The responsibility of the NKVD was to ensure the internal security of the Soviet Union, which systematically meant ensuring that there was no opposition, dissent, or incitement, through massive political repression. This was directly authorized by Stalin through kidnappings, deportations, and the murder of thousands of political opponents and citizens.
Besides being a notorious “ambassador of death,” Beria was privately a serial rapist. Every day, he would drive his armored Packard limousine through the streets of Moscow looking for girls who could fulfill his fantasies, lust, and desire. When a girl was targeted, his agents would escort her to his mansion where food and wine would be set up for the night. There, in his soundproof bedroom, he would rape his victim repeatedly throughout the night. After the rape, she would be given a bouquet and instructed never to open her mouth. If the victim protested, she would be arrested and sent to Lubyanka, one of the most infamous buildings in the USSR. If, on rare occasions, a girl escaped from his mansion, Beria would simply ensure that she swiftly and quietly disappeared.
On August 29, 1949, under Beria’s leadership, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first plutonium implosion bomb code-named “First Lightning”. Yuli Khariton, a prominent Russian physicist, wrote of Beria: “This man personified evil in the country’s modern history and at the same time possessed tremendous vigor and efficiency. It was impossible not to admit his intellect, willpower, and purposefulness. He was a first-class manager able to bring every job to its conclusion.”
Soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, Beria became one of four deputy prime ministers as well as head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an organization which at that time combined both the secret political and regular police functions. During the ensuing struggle for power, Beria apparently attempted to use his position as chief of the secret police to succeed Stalin as sole dictator.
In the wake of the June 1953 uprising against the German Communist regime in East Berlin, Beria feared the USSR’s inability to retain the loyalty and allegiance of its Eastern European satellite states given the poor state of the Soviet economy. Seeking to preserve the financial solvency of the Soviet Union, he suggested Moscow enter into diplomatic negotiations with the US to peacefully bring an end to the Cold War. Seizing the opportunity, Soviet leadership under Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov accused him of conspiring with the American “imperialists.” By July 1953, he had been defeated by an anti-Beria coalition led by Georgy M. Malenkov, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Many Soviet leaders, among them Nikita Khrushchev, feared Beria would use his control of the secret police to ultimately seize full power. In the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev, Beria was arrested, deprived of his government and party posts, and publicly accused of being an “imperialist agent” and of conducting “criminal anti-party and anti-state activities.” On December 23, 1953, Beria was convicted of these charges at his trial and was immediately executed in Moscow.
VASILY MIKHAILOVICH BLOHKIN The Katyn Massacre
VASILY MIKHAILOVICH BLOHKIN (07/01/1895–03/02/1955)
From the Russian Czarist Army in 1921, to the Cheka, the political police created by Lenin, Vasily Blohkin persecuted, tortured, and executed all kinds of dissidents. Notorious for his remarkable killing abilities, he caught the attention of Stalin, and in 1926, he was rapidly promoted within six years to the head of the purposely created Kommandatura Branch of the NKVD, headquartered at the Lubyanka in Moscow. The Kommandatura was an elite section of the Executive Administrative Department of the NKVD. Its members were all approved by Stalin and took their orders directly from him, which ensured the unit’s longevity despite three bloody purges of the organization.
He worked under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria, carrying out his duties with a minimum of scrutiny and no official paperwork. The team of executioners was responsible for intimidation and murder, particularly during the periods of the Great Purge and World War II. Most of the estimated 828,000 executions conducted on Stalin’s orders, were performed by local Chekists in concert with NKVD troikas. Blokhin personally pulled the trigger in all of the individual high-profile executions. They included those of the Old Bolsheviks convicted at the Moscow Trials, the Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky convicted in a secret trial, and two of the three killed NKVD Chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda in 1938, and Nikolay Yezhov in 1940, whom he had once served.
As Stalin’s chief executioner from 1926 to 1953, he became the most prolific executioner in the history of the 20th century. Not only did he oversee mass executions, but he singlehandedly killed more than 7,000 people, though others contend the number may be as high as 15,000.
Blokhin’s nationwide fame came with the Katyn massacre in April 1940. The gruesome mass executions, initiated by Beria on orders of Stalin, claimed the lives of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, and intelligentsia who had been captured following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 and sent to the Ostashkov Prison camp. The massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where Nazis discovered the mass graves.
Blokhin was charged with carrying out the brutal operation and did so with great planning and precision. He procured large quantities of German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistols commonly carried by German police and intelligence agents. Not only did he prefer using them over the Soviet Tokarev TT-30 which he considered inferior for such serial killings, but he calculated that if the crimes were discovered, the Soviets could deny any involvement and blame the German Gestapo — a stunt supported by the Western Allies in their anti-Nazi propaganda.
He brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, and engineered an efficient killing system at an ambitious target of 300 executions per night in 10-hour shifts, over 28 nights, at a rate of one execution every two minutes. The executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing just before dawn. An estimated 30 local NKVD agents, guards, and drivers were pressed into service to escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, then remove their bodies and hose down the blood after each execution.
Every prisoner was led individually led into a small room painted red and called the ‘Lenin Room’. The room was specially designed with padded soundproof walls, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and a hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb with NKVD guards. He dressed like a self-styled executioner in a long leather apron, brown leather gloves, and a brown leather hat. Then, without a hearing, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while his sentence was read. Blokhin would shoot him expertly in order to minimize bleeding.
The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and transported twice a night to Mednoye, where Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose of the bodies at an unfenced site. Each night, 24 to 25 trenches were dug, measuring 8 to 10 meters in length, to hold the dead victims, and each trench was covered over before dawn. At the end of the night, Blokhin provided vodka to all his men.
On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received from Stalin the Order of the Red Banner, and a modest monthly pay premium as a reward for his “skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special duties”. The chief executioner of the NKVD became a hero of the Soviet Union. In addition to other awards, he received the Order of Lenin, the highest civil decoration presented by the USSR, and the 1st Class Order of the Patriotic War.
Blokhin’s fortunes changed after the death of Stalin when Nikita Khrushchev came to power condemning all the brutal policies of Stalin. Despite his “irreproachable service” publicly announced by Beria, when Beria himself was removed, Blokhin was stripped of his rank, eight of his decorations, and his pension, and forcibly retired in March 1953,
Already an alcoholic suffering from mental illness, Blokhin could not bear the humiliation heaped upon him, and gradually sank into insanity and alcoholism. He died on 03/02/1955, at the age of 60. Many believe that he committed suicide using his own favorite Walther pistol. However, his personal files recorded that he died of a heart attack, a myocardial infarction.
He was buried in the Muscovite cemetery of Novodevichy and to this day, his portrait along with others in his team continues to adorn the walls of the cemetery as a national hero. He remains the most organized single individual of a protracted mass murder on the historical record.
Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery
In 1990, as part of Glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev gave the Polish government the files on the victims massacred at Katyn, Starobilsk, and Kalinin (now Tver), confirming Stalin’s involvement. Based on the 4 April secret order from Stalin to Lavrentiy Beria. Order №00485 was assigned by name directly to Blokhin. In 2010, his notoriety caused him to be named the Guinness World Record holder for ‘Most Prolific Executioner’.
Sammy RNAJ — sammy.rnaj.writer@gmail.com
