Sergei Pavlovich Chaplin

Sergei Pavlovich Tschaplin ( Russian Сергей Павлович Чаплин ; born October 10, 1905 in Mignowitschi, Smolensk Oblast ; † February 14, 1942 ) was an officer in the Soviet foreign intelligence service. He died as a victim of the Stalin terror at the age of 36 in the GULag .

youth

Sergei Tschaplin was born the third of four sons of the then priest Pawel Pawlowitsch Tschaplin and his wife, the village school teacher Vera Ivanovna. At thirteen he was already Courier and fourteen clerk of the Komsomol -Stadtkomitees of Smolensk . From 1921 to 1924 Sergei attended the workers' faculty . After that he was with the Baltic Fleet for two years . From 1926 to 1927 he was at the Naval Aviation Military School in Sevastopol . At the age of 15, Sergei was recruited for the OGPU by his brother Nikolai .

activity

As early as 1928, the intern Sergei Tschaplin distinguished himself in the case of the counterfeit Tscherwonzen . These had been printed by White Guards in Germany and brought to the Soviet Union using forged identity documents in order to weaken it. They had been supported by German intelligence agents, which was also known. Tschaplin was then promoted to counterintelligence. What he did from 1929 to 1933 is not known, as the secret service archives are not yet accessible. From May 1933, Tschaplin initially worked in Finland under a diplomatic guise and under the name Borissow to collect material on the military construction work on the Finnish-Soviet border. In 1934 he was exposed and expelled. In 1935 and 1936 he was responsible for counter-espionage in Leningrad for the Finnish consulate and was deployed to “combat right-wing Trotskyist, counter-revolutionary elements” - but without success. After that he worked in Tallinn until December 1939, as he did in Helsinki with his wife and two children . There he learned of the arrest of his brother Nikolai on June 29, 1937 and immediately drove to Moscow.

In custody

On July 1, 1937, Sergei Chaplin was arrested on the premises of the NKVD in Leningrad. and taken to Kresty Prison after a month . The investigation against him then lasted 25 months. At first he was accused of being drawn into a counterrevolutionary organization by his brother Nikolai. On July 11, 1937, he was expelled from the party as an enemy of the people. On January 3, 1938, he was also accused of having been a member of a counter-revolutionary organization at the Murman Railway and of having prepared a terrorist act. The allegedly incriminating confessions of his brothers Nikolai and Viktor are read to him, but Sergei rejects all allegations. On September 23, 1938, the accusation of taking part in the preparation of an attack on the People's Commissar for Transport, Kaganowitsch, was withdrawn, as he was demonstrably abroad on behalf of the NKVD at the time in question, which is why he was not sentenced to death. On the night of January 27-28, 1939, Sergei Tschaplin was, in his own words, tortured "like in a fascist torture chamber" until he confessed what he was supposed to confess. On April 3, he retracted the statements because he had made them under torture.

From July 23, 1939, his case was before the special committee of the NKVD. On July 29, he wrote a letter to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, Beria, in the Kresty, in which he affirmed that he was "not an enemy of the people, not a counter-revolutionary, but an honest and convinced Bolshevik". He also stated that he had been tortured and gave the names of the torturers. However, he was sentenced to ten years of forced labor.

He had already met the actor Georgi Stepanowitsch Schschonow among his fellow prisoners in Kresty, who was sentenced to five years in a labor camp on charges of espionage . Both were deported at the beginning of September 1939 and stayed together on the Trans-Siberian in a carriage on the transport train to Vladivostok . On the crossing from there by ship to Magadan, there was a threat of rebellion because of the thirst among the prisoners on board. The captain put the hold under water with the result that the dysentery broke out and hundreds of prisoners died. Magadan on the Sea of ​​Okhotsk was the eastern end point of the Kolymat race , which began near Jakutsk on the Lena . The truck drove 47 km to a logging operation. Because of their knowledge, Schschonow and Tschaplin were also employed as car mechanics and chauffeurs. One year later, Tschaplin was transferred to the Butugychag camp to be felled. There the NKVD officer Pinajew accused him at the end of June 1941 of spreading "systematically counterrevolutionary hate speech against the leaders of the party and the Soviet government as well as numerous lies about measures taken by the Soviet government and the party". The "camp file on procedure no. 5677" also shows that three prisoners contributed statements to these accusations against the prisoners Tschaplin, Bersin and Shuravlyov, which also culminated in the fact that they intended "to take revenge on the Soviet power". On August 20, 1941, the three defendants were sentenced to death by the tribunal in Ust-Omtschug . Shuravlyov and Bersin were shot on September 21, 1941, while Chaplin, according to official information, was not shot until February 14, 1942.

His judgment had probably been revised and converted into ten more years of forced labor, because Georgij Schschonow met him again in the Verkhni cassiterite mine near kilometer 406 of the Kolyma race. One day in early autumn, a guard shot and killed an inmate for no reason. The camp authorities were added, including the operative agent of the Orotukan camp named Voron. This questioned the shooter, suggesting that the man who had been shot had attempted to escape, which the guard confirmed. For Woron, that was the end of the matter. But then Sergei Tschaplin stepped forward and demanded the punishment of the murderer and, for the future, humane and responsible treatment of the prisoners. Voron had Tschaplin put in the dungeon. The next morning, Voron, on horseback and swinging his whip, chased Chaplin to the pit 17 in front of everyone else. After that, Shschonov did not see Chaplin again and learned nothing more about him. Based on this eyewitness report, Ryklin doubts the officially stated date of his grandfather's death.

family

Chaplin's wife Wera Michajlowna Tschaplina, née Levintowa, taught Russian literature. She always supported her "former husband" financially and through packages. Otherwise she held back in order to be able to continue to look after the two daughters, of whom Sergei had one named Stalina - against the protest of her mother. She married the military doctor Kusma Ryklin and had with him the son Mikhail Kuzmich Ryklin . Nikolai was shot by his brothers Alexander, Nikolai and Viktor in the course of the Stalin "purges" and Viktor survived many years of forced labor.

literature

• Mikhail Ryklin: Life thrown into the fire - The generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-42773-6
• Georgi Schschonow : Proschitoje , Moscow 2002.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This date of death given by the Far East Military Tribunal is questionable. Mikhail Ryklin : Life thrown into the fire - The generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 301.
2. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 137 f.
3. ↑ Arif Safarow: Fake Chervonzen in: Leningradskaja Pravda, August 11, 1989.
4. ↑ Der Spiegel, February 17, 2012: The appearance of contention : [1]
5. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 147–153 f.
6. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 185.
7. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 186.
8. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 187.
9. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 187–192.
10. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 200.
11. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 211–216.
12. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 228–237.
13. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 238.
14. ↑ Georgi Schschonow : Prožitoe , Moscow 2002, pp. 81 - 87. Quoted from: Michail Ryklin: Life, thrown into the fire - The generation of the great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 250 ff.
15. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 263-270.
16. ↑ Georgi Schschonow : Prožitoe , Moscow 2002, pp. 110-114 . quoted from: Michail Ryklin: Life, thrown into the fire - The generation of the great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 275–280.
17. ↑ Mikhail Ryklin: Life Thrown into the Fire - The Generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 323.