The story of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots, is another, dark side of the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War.

Tonka the machine-gunner, as she was called then, worked in the Soviet territory occupied by Nazi troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out mass death sentences of fascists to partisan families.

Twitching the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that then you suffer from remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one, ”she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless identified and detained - 35 years after her last execution.

The criminal case of the Bryansk punitive woman Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the depths of the FSB special guard. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world was a woman born who personally killed 1,500 people.

Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman's name was Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by the status: an apartment, badges for round dates and a scarce sausage in a grocery ration. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. Two grown daughters were proud of their mother.

They looked up to her, they took an example from her: still, such a heroic fate: to walk the whole war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Konigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak at the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for a feat. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to face death. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best of all ...

She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a string bag in her hands was walking down the street, when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: "You urgently need to go with us!" surrounded her, not giving an opportunity to escape.

"Do you guess why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some mistake,” the woman chuckled in response.

“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. Your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk, are still legendary. We have been looking for you for over thirty years - now it's time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations ”.

“So, it’s not for nothing that the last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. - How long ago it was. As if not with me at all. Almost all my life has already passed. Well, write it down ... "

From the interrogation protocol of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 78:

“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - as many partisans were contained in a cell. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near some pit. The arrested were put in a chain facing the pit. One of the men was rolling out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and shot at people until everyone fell dead ... "

"Lead into nettles" - in Tony's jargon, this meant lead to execution. She herself died three times. For the first time in the fall of 1941, in a terrible "Vyazma cauldron", a young girl-sanitary instructor. Hitler's troops then attacked Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders threw their armies to death, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazma meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were captured. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. As well as helping a nurse to the dead ...

19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a fight in the forest. The air smelled of burnt flesh. An unfamiliar soldier was lying nearby. “Hey, are you still safe? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk ”. “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul was concussed, and only a human shell remained, but inside there was emptiness. She reached out to him, trembling: "Ma-a-amochka, how cold it is!" “Well, beautiful, don't cry. Let's get out together, ”Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
For three months, before the first snow, they wandered through the thickets together, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their ultimate goal, or where their enemies were, or where. They were starving, breaking the stolen loaves of bread for two. During the day they shied away from the military carts, and at night they warmed each other. Tonya washed both footcloths in cold water, cooked a simple dinner. Did she love Nikolai? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a hot iron, fear and cold from within.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. - There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I am the eldest, like Gorky's, early in the world. She grew such a beech, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, in the first grade, and forgot my last name. The teacher asks: "What is your name, girl?" And I know that Parfenova, but I'm afraid to say. The children from the back of the school scream: "Yes, she is Makarova, her father is Makar." So they wrote me down alone in all the documents. After school she left for Moscow, then the war began. I was called up as a nurse. And my dream was different - I wanted to scribble on a machine gun, like Anka the machine gunner from “Chapaev”. Don't I look like her? When we get to ours, let's ask for a machine gun ... "

In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally came out to the village of Krasny Kolodets. And then they had to part forever. “You know, my home village is nearby. I am there now, I have a wife, children, ”Nikolai said goodbye to her. - I could not admit to you earlier, forgive me. Thanks for the company. Then get out yourself somehow. " “Don't leave me, Kolya,” Tonya begged, hanging on top of him. However, Nikolai shook it off like ashes from a cigarette and left.

For several days Tonya begged around the huts, prayed for Christ, asked to stay. At first, the compassionate hostesses let her in, but after a few days they invariably refused the shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. “It hurts to look bad,” the women said. “He pesters our peasants who are not at the front, climbs into the attic with them, asks to warm her up.”

It is possible that Tonya at that moment was really moved by her mind. Perhaps she was finished off by the betrayal of Nikolai, or she simply ran out of strength - one way or another, she only had physical needs: she wanted to eat, drink, wash with soap in a hot bath and sleep with someone, so as not to be alone in the cold darkness. She didn't want to be a heroine, she just wanted to survive. At any cost.

In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all of its inhabitants went to the partisans. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punishers were registered. The front line here was in the middle of the outskirts. Somehow she wandered around the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend this night. People in uniform stopped her and asked in Russian: "Who is this?" “I'm Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow, ”the girl replied.

She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns “loving” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, after which they shoved a machine gun into her hands. As she dreamed of - to disperse the void inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.

“Makarova-Ginzburg told during interrogations that for the first time she was taken to the execution of partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. - But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on a permanent basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred a woman to carry out the executions of partisans and their family members. A homeless and lonely Antonina was given a bed in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. In the morning she voluntarily went to work. "

“I didn’t know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes, you shoot, come closer, and some still twitch. Then she again shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisans” was hung on the chest of several prisoners. Some sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. There were plenty of cartridges ... "

Former Redwell landlady Tony, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Elbow for salt. She was detained by policemen and taken to a local prison, attributing a connection with the partisans. “I'm not a partisan. Just ask your Tonka-machine-gunner, ”the woman was frightened. Tonya looked at her attentively and chuckled: "Come on, I'll give you salt."

Order reigned in the tiny room where Antonina lived. There was a machine gun, glistening with machine oil. Nearby, on a chair, clothes were stacked neatly: smart dresses, skirts, white blouses with holes ricocheting in the back. And a washing trough on the floor.

“If I like the things of the condemned, then I take them off the dead, so why waste,” explained Tonya. - Once the teacher was shot, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was all stained with blood, I was afraid that I would not wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. It's a pity ... So how much salt do you need? "
“I don’t want anything from you,” the woman backed away to the door. - Fear God, Tonya, he is there, he sees everything - there is so much blood on you, you can't wipe yourself off! ” “Well, since you are brave, why did you ask me for help when they took you to prison? - shouted Antonina after. - That would die like a hero! So, when the skin needs to be saved, then Tonkina's friendship is good? ”.

In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya lifted her nose, boasting that she was a Muscovite. With her roommate, the village headman's typist, she also did not open up, and she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the crease on her forehead that had cut through early, as if Tonya was thinking too much.

At the dances, Tonya got drunk, and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, shot cigarettes from the officers. And she did not think about those next 27, whom she was to execute in the morning. It's scary to kill only the first, the second, then, when the count goes to hundreds, it becomes just hard work.

Before dawn, when, after torture, the groans of the partisans sentenced to execution subsided, Tonya quietly climbed out of her bed and wandered for hours through the former stable, hastily converted into a prison, peering into the faces of those whom she was about to kill.

From the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 78:

“It seemed to me that the war would write off everything. I was just doing my job for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, a guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won't see you again, goodbye, sister! ..”

She was incredibly lucky. In the summer of 1943, when the fighting for the liberation of the Bryansk region began, Tony and several local prostitutes were diagnosed with a venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner.

From material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves in an unmarked field, where, according to the most conservative estimates, the remains of one and a half thousand people were buried. It was possible to restore the passport data of only about two hundred people shot by Tonya. The death of these people formed the basis for the accusation in absentia of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. They did not know anything more about her ...

“Our employees have been conducting the search for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was engaged in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s, told MK. - From time to time it got into the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Tonka couldn't disappear without a trace ?! It is now possible to accuse the authorities of incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was going on with jewelry. During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all the women of the Soviet Union who bore this name, patronymic and surname and matched their age - there were about 250 such Tonyok Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine-gunner has sunk into the water ... "

“You don't scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. - You know, I even feel sorry for her. This is all a war, damned, guilty, she broke her ... She had no choice - she could remain a man and then herself would be among those shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in the 41st year ”.

But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. - It just did not fit in my head how many lives she took. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in their dreams. Young, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not avert her eyes. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked to be sure to find her in order to end these nightmares. We understood that she could have married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "

However, none of the investigators had any idea that it was necessary to start looking for Antonina not with the Makarovs, but with the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her middle name as a surname, and allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retaliation for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.

But in the 76th year, one of the Moscow officials by the name of Parfenov was going abroad. Filling out the application for a foreign passport, he honestly listed the names of his brothers and sisters in a list, the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfenovs, and only one for some reason was Antonina Makarovna Makarova, married since 1945, Ginzburg, now living in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. Naturally, people from the KGB in civilian clothes were also present at the fateful meeting.

“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a respected woman, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. - Therefore, our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, for a whole year they watched Antonina Ginzburg, brought there one by one surviving witnesses, a former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when every last man said the same thing - it was she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by the noticeable fold on her forehead - doubts disappeared ”.

Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We didn’t confess to him what the accusation was against the one with whom he lived happily his whole life. They were afraid that the man would simply not survive this, ”the investigators said.

Viktor Ginzburg threw complaints at various organizations, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she had committed some crime - for example, financial embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. And he also talked about how, as a wounded boy, in April 1945, he was lying in a hospital near Konigsberg, and suddenly she, the new nurse Tonechka, entered the ward. Innocent, pure, as if not in a war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.

Antonina took her husband's surname, and after demobilization she went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, forgotten by God and people, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And he did not write any more complaints.

“The woman who was arrested from the pre-trial detention center did not convey a single line to her husband. And by the way, she also did not write anything to the two daughters whom she gave birth to after the war and did not ask to see him, ”says investigator Leonid Savoskin. - When we managed to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped, having escaped from a German hospital and got into our environment, corrected other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but that was the most terrible thing. There was a feeling that she was sincerely misunderstanding: why was she imprisoned, what was SO terrible she had done? It was as if a bloc of some kind from the war stood in her head, so that she probably would not go crazy herself. She remembered everything, each of her executions, but she did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. Desire to survive? A moment's darkening? Horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. Psychological examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane ”.

The investigators were very afraid of any excesses on the part of the accused: before, there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse. “You can't be afraid all the time,” she said. - The first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then calmed down. There are no such sins that a person would be tormented all his life. "

During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she conducted the executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina just looked askance at them, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and what she killed ... For her it was a distant past, a different life.

“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in a cell, to her jailers. - Now, after the verdict, I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will poke a finger at me. I think that I will be given probation for three years. For what more? Then you need to somehow reorganize life. And how much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I can get a job with you - the job is familiar ... "

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was passed. The court's decision came as an absolute surprise even for the people who were investigating, not to mention the defendant herself. All of the 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg's petitions for clemency in Moscow were rejected.

In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a woman punisher was involved. Never later were women in the USSR executed by a court verdict.

Took here-

Antonina Makarova was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region, in the village of Malaya Volkovka, in a large peasant family Makara Parfyonova... She studied at a rural school, and it was there that an episode occurred that influenced her future life. When Tonya came to the first grade, because of shyness, she could not give her last name - Parfyonova. Classmates began to shout "Yes, she is Makarova!", Meaning that Tony's father's name was Makar.

So, with the light hand of a teacher, at that time almost the only literate person in the village, Tonya Makarova appeared in the Parfyonov family.

The girl studied diligently, with diligence. She also had her own revolutionary heroine - Anka the machine gunner... This cinematic image had a real prototype - a nurse of the Chapaevsk division Maria Popova, which once in battle really had to replace the killed machine gunner.

After graduating from school, Antonina went to study in Moscow, where she was caught by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The girl went to the front as a volunteer.

Camping Wife of the Surroundings

All the horrors of the infamous Vyazemsky Cauldron fell to the lot of 19-year-old Komsomol member Makarova.

After the hardest battles, in complete encirclement from the entire unit, only a soldier turned out to be next to the young nurse Tonya Nikolay Fedchuk... With him, she wandered through the local forests, just trying to survive. They did not look for partisans, did not try to break through to their own - they fed themselves with whatever they had to do, sometimes they stole. The soldier did not stand on ceremony with Tonya, making her his "field wife". Antonina did not resist - she just wanted to live.

In January 1942, they went to the village of Krasny Kolodets, and then Fedchuk admitted that he was married and his family lived nearby. He left Tonya alone.

They did not drive Tonya out of the Red Well, but the local residents were already full of worries. And the strange girl did not strive to go to the partisans, did not rush to break through to ours, but strove to twist love with one of the men who remained in the village. Having turned the locals against herself, Tonya was forced to leave.

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg. Photo: Public Domain

Salary killer

Tony Makarova's wanderings ended in the area of ​​the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region. The infamous "Lokotskaya Republic", an administrative-territorial entity of Russian collaborators, operated here. In essence, these were the same German lackeys as in other places, only more clearly formalized.

The police patrol detained Tonya, but the partisan or the underground was not suspected of her. She liked the policemen, who took her to them, gave her drink, fed her and raped her. However, the latter is very relative - the girl, who only wanted to survive, agreed to everything.

Tonya did not play the role of a prostitute under the police for long - once, drunk, she was taken out into the courtyard and put behind the Maxim machine gun. There were people in front of the machine gun - men, women, old people, children. She was ordered to shoot. For Tony, who took not only nursing courses, but also machine gunners, this was not a big deal. True, a drunk woman did not really understand what she was doing. But, nevertheless, she coped with the task.

The next day, Makarova learned that she was now an official - an executioner with a salary of 30 German marks and with her own bunk.

The Lokot Republic mercilessly fought against the enemies of the new order - partisans, underground fighters, communists, other unreliable elements, as well as members of their families. Those arrested were herded into a barn, which served as a prison, and in the morning they were taken out to be shot.

The cell accommodated 27 people, and all of them had to be eliminated in order to make room for new ones.

Neither the Germans nor even the local police wanted to take on this work. And then Tonya, who appeared out of nowhere with her shooting abilities, came in very handy.

The girl did not lose her mind, but on the contrary, felt that her dream had come true. And let Anka shoot enemies, and she shoots women and children - the war will write off everything! But her life is finally getting better.

1,500 lives lost

Antonina Makarova's daily routine was as follows: in the morning, shooting 27 people with a machine gun, finishing off survivors with a pistol, cleaning weapons, in the evening schnapps and dancing in a German club, and at night love with some cute German or, at worst, with a policeman.

As an incentive, she was allowed to take the belongings of those killed. So Tonya acquired a bunch of outfits, which, however, had to be repaired - traces of blood and bullet holes immediately interfered with wearing.

However, sometimes Tonya allowed a "marriage" - several children managed to survive, because because of their small stature, the bullets passed over their heads. The children were taken out along with the corpses by the local residents who buried the dead and handed over to the partisans. Rumors about a woman executioner, "Tonka the machine gunner", "Tonka the Muscovite" spread around the area. Local partisans even announced a hunt for the executioner, but they could not get to it.

In total, about 1,500 people became victims of Antonina Makarova.

By the summer of 1943, Tony's life again took a sharp turn - the Red Army moved to the West, starting to liberate the Bryansk region. This did not bode well for the girl, but here she very opportunely fell ill with syphilis, and the Germans sent her to the rear, so that she would not re-infect the valiant sons of Great Germany.

Honored Veteran Instead of War Criminals

In the German hospital, however, it also soon became uncomfortable - the Soviet troops were approaching so quickly that only the Germans had time to evacuate, and there was no longer any concern for accomplices.

Realizing this, Tonya escaped from the hospital, once again being surrounded, but now Soviet. But her survival skills were honed - she managed to get documents proving that all this time Makarova was a nurse in a Soviet hospital.

Antonina successfully managed to enter the service in a Soviet hospital, where at the beginning of 1945 a young soldier, a real war hero, fell in love with her.

The guy made Tonya an offer, she answered with consent, and, having got married, the young people left after the end of the war for the Belarusian city of Lepel, home of her husband.

So the female executioner Antonina Makarova disappeared, and her place was taken by the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg.

They've been looking for her for thirty years

Soviet investigators learned about the monstrous deeds of the "Tonka-machine-gunner" immediately after the liberation of the Bryansk region. The remains of about one and a half thousand people were found in mass graves, but only two hundred were identified.

They interrogated the witnesses, checked, specified - but they could not attack the trail of the woman-punisher.

Meanwhile, Antonina Ginzburg led the ordinary life of a Soviet person - she lived, worked, raised two daughters, even met with schoolchildren, talking about her heroic military past. Of course, without mentioning the deeds of "Tonka the machine gunner".

The KGB spent more than three decades looking for her, but found it almost by accident. A certain citizen Parfyonov, going abroad, submitted a questionnaire with information about his relatives. There, among the solid Parfyonovs, for some reason, Antonina Makarova, married to Ginzburg, was listed as her own sister.

Yes, how that mistake of the teacher helped Tonya, how many years thanks to her she remained out of reach of justice!

The KGB operatives worked with jewelry - it was impossible to blame an innocent person for such atrocities. Antonina Ginzburg was checked from all sides, witnesses, even a former policeman-lover, were secretly brought to Lepel. And only after all of them confirmed that Antonina Ginzburg was "Tonka the machine gunner", she was arrested.

She did not deny, talked about everything calmly, said that nightmares did not torment her. She did not want to communicate with her daughters or her husband. And the front-line spouse ran around the authorities, threatened with a complaint Brezhnev, even at the UN - demanded the release of his wife. Exactly until the investigators decided to tell him what his beloved Tonya is accused of.

After that, the dashing, gallant veteran turned gray and aged overnight. The family disowned Antonina Ginzburg and left Lepel. You cannot wish the enemy what these people had to endure.

Retribution

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was tried in Bryansk in the fall of 1978. This was the last major trial of traitors to the Motherland in the USSR and the only trial of a woman punisher.

Antonina herself was convinced that, due to the years ago, the punishment could not be too severe, she even believed that she would receive a suspended sentence. She only regretted that because of the shame she had to move again and change jobs. Even the investigators, knowing about the post-war exemplary biography of Antonina Ginzburg, believed that the court would show leniency. Moreover, 1979 was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.

However, on November 20, 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg to capital punishment - execution.

At the trial, her guilt was documented in the murder of 168 people from those whose identities were identified. More than 1300 remained unknown victims of the "Tonka-machine-gunner". There are crimes that cannot be forgiven.

At six in the morning on August 11, 1979, after all requests for clemency had been rejected, the sentence against Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was carried out.

In September 1918, the decree "On the Red Terror" was proclaimed, which gave rise to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Russia. In essence, having legalized the methods of radical elimination of dissent, the Bolsheviks untied the hands of both outspoken sadists and mentally unhealthy people who received pleasure and moral satisfaction from the murders.

Strange as it may seem, the representatives of the fairer sex distinguished themselves with special zeal.

Varvara Yakovleva

During the civil war, Yakovleva acted as deputy, and then head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The daughter of a Moscow merchant, she showed striking toughness even for her contemporaries. In the name of a "bright future" Yakovleva was ready, without batting an eye, to send as many "enemies of the revolution" to the next world. The exact number of her victims is unknown. According to historians, this woman personally killed several hundred "counter-revolutionaries".

Her active participation in mass repressions is confirmed by the execution lists of October-December 1918, published signed by Yakovleva herself. However, soon the "executioner of the revolution" was recalled from Petrograd on the personal order of Vladimir Lenin. The fact is that Yakovleva led a promiscuous sex life, changed gentlemen like gloves, so she turned into an easily accessible source of information for spies.

Evgeniya Bosh

"Distinguished" in the field of executions and Eugene Bosch. The daughter of a German immigrant and a Bessarabian noblewoman, she took an active part in revolutionary life since 1907. In 1918 Bosch became the head of the Penza committee of the party, its main task was to confiscate grain from the local peasantry.

In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch's cruelty in the suppression of peasant uprisings was recalled decades later. Those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people, she called "weak and soft", accused of sabotage.

Most historians studying the topic of the Red Terror believe that Bosch was mentally ill and herself provoked peasant demonstrations for subsequent demonstrative reprisals. Eyewitnesses recalled that in the village of Kuchki the punitive woman shot one of the peasants without batting an eye, which caused a chain reaction of violence from the food detachments subordinate to her.

Vera Grebenshchikova

Odessa punitive Vera Grebenshchikova, nicknamed Dora, worked in a local "emergency department". According to some reports, she personally sent 400 people to the next world, according to others - 700. Most of the nobles, white officers, too well-off, in her opinion, the bourgeois, as well as all those whom the woman executioner considered unreliable fell under the hot hand of Grebenshchikova ...

Dora liked more than just killing. She enjoyed the many hours of torture of the unfortunate man, causing him unbearable pain. There is information that she tore off the skin from her victims, tore out their nails, and engaged in self-harm.

A prostitute named Alexandra, her sex partner, who was 18 years old, helped Grebenshchikova in this "craft". She has about 200 lives on her account.

Rose Schwartz

Lesbian love was also practiced by Rosa Schwartz, a Kiev prostitute who ended up in the Cheka from a denunciation of one of the clients. Together with her friend Vera Schwartz, she also loved to practice sadistic games.

The ladies wanted a thrill, so they came up with the most sophisticated ways to mock the "counter-voluntary elements." Only after the victim was brought to an extreme degree of exhaustion was she killed.

Rebekah Maisel

In Vologda, one more "Valkyrie of the revolution" - Rebekah Eisel (Plastinina's pseudonym) was infinite. The husband of the woman executioner was Mikhail Kedrov, the head of the special department of the Cheka. Nervous, embittered by the whole world, they took out their complexes on others.

The Sweet Couple lived in a railway carriage near the station. Interrogations were also conducted there. They shot me a little further away - 50 meters from the carriage. Aysel personally killed at least a hundred people.

The executioner woman also managed to make some fun in Arkhangelsk. There she carried out the death sentence against 80 White Guards and 40 civilians suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. By her own order, the Chekists flooded a barge with 500 people on board.

Rosalia Zemlyachka

But in cruelty and ruthlessness there was no equal to Rosalia Zemlyachka. Coming from a family of merchants, in 1920 she received the post of the Crimean Regional Party Committee, then she became a member of the local revolutionary committee.

This woman outlined her goals at once: speaking before members of the same party in December 1920, she said that the Crimea must be cleared of 300 thousand "White Guard elements." The purge began immediately. Mass executions of captured soldiers, Wrangel officers, members of their families and representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who failed to leave the peninsula, as well as "too wealthy" local residents - all this became a common occurrence in the life of Crimea in those terrible years.

In her opinion, it was unwise to spend ammunition on "enemies of the revolution", therefore, those sentenced to death were drowned, tied to their feet with stones, loaded onto barges, and then drowned in the open sea. In this barbaric way, at least 50 thousand people were killed. All in all, under the leadership of Zemlyachka, about 100 thousand people were sent to the next world. However, the writer Ivan Shmelev, who was an eyewitness to the terrible events, stated that there were actually 120 thousand victims. It is noteworthy that the ashes of the punisher are buried in the Kremlin wall.

Antonina Makarova

Makarova (Tonka the machine gunner) - the executioner of the "Lokot Republic" - a collaborationist semi-autonomy during the Great Patriotic War. She was surrounded, she preferred to go to the service of the Germans as a policeman. I personally shot 200 people with a machine gun. After the war, Makarova, who got married and changed her last name to Ginzburg, was searched for for more than 30 years. Finally, in 1978 she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.

In September 1918, the decree "On the Red Terror" was proclaimed, which gave rise to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Russia. In essence, having legalized the methods of radical elimination of dissenters, the Bolsheviks untied the hands of outspoken sadists and mentally unhealthy people who received pleasure and moral satisfaction from the murders.

Strange as it may seem, the representatives of the fairer sex distinguished themselves with special zeal.

Varvara Yakovleva

During the civil war, Yakovleva acted as deputy, and then head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The daughter of a Moscow merchant, she showed striking toughness even for her contemporaries. In the name of a "bright future" Yakovleva was ready, without batting an eye, to send as many "enemies of the revolution" to the next world. The exact number of her victims is unknown. According to historians, this woman personally killed several hundred "counter-revolutionaries".

Her active participation in mass repressions is confirmed by the execution lists of October-December 1918, published signed by Yakovleva herself. However, soon the "executioner of the revolution" was recalled from Petrograd on the personal order of Vladimir Lenin. The fact is that Yakovleva led a promiscuous sex life, changed gentlemen like gloves, so she turned into an easily accessible source of information for spies.

Evgeniya Bosh

"Distinguished" in the field of executions and Eugene Bosch. The daughter of a German immigrant and a Bessarabian noblewoman, she took an active part in revolutionary life since 1907. In 1918 Bosch became the head of the Penza committee of the party, its main task was to confiscate grain from the local peasantry.

In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch's cruelty in the suppression of peasant uprisings was recalled decades later. Those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people, she called "weak and soft", accused of sabotage.

Most historians studying the topic of the Red Terror believe that Bosch was mentally ill and herself provoked peasant demonstrations for subsequent demonstrative reprisals. Eyewitnesses recalled that in the village of Kuchki the punitive woman shot one of the peasants without batting an eye, which caused a chain reaction of violence from the food detachments subordinate to her.

Vera Grebenshchikova

Odessa punitive Vera Grebenshchikova, nicknamed Dora, worked in a local "emergency department". According to some sources, she personally sent 400 people to the next world, according to others - 700. Most of the nobles, white officers, too wealthy, in her opinion, the bourgeois, as well as all those whom the executioner woman considered unreliable fell under the hot hand of Grebenshchikova ...

Dora liked more than just killing. She enjoyed the many hours of torture of the unfortunate man, causing him unbearable pain. There is information that she tore off the skin from her victims, tore out their nails, and engaged in self-harm.

Assisted Grebenshchikova in this "craft" a prostitute named Alexandra - her intimate partner, whose age was 18 years. She has about 200 lives on her account.

Rose Schwartz

Lesbian love was also practiced by Rosa Schwartz - a Kiev prostitute who got into the Cheka from a denunciation of one of the clients. Together with her friend Vera Schwartz, she also loved to practice sadistic games.

The ladies wanted a thrill, so they came up with the most sophisticated ways to mock the "counter-revolutionary elements." Only after the victim was brought to an extreme degree of exhaustion was she killed.

Rebekah Maisel

In Vologda, one more "Valkyrie of the revolution" - Rebekah Eisel (Plastinina's pseudonym) was infinite. The husband of the woman executioner was Mikhail Kedrov, the head of the special department of the Cheka. Nervous, embittered by the whole world, they took out their complexes on others.

The Sweet Couple lived in a railway carriage near the station. Interrogations were also conducted there. They shot me a little further away - 50 meters from the carriage. Aysel personally killed at least a hundred people.

The executioner woman also managed to get around in Arkhangelsk. There she carried out the death sentence against 80 White Guards and 40 civilians suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. By her own order, the Chekists flooded a barge with 500 people on board.

Rosalia Zemlyachka

But in cruelty and ruthlessness there was no equal to Rosalia Zemlyachka. Coming from a family of merchants, in 1920 she received the post of the Crimean Regional Party Committee, then she became a member of the local revolutionary committee.

This woman outlined her goals at once: speaking to members of the same party in December 1920, she said that the Crimea must be cleared of 300 thousand "White Guard elements." The purge began immediately. Mass executions of captured soldiers, Wrangel officers, members of their families and representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who failed to leave the peninsula, as well as “too wealthy” local residents - all this became a common occurrence in the life of Crimea in those terrible years.

In her opinion, it was unwise to spend ammunition on "enemies of the revolution", therefore, those sentenced to death were drowned, tied to their feet with stones, loaded onto barges, and then drowned in the open sea. In this barbaric way, at least 50 thousand people were killed. All in all, under the leadership of Zemlyachka, about 100 thousand people were sent to the next world. However, the writer Ivan Shmelev, who witnessed the terrible events, stated that there were actually 120 thousand victims. It is noteworthy that the ashes of the punisher were buried in the Kremlin wall.

Antonina Makarova

Makarova (Tonka the machine gunner) - the executioner of the "Lokot Republic" - a collaborationist semi-autonomy during the Great Patriotic War. She was surrounded, she preferred to go to the service of the Germans as a policeman. I personally shot 200 people with a machine gun. After the war, Makarova, who got married and changed her last name to Ginzburg, was searched for for more than 30 years. Finally, in 1978, she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.

WOMEN-EXECUTIONERS

Until the 20th century, there were no professional women executioners in history, and only occasionally there were female serial killers and sadists. Landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, entered Russian history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs.

During her husband's life, she did not notice a particular propensity for violence, but soon after his death, she began to regularly beat the servants. The main reason for punishment was unfair attitude to work (washing floors or doing laundry). She struck the guilty peasant women with the first object that came to hand (most often it was a piece of wood). Then the guilty grooms were flogged and sometimes beaten to death. Saltychikha could pour boiling water over the victim or singe her hair on her head. She used hot curling irons for torture, with which she grabbed the victim by the ears. She often dragged people by the hair and hit their heads hard against the wall. According to witnesses, many of those killed by her did not have hair on their heads. The victims, on her orders, were starved and tied naked in the cold. Saltychikha loved to kill brides who were going to get married in the near future. In November 1759, in the course of torture that lasted almost a day, she killed a young servant Khrisanf Andreev, and in September 1761 Saltykov personally beat the boy Lukyan Mikheev. She also tried to kill the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, the poet's grandfather Fyodor Tyutchev. Land surveyor Tyutchev for a long time was in a love relationship with her, but decided to marry the girl Panyutina. Saltykova ordered her people to burn down Panyutina's house and gave sulfur, gunpowder and tow for this. But the serfs were frightened. When Tyutchev and Panyutina got married and went to their Oryol estate, Saltykova ordered her peasants to kill them, but the executors reported the order to Tyutchev (156).

Numerous complaints from peasants led only to severe punishments for the complainants, since Saltychikha had many influential relatives and was able to bribe officials. But two peasants, Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, in 1762 managed to convey a complaint to Catherine I.

During the investigation, which lasted six years, searches were carried out in Saltychikha's Moscow house and her estate, hundreds of witnesses were interviewed, and accounting books containing information about bribes to officials were seized. Witnesses told about the killings, gave the dates and names of the victims. From their testimony it followed that Saltykova had killed 75 people, mostly women and girls.

The investigator in the case of the widow Saltykova, court adviser Volkov, based on the data from the house books of the suspect, compiled a list of 138 names of serfs whose fate was to be clarified. According to official records, 50 people were considered “dead from disease”, 72 people “were missing”, 16 were considered “leaving for their husbands” or “on the run”. Many suspicious death records have been identified. For example, a twenty-year-old girl might go to work as a servant and die a few weeks later. The groom Ermolai Ilyin, who filed a complaint against Saltychikha, died in a row three wives. Some peasant women were allegedly released to their native villages, after which they either immediately died or disappeared without a trace.

Saltychikha was taken into custody. During interrogations, the threat of torture was used (no permission was obtained for torture), but she did not confess to anything. As a result of the investigation, Volkov came to the conclusion that Daria Saltykova was “undoubtedly guilty” of the death of 38 people and “left in suspicion” regarding the guilt of 26 more people.

The trial lasted over three years. The judges found the accused "guilty without leniency" in thirty-eight proven murders and torture of courtyard people. By the decision of the Senate and Empress Catherine II, Saltykova was stripped of her noble rank and sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only with the chief of the guard and a woman nun). She was also sentenced to serve for an hour a special "revolting show", during which the convict was to stand on the scaffold chained to a post with the inscription over her head "torturer and murderer."

The punishment was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. In the Moscow Ivanovsky convent, where the convict arrived after being punished on Red Square, a special "penitential" cell was prepared for her. The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (2.1 meters). It was located below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of getting into the daylight. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only a candle stub was passed to her during the meal. Saltychikha was not allowed to walk, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence. On major church holidays she was taken out of prison and brought to a small window in the wall of the church, through which she could listen to the liturgy. The strict regime of detention lasted 11 years, after which it was weakened: the convict was transferred to a stone annex to the temple with a window. Visitors to the temple were allowed to look out the window and even talk to the prisoner. According to the historian, "Saltykov, when it happened, the curious would gather at the window behind the iron grating of her dungeon, swear, spit and stick a stick through the window that was open in the summer." After the death of the prisoner, her cell was converted into a sacristy. She spent thirty-three years in prison and died on November 27, 1801. She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where all her relatives were buried (157).

Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan became famous for her attempt on Lenin's life at the Michelson plant. In 1908, being an anarchist, she made a bomb, which suddenly exploded in her hands. After this explosion, she almost went blind. Half blind, she shot at Lenin from two steps - once missed, and twice wounded him in the arm. She was shot four days later, and the corpse was burned and scattered in the wind. In Lenin, Professor Passoni describes her as crazy. During the Civil War in Ukraine, a gang of other passionaries, the anarchist Maruska Nikiforova, who sided with Father Makhno, committed atrocities. Before the revolution, she served a twenty-year term in hard labor. The whites eventually caught and shot her. It turned out that she is a hermaphrodite, i.e. not a man or a woman, but from those who were previously called witches.

In addition to Marusya Nikiforova and Fanny Kaplan, there were many other women who influenced the outcome of the bloody October coup. The activities of such revolutionaries as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Alexandra Kollontai (Domontovich), Inessa Armand, Serafima Gopner, Maria Aveide, Lyudmila Stal, Evgenia Shlikhter, Sofya Brichkina, Cecilia Zelikson, Zlata Rodomyslskaya, Claudia Sverdlova, Nina Didrikil and many others undoubtedly contributed to the victory of the revolution, which led to the greatest calamities, the destruction or expulsion of the best sons and daughters of Russia. The activities of the majority of these "fiery revolutionaries" were mainly limited to "party work" and there is no direct blood on them, that is, they did not pass death sentences and did not personally kill in the basements of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD nobles, entrepreneurs, professors, officers, priests and other representatives of "hostile" classes. However, some "Valkyries of the revolution" skillfully combined party propaganda and "combat" work.

The most striking representative of this cohort is the prototype of the commissar in the "Optimistic Tragedy" Reisner Larisa Mikhailovna (1896-1926). She was born in Poland. Father is a professor, a German Jew, mother is a Russian noblewoman. She graduated from a gymnasium and a neuropsychiatric institute in St. Petersburg. Member of the Bolshevik Party since 1918. During the Civil War, a soldier, political worker of the Red Army, commissar of the Baltic Fleet and the Volga Flotilla. Contemporaries remembered her giving orders to revolutionary sailors in an elegant naval overcoat or leather jacket, with a revolver in hand. The writer Lev Nikulin met with Reisner in the summer of 1918 in Moscow. According to him, Larisa chanted in a conversation: “We are shooting and we will shoot counter-revolutionaries! We will! "

In May 1918, L. Reisner married Fyodor Raskolnikov, Deputy People's Commissar for Naval Affairs, and soon left with her husband, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, to Nizhny Novgorod. Now she is the flag secretary of the commander of the Volga military flotilla, the commissar of the reconnaissance detachment, the correspondent of the Izvestia newspaper, where her essays "Letters from the Front" are published. In a letter to her parents, she writes: “Trotsky summoned me to his place, I told him a lot of interesting things. We are now great friends, I was appointed by order of the army as commissar of the intelligence department at headquarters (please do not confuse with espionage counterintelligence), recruited and armed thirty Magyars for bold assignments, got them horses, weapons, and from time to time I go with them on reconnaissance ... I speak German with them. " In this role Larisa was described by another passionary, Elizaveta Drabkina: “A woman in a soldier's tunic and a wide plaid skirt, blue and blue, was galloping ahead on a black horse. Deftly holding on to the saddle, she boldly rushed across the plowed field. It was Larisa Reisner, the chief of army intelligence. The rider's pretty face burned with the wind. She had bright eyes, chestnut braids grabbed at the back of her head ran down from her temples, a stern wrinkle crossed her high, clean forehead. Larisa Reisner was accompanied by the soldiers of the reconnaissance company of the International Battalion. "

After heroic deeds on the Volga, Reisner, together with her husband, who commanded the Baltic Fleet, worked in Petrograd. When Raskolnikov was appointed diplomatic representative in Afghanistan, she left with him, however, leaving him, she returned to Russia. Upon her return from Central Asia, Larisa Reisner was expelled from the party for "behavior unworthy of a communist." Elizabeth Poretski, the wife of intelligence officer Ignas Poretski, who knew Reisner intimately, writes in her book: “There were rumors that during her stay in Bukhara she had numerous contacts with the officers of the British army, to meet with whom she went to the barracks naked, in the same fur coat. Larisa told me that the author of these inventions was Raskolnikov, who turned out to be insanely jealous and unbridledly cruel. She showed me the scar on my back from his whip. Although she was expelled from the party and the young woman's position remained unclear, she was not deprived of the opportunity to travel abroad due to her relationship with Radek ... ”(161: 70). Reisner became the wife of another revolutionary, Karl Radek, with whom she tried to light the fire of the "proletarian" revolution in Germany. She wrote several books, wrote poetry. The bullets that passed her at the front killed all those who loved her. The first - her lover in his youth, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot in the Cheka. Raskolnikov in 1938 was declared an "enemy of the people", became a defector and was liquidated by the NKVD in Nice, France. Karl Radek, a "conspirator and spy of all foreign intelligence services," also died in the dungeons of the NKVD. One can only guess what fate awaited her, if not for illness and death.

Reisner died of typhoid fever at the age of thirty. She was buried at the "Communards' site" at the Vagankovskoye cemetery. One of the obituaries said: "She should have died somewhere in the steppe, in the sea, in the mountains, with a tightly gripped rifle or Mauser." The life of this “Valkyrie of the Revolution” was very briefly and figuratively described by the talented journalist Mikhail Koltsov (Fridlyand), who knew her well and was also shot: “The spring laid in the life of this happily gifted woman unfolded spaciously and beautifully ... to the lower reaches of the Volga, engulfed in fire and death, then to the Red Fleet, then - through the Central Asian deserts - into the deep jungles of Afghanistan, from there - to the barricades of the Hamburg uprising, from there - to coal mines, to oil fields, to all peaks, to all rapids and nooks the world, where the elements of struggle are bubbling - forward, forward, on a par with the revolutionary locomotive rushed the hot, indomitable horse of her life. "

Mokievskaya-Zubok Lyudmila Georgievna was also a militant and bright revolutionary, whose biography surprisingly resembles the biography of Larisa Reisner. She is a student of the same Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute, which "gave out" a whole constellation of revolutionaries and passionaries. Born in Odessa in 1895. Mother, Mokievskaya-Zubok Glafira Timofeevna, noblewoman, did not take part in political life. Father Bykhovsky Naum Yakovlevich. Jew, socialist-revolutionary since 1901, in 1917 - member of the Central Committee. He lived in Leningrad and Moscow. He worked in trade unions. Arrested in July 1937, shot in 1938. Mokievskaya-Zubok was the first and only commander in history and at the same time commissar of an armored train. In 1917, being a maximalist Socialist Revolutionary, Lyudmila came to Smolny and connected her life with the revolution. In December 1917, Podvoisky sent her to the Ukraine to get food, but she, under the name of a student Mokiyevsky Leonid Grigorievich, entered the Red Army and from February 25, 1918 became commander of the armored train "3rd Bryansk" and at the same time the commissar of the Bryansk combat detachment ... She fights with the Germans and Ukrainians on the Kiev-Poltava-Kharkov line, then with the Krasnovites near Tsaritsyn, her train participates in the suppression of the Yaroslavl rebellion. At the end of 1918, the armored train arrived at the Sormovo plant for repairs, where Lyudmila received another armored train - "Power to the Soviets" and was appointed its commander and commissar. The armored train was assigned to the operational subordination of the 13th Army and fought in the Donbass on the De-Baltsevo-Kupyanka line. In the battle near Debaltsevo on March 9, 1919, Mokievskaya died at the age of twenty-three. She was buried in Kupyansk with a large crowd of people, the funeral was captured on film. After the arrival of the Whites in Kupyansk, the body of Lyudmila Mokievskaya was dug up and thrown into a dump in a ravine. They buried her again only after the re-arrival of the Reds (162: 59-63).

However, there was another, completely special category of overly active, and often just mentally ill "revolutionaries" who left a truly terrible mark on the history of Russia. How many of them were there? We will probably never get an answer to this question. The communist press shyly avoided describing the "deeds" of such "heroines". Judging by the well-known photograph of members of the Kherson Cheka, the ferocity of which is documented, where there are three women out of nine photographed employees, this type of "revolutionary" is not uncommon. What are their fates? Some of them were destroyed by the system they served, some committed suicide, and some of the most "honored" ones were buried in the best Moscow cemeteries. The ashes of some of them are even walled up in the Kremlin wall. The names of most of the executioners are still kept with seven seals as an important state secret. Let us name the names of at least some of these women, who especially distinguished themselves and left a bloody mark in the history of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. By what principle and how to rank them? It would be most correct according to the amount of blood shed by each of them, but how much was shed and who measured it? Who is the bloodiest of them all? How to calculate it? Most likely, this is our Countrywoman. Zalkind Rozalia Samoilovna (Zemlyachka) (1876-1947). Jewess. Born into the family of a merchant of the 1st guild. She studied at the Kiev women's gymnasium and the medical faculty of the Lyon University. She was engaged in revolutionary activities from the age of 17 (and what did she lack?). Prominent Soviet statesman and party leader, party member since 1896, active participant in the revolution of 1905-1907. and the October armed uprising. Party aliases (nicknames) Demon, Zemlyachka.

During the Civil War as a political worker in the Red Army. Member of the Central Committee of the party in 1939, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR since 1937. In 1921, she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner - "for services in political education and increasing the combat capability of the Red Army units." She was the first woman to receive such an award. For what "merits" the order was received, it will be clear from the further description of her "exploits". Later she was awarded two Orders of Lenin.

Speaking on December 6, 1920 at a meeting of the Moscow party activists, Vladimir Ilyich said: “There are 300 thousand bourgeoisie in Crimea now. This is the source of future speculation, espionage, and any help to the capitalists. But we are not afraid of them. We say that we will take them, distribute them, subjugate them, and digest them. " When the victors, overwhelmed with celebration, invited Lev Davidovich Trotsky to the chair of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Republic of Crimea, he replied: "I will then come to Crimea when not a single White Guard remains on its territory." “The war will continue as long as at least one white officer remains in the Red Crimea,” his deputy E.M. Sklyansky.

In 1920, the secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP (b) Zemlyachka, together with the leader of the emergency "troika" in Crimea, Georgy Pyatakov, and the chairman of the revolutionary committee, "specially authorized" Bela Kun (Aron Kogan, who had previously flooded Hungary with blood), began to "digest" the Crimean bourgeoisie: organized mass executions of captured soldiers and officers of the army P.N. Wrangel, members of their families, representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who found themselves in the Crimea, as well as local residents who belonged to the "exploiting classes." The victims of Zemlyachka and Kuna-Kogan, first of all, were the officers who surrendered, believing the widespread official appeal of Frunze, who promised those who surrender, life and freedom. According to the latest data, about 100 thousand people were shot in Crimea. The writer Ivan Shmelev, an eyewitness to the events, names 120 thousand people shot. The countrywoman owns the phrase: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them - to drown them in the sea." Her accomplice Bela Kun said: "Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counter-revolutionary will jump out, and since Crimea is three years behind in its revolutionary development, we will quickly move it to the general revolutionary level of Russia ..."

Considering the special, truly brutal nature of the crime, let us dwell on the activities of Rosalia Zalkind in more detail. Mass repressions under the leadership of Zemlyachka were carried out by the Crimean Extraordinary Commission (KrymChK), county Cheka, TransChK, MorChK, headed by Jewish Chekists Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman, Tolmats, Udris and Pole Redens (163: 682-693).

The activities of the special departments of the 4th and 6th armies were led by Efim Evdokimov. In just a few months he "managed" to destroy 12 thousand "White Guard elements", including 30 governors, 150 generals and more than 300 colonels. For his bloody "exploits" he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, however, without a public announcement of this. On the award list of Evdokimov, the commander of the Southern Front M.V. Frunze left behind a unique resolution: “I consider the activities of Comrade Evdokimov deserving of encouragement. Due to the special nature of this activity, it is not very convenient to carry out the awards in the usual manner ”. The famous polar explorer, twice Hero of the Soviet Union and holder of eight Orders of Lenin, Doctor of Geographical Sciences, honorary citizen of the city of Sevastopol, Rear Admiral Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, who “worked” in the period under review as a commandant, i.e. chief executioner and investigator of the Crimean Cheka.

The result of his KGB career was the award of the Order of the Red Banner ... and a long stay in the clinic for the mentally ill. Not surprisingly, the renowned Arctic explorer disliked reminiscing about his past. The destruction of the unfortunate took nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned in the sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time afterwards, through the clear sea water, the standing dead were visible in rows. They say that, tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at a machine gun. Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of stench from the decomposing corpses of those shot, which were not even buried in the ground. The pits behind the Vorontsov garden and the greenhouses in the Krymtaev estate were full of the corpses of the executed, lightly sprinkled with earth, and the cadets of the cavalry school (future red commanders) traveled a mile and a half from their barracks to knock out gold teeth from the mouths of the executed with stones, and this hunt always gave great booty. " ... During the first winter, 96 thousand people out of 800 thousand of the Crimean population were shot. The slaughter went on for months. The executions went all over the Crimea, machine guns worked day and night.

The poems about the tragic massacre in Crimea, written by the eyewitness of those events, the poet Maximilian Voloshin, burn with horror from everything that happened there:

The east wind howled through the broken windows

And machine guns pounded at night,

Whistling like a scourge over the meat of the naked

Male and female bodies ...

Winter was Holy Week that year,

And red May merged with bloody Easter,

But that spring, Christ did not rise again.

Not a single mass grave of those years in the Crimea has yet been opened. In Soviet times, a ban was imposed on this topic. Rosalia Zemlyachka ruled in the Crimea so that the Black Sea turned red with blood. Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like many other executioners of the Russian people, are buried in the Kremlin wall. We can only add that Pyatakov, Bela Kun, Evdokimov, Redens, Mikhelson, Dagin, Zelikman and many other executioners did not escape retribution. They were shot in 1937-1940.

Ostrovskaya Nadezhda Ilyinichna (1881-1937). Jewish woman, member of the CPSU (b). Nadezhda Ilyinichna was born in 1881 in Kiev in the family of a doctor. She graduated from the Yalta women's gymnasium, in 1901 she joined the Bolshevik Party. She took an active part in the events of the revolution of 1905-1907. in Crimea. In 1917-1918. Chairman of the Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, the right hand of Zemlyachka. She supervised executions in Sevastopol and Evpatoria. The Russian historian and politician Sergei Petrovich Melgunov wrote that in the Crimea, the most actively executed in Sevastopol. In the book “Sevastopol Golgotha: Life and Death of the Officer Corps of Imperial Russia”, Arkady Mikhailovich Chikin, referring to documents and testimonies, says: “On November 29, 1920 in Sevastopol, on the pages of the Izvestiya of the Provisional Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee, the first list of executed people was published. Their number was 1,634 people (278 women). On November 30, the second list was published - 1202 executed people (88 women). According to the newspaper "Latest News" (No. 198), in the first week after the liberation of Sevastopol, more than 8,000 people were shot. The total number of those executed in Sevastopol and Balaklava is about 29 thousand people. Among these unfortunates were not only military ranks, but also officials, as well as a large number of people with a high social status. They were not only shot, but also drowned in the Sevastopol bays, having stones tied to their feet ”(ibid., P. 122).

And here are the recollections of an eyewitness given by the author: “Nakhimovsky Avenue is hung with the corpses of officers, soldiers and civilians arrested in the street and immediately executed without trial. The city died out, the population is hiding in cellars, in attics. All fences, walls of houses, telegraph and telephone poles, shop windows, signboards are pasted over with posters “death to traitors ...”. Officers were always hung with shoulder straps. Most of the civilians dangled about half-naked. They shot the sick and the wounded, young school girls - sisters of mercy and employees of the Red Cross, zemstvo leaders and journalists, merchants and officials. In Sevastopol, about 500 port workers were executed for the fact that during the evacuation they ensured loading onto the ships of Wrangel's troops ”(ibid., P. 125). A. Chikin also cites testimony published in the Orthodox bulletin "Sergiev Posad": “... In Sevastopol, victims were tied up in groups, inflicted serious wounds on them with sabers and revolvers and thrown half-dead into the sea. In the Sevastopol port there is a place where divers refused to go down: two of them, after being at the bottom of the sea, went crazy. When the third decided to jump into the water, he came out and declared that he had seen a whole crowd of drowned men tied with their feet to large stones. Their hands were set in motion by the flow of water, their hair was disheveled. Among these corpses, a priest in a cassock with wide sleeves raised his hands as if making a terrible speech. "

The book also describes the executions in Yevpatoria on January 18, 1918. The cruiser "Romania" and the transport "Truvor" were in the roadstead. “The officers went out one by one, flexing their joints and greedily swallowing the fresh sea air. On both courts, executions began at the same time. The sun was shining, and the crowd of relatives, wives and children crowded on the pier could see everything. And I saw. But their despair, their pleas for mercy only amused the sailors. " In two days of executions, about 300 officers were killed on both ships. Some officers were burned alive in furnaces, and before the murder they were tortured for 15-20 minutes. The lips, genitals, and sometimes hands were cut off to the unfortunate and thrown into the water alive. The entire family of Colonel Seslavin was kneeling on the pier. The colonel did not immediately go to the bottom, and a sailor shot him from the side of the ship. Many were completely undressed, their hands tied and their heads pulled back towards them, and thrown into the sea. The badly wounded staff captain Novatsky was burned alive in the ship's furnace after being torn off the bloody bandages that had dried to his wounds. From the shore, his wife and 12-year-old son watched his bullying, to whom she closed her eyes, and he howled wildly. The executions were supervised by a "thin, hair-cut lady" teacher Nadezhda Ostrovskaya. Unfortunately, there is no information about the revolutionary awards of this executioner in a skirt. True, in Evpatoria, a street is not named after her. She was shot on November 4, 1937 in the Sandarmokh tract. Having made so many efforts to consolidate communist power, Ostrovskaya, like many other party functionaries, was destroyed by the very system in the creation of which she was once involved. Fighting against officers, nobles and other "enemy elements", Ostrovskaya could hardly imagine that years later she would share their fate.

The crime family of the Yevpatoria Bolsheviks Nemichs played a big role in the fate of many of those executed in Crimea, which became a part of the judicial commission that met at Truvor in the days of the shootings. This commission was created by a revolutionary committee and dealt with the cases of those arrested. Its structure, along with the "revolutionary sailors", included Antonina Nemich, her partner Feoktist Andriadi, Yulia Matveeva (née Nemich), her husband Vasily Matveev and Varvara Grebennikova (née Nemich). This "holy family" determined the "degree of counter-revolutionary and bourgeois" and gave the go-ahead for execution. “Ladies” from the “Holy Family” encouraged the executioners and were themselves present at the executions. At one of the rallies, sailor Kulikov proudly said that he had thrown 60 people overboard into the sea with his own hand.

In March 1919, Nemichi and other organizers of the murders in the Yevpatoriya raid were shot by whites. After the final establishment of Soviet power in Crimea, the remains of the sisters and other executed Bolsheviks were buried with honors in a mass grave in the center of the city, over which in 1926 the first monument was erected - a five-meter obelisk crowned with a scarlet five-pointed star. A few decades later, in 1982, the monument was replaced by another. At its foot, you can still see fresh flowers. One of the streets in Evpatoria is named in honor of the Nemichs.

Braude Vera Petrovna (1890-1961). Revolutionary Socialist Revolutionary. She was born in Kazan. At the end of 1917, by decision of the Presidium of the Kazan Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies, she was sent to work on the investigative commission of the provincial tribunal, in the department for combating counterrevolution. From that moment on, all her further activities were associated with the Cheka. In September 1918 she joined the CPSU (b). She worked in the Cheka in Kazan. With her own hands she shot the "White Guard bastard", during a search she personally undressed not only women, but also men. The Social Revolutionaries in exile who visited her for a personal search and interrogation wrote: “There is absolutely nothing human left in her. This is a machine doing its job coldly and soullessly, evenly and calmly ... And at times one had to be perplexed that this was a special kind of a sadistic woman, or simply a completely deafened human machine ”. At this time, lists of counter-revolutionaries who were being shot were printed in Kazan almost every day. They talked about Vera Braud in whispers and with horror (164).

During the Civil War, she continued to work in the Cheka of the Eastern Front. Denying herself from the persecuted fellow Socialist-Revolutionaries, Braude wrote: “In further work as deputy. I fought mercilessly against the [social] - [revolutionaries of all kinds, participating in their arrests and executions, of the chairman] of the Cheka in Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk and Tomsk. In Siberia, a member of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, the well-known right-wing Frumkin, in spite of the Novosibirsk Provincial Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), even tried to dismiss me from my job as chairman of the Cheka in Novosibirsk for shooting [socialist] - [revolutionaries], whom he considered "irreplaceable specialists." For the liquidation of the White Guard and Socialist-Revolutionary organizations in Siberia, V.P. Braude was awarded a weapon and a gold watch, and in 1934 she received the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She was repressed in 1938. Charged with being “a cadre socialist revolutionary; on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Left SRs, she made her way into the organs of the Cheka and the CPSU (b); informed the SRs about the work of the NKVD. " Released in 1946, Braude herself noted that she was convicted of "disagreeing with some of the so-called" active "methods of investigation."

In a letter to V.M. She told Molotov from the Akmola camp with a request to understand her case in detail her understanding of the methods of conducting the investigation. V.P. Braude wrote: “I myself have always believed that all means are good with enemies, and according to my orders, active methods of investigation were used on the Eastern Front: conveyor belt and methods of physical pressure, but under the leadership of Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, these methods were used only in relation to those enemies who [ontr] whose revolutionary activities were established by other methods of investigation and the fate of which, in the sense of imposing capital punishment on them, was already predetermined ... These measures were applied only to real enemies, who were then shot, and not released and did not return to common cells, where they could demonstrate in front of other arrested persons the methods of physical pressure applied to them. Thanks to the massive use of these measures not in serious cases, often as the only method of investigation, and at the personal discretion of the investigator ... these methods turned out to be compromised and deciphered. " Braude also recalled: “I did not have a gap between political and personal life. Everyone who knew me personally considered me a narrow fanatic, perhaps I was, because I was never guided by personal, material or careeristic considerations, since ancient times I devoted myself entirely to work. " Rehabilitated in 1956, reinstated in the party, as well as in the rank of major in state security. Received a decent personal pension (165).

Grundman Elsa Ulrikhovna - Bloody Elsa (1891-1931). Latvian. She was born into a peasant family, graduated from three classes of a parish school. In 1915 she left for Petrograd, established contacts with the Bolsheviks and became involved in party work. In 1918 she got to the Eastern Front, was appointed commissar of the detachment for suppressing the rebellion in the area of ​​Osa, led the forced requisitions of food from the peasants and punitive operations. In 1919 she was sent to work in the state security bodies as the head of the information section of the Special Department of the Moscow Cheka. She worked in the Special Department of the Cheka of the Southern and Southwestern Fronts, in the Podolsk and Vinnitsa provincial Cheka, fought against peasant uprisings. Since 1921 - head of the Informative (intelligence) department of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission. Since 1923 - head of the secret department in the representative office of the GPU in the North Caucasus Territory, since 1930 - in the central office of the OGPU in Moscow. During her work, she received numerous awards: the Order of the Red Banner, a personal Mauser, a gold watch from the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, a cigarette case, a horse, a certificate and a gold watch from the OGPU Collegium. She became the first woman to be awarded the Honorary Chekist badge. She shot herself on March 30, 1931 (166: 132-141).

Khaikina (Shchors) Fruma Efimovna (1897-1977). In the camp of the Bolsheviks since 1917. In the winter of 1917/18, from the Chinese and Kazakhs hired by the Provisional Government for the construction of railways, she formed an armed detachment of the Cheka, which was stationed at the Unecha station (now in the Bryansk region). She commanded the Cheka at the border station Unecha, through which emigrant flows went to the territory of Ukraine, controlled by the Germans under an agreement with Skoropadsky. Among those who left Russia that year were Arkady Averchenko and Nadezhda Teffi. And they, too, had to deal with Comrade Khaikina. The impressions were indelible. In "A friendly letter to Lenin from Arkady Averchenko," the humorist remembers Fruma with a "kind word": "At Unech, your communists received me remarkably. True, the commandant of Unecha, the famous student comrade Khaikina, first wanted to shoot me. - For what? I asked. "Because you scolded the Bolsheviks in your feuilletons." And here is what Teffi writes: “The main person here is Commissioner X. A young girl, a student, or a telegraph operator, I don’t know. She's everything here. Crazy - as they say, an abnormal dog. The beast ... Everyone obeys her. She searches herself, judges herself, shoots herself: she sits on the porch, here she judges, here she shoots ”(167).

Khaikina was distinguished by her particular cruelty, she took a personal part in executions, torture and robberies. She burned alive an old general, who was trying to leave for Ukraine, who had kernels sewn into stripes. They beat him with rifle butts for a long time, and then, when they were tired, they simply doused him with kerosene and burned him. Without trial or investigation, she shot about 200 officers who were trying to drive through Unecha to Ukraine. Emigration documents did not help them. In the book "My Klintsy" (authors P. Khramchenko, R. Perekrestov) there is the following passage: "... after the liberation of Klintsy from the Germans and Haidamaks, the revolutionary order in the posad was established by Shchors' wife, Frum Khaikina (Shchors). She was a resolute and courageous woman. She rode in a saddle on a horse, in a leather jacket and leather pants, with a Mauser on her side, which she used on occasion. She was called in Klintsy “Khaya in leather pants”. In the coming days, under her command, everyone who collaborated with the Haidamaks or sympathized with them, as well as former members of the Union of the Russian People, was identified and shot at Orekhovka, in a clearing beyond the Gorsad. Several times the clearing was stained with the blood of the enemies of the people. The whole family was destroyed, even teenagers were not spared. The bodies of the executed people were buried to the left of the road to Vyunka, where in those years the houses of the posad ended ... "

The German command, having heard enough terrible stories from those who came from the other side, sentenced this demonic woman to be hanged in absentia, but this did not come true (the revolution began in Germany). The demonic woman, just in case, changes her surname, now she is Rostov. She followed along with her husband's detachment and "cleaned" the "liberated" territories from the counter-revolutionary element. Carried out mass executions in Novozybkov and executions of insurgent soldiers of the Bohunsky regiment, commanded by Shchors. In 1940, after Stalin remembered about the Ukrainian Chapaev-Shchors, and Dovzhenko, by his order, rented his famous militant, Shchors's wife, as the widow of a Civil War hero, received an apartment in the "government house" on the embankment. After that, and until her death, she worked mainly as the "widow of Shchors," carefully hiding her maiden name, under which she headed the Chechen Committee in Unecha. Buried in Moscow.

Stasova Elena Dmitrievna (1873-1966). A well-known revolutionary (party nickname Comrade Absolute), was repeatedly arrested by the tsarist government, Lenin's closest ally. In 1900 Lenin wrote: “In case of my failure, my heir is Elena Dmitrievna Stasova. A very energetic, dedicated person. " Stasova is the author of the memoirs "Pages of Life and Struggle". To describe her "services" to the Russian people would require a separate big work. We will limit ourselves to listing her main party merits and state awards. She is a delegate to seven party congresses, including the twenty-second, was a member of the Central Committee, Central Control Commission, All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, was awarded four Orders of Lenin, medals, she was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. We are interested in the punitive activities of the honored revolutionary, which for obvious reasons is not advertised by the Bolsheviks.

In August 1918, during the period of the "Red Terror", Stasova was a member of the Presidium of the Petrograd Cheka. The "efficiency" of the PSChK's work at this time can be illustrated by the report of the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda on September 6, 1918, signed by the chairman of the PSChK Bokiy: “The Right Social Revolutionaries killed Uritsky and also wounded Comrade Lenin. In response, the Cheka decided to shoot a number of counter-revolutionaries. Only 512 counter-revolutionaries and White Guards were shot, 10 of them are right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries. " In the book “Heroic Symphony” P. Podlyashchuk wrote: “In the work of Stasova in the Cheka, her inherent adherence to principles and scrupulousness towards the enemies of Soviet power were especially manifested. She was merciless to traitors, marauders and self-seekers. She signed sentences with a firm hand when she was convinced of the absolute correctness of the charges. " Her "work" lasted seven months. In Petrograd, Stasova was also engaged in the recruitment of the Red Army, mainly punitive, detachments from prisoners of Austrians, Hungarians and Germans. So there is a lot of blood on the hands of this fiery revolutionary. Her ashes are buried in the Kremlin wall.

Yakovleva Varvara Nikolaevna (1885-1941) was born into a bourgeois family. Father is an expert in gold casting. Since 1904, member of the RSDLP, professional revolutionary. In March 1918. became a member of the collegium of the NKVD, since May - the head of the department for combating counter-revolution at the Cheka, since June of the same year - a member of the board of the Cheka, and in September 1918 - January 1919. - Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka. Yakovleva became the only woman in the history of the state security agencies to hold such a high post. After the injury of Lenin and the murder of the chairman of the Cheka Uritsky in August 1918, the "Red Terror" raged in St. Petersburg. Yakovleva's active participation in the terror is confirmed by the execution lists published with her signature in October-December 1918 in the newspaper Petrogradskaya Pravda. Yakovleva was recalled from St. Petersburg on the direct orders of Lenin. The reason for the recall was her "impeccable" lifestyle. Having become entangled in connections with the gentlemen, she "turned into a source of information for the White Guard organizations and foreign special services." After 1919, she worked in various positions: secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (b), secretary of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), minister of finance of the RSFSR and others, was a delegate to the VII, X, XI, XIV, XVI and XVII party congresses. Arrested on September 12, 1937 on suspicion of participation in a terrorist Trotskyist organization, and on May 14, 1938, sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. She was shot on September 11, 1941 in the Medvedsky forest near Orel (168).

Bosh Evgenia Bogdanovna (Gotlibovna) (1879-1925) was born in the town of Ochakov, Kherson province, in the family of the German colonist Gottlib Maish, who had significant land plots in the Kherson region, and the Moldovan noblewoman Maria Krusser. For three years Evgenia attended the Voznesensk women's gymnasium. An active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Established Soviet power in Kiev, and then fled with the Kiev Bolsheviks to Kharkov. At the insistence of Lenin and Sverdlov, Bosch was sent to Penza, where she headed the provincial committee of the RCP (b). In this region, according to V.I. Lenin, “a firm hand was needed” to step up the work to confiscate grain from the peasantry. In the Penza province, they remembered for a long time the cruelty of E. Bosch, shown during the suppression of peasant uprisings in the districts. When the Penza communists - members of the gubernia executive committee - obstructed her attempts to arrange mass reprisals against the peasants, E. Bosch in a telegram addressed to Lenin accused them of "excessive softness and sabotage." Researchers are inclined to believe that E. Bosch, being a "mentally unbalanced person", herself provoked peasant unrest in the Penza district, where she went as an agitator for the food detachment. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, “... in the village of Kuchki, Bosh, during a rally in a village square, personally shot a peasant who refused to hand over bread. It was this act that angered the peasants and caused a chain reaction of violence. " Bosch's cruelty towards the peasantry was combined with her inability to stop the abuses of her food detachments, many of whom did not hand over the grain confiscated from the peasants, but exchanged it for vodka. Committed suicide (169: 279-280).

Rozmirovich-Troyanovskaya Elena Fedorovna (1886-1953). An active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Eugenia Bosch's cousin. The wife of Nikolai Krylenko and Alexander Troyanovsky. The mother of the third wife V.V. Kuibysheva Galina Aleksandrovna Troyanovskaya. Graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Paris. In the party since 1904. She had the conspiratorial names Eugene, Tanya, Galina. She exposed the provocateur Roman Malinovsky. According to the personal characteristics of V.I. Lenin: "I testify, from the experience of me personally and the Central Committee of 1912-1913, that this worker is very important and valuable for the party." In 1918-1922. was at the same time the chairman of the Main Political Directorate of the People's Commissariat of Railways and the chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Supreme Tribunal at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. She held positions of responsibility in the People's Commissariat of Railways, the People's Commissariat of the RFI, the People's Commissariat of Communications. In 1935-1939. was the director of the State Library. Lenin, then an employee of the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences. She was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery (170).

Benislavskaya Galina Arturovna (1897-1926), Party member since 1919.Since that time she has been working in the Special Interdepartmental Commission at the Cheka. Leads a bohemian life. In 1920 she met Sergei Yesenin, allegedly fell in love with him, and for some time the poet and his sisters lived in her room. According to other sources, she was "assigned" to him by the Cheka for observation. This version was reinforced by F. Morozov in a literary-historical journal by the fact that "Galina Arturovna was a secretary under the" gray cardinal of the Cheka-NKVD Yakov Agranov, who was a friend of the poet. " Many other authors also agreed that Benislavskaya was friends with the poet at the direction of Agranov. Galina Arturovna was treated in the clinic for a "nervous disease"; apparently, it is hereditary, tk. her mother also suffered from mental illness. Yesenin's life was cut short, or it was cut short, on December 27, 1925. Benislavskaya shot herself at the poet's grave on December 3, 1926, almost a year after his death. What was it? Love? Remorse? Who knows (171: 101-116).

Raisa Romanovna Sobol (1904-1988) was born in Kiev in the family of the director of a large plant. In 1921-1923. studied at the law faculty of Kharkov University, worked in the criminal investigation department. Since 1925, a member of the CPSU (b), since 1926 - work in the economic, and then in the foreign department of the OGPU. In 1938, according to the testimony of her convicted husband, with whom she lived for thirteen years, she was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. At the request of Sudoplatov in 1941, she was freed by Beria and reinstated in the state security organs. She worked as an operative of the Special Department and an instructor of the intelligence department. In 1946 she retired and began her literary career under the pseudonym Irina Guro. Awarded with orders and medals (172: 118).

Andreeva-Gorbunova Alexandra Azarovna (1988-1951). The daughter of a priest. At the age of seventeen she joined the RSDLP (b). She was engaged in propaganda activities in the Urals. In 1907 she was arrested and served four years in prison. From 1911 to 1919 she continued her underground work. In 1919, in Moscow, he went to work in the Cheka. Since 1921, he was assistant to the head of the Secret Department of the Cheka for investigation, then deputy head of the Secret Department of the OGPU. In addition, she was in charge of the work of the detention facilities of the OGPU-NKVD. During her work in the agencies, she was awarded with military weapons and twice with the "Honorary Chekist" badge. She is the only female Chekist who was awarded the rank of major (according to other sources, senior major) of state security, corresponding to the rank of general in the army. In 1938 she was dismissed due to illness, but at the end of the year she was arrested on suspicion of "sabotage activities" and sentenced to fifteen years in forced labor camps and five years of disqualification. In statements addressed to Beria, she wrote: “It is hard for me in the camp - a Chekist who worked for eighteen years in the fight against the political enemies of the Soviet regime. Members of anti-Soviet political parties and especially Trotskyists, who knew me from my work in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD, met me here and created an intolerable situation for me. She died in Inta HTJI in 1951. The last document in her personal file read: “The corpse, delivered to the burial place, is dressed in underwear, laid in a wooden coffin, on the left leg of the deceased there is a plaque with the inscription (surname, name, patronymic), there is a post on the grave with the inscription "letter No. I-16". By the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of June 29, 1957, she was rehabilitated (173).