The 1930s, the Soviet Union. After investigation reveals that some members of the former Bolshevik
party question Stalin’s authority and that there is a network of party members supposedly working
against him, Stalin believes anyone with ties to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government is a threat
to his leadership and needs to go. He initiates the Great Purge which starts with the arrests of
party members, Bolsheviks, and members of the Red Army and then grows to include Soviet peasants,
members of the intelligentsia, and members of certain nationalities. By 1938, however,
the oppression has become so extensive that it is damaging the infrastructure, economy and even the
armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. In November 1938 Lavrentiy
Beria succeeds Nikolai Yezhov as head of Russian Secret Service NKVD, which coordinated the purge,
and easing of the repression that begun under Yezhov. Beria promotes new officers who will
become notorious for brutally torturing prisoners during interrogations. One of them is Boris Rodos.
Boris Veniaminovich Rodos, the son of a Jewish tailor, was born on the 22nd of June 1905 in
Melitopol then part of the Russian Empire. In 1921 he graduated from elementary school
and then immediately went to work in a private fruit shop as a packer. He then
sold cigarettes and in 1924 Rodos completed a six-month course for tractor mechanics,
but did not work in this job but instead got a job as an office worker in the Melitopol.
He soon joined Komsomol, the Young Communist League,
but was expelled in 1930 for attempted rape.
One year later he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, around the same time,
became an officer of the Joint State Political Directorate - OGPU - in Ukraine.
OGPU was the intelligence and state security service and secret police of the Soviet Union
from 1923 to 1934. The agency operated inside and outside the Soviet Union, persecuting political
criminals and opponents of the Bolsheviks such as Soviet dissidents, anti-communists and White
émigrés who were Russians who emigrated from the territory of the former Russian Empire
in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and Russian Civil War between 1917 and 1923.
The OGPU was based in the Lubyanka Building in Moscow and in 1934 it was
reincorporated as the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD in 1934.
At this time, the NKVD, Russian secret service, was headed by Genrikh Yagoda.
Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with
Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the gulag system, during which
12,000–25,000 forced laborers died. Genrikh Yagoda also supervised arrests, show
trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks such as Lev Kamenev who during Lenin's final illness
in 1923–24, was the acting leader of the Soviet Union, forming a triumvirate with Grigory Zinoviev
and Joseph Stalin which led to Leon Trotsky's downfall. Yagoda also supervised the downfall
of Grigory Zinoviev - a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was a close associate of Vladimir
Lenin and during the 1920s belonged to the most influential figures in the Soviet leadership.
These were the climactic events of the Great Purge which followed later.
In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin's orders.
At this time, NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov who had replaced Yagoda one year sooner.
Under Nikolai Yezhov, the organization carried out the Great Purge which was the imprisonment
or execution of a huge number, possibly over a million, of citizens throughout
the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the people” between August 1936 and March 1938.
Upon Stalin’s rise to power, some members of the former Bolshevik party began to question
his authority. An investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working
against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. By the mid-1930s, Stalin believed anyone
with ties to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government was a threat to his leadership and needed to go.
The Great Purge started with the arrests of party members,
Bolsheviks, and members of the Red Army and then grew to include Soviet peasants,
members of the intelligentsia, and members of certain nationalities.
During its mass operations, the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture,
violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear.
By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure,
economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down.
In November 1938 Yezhov was succeded by Lavrentiy Beria as NKVD head easing of the
repression that had begun under Yezhov. The government officially admitted that
there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges,
which were blamed entirely on Yezhov and over 100,000 people were released from the labour
camps. But the liberalization was only relative as arrests, torture and executions continued.
In May 1937, Rodos had been sent for an internship to Moscow in the 4th
secret-political department of the organization and in December 1938 Beria promoted Rodos to the
rank of Lieutenant and appointed him Deputy Head of the NKVD Investigation Department.
One of Rodos’ main duties in his new position was to interrogate the prisoners. During
interrogations, Rodos would turn into a sadistic torturer forcing
confessions out of the prisoners, no matter if they were true or not.
One of the first prisoners interrogated by Rodos was a fellow officer, Pyotr Zubov,
who was arrested for bungling an attempted coup against the King of Yugoslavia. Rodos smashed his
knees with a hammer in a failed attempt to force a confession out of him. Zubov was later cleared
and returned to work as a foreign agent but needed a walking stick because of his injuries.
In the spring and summer of 1939, Rodos was in charge of interrogating his former superior,
Yezhov. However, Yezhov did not need to be tortured because he
was so terrified that he signed everything he was told to sign.
Rodos also interrogated and tortured the heads of the Ukrainian communist
party and government such as Vlas Chubar and Stanislav Kosior, who under interrogation,
withstood brutal tortures, including being interrogated for 14 hours at a time,
but cracked when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought into the room and
raped in front of him. Kosior then admitted that he was a Polish spy.
Another so called enemy of the people was a former head of the Komsomol – the Young Communist
League - Alexander Kosarev. However, Rodos was unable to force a confession out of Kosarev who
demanded an honest, authoritative commission be created that will check all materials
without bias and make objective conclusions. Alexander Kosarev was shot on 23 February 1939.
Rodos also interrogated and tortured Isaac Babel – a Russian writer and journalist - who
'confessed' to spying for Austria and France and named many people as co-conspirators.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Poland found itself fighting a two front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from the east
on the 17th of September. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on the 28th of
September and one day later in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact,
Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland. In March 1940, Rodos was sent to direct the
deportations of Poles from Lviv, then annexed to the Soviet Union.
The purpose of the deportations from Lviv was to destroy any potential center of resistance:
the intelligentsia, the leadership of the interwar police, members of nationalist
movements, former government officials and medium-sized businesses. About 300,000
people were deported in two years. It is estimated that 20–30% of the deportees were Jews, 52–60%
were Poles, and 10–18% were Ukrainians. For for his role in the deportations,
Rodos was promoted in 1941 to the rank of major.
In February 1940, Rodos was assigned to beat a confession out of Robert
Eikhe - the provincial head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Siberia during
the collectivization of agriculture, until his arrest in 1938. Eikhe's wife Yevgenia was
arrested with him and shot on 26 August 1938. During one of his interrogations, Robert Eikhe
was beaten with rubber sticks and when he fell down, he was also beaten where he lay.
Then he was lifted up, and Beria, who was also present, asked him one question:
“Do you admit that you are a spy?”. Eikhe answered him: "No, I do not admit it."
Then Rodos beat him again and gouged out his eye. Beria, convinced that he could not get
any confession of espionage from Eikhe, ordered him to be taken away and shot.
In 1941, Rodos also interrogated the former People's Commissar for armaments,
Boris Vannikov, whom he threw on the floor and jumped on, shouting “Tell all, tell all.”
In 1941 Rodos interrogated a Soviet military commander Kirill Meretskov who after being
subjected to two months of torture, including being beaten with rubber rods, and having
one of his ribs broken, Meretskov relented and signed a written confession. According
to Nikita Khrushchev, "before his arrest, Meretskov had been a strapping young general,
very strong and impressive-looking. After his release, he was a shadow of his former
self. He had lost so much weight that he could hardly speak." Released in September,
he was then presented to Stalin, in full army dress, and given command of the 7th Separate Army.
Alexander Belosludtsev, the head of the Komsomol’s organizational department, when being interrogated
by Rodos, asked him to be taken to the bathroom to urinate. Rodos told him: "Take a glass and
urinate." He did so and asked where to put the glass. Rodos then grabbed the glass and forced
it to his mouth shouting "Drink, you shit in human skin, or testify." Belosludtsev signed everything.
Rodos’ downfall came in 1952 when he was dismissed from the MGB, the successor to the NKVD, probably
because Beria had temporarily lost control of the organisation. Rodos was then the head of
anti-aircraft defence staff in Simferopol until his arrest on October 5, 1953. During his closed
trial in 1956, at which he was convicted of extracting confessions under torture,
he was asked whether he knew what Isaac Babel did for a living. He replied that he had been told
that Babel was a writer. Asked whether he had read any of Babel's stories, he replied: "What for?"
General Kirill Meretskov, whom Rodos had tortured in 1941 also gave evidence at the trial.
In February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous "On the Cult of Personality
and Its Consequences" speech to the 20th communist party congress, denouncing crimes committed by the
Soviet authorities during the 1930s. Khrushchev included a denunciation of Rodos saying:
“The investigative judge Rodos, who in his time investigated and interrogated Kosior, Chubar and
Kosarev, is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and completely degenerate morally.”
On 26 February 1956, one day after the speech, Boris Rodos was sentenced to death. In a desperate
attempt to save his life, Rodos, who during his reign of terror had no mercy with his victims,
wrote a long appeal, claiming that he had been the 'blind instrument' of senior officers such
as Beria and that he was being made a scapegoat when he was not the only officer who had beaten
prisoners, and pleading to be spared the death penalty for the sake of his innocent children.
However, he did not escape justice.
Rodos was 50 years old when he was executed on 20 April 1956.
There were no tears shed for Boris Rodos.
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