Vyacheslav Menzhinsky

Vyacheslav Rudolfowitsch Menzhinsky (Russian Вячеслав Рудольфович Менжинский, scientific transliteration Vjačeslav Rudol'fovič Menžinskij; * 19 Augustjul / August 31 1874greg in Saint Petersburg, .. † May 10, 1934 in Moscow) was a Soviet revolutionary and politician. From 1926 to 1934 he was head of the Soviet secret OGPU.

Life

Menzhinsky came from a family of Polish origin erbadeligen. His parents were teachers. He mastered 16 languages ​​fluently, including Japanese. The last language he learned Farsi was because he allegedly wanted to study the work of Omar Khayyam. In 1898, he graduated in law at the University of Petersburg successfully and entered 1902, the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia at. In 1905 he became a member of the military arm of the St. Petersburg Committee of the Party. In 1906 he was arrested; However, he managed to escape abroad. After that, he lived in exile in Belgium, Switzerland, France and the United States. In the summer of 1917 he returned to Russia.

After the October Revolution Menzhinsky was first People's Commissar (Minister ) of Finance. From 1919 he was a member of the Presidium of the Cheka and was appointed deputy head of the OGPU, the successor organization of the Cheka five years later. After the death of his boss Felix Dzerzhinsky in July 1926 Menzhinsky joined its successor as head of the secret service. Menzhinsky was involved in some spectacular successes of the OGPU on sitting abroad groups of exiled Russians, the Soviet Union were hostile. This enabled the Soviet intelligence with significant participation Menschinskis off, among other things Boris Sawinkow and Sidney Reilly. Both were lured by an initiated in truth by the Soviet secret alleged secret opposition group in the Soviet Union and arrested there.

Compared to Stalin remained Menzhinsky even after the initial stages of incipient personality cult and the first cleansing that took place in 1930, loyal. Trotsky described Menzhinsky, whom he had met before his transition into exile, as unassuming personality. He appears as the shadow of another not real man, or a poor draft of an unfinished portraits.

In his last years Menzhinsky pectoris was severely limited due to angina. So he headed the intelligence, as he lay on a couch in his office in Lubyanka. In 1934, he succumbed to the disease and was buried at the Kremlin wall in Moscow. He died - in contrast to all his successors Genrich Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Beria Lawrenti, Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov and Viktor Semenovich Abakumov - a natural death. Although Yagoda confessed during his show trial that he had next to Kuibyshev and Maxim Gorky also poisoned Menzhinsky, but should this statement with regard to the circumstances under which Yagoda's confession was extorted, probably not correspond to the facts.