Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov

Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov, 2019

Nikita Wassiljewitsch Petrov ( Russian: Никита Васильевич Петров , scientific transliteration Nikita Vasil'evič Petrov ; born January 31, 1957 in Kiev , USSR ) is a Russian historian who served as the deputy chairman of the human rights organization Memorial on publications about crimes during the Soviet Stalin era specializes.

Life

When Petrov was three years old, his family moved from Kiev to Moscow. He studied at the Mendeleev technical center and obtained his diploma in 1980 with a thesis on the compounds of fluorine with uranium . During this time he began to be interested in the repressive apparatus of the Communist Party and in the reading room of the Lenin Library regularly borrowed newspapers from the time of the Stalinist repression . This made the KGB aware of him, and his institute struck him off the list of doctoral candidates . Nevertheless, he found a job as an engineer at the National Atomic Research University (MIFI) , but was dismissed there in 1984 under pressure from the KGB. From 1985 to 1988 he worked as an engineer in research laboratories subordinate to the Ministry of Bread Production of the Russian Federal Soviet Socialist Republic , the following two years in the Center for Standardization .

Petrov has been involved with Memorial since 1988. In 1990 he was appointed deputy head of the Memorial Moscow Documentation and Education Center. In this capacity he was granted access to the archives of the state administration in the same year. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Russian Constitutional Court appointed him to the expert commission for the trial of the ban on the CPSU, which was ordered by Russian President Boris Yeltsin . From 1992 onwards, Petrov was allowed to work in the archives of the Soviet secret services from the Cheka to the KGB for the first time.

From then on, his activities focused on publications about the secret services as well as processes relating to access to the archives, which had been handled restrictively again since the mid-1990s. Petrov was also an expert at Memorial in the trials of relatives of the victims of the Katyn massacre , who demanded inspection of the files and legal rehabilitation of Polish prisoners of war shot in 1940 before Moscow courts . In 2005 he was awarded the Cavalier Cross for Services to the Republic of Poland by the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski for his commitment .

Petrov took the view in the media that the Soviet Union, because of its alliance with the Third Reich , which was sealed in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact , was equally complicit in the outbreak of World War II. In 2008 the University of Amsterdam , from which he had already received two three-month research grants in 1990 and 1996, accepted his dissertation on "Stalin and the organs of the NKVD-MGB in the Sovietization of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1953". In it he states that in all the countries to which the Red Army came, totalitarian terror regimes with repressive apparatuses operating beyond the law had been established.

Petrow worked on Jens Becker's documentary Erich Mielke - Meister der Angst (2015). He works for Novaya Gazeta in Moscow.

Works

• with AI Kokurin: VČK-OGPU- NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB. 1917-1960. Spravočnik. Moscow 1997, ISBN 5-89511-004-5 .
• with AI Kokurin: Kto rukovodil NKVD. 1934–1941 against Spravočnik. Zven'ja, Moscow 1999, ISBN 5-7870-0032-3 .
• with AI Kokurin: GULAG. Glavnoe upravlenie lagerej 1918–1960. Moscow 2000, ISBN 5-85646-046-4 .
• with M. Jansen: Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov , 1895–1940 . Hoover Institution Press, Stanford 2002, ISBN 0-8179-2902-9 .
• with AI Kokurin: Lubyanka . Organy VČK-OGPU- NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB 1917–1991. Spravočnik. Meždunarodnyj fond “Demokracija”, Moscow 2003, ISBN 5-85646-109-6 .
• Pervyj secretary 'KGB Ivan Serov . Materik, Moscow 2005, ISBN 5-85646-129-0 .
• with Jan Foitzik: The Soviet secret services in the SBZ / GDR from 1945 to 1953. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-023014-7 .
• Account rukovodil organami Bezopasnosti 1941–1954 against Spravočnik. Zven'ja, Moscow 2010, ISBN 978-5-7870-0109-9 .
• The Soviet secret service workers in Germany. The senior staff of the state security organs of the USSR in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and the GDR from 1945–1954. Biographical reference work. Metropo, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940938-80-0 .
• Po scenariju Stalina. Rol 'organov NKVD-MGB SSSR v sovetizacii stran Central'noj i Vostočnoj Evropy. Rossijskaja političeskaja enciklopedija, Moscow 2011, ISBN 978-5-8243-1541-7 .
• Palači. Oni vypolnjali zakazy Stalina. Novaja Gazeta, Moscow 2011, ISBN 978-5-91147-018-0 .
• Poczet katów katyńskich. Centrum Polsko-Rosyjskiego Dialogu i Porozumienia, Warsaw 2015, ISBN 978-83-64486-33-3 .

Video lectures

• "Memorial" lesson on the history of political repression (Russian, 149 min)
• Society Memorial: Seminar “Moscow. Places of Remembrance " (Russian, 68 min)
• The staff of the law enforcement agencies from the Cheka to the KGB (Russian, 134 min)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information, unless otherwise stated, from Memorial website
2. ↑ Who were Stalin's executors? on: faz.net , March 30, 2000.
3. ↑ The historians Igor Kurljandski and Nikita Petrow on the appeal “Open the archives of Soviet history!” Memorial.ru (based on: Radio Svoboda , November 2, 2010).
4. ↑ Aleksander Gurjanow: "Memoriał" a Katyń. In: Rosja a Katyń. Wyd. Ośrodek “Karta”. Warsaw 2010, pp. 117-136.
5. ^ Celebrations for the 65th anniversary of the Katyn crime prezydent.pl, April 16, 2005.
6. ↑ Should the anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact be celebrated as a day of remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and National Socialism, following the example of the EU? Radio Svoboda , August 25, 2009.
7. ↑ Information on the doctoral thesis. University of Amsterdam, accessed August 30, 2016 . 
8. ↑ Why don't the Kremlin ideologues celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the Second Front as a holiday? Radio Svoboda , June 9, 2009.
9. ↑ Erich Mielke - Master of Fear
10. ↑ Nikita Petrov ( Memento of the original from November 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , June 17, 2016.