Vyacheslav Rudolfowitsch Menschinsky

Menschinski at his desk, 1926.

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky ( Russian Вячеслав Рудольфович Менжинский , scientific. Transliteration Vjačeslav Rudol'fovič Menžinskij , Polish Wiaczesław Mienżynski ; born August 19 ^{. Jul} / 31 August  1874 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 10. May 1934 in Moscow ) was a Soviet Revolutionary and politician. From 1926 to 1934 he was head of the Soviet secret service OGPU .

Life

Menschinski came from a noble family of Polish origin. His parents were teachers. He was fluent in 16 languages, including Japanese. The last language he learned was Farsi , as he supposedly wanted to study the work of Omar Chayyām . In 1898 he successfully completed his law studies at the University of Petersburg and in 1902 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party . In 1905 he became a member of the military arm of the party's St. Petersburg Committee. He was arrested as early as 1906; However, he managed to flee abroad. He then lived in exile in Belgium , Switzerland , France and the USA . In the summer of 1917 he returned to Russia.

After the October Revolution , Menschinski first became People's Commissar (Minister) for Finance. From 1919 he was a member of the Presidium of the Cheka and five years later was appointed Deputy Head of the OGPU , the successor organization to the Cheka. After the death of his superior Felix Dzerzhinsky in July 1926, Menschinski succeeded him as head of the secret service. Menshinsky was involved in some of the OGPU's spectacular successes against groups of Russian exiles residing abroad who were hostile to the Soviet Union . The Soviet secret service, with significant participation by Menschinski, succeeded in eliminating Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly , among others . Both were lured into the Soviet Union by an alleged secret opposition group initiated by the Soviet secret service and arrested there.

Compared to Stalin remained Menzhinsky after the first approaches of the early cult of personality and the first cleansing which in 1930 took place, loyal. Trotsky described Menshinsky, whom he had met before going into exile, as an inconspicuous personality. He appears like the shadow of another unreal man, or like a poor draft of an unfinished portrait.

In his final years, Menschinski was severely restricted due to angina pectoris . So he ran the secret service while lying on a couch in his office on Lubyanka . In 1934 he succumbed to the disease and was buried at the Kremlin wall in Moscow. Unlike his successors Genrich Jagoda , Nikolai Jeschow , Lavrenti Beria , Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov and Viktor Semjonowitsch Abakumow , he died of natural causes. Yagoda admitted during his show trial that he had poisoned Menshinsky as well as Kuibyshev and Maxim Gorky , but this statement is unlikely to be true in view of the circumstances under which Yagoda's confession was extorted.

Web links

Commons : Vyacheslav Menzhinsky  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Article Vjatscheslaw Rudolfowitsch Menschinsky in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)http: //vorlage_gse.test/1%3D075492~2a%3D~2b%3DWjatscheslav%20Rudolfowitsch%20Menschinski