Leonid Zakovsky


Leonid Zakovsky was an ethnic Latvian NKVD Commissar 1st Class of State Security.

Early career

He was born Henriks Štubis in Kreis Hasenpoth in the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire in a family of Latvian ethnicity. He was arrested twice during 1913, and on the second occasion was convicted of belonging to an anarchist group, and deported to Olonets province in north Russia. He later concealed his anarchist past, claiming to have been a Bolshevik since 1913. After the February Revolution, he moved to Petrograd, and was responsible for security at the Smolny Institute, the building which the Bolsheviks commandeered for their headquarters. During the Bolshevik Revolution, he led a detachment of sailors who seized control of Petrograd's telephone exchange. In December 1917, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks had seized power, renaming their organisation the All-Russian Communist Party, Zakovsky became one of the founding members of the Cheka. He served in this organisation, under its different names, for the remainder of his career. During the Russian Civil War, he took part in suppressing anti-communist rebellions in Astrakhan, Saratov, Kazan and elsewhere.
In February 1926, he was appointed head of the OGPU in Siberia. He was in charge of security during Josif Stalin's visit to Siberia early in 1928, during which the General Secretary ordered grain to be seized by force from producers who were unwilling to sell, a decision which was the precursor to the forced collectivisation of agriculture. In 1928, Zakovsky was given the additional role of head of the 'troika' system, created to administer extrajudicial reprisals against peasants who resisted the change in policy. From November 21, 1929, to January 21, 1930, alone, the troika handled 156 cases, in which 898 people were convicted and, of those, 347 were shot. At the height of collectivisation, in 1930, the troika handed out sentences on 16,553 people, of whom 4,762 were shot - their death signed by Zakovsky - and 8,576 were sent to the labour camps. In 1932, he was appointed head of the OGPU in the Belorussian soviet republic.

Role in the 1930s purges

In December 1934, the Leningrad communist party boss Sergei Kirov was assassinated. The police officers deemed responsible for this security lapse were sacked, and Zakovsky was transferred in January 1935 as head of the Leningrad NKVD. In this capacity, alongside Kirov's successor, A.A.Zhdanov, he organized the round-up and mass deportation of the so-called 'Leningrad aristocrats' - 11,702 people who had lived in comparative prosperity before the revolution. The writer Nadezhda Mandelstam later described going with Anna Akhmatova to the station to say goodbye to a woman who was being deported with her three small sons.
After this operation, Zakovsky was promoted to the level of Commissar of State Security, First Rank, and awarded the Order of the Red Star. At the plenary session of the Leningrad communist party on March 20, 1937, he declared that there were "enemies still active" within the organisation, an announcement that marked the onset of a purge of the Leningrad party that was "violent even by Soviet standards." Zakovsky was planning a major trial of leading Leningrad communists, including Zhdanov's deputy, Mikhail Chudov, his wife Lyudmila Shaposhnikova, Boris Pozern, and others. An Old Bolshevik named Rozenblum, who survived the purges, was lined up as a witness, brutally tortured, and then brought before Zakovsky. This case was included in the famous Secret Speech which the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered to the 20th Communist Party congress, in 1956, denouncing crimes committed under Josif Stalin. Khrushchev said:
The public trial never took place: the victims were shot after closed trials. In 1937 Zakovsky was awarded the Order of Lenin. Around this time he is said to have boasted that if he had had Karl Marx to interrogate he would make him confess to being an agent of Bismarck.
On January 29, 1938, it was announced that Zakovsky had been transferred to Moscow as First Deputy head of the NKVD, second in command to the infamous Nikolai Yezhov. Among his first tasks was to dispose of the head of the NKVD foreign department, Abram Slutsky. Rather than have him arrested, which might have provoked foreign agents to defect, Zakovsky crept up on him while he was talking to fellow officer Mikhail Frinovsky and stupified him with chloroform, allowing another officer to inject him with poison. Zakovsky also took part in interrogating the former head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, to get him to confess under torture to being a terrorist, but on April 19, 1938, he was himself arrested and accused of being part of the 'Yagoda conspiracy,' of being a spy, and of organising a Latvian nationalist clique within the NKVD. He and his former deputy, Nikonovich, were both severely tortured. In summer 1938, as Lavrenti Beria was about to take over control of the NKVD, Zakovsky's successor, Mikhail Frinovsky, decided rapidly to get rid of former officers who might incriminate him, including Zakovsky, who was shot on August 29, 1938.

Publications