On
this date, February 3, 1955, the most prolific executioner in history, Vasili
Blokhin, passed away. I will post information about him from Wikipedia and
other links.
Vasili
Blokhin
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://www.snipview.com/q/Vasili_Blokhin]
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Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin (7 January 1895 – 3 February 1955)
was a Soviet Russian Major-General who served as the chief executioner of the
Stalinist NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy
Beria (after their respective falls from power, Yagoda and Yezhov were executed
by Blokhin himself). Hand-picked for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926,
Blokhin led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous
mass executions during Stalin's reign, mostly during the Great Purge and World
War II. He is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his
own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during
the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official
executioner and mass murderer in recorded world history. Forced into retirement
following the death of Stalin, Blokhin died in 1955, officially by suicide.
Early
life and career
Blokhin,
born into a peasant family on 7 January 1895, served in the Tsarist army during World War I, and joined the Soviet state
security agency Cheka in March 1921. Though records are
scant, he was evidently noted for both his pugnaciousness and his mastery of
what Joseph Stalin termed chernaya rabota—"black
work": assassinations, torture, intimidation, and executions conducted
clandestinely. Once he gained Stalin's attention, he was quickly promoted and
within six years was appointed the head of the purposely created Kommandatura
Branch of the Administrative Executive Department of the NKVD. This branch was
a company-sized element created by Stalin specifically for "black
work". Headquartered at the Lubyanka in Moscow, its members were all
approved by Stalin and took their orders directly from his hand, a fact that
ensured the unit's longevity despite three bloody purges of the NKVD.
As
senior executioner, Blokhin had the official title of commandant of the
internal prison at the Lubyanka, which allowed him to perform his true job with
a minimum of scrutiny and no official paperwork. Although most of the estimated
828,000 NKVD executions conducted in Stalin's lifetime were performed by local
Chekists in concert with NKVD troikas,
mass executions were overseen by specialist executioners from the Kommandantura.
In addition to overseeing the mass operations, Blokhin also personally pulled
the trigger of the gun during all of the individual high-profile executions
conducted in the Soviet Union
during his tenure, including those of the Old Bolsheviks condemned at the Moscow Show Trials;
Marshal of
the Soviet Union Mikhail
Tukhachevsky (condemned at a secret trial); and two of the three fallen NKVD
Chiefs (Genrikh Yagoda
in 1938 and Nikolai Yezhov
in 1940) he had once served under. He was awarded the Badge of
Honor for his service in 1937.
Scene
from the 2007 Movie ‘Katyn’
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Role
in the Katyn massacre
Blokhin's
most infamous act was the April 1940 execution by
shooting of over 7,000 Polish prisoners interned in the Ostashkov prisoner of war camp—mostly military—and
police officers who had been captured following the Soviet
invasion of Poland in 1939—as part of the extended Katyn massacre. (The event's infamy also
stems from the Stalin regime's orchestration of the murders and subsequent
propaganda campaign in order to blame Nazi Germany for the massacres.) In 1990 as
part of Glasnost, Gorbachev gave the Polish government the
files on the massacres at Katyn, Starobelsk and Kalinin (now Tver),
revealing Stalin's involvement. Based on the 4 April secret order from Stalin
to NKVD Chief Lavrentiy Beria (as well as NKVD Order № 00485,
which still applied), the executions were carried out over 28 consecutive
nights at the specially-constructed basement execution chamber at the NKVD
headquarters in Kalinin, and were assigned, by name, directly to Blokhin,
making him the official executioner of the NKVD.
Blokhin
initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night; and
engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to
a small antechamber—which had been painted red and
was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive
identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next
door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a
sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners
to stand against. Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his
executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length
leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other
formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while
Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. He had brought a briefcase
full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the
standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the
frequent, heavy use he intended. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was
commonly carried by German police and intelligence agents, also provided plausible
deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.
An
estimated 30 local NKVD agents, guards and drivers were pressed into service to
escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, then remove the
bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. Although some of the
executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei M.
Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked
to work continuously and rapidly without interruption. In keeping with NKVD
policy and the overall "black" nature of the operation, the
executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until just
prior to dawn. The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks
through a back door in the execution chamber and trucked, twice a night, to Mednoye, where Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose
of bodies at an unfenced site. Each night, 24–25 trenches, measuring eight to
ten meters (24.3 to 32.8 feet) total, were dug to hold that night's corpses,
and each trench was covered up before dawn.
Blokhin
and his team worked without pause for ten hours each night, with Blokhin
executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes. At the end of the
night, Blokhin provided vodka to all his men. On 27 April 1940, Blokhin
secretly received the Order of the Red
Banner and a modest monthly pay premium as a reward from Joseph
Stalin for his "skill and organization in the effective carrying out of
special tasks". His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains the most
organized and protracted mass murder by a
single individual on record; and saw him being named the Guinness World
Record holder for 'Most Prolific Executioner' in 2010.
Retirement and death
Blokhin
was forcibly retired in 1953 following Stalin's death that March, although his
"irreproachable service" was publicly noted by Lavrenty Beria at the
time of his departure. After Beria's fall from power in June of the same year,
Blokhin's rank was stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sank into
alcoholism, went insane, and died on 3 February 1955 with the official cause of
death listed as "suicide".
Honours
and awards
This
article incorporates information from the Russian
Wikipedia.
- Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU (V) № 498
- Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU (XV) (1932)
- Order of the Red Star (1936)
- Order of the Badge of Honour (1937)
- Order of the Red Banner, twice (1940, 1944)
- Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1943)
- Order of Lenin (1945)
- Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (1945)
References
- Glenday, Craig (2010). Guinness World Records 2010. Random House Digital. ISBN 0-553-59337-4.
- Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2005). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-7678-9.
- Parrish, Michael (1996). The Lesser Terror: Soviet state security, 1939–1953. Westport, CT: Praeger Press. ISBN 0-275-95113-8.
- Rayfield, Donald (2005). Stalin and His Hangmen: The tyrant and those who killed for him. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-75771-6.
- Remnick, David (1994). Lenin's Tomb. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-75125-4.
- Sanford, George (2005). Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-33873-5.
- Brackman, Roman (2003). The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. Routledge. p. 287. ISBN 0-7146-8402-3.
- Cummins, Joseph (2009). The World's Bloodiest History: Massacre, Genocide, and the Scars They Left on Civilization. Fair Winds. pp. 176–7. ISBN 1-59233-402-4.
OTHER
LINKS:
The so-called “de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev” (cited above) were nothing but “positive framings.” Khrushchev earned the name, “the Butcher of the Ukraine.” Every Soviet Premier began his term with denunciations of previous premiers. Wikipedia, as well as too many “sources” promulgate the whitewash of Khrushchev. From the Encyclopædia Britannica, under “HELP SCHOOL & LIBRARY PRODUCTS SHOP”: “Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev… (in) foreign policy… pursued a policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West.” Soviet dezinformatsiya pure and simple. He did no such thing.
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