Chronicle of crimes in Leningrad after the war. Several black pages of the Great Patriotic War

My grandfather is a red Voenlet. He served during the Great Patriotic War in a special long-range aviation regiment of the NKVD. From the little that he told, I am conveying a terrible episode from the life of the "Air Carriers". For certain reasons - I don’t name my grandfather, everything that is said here is true, confirmed by references from publications ...

“The blockade drama was presented only as an example of the courage and unbending stamina of both the soldiers of the Red Army and ordinary civilians. For many years, the terrible truth about the fight against cannibals in besieged Leningrad was classified as "Top Secret". Nevertheless, there were such facts, and there were many of them. Cannibalism in the city besieged by the Nazis began already in 1941, when the delivery of food along Ladoga became difficult due to endless bombing.

“From a memorandum dated February 21, 1942, the military prosecutor of Leningrad A.I. Panfilenko to the Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks A.A. Kuznetsov
“Under the conditions of the special situation in Leningrad, a new type of crime arose ... All murders for the purpose of eating the meat of the dead were qualified as banditry due to their particular danger ... The social composition of persons put on trial for the commission of the above crimes is characterized by the following data. 5%, women - 63.5% By age: from 16 to 20 years old - 21.6%, from 20 to 30 years old - 23%, from 30 to 40 years old - 26.4%, over 40 years old - 29% By occupation: workers - 41%, employees - 4.5%, peasants - 0.7%, unemployed - 22.4%, without certain occupations - 31% ... Of those brought to criminal responsibility, 2% had previous convictions " ."

December 1941.
- Well guys, are you ready? This is KomEsk of our SpetsAviaTransport Regiment of the NKVD, officially Dal-Avia.
- Ready!
- Today we go to Leningrad. There are three days. We walk around the city, we collect children. Your site is marked on the city map. Then, we are loaded to the mainland.
- Navigator: Three days is too much. Last time, there were five flights in a day.
- Conversations! As much as you need - so much you will walk! Take more chocolate with you, it won't be enough - open your "NZ", then we'll write it off ... You know the route.
And commanded: Everything. All about cars.
(Further - the words of the grandfather, unfortunately - laconic)
The TB engines were warmed up. So they flew, having received the "Good" for takeoff. Without fighter escort, without side lights - for camouflage - so there are more chances to fly, and then - as lucky. We flew without incident, hit the searchlight cross a couple of times, but everything worked out, they didn’t hit us during the shelling.
Landing at dawn, as always at the front airfield, is harsh: the strip is broken by shells and bombs, hastily covered by repairmen, covered with snow, although it has been cleaned in places. Cold and windy. Rescues warm linen and fur clothes. We quickly went to the dining room, drank the "People's Commissar", ate something, and three crews loaded onto the car under a tarpaulin. For several hours they were shaking under the awning of a lorry, fell under the "morning shelling", and after a couple of hours they were in place. The city is in ruins. How he is still holding up is unclear. There are few people, they huddle against the walls of houses, look at us with hope in their eyes. Ashamed. We, healthy, warmly dressed, well-fed - and they. A woman sitting on a snowdrift raises her head with the last of her strength, silently staring. He broke off a bar of chocolate in his pocket, went over and put it in her mouth. Thank you in the eyes. Helped to get up - the body without weight. He pulled out the rest of the tile, put it in her bosom, trying to do it unnoticed, otherwise others would take it away. Again caught the eye and mute thanks. She suddenly walked more confidently. Perhaps there is someone to go to.
Here is the first house to inspect on our site. Today we need to go only one block, check all the surviving houses and apartments. Let's go together. We rise to the first floor of the ice entrance. The apartment is empty. The windows are broken. Open cabinets - without things, the marauders have already worked. There are no people. The next apartment - similar to the first, differs - the absence of a window opening - collapsed from a bomb or shell explosion.
So, house by house, we looked at less than half of the block. Often came across dead, not buried people. We wrote down the address to pass on to the funeral team. Sometimes, people came across with severed legs. It was clear that this was done by cannibals who had already appeared.
Another house. Second floor. There are signs of life, there are footprints on the snow-covered steps. We went in, a little warmer than outside. The room is murmuring. We open the door, twilight due to blackout. The picture is as follows: the silhouette of a man (it turned out to be a boy, about 15 years old), in his hands (hands in mittens) in one knife, in the other - a fork. In front of him, judging by the size, is a child's corpse, already with a bare leg. We made it. Although we could shoot people in this case, we did not shoot him. They took me to the next room, gave me tea with condensed milk from a thermos and a few slices of chocolate.
... Three days later we flew to the mainland. "NZ" was left to Leningraders, in dilapidated quarters. All planes were filled with people...

Grandfather didn't say much. He probably spared us, his grandchildren, in 1963 - still quite boys. One can only guess about the rest seen by the TB crews by reading in short articles on this topic, for example, these materials:

Lines from letters seized by military censorship (from archival documents of the FSB department for St. Petersburg and the region [materials of the NKVD department for the Leningrad region]).:
"... Life in Leningrad is deteriorating every day. People are beginning to swell, as they eat mustard, they make cakes out of it. Flour dust, which was used to glue wallpaper, is nowhere to be found."
"... There is a terrible famine in Leningrad. We drive through the fields and dumps and collect all sorts of roots and dirty leaves from fodder beet and gray cabbage, and there are none."
"... I witnessed a scene when a horse fell from exhaustion on the street near a cab driver, people ran up with axes and knives, began to cut the horse into pieces and drag it home. It's terrible. People looked like executioners."
For eating human meat, 356 people were arrested in January, 612 in February, 399 in March, 300 in April, and 326 in May.
Here are the characteristic messages that took place in May:
On May 20, a worker of the Metal Plant M. lost her 4-year-old daughter Galina. The investigation established that the girl was killed by L., 14 years old, with the participation of her mother L., 42 years old.
L. confessed that on May 20 she lured 4-year-old Galina to her apartment and killed her for food. In April, for the same purpose, L. killed 4 girls aged 3-4 years and, together with her mother, ate them.
P., 23 years old, and his wife L., 22 years old, lured citizens into the apartment, killed them and ate the corpses for food. Within a month they committed murders of 3 citizens.
Unemployed K., 21 years old, non-party, killed her newborn son and used the corpse for food. K. was arrested and confessed to the murder.
The unemployed K., aged 50, together with their daughter, aged 22, killed K.'s daughter, Valentina, aged 13, and together with other residents of the apartment - a turner of plant No. 7 V. and an artel worker V. - ate the corpse for food.
Pensioner N., aged 61, together with her daughter L., aged 39, killed her granddaughter S., aged 14, in order to eat the corpse. N. and L. are arrested. They confessed to the crime.
From the memorandum of the military prosecutor of Leningrad A.I. Panfilov to A.A. Kuznetsov dated February 21, 1942

(Material from Wikisource - a free library)
February 21, 1942
In the conditions of the special situation in Leningrad, created by the war with Nazi Germany, a new type of crime arose.
All murders for the purpose of eating the meat of the dead, due to their particular danger, were qualified as banditry (Article 59-3 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR).
At the same time, taking into account that the vast majority of the above type of crimes concerned the eating of cadaverous meat, the prosecutor's office of Leningrad, guided by the fact that these crimes are especially dangerous by their nature against the order of management, qualified them by analogy with banditry (according to Art. 16- 59-3 of the Criminal Code).
From the moment such crimes arose in Leningrad, that is, from the beginning of December 1941 to February 15, 1942, the investigating authorities were prosecuted for committing crimes: in December 1941 - 26 people, in January 1942 - 366 people and for the first 15 days of February 1942 - 494 people.
In a number of murders with the aim of eating human meat, as well as in the crimes of eating cadaverous meat, entire groups of people participated.
In some cases, the perpetrators of such crimes not only ate cadaverous meat themselves, but also sold it to other citizens...
The social composition of persons put on trial for the commission of the above crimes is characterized by the following data:
1. By gender:
men - 332 people. (36.5%) and
women - 564 people, (63.5%).
2. By age;
from 16 to 20 years old - 192 people. (21.6%)
from 20 to 30 years old - 204 "(23.0%)
from 30 to 40 years old - 235 "(26.4%)
over 49 years old - 255 "(29.0%)
3. By partisanship:
members and candidates of the CPSU (b) - 11 people. (1.24%)
members of the Komsomol - 4 "(0.4%)
non-party - 871 "(98.51%)
4. By occupation, those brought to criminal responsibility are distributed as follows
workers - 363 people. (41.0%)
employees - 40 "(4.5%)
peasants - 6 "(0.7%)
unemployed - 202 "(22.4%)
persons without certain occupations - 275 "(31.4%)
Among those brought to criminal responsibility for the commission of the above crimes, there are specialists with higher education.
Of the total number of natives of the city of Leningrad (natives) brought to criminal responsibility in this category of cases - 131 people. (14.7%). The remaining 755 people. (85.3%) arrived in Leningrad at different times. Moreover, among them: natives of the Leningrad region - 169 people, Kalinin - 163 people, Yaroslavl - 38 people, and other regions - 516 people.
Of the 886 people brought to criminal responsibility, only 18 people. (2%) had previous convictions.
As of February 20, 1942, 311 people were convicted by the Military Tribunal for the crimes I have indicated above.
Military Prosecutor of Leningrad
Brigadier A. PANFILENKO

Murders and banditry in besieged Leningrad
Having reached a maximum in the 1st decade of February 1942, the number of crimes of this kind began to decline steadily. Separate cases of cannibalism are still noted in December 1942, however, already in the special message of the UNKVD for the Leningrad Region and the mountains. Leningrad dated 04/07/1943, it is stated that "... murders for the purpose of eating human meat were not noted in March 1943 in Leningrad." It can be assumed that such killings ceased in January 1943, with the breaking of the blockade. In particular, in the book “Life and death in besieged Leningrad. Historical and medical aspect "it is said that" In 1943 and 1944. cases of cannibalism and corpse-eating were no longer noted in the criminal chronicle of besieged Leningrad.

Total for November 1941 - December 1942. 2,057 people were arrested for murder for the purpose of cannibalism, cannibalism and the sale of human meat. Who were these people? According to the already mentioned note by A.I. Panfilenko, dated February 21, 1942, 886 people arrested for cannibalism from December 1941 to February 15, 1942 were divided as follows.

Women were the vast majority - 564 people. (63.5%), which, in general, is not surprising for the city-front, in which men constituted a minority of the population (about 1/3). The age of criminals is from 16 to “over 40 years old”, and all age groups are approximately the same in number (the category “over 40 years old” slightly prevails). Of these 886 people, only 11 (1.24%) were members and candidates of the CPSU (b), four more were members of the Komsomol, the remaining 871 were non-party. The unemployed prevailed (202 people, 22.4%) and "persons with no fixed occupation" (275 people, 31.4%). Only 131 people (14.7%) were natives of the city.
A. R. Dzeniskevich also cites the following data: “Illiterate, semi-literate and people with a lower education accounted for 92.5 percent of all the accused. Among them ... there were no believers at all.”

The image of the average Leningrad cannibal looks like this: this is a non-native resident of Leningrad of an indeterminate age, unemployed, non-party, unbelieving, poorly educated.

There is a belief that cannibals in besieged Leningrad were shot without exception. However, it is not. As of June 2, 1942, for example, out of 1913 people who were investigated, 586 people were sentenced to VMN, 668 were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. Apparently, murderers-cannibals who stole corpses from morgues, cemeteries, etc. were sentenced to VMN. places "got off" with imprisonment. A. R. Dzeniskevich comes to similar conclusions: “If we take the statistics until the middle of 1943, then 1,700 people were convicted under Article 16-59-3 of the Criminal Code (special category). Of these, 364 people received the highest measure, 1336 people were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. With a high degree of probability, it can be assumed that the majority of those shot were cannibals, that is, those who killed people in order to eat their bodies for food. The rest are convicted of corpse-eating.

Yevgeny Tarkhov describes how he was afraid to meet a cannibal on the way to the bakery. “The day before, a woman was killed in the entrance with an ax on the head. They cut out the soft parts of the body of the murdered woman. The ax remained lying next to the corpse. The frozen blood is still there. There are not so few cannibals. mass graves, buttocks were cut out. Many people talk about this. A neighbor who was mobilized into the funeral brigade also told. At the Andreevsky market, the police always catch merchants of human jelly "
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Kristina VAZHENINA from "Answers mail.ru"
My grandmother's brother served in the navy in besieged Leningrad, on patrol he shot dozens of cannibals a night. We found them by smell, no matter how they hid. And the meat with the broth was thrown into the snow and waited until it freezes, but then the neighbors gnawed it out anyway.

Luneev V.V. Crime during WWII
Cherepenina N. Yu. Demographic situation and healthcare in Leningrad on the eve of the Great Patriotic War// Life and death in besieged Leningrad. Historical and medical aspect. Ed. J. D. Barber, A. R. Dzeniskevich. St. Petersburg: "Dmitry Bulanin", 2001, p. 22. With reference to the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, f. 7384, op. 3, d. 13, l. 87.
Cherepenina N. Yu. Hunger and death in a blockaded city // Ibid., p. 76.
Blockade declassified. St. Petersburg: Boyanych, 1995, p. 116. With reference to the fund of Yu. F. Pimenov in the Museum of the Red Banner Leningrad Militia.
Cherepenina N. Yu. Hunger and death in a besieged city // Life and death in besieged Leningrad. Historical and medical aspect, pp.44-45. With reference to TsGAIPD SPB., f. 24, op. 2c, d. 5082, 6187; TsGA SPB., f. 7384, op. 17, d. 410, l. 21.
Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Center for International Crime Prevention)
TsGAIPD SPB., f. 24, op. 2b, d. 1319, l. 38-46. Cit. Quoted from: Leningrad under siege. Collection of documents on the heroic defense of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1944. Ed. A. R. Dzeniskevich. St. Petersburg: Faces of Russia, 1995, p. 421.
Archive UFSB LO., f. 21/12, op. 2, b.s. 19, d. 12, ll. 91-92. Lomagin N.A. In the grip of hunger. Blockade of Leningrad in the documents of the German special services and the NKVD. St. Petersburg: European House, 2001, p. 170-171.
Archive UFSB LO., f. 21/12, op. 2, b.s. 19, d. 12, ll. 366-368. Cit. Quoted from: Lomagin N.A. In the grip of hunger. Siege of Leningrad in the documents of the German special services and the NKVD, p. 267.
Belozerov B.P. Illegal actions and crime in the conditions of hunger // Life and death in besieged Leningrad. Historical and medical aspect, p. 260.
Archive UFSB LO., f. 21/12, op. 2, b.s. 19, d. 12, ll. 287-291. Lomagin N.A. In the grip of hunger. Siege of Leningrad in the documents of the German special services and the NKVD, p. 236.
Dzeniskevich A.R. Banditry of a special category // Journal "City" No. 3 of 01/27/2003
Belozerov B.P. Illegal actions and crime in the conditions of hunger // Life and death in besieged Leningrad. Historical and medical aspect, p. 257. With reference to the Information Center of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region, f. 29, op. 1, d. 6, l. 23-26.
Leningrad under siege. Collection of documents on the heroic defense of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1944, p. 457.
TsGAIPD St. Petersburg, f. 24, op. 2-b, house 1332, l. 48-49. Cit. Quoted from: Leningrad under siege. Collection of documents on the heroic defense of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1944, p. 434.
TsGAIPD St. Petersburg, f. 24, op. 2-b, house 1323, l. 83-85. Cit. Quoted from: Leningrad under siege. Collection of documents on the heroic defense of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1944, p. 443.

Vladimir Ivanovich Terebilov worked for 10 years, from 1939 to 1949, in the prosecutor's office of Leningrad and the region, and then in the Prosecutor General's Office. Later he was Minister of Justice and Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The memories of our hero about the blockade years, about the work of supervisory authorities at this terrible time for Leningrad are unique.

Over the years of my life, I have experienced a prickly polar winter, I have seen terrible landslides in the mountains and mines, the severe consequences of air and railway accidents, - said Terebilov. - But there was no picture harder than the cold and hungry winter of 1941-1942.

"The old woman is mine!"

For us, the prosecutors, in the first days of the war, the main operational task is to urgently complete the investigative files and check the materials. Everyone is busy preparing firing points and trenches, the broken line of which runs just along the slope of the hill on which the building of the Pargolovskaya prosecutor's office is located. A mass evacuation of the population began. The order to evacuate citizens of German and Finnish nationalities was especially adamantly carried out. A significant part of them are the economic and party assets of the collective farms and institutions of the region. Crying, asking, complaining. Many categorically refused to leave, but
the harsh law of war prevailed.

The most difficult situation gave rise to extraordinary criminal situations. I will mention the case of the former editor-in-chief of the magazine Rural Life of Russia, patronized by Tsarevich Alexei. I think his last name was Steinberg. He drew attention to himself by the fact that, imitating a dog, he barked in the evenings! Yes, barking on the porch of his house. As it turned out, he ate the dog, but, imitating dog barking, apparently wanted to hide this fact. During a search in the cast-iron, along with the slurry, pieces of the human body were also found. This is what is left of his maid who disappeared a few days before. It was not necessary to interrogate the unfortunate man, he died in our presence. One can only imagine the horror of the last hours of his life. Later, to a relative of the deceased, her last name is Grushko, we handed over several kilograms of frozen potatoes that Steinberg had kept. Through the window, I saw how an exhausted woman, barely moving, was pulling a pitiful, but at that time valuable inheritance on a sled. After all, this may have been her last load, or perhaps her last chance to survive.

Undoubtedly, hunger and dystrophy often entail serious changes in the psyche. For example, during interrogation, old man V., who used parts of a corpse for food dead wife, said: “What’s wrong with that, my old woman!”

Couldn't carry

By the end of winter, the situation with the supply of the city improved somewhat, they began to deliver it along Ladoga. But there have been instances of theft. Here is one episode. In order to somehow support scientists, it was allowed to involve them in unloading food. There they sometimes got something. Three, as it turned out, engineers, could not resist, carried away and hid three sacks of flour in a dugout. Here they were found. But how?! They dropped the burden, and two were under the bags, and the third, the same dystrophic as they are, did not have the strength to free them. All three were crying quietly... Looking at their emaciated faces, we, hiding our tears, helped them to get out.

It would not be true to say that hunger is the only cause of all delinquency in the city. No, not only because of hunger they looted and even killed. Serious crimes were investigated, and the perpetrators went to trial. True, not everyone survived. The temperature in the pre-trial detention cells was below zero, which meant death from cold and hunger.

Not human

The blockade and the war did not allow themselves to be forgotten for a long time, and in post-war years. One day, a front-line soldier, a young woman demobilized from the army, came to the prosecutor's office. She asked to return the apartment occupied during the blockade. According to the law, the living space must be returned, but how, if the family of blockade survivors who settled in it has nowhere to relocate?! Postponed the eviction, and offered the woman to come in a month. Then he extended the delay for another 3 weeks, for another two ... As luck would have it, the issue was not resolved for a long time. The woman, apparently, regarded the red tape in her own way, put an envelope on my desk, and ran out of the office herself. And then - a trial in the case of an attempt to bribe an official. Two of her brothers, who also went through the entire war, were present at the trial. She was punished with imprisonment. Formally, everything is correct, but in essence - not humanly, not according to conscience. You have to carry this sin on your soul.

A few months passed, and again a similar episode. An old man came and asked to be released until the trial of his son, who was brought in for a small theft. I promised to talk to the investigator. The old man, leaving, left a bundle near the door. He was arrested and brought back. The bundle contained a small amount of money, cereals, vodka. What to do? The old man repeats: this is a token of "gratitude." He ordered the old man to be released, the bundle was returned. In parting, he threatened him with all possible punishments, but we nevertheless released his son before the trial.

Michael DORFMAN

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the 872-day siege of Leningrad. Leningrad survived, but for the Soviet leadership it was a Pyrrhic victory. They preferred not to write about it, and what was written was empty and formal. Later, the blockade was included in the heroic heritage of military glory. They began to talk a lot about the blockade, but we can find out the whole truth only now. Do we just want to?

“Leningraders lie here. Here the townspeople - men, women, children.Next to them are Red Army soldiers.

Blockade Bread Card

In Soviet times, I ended up at the Piskarevskoye cemetery. I was taken there by Roza Anatolyevna, who survived the blockade as a girl. She brought to the cemetery not flowers, as is customary, but pieces of bread. During the most terrible period of the winter of 1941-42 (the temperature dropped below 30 degrees), 250 g of bread per day was given to a manual worker and 150 g - three thin slices - to everyone else. This bread gave me much more understanding than the peppy explanations of the guides, official speeches, films, even an unusually modest statue of the Motherland for the USSR. After the war, there was a wasteland. Only in 1960 the authorities opened the memorial. Only recently have nameplates appeared, trees have been planted around the graves. Roza Anatolyevna then took me to the former front line. I was horrified how close the front was - in the city itself.

September 8, 1941 German troops broke through the defenses and went to the outskirts of Leningrad. Hitler and his generals decided not to take the city, but to kill its inhabitants with a blockade. This was part of a criminal Nazi plan to starve to death and destroy the "useless mouths" - the Slavic population of Eastern Europe - to clear the "living space" for the Millennium Reich. Aviation was ordered to raze the city to the ground. They failed to do this, just as the Allied carpet bombing and fiery holocausts failed to wipe out German cities from the face of the earth. As it was not possible to win a single war with the help of aviation. This should be thought of by all those who, over and over again, dream of winning without setting foot on the ground of the enemy.

Three quarters of a million citizens died from hunger and cold. This is from a quarter to a third of the pre-war population of the city. This is the largest extinction of the population of a modern city in recent history. About a million Soviet servicemen who died on the fronts around Leningrad, mainly in 1941-42 and in 1944, must be added to the account of the victims.

The Siege of Leningrad was one of the largest and most brutal atrocities of the war, an epic tragedy comparable to the Holocaust. Outside the USSR, almost no one knew about it and did not talk about it. Why? Firstly, the blockade of Leningrad did not fit into the myth of the Eastern Front with boundless snow fields, General Zima and desperate Russians marching in droves on German machine guns. Right down to Antony Beaver's wonderful book about Stalingrad, it was a picture, a myth, established in the Western mind, in books and films. Much less significant Allied operations in North Africa and Italy were considered the main ones.

Secondly, the Soviet authorities were also reluctant to talk about the blockade of Leningrad. The city survived, but very unpleasant questions remained. Why such a huge number of victims? Why did the German armies reach the city so quickly, advanced so far deep into the USSR? Why wasn't a mass evacuation organized before the blockade closed? After all, it took the German and Finnish troops three long months to close the blockade ring. Why was there no adequate food supply? The Germans surrounded Leningrad in September 1941. The head of the party organization of the city, Andrei Zhdanov, and the commander of the front, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, fearing that they would be accused of alarmism and disbelief in the forces of the Red Army, refused the proposal of Anastas Mikoyan, Chairman of the Committee for Food and Clothing Supply of the Red Army, to provide the city with food supplies sufficient to the city survived a long siege. A propaganda campaign was launched in Leningrad, denouncing the "rats" fleeing the city of three revolutions instead of defending it. Tens of thousands of citizens were mobilized for defense work, they dug trenches, which soon ended up behind enemy lines.

After the war, Stalin was least interested in discussing these topics. And he clearly did not like Leningrad. Not a single city was cleaned the way Leningrad was cleaned, before the war and after it. Repressions fell upon the Leningrad writers. The Leningrad party organization was crushed. Georgy Malenkov, who led the rout, shouted into the hall: “Only the enemies could need the myth of the blockade to belittle the role of the great leader!” Hundreds of books about the blockade were confiscated from libraries. Some, like the stories of Vera Inber, for “a distorted picture that does not take into account the life of the country”, others for “underestimating the leading role of the party”, and the majority for the fact that there were the names of the arrested Leningrad leaders Alexei Kuznetsov, Pyotr Popkov and others, marching on the "Leningrad case". However, they are also to blame. The Heroic Defense of Leningrad Museum, which was very popular, was closed (with a model of a bakery that gave out 125-gram bread rations for adults). Many documents and unique exhibits were destroyed. Some, like the diaries of Tanya Savicheva, were miraculously saved by the museum staff.

The director of the museum, Lev Lvovich Rakov, was arrested and charged with "collecting weapons for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts when Stalin arrives in Leningrad." It was about the museum collection of captured German weapons. For him it was not the first time. In 1936, he, then an employee of the Hermitage, was arrested for a collection of noble clothes. Then “propaganda of the noble way of life” was also sewn to terrorism.

"With all their lives, They defended you, Leningrad, the Cradle of the Revolution."

In the Brezhnev era, the blockade was rehabilitated. However, even then they did not tell the whole truth, but they gave out a strongly cleaned up and heroized history, within the framework of the leaf mythology of the Great Patriotic War that was then being built. According to this version, people were dying of hunger, but somehow quietly and carefully, sacrificing themselves to victory, with the only desire to defend the "cradle of the revolution." No one complained, no one shied away from work, no one stole, no one manipulated card system, did not take bribes, did not kill neighbors to get hold of their food cards. There was no crime in the city, there was no black market. No one died in the terrible epidemics of dysentery that mowed down Leningraders. It's not that aesthetically pleasing. And, of course, no one expected that the Germans could win.

Residents of besieged Leningrad collect water that appeared after shelling in holes in the asphalt on Nevsky Prospekt, photo by B.P. Kudoyarov, December 1941

The taboo was also imposed on the discussion of the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet authorities. The numerous miscalculations, tyranny, negligence and bungling of army officials and party apparatchiks, theft of food, the deadly chaos that reigned on the ice "Road of Life" across Lake Ladoga were not discussed. Silence was shrouded in political repression, which did not stop for a single day. The KGBists dragged honest, innocent, dying and starving people to Kresty, so that they could die there sooner. Before the noses of the advancing Germans, arrests, executions and deportations of tens of thousands of people did not stop in the city. Instead of an organized evacuation of the population, convoys with prisoners left the city until the closing of the blockade ring.

The poetess Olga Bergolts, whose poems, carved on the memorial of the Piskarevsky cemetery, we took as epigraphs, became the voice of besieged Leningrad. Even this did not save her elderly doctor father from arrest and deportation to Western Siberia right under the noses of the advancing Germans. All his fault was that the Bergoltsy were Russified Germans. People were arrested only for nationality, religious affiliation or social origin. Once again, the KGB went to the addresses of the book "All Petersburg" in 1913, in the hope that someone else had survived at the old addresses.

In the post-Stalin era, the entire horror of the blockade was successfully reduced to a few symbols - stoves, potbelly stoves and home-made lamps, when the utilities ceased to function, to children's sledges, on which the dead were taken to the morgue. Potbelly stoves have become an indispensable attribute of films, books and paintings of besieged Leningrad. But, according to Rosa Anatolyevna, in the most terrible winter of 1942, a potbelly stove was a luxury: “No one in our country had the opportunity to get a barrel, pipe or cement, and then they didn’t even have the strength ... In the whole house, a potbelly stove was only in one apartment, where the district committee supplier lived.

“Their noble names we cannot list here.”

With the fall of Soviet power, the real picture began to emerge. More and more documents are being made available to the public. Much has appeared on the Internet. Documents in all their glory show the rot and lies of the Soviet bureaucracy, its self-praise, interdepartmental squabbling, attempts to shift the blame on others, and ascribe merit to themselves, hypocritical euphemisms (hunger was called not hunger, but dystrophy, exhaustion, nutritional problems).

Victim of the "Leningrad disease"

We have to agree with Anna Reed that it is the children of the blockade, those who are over 60 today, who most zealously defend the Soviet version of history. The blockade survivors themselves were much less romantic in relation to the experience. The problem was that they had experienced such an impossible reality that they doubted they would be listened to.

"But know, listening to these stones: No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten."

The Commission for Combating the Falsification of History, set up two years ago, has so far turned out to be just another propaganda campaign. Historical research in Russia is not yet subject to external censorship. There are no taboo topics related to the blockade of Leningrad. Anna Reed says that there are quite a few cases in the Partarkhiv to which researchers have limited access. Basically, these are cases of collaborators in the occupied territory and deserters. Petersburg researchers are much more concerned about the chronic lack of funding and emigration the best students to the west.

Outside universities and research institutes the leafy Soviet version remains almost untouched. Anna Reid was struck by the attitude of her young Russian employees, with whom she sorted out cases of bribery in the bread distribution system. “I thought that during the war people behaved differently,” her employee told her. “Now I see it’s the same everywhere.” The book is critical of the Soviet regime. Undoubtedly, there were miscalculations, mistakes and outright crimes. However, perhaps without the unwavering brutality of the Soviet system, Leningrad might not have survived, and the war might have been lost.

Jubilant Leningrad. Blockade lifted, 1944

Now Leningrad is again called St. Petersburg. Traces of the blockade are visible, despite the palaces and cathedrals restored in the Soviet era, despite the European-style repairs of the post-Soviet era. “It is not surprising that the Russians are attached to the heroic version of their history,” Anna Reid said in an interview. “Our Battle of Britain stories also don't like collaborators in the occupied Channel Islands, mass looting during German bombing raids, Jewish refugees and anti-fascist internment. However, sincere respect for the memory of the victims of the blockade of Leningrad, where every third person died, means telling their story truthfully.”

Military tribunal in besieged Leningrad. Executions for speculation, participation in the theft of bread, cannibalism, banditry. The end of the failed governor of Leningrad. Executions in the territories occupied by fascist troops. The last public execution in the city: "The fulcrum has gone from under the feet of the condemned."

Before approaching the events of the Great Patriotic War, let's provide a few more lines of statistics. Vasily Berezhkov, a historian of special services already known to the reader, cites the following data on those shot in Leningrad until 1945:

1939 - 72 executed,

1940 - 163,

1941 - 2503,

1942 - 3621,

1943 - 526,

1944 - 193,

1945 - 115.

The statistics are telling here. Pre-war executions, as it is easy to understand, are the executions of some Yezhov's executioners, and reprisals against the enemies of the people who have not yet been killed, and a tribute to the spy mania of those years. I will give only two names: Leningraders Konstantin Petrovich Vitko and Alexei Nikolaevich Vasiliev, both were sentenced to death for espionage and treason, the sentence was carried out on July 3 and September 23, 1939, respectively.

The war that began in 1941 could not but lead to a sharp tightening of the repressive mechanism. This is understandable: military everyday life is always difficult, and for Leningraders they turned out to be especially difficult, because rampant crime was added to the great loss of life, hunger, cold and bombing. Speculation in food, for example: in conditions of unbearable shortages, it was inevitable, and they fought against it, including executions. One of the cases is described in a secret special message from the head of the Leningrad department of the NKVD, Pyotr Nikolaevich Kubatkin, dated November 7, 1941: a criminal group was formed in the trust system of canteens and restaurants in Leningrad, whose members "systematically stole large quantities of products from the warehouses and bases where they worked," and then sold the mined at speculative prices. During the arrest of the leader of the group, Burkalov, the warehouse manager of the Kavkaz restaurant, “the following were found stolen by him: flour 250 kg., groats 153 kg., sugar 130 kg. and other products”.

Burkalov and one of his accomplices were sentenced to death. The besieged shot were buried in different places, including on the Levashovskaya wasteland.

They were sentenced to capital punishment in blockade and “for incitement to protests and participation in the theft of bread”: in January 1942 alone, seven were shot on such charges. It was not only about gang attacks on shops, but also spontaneous riots that broke out in lines. There is a well-known case in store No. 12 of the Leninsky district food trade in January 1942: “About 20 citizens rushed behind the counter, began to throw bread from the shelves into the crowd”, as a result, according to the NKVD, they stole about 160 kg of bread.

Food shortages led to executions even on the Road of Life: despite tight control, some drivers managed to steal flour, pouring it out of bags. Commissar of the echelons of the OATB of the 102nd military highway N.V. Zinoviev later recalled: “If theft is discovered, then a military tribunal goes to the place, the death penalty is imposed, and the sentence is immediately carried out. I happened to be a witness to the execution of the driver Kudryashov. The battalion lined up in a square. A closed car drove up with the condemned. He came out in felt boots, wadded pants, one shirt and no hat. Hands tied back with a strap. A man of 10 shooters is lined up right there. The chairman of the tribunal reads the verdict. Then an order is given to the commandant, he commands the condemned: “Circle! On your knees! ”- and to the arrows:“ Fire! ”A volley of 10 shots sounds, after which Kudryashov shudders, continues to kneel for some time, and then falls face down into the snow. The commandant comes up and shoots from a revolver in the back of the head, after which the corpse is loaded into the back of a car and taken away somewhere.”

Among the blockade crimes motivated by hunger is the most terrible - cannibalism. In Kubatkin’s special report dated June 2, 1942, one can find summary statistics of cases of cannibalism: 1965 people were arrested, the investigation of 1913 of them was completed, 586 were sentenced to capital punishment, 668 were sentenced to imprisonment. The then military prosecutor of Leningrad Anton Ivanovich Panfilenko informed the leadership and about other details: according to him, the natives of Leningrad made up less than 15% of cannibals, the rest were from newcomers; only 2% of those prosecuted had previous convictions.

One of these cases was reflected in the blockade diary of Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina, an entry dated February 10, 1942: “A certain Karamysheva lived in apartment 98 of our house with her daughter Valya, 12 years old, and her teenage son, a craftsman. A neighbor says: “I was sick, my sister had a day off, and I persuaded her to stay with me. Suddenly I hear a terrible cry from the Karamyshevs. Well, I say, Valka is being whipped. No, they shout: "Save, save." The sister rushed to the door of the Karamyshevs, knocked, they didn’t open it, and the cry “save me” was getting louder. Then other neighbors ran out, everyone was knocking on the door, demanding to open it. The door opened, a girl ran out covered in blood, followed by Karamysheva, her hands were also covered in blood, and Valka played the guitar and sang at the top of her lungs. He speaks:

an ax from the stove fell on the girl. The manager told the information that came to light during the interrogation. Karamysheva met a girl at the church who asked for alms. She invited her to her place, promised to feed her and give her a ten. At home, they assigned roles. Valya sang to drown out the screams, the son clamped the girl's mouth. At first, Karamysheva thought to stun the girl with a log, then hit her on the head with an axe. But the girl was saved by a dense downy hat. They wanted to kill and eat. Karamysheva and her son were shot. The daughter was placed in a special school.

Another case is in Kubatkin’s message dated May 2, 1942, which refers to a female gang captured at the Razliv station: “Gang members visited bread and grocery stores, targeted a victim and lured her to G.’s apartment, allegedly to exchange things for food .

During a conversation at G.'s apartment, a member of V.'s gang committed murders with an ax hit from behind in the back of the head. The corpses of the murdered gang members were dismembered and eaten. Clothes, money and food cards were divided among themselves.

During January-March, gang members killed 13 people. In addition, 2 corpses were stolen from the cemetery and used for food.”

All six members of the gang were sentenced to death by a military tribunal. Such a fate awaited in the blockade all those cannibals who killed and then ate the meat of their victims for food: their crimes were qualified as banditry. Those who ate the meat of corpses were mostly sentenced to prison, although the highest measure sometimes awaited them (for example, the milling machine operator of the Bolshevik plant K., who in December 1941 cut off his legs “from unburied corpses at the Serafimovsky cemetery in order to eating"). At the same time, let's pay attention to the difference between the total number of people in Kubatkin's statistics and the number of convicts: the rest, apparently, did not live to see the verdict.

Unfortunately, cases of cannibalism continued in the besieged city even after Kubatkin compiled his horrific statistics. There were also more shootings. Unemployed K., aged 59, was executed for the fact that on July 1, 1942, “having lured a five-year-old boy I. to her apartment, killed him and ate the corpse for food.” Around the same time, the assistant driver of the Finnish Line of the October Railway A., aged 36, killed his neighbor, an employee of the technical school of the City Purification Trust, dismembered the body “and prepared parts of it for eating.” He was detained on the street by a police officer with a bag in which the severed head of a neighbor lay. According to the verdict of the military tribunal, he was shot.

The famine in besieged Leningrad also contributed to the usual banditry: “Individual criminal elements, in order to take possession of food cards and food, committed gangster murders of citizens.” This was also a problem for the city. And it is no coincidence that on November 25, 1942, the military council of the Leningrad Front, headed by Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, adopted resolution No. and publish several verdicts in the press.”

They were also sentenced to death for less serious crimes. Evidence of this is not difficult to find in the blockade issues of the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper. In early November 1941, for example, citizen I. Ronis, the head of a gang that systematically stole food and manufactured goods cards from citizens, was sentenced to capital punishment by a military tribunal. In April 1942, citizen A.F. was shot. Bakanov, who, “having entered Mrs. S.’s apartment, stole her belongings”, as well as with an accomplice, “robbed two citizens using their bread cards”. Reports of such trials and executions were published regularly in the first months of the blockade under the invariable heading "At the military tribunal." Although the executions themselves were not public, the instructive element was still the most important in these executions.

All these crimes are purely criminal, but there were facts of political crimes during the blockade. Siege historian Nikita Lomagin writes that “on average, during the war months of 1941, 10-15 people were shot per day in the city for anti-Soviet activities,” but notes that “the number of those convicted for robbery, banditry and murder was three times more rather than “political”…”

What political crimes are we talking about? The report on the activities of the Leningrad militia, compiled in the autumn of 1943, states bluntly: “In the first period of the war, there were manifestations of anti-Soviet pro-fascist agitation, the spread of false rumors, leaflets, etc.<…>Resolute, harsh measures were taken against the accused in these cases, which yielded positive results in terms of reducing this type of crime.

And again, examples are given to us by Leningradskaya Pravda. On July 3, 1941, for example, she informed readers that the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Leningrad District considered the case on charges of V.I. Koltsov in distributing anti-Soviet leaflets “manufactured by the Finnish White Guard” among the visitors of the cafe buffets, and sentenced him to death. On September 30, 1941, the newspaper reported on “the case of Yu.K. Smetanin, E.V. Sergeeva, and V.M. Surin. on charges of counter-revolutionary agitation”: the defendants not only spread “false rumors aimed at weakening the power of the Red Army,” but also kept the fascist leaflets they had picked up. The ending is clear: “Fascist agents Smetanin, Sergeeva and Surin were sentenced to capital punishment - execution. The sentence has been carried out."

The severity of blockade justice was sometimes exacerbated by the excessive zeal of the NKVD. The case of a group of Leningrad scientists convicted of anti-Soviet sentiments and the creation of a counter-revolutionary organization called the “Committee of Public Salvation” affected dozens of people, and five were shot by a military tribunal in the summer of 1942: an outstanding optical scientist, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Vladimir Sergeevich Ignatovsky, his wife, professors Nikolay Artamonovich Artemyev and S.M. Chanyshev, senior engineer of the Institute of Fine Mechanics Konstantin Alekseevich Lyubov. Already after the war, in 1957, a special inspection of the personnel department of the KGB was forced to state: “No objective data on the existence of a counter-revolutionary organization among scientists, except for the testimony of the arrested themselves, obtained as a result of physical and moral pressure on them, were obtained during the investigation” . And a year later, the Party Control Committee admitted something else: in the Leningrad department of the NKVD, “the criminal practice of interrogating prisoners after they were sentenced to VMN was widespread. During these interrogations, by promising to save lives from those sentenced to death, the incriminating evidence necessary for the investigation against other persons was extorted.

A clear confirmation that the interrogations before death - such as once in the Kovalevsky Forest - were at that time a permanent working tool of the Cheka / NKVD.

Another example, later, reminiscent of the fact that defectors-saboteurs appeared in the besieged Leningrad - as a rule, from among the captured Soviet citizens. They usually tried to find shelter with relatives, and in case of failure, severe punishment awaited everyone. June 16, 1942 military tribunal Baltic Fleet sentenced to death with confiscation of property three relatives of the deserter and saboteur Yemelyanov at once - his wife, an employee of the evacuation hospital Nadezhda Afanasyevna Yemelyanova, brother-in-law Vasily Afanasevich Voitko-Vasilyev and mother-in-law Alexandra Ignatyevna Voytko-Vasilyeva, as well as the wife of another saboteur Kulikov, a postman of the 28th department communications Maria Petrovna Kulikova. All of them confessed to assisting dangerous relatives, as well as receiving from the enemy Money. From the testimony of Emelyanova: “In total, I received 7,000 rubles, I committed treason not for political reasons and not because I was hostile towards Soviet power, but solely due to moral depression due to the death of his father and hunger.

Finally, two more high-profile cases - the teacher of geography Alexei Ivanovich Vinokurov and the senior auditor-inspector of the Leningrad city department of public education Alexei Mikhailovich Kruglov. The first not only "systematically carried out counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet agitation among school workers, students and those around him", but also kept a diary filled with very risky statements. Here is just one quote: “Everyone lives in hopes of a speedy deliverance and believes in it, each in his own way. The population suffers unheard-of hardships, many die, but, oddly enough, there are still a lot of people in the city who believe in the victory of adventurers.”

The verdict to the geography teacher, passed on March 16, 1943 by the military tribunal of the troops of the NKVD of the USSR of the Leningrad District and the guards of the rear of the Leningrad Front, is still the same - execution; he was executed on March 19.

Vinokurov's blockade diary, it is worth adding, was published in the 21st century.

The case of Aleksey Mikhailovich Kruglov became even more noticeable. He was arrested on January 26, 1943, shortly after he told his acquaintances: “If you see a car or a carriage with a swastika driving along Nevsky, then know that I am driving in them. Feel free to take off your hat and come." During the investigation, it turned out that Kruglov was in contact with representatives of German intelligence and even agreed to take the post of governor of the city after the occupation of Leningrad. On April 8, 1943, a military tribunal sentenced the failed governor to capital punishment with confiscation of property; on April 14, the sentence was carried out.

A special place in the life of justice in the besieged city was occupied by purely military crimes committed by regular soldiers and officers of the Leningrad Front. One of the eloquent examples is the verdict passed on December 2, 1941 by the military tribunal of the front to the former commander and commissar of the 80th Infantry Division Ivan Mikhailovich Frolov and Konstantin Dmitrievich Ivanov. Both of them, having received an oral order from the commander to break through the blockade of the enemy in their sector, “they reacted defeatistly to the execution of the combat order of the Front Command, showed cowardice and criminal inaction, and Frolov told two representatives of the front 3 hours before the start of the operation that he did not believe in successful outcome of the operation.

The verdict of the tribunal stated: "Frolov and Ivanov violated the military oath, dishonored the high rank of a soldier of the Red Army and, with their cowardly defeatist actions, caused serious damage to the troops of the Leningrad Front." Both were deprived military ranks and shot.

And some more statistics: according to a memorandum from the special department of the NKVD of the Leningrad Front, addressed to the representative of the Stavka Kliment Voroshilov, from May to December 1942 alone, almost four thousand soldiers and officers were arrested for espionage, sabotage, treasonous intentions, defeatist agitation, desertion and self-mutilation; 1,538 of them were sentenced to capital punishment.

... The time has come to move on to the most difficult chapter of military history, one of the most dramatic parts of this already difficult book - to executions in the lands occupied by the Nazis. The central part of Leningrad, as everyone knows, was defended from the enemy at the cost of enormous efforts and losses, but the suburbs - including Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Krasnoe Selo, then belonging to the Leningrad Region, but now included in the city limits - were under the Germans . It was a truly tragic period in the history of these suburbs. It is no coincidence that the poetess Vera Inber wrote in her poem "The Pulkovo Meridian", written in 1941-1943:

We will avenge everything: for our city,

The great creation of Petrovo,

For the people left homeless

For the dead, like a tomb, the Hermitage,

For the gallows in the park above the water,

Where young Pushkin became a poet...

Although Vera Mikhailovna was not entirely accurate - apparently, the Nazis did not set up gallows in Tsarskoe Selo parks, but they often shot them there. A resident of Pushkin Pavel Bazilevich, who caught the occupation as an 11-year-old child and lived with his mother in the left semicircle of the Catherine Palace, recalled: “For water, I went to the park to the spring of the monument“ Girl with a Jug ”, the only place with clean drinking water. I walked through Triangular Square, Private Garden and further down. Every morning I saw a terrible picture. A German was coming out of the palace and leading a man in front of him. Often these were women with children. The fascist led them to a funnel near the Evening Hall and shot them in the back or in the back of the head with a pistol, and then pushed them into the pit. This is how the Germans dealt with the Jews. They paid no attention to me. I remember this: a German executioner, always dressed in a black sweater with sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

Not only Jews were shot. Acts on the atrocities of the Nazi invaders, drawn up in 1944-1945 by special commissions, after the liberation of the Leningrad suburbs from occupation, recorded: people were executed in Pushkin, and in Pavlovsk, and in Peterhof, and in Krasnoye Selo. In Pavlovsk, for example, as the local commission managed to establish, the occupying power shot over 227 residents, and hanged six.

Mass executions took place on the territory of Pavlovsky Park, in the area of ​​mass graves, but not only there; during the retreat of the Nazis, ordinary Pavlovsk trees were used to massacre local residents - and Anna Ivanovna Zelenova, director of the palace and park of Pavlovsk, noted in February 1944 that "even now the branches of the trees are broken and the ropes dangle."

It was not possible to collect clear statistics on the city of Pushkin; the number of those executed was estimated by the 1945 commission at 250-300 people, modern historians of the Holocaust believe that up to 800 people were killed alone. They were shot on the Rose Field, in the Lyceum Garden, in Alexander and Babolovsky parks. Witness Ksenia Dmitrievna Bolshakova told how already on September 20, three days after their invasion of Pushkin, the Germans destroyed a whole group of Jews on the square in front of the Catherine Palace: “... Then they opened fire from machine guns. So they shot these children. The corpses of fifteen adults and 23 children who were shot were lying on the square for about 12 days, and then 2 German officers came to my room, one of them spoke Russian well, who suggested that I clean up the stinking corpses on the palace square. I and several citizens from among the inhabitants of the city of Pushkin buried the corpses in craters on the palace square, and some of the corpses, about 5 pieces, were buried in the Own Garden opposite the room of Alexander II, in Catherine's park. Buried in a trench."

Pavel Bazilevich also recalled something else: “The German commandant's office was then located in the pharmacy building opposite the Avangard cinema. Here, on electric lighting poles, the Nazis hung those whom they considered guilty of something. There they hanged my comrade Vanya Yaritsa together with his father.” Another resident of Pushkin, Nina Zenkovich, echoes him: “The Germans used the lampposts on the streets of Komsomolskaya, Vasenko and near the Lyceum as gallows, and in the square opposite the Avangard cinema, where the chapel now stands, there was a gallows on which they hung people with signs on the chest "I am a partisan" or "I am a marauder" ... "

Gallows, as another witness, Anna Mikhailovna Aleksandrova, told the commission in 1945, stood throughout Pushkin during the occupation: “There were a lot of gallows with hanged people around the city: along the street. Komsomolskaya, against the street. Comintern and at the Alexander Palace, with inscriptions: "For connection with the partisans", "Jew (Jews)". About the same witness Averina, who added another address to the mournful topography: “When I went for potatoes in the early days of October 1941, I saw hanged men on Oktyabrsky Boulevard.”

In general, almost all of Pushkin was then lined with gallows, and the bodies of the hanged were not allowed to be removed for weeks. A clear confirmation of what kind of “ordnung” the fascist war machine brought to Russian soil.

This is also evidenced by a fragment of the memoirs of Svetlana Belyaeva, the daughter of the outstanding science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev, who was then forced to stay in Pushkin for health reasons: “I hardly went out into the street, I watched life through a peephole melted in frosty glass. Through it, I could see a boarded-up “sweet” stall, trees in hoarfrost and a pillar with an arrow “transition” ... Once, breathing through the peephole, I clung to the window, and my heart sank - instead of the arrow “transition”, a man with a plywood sheet hung on the crossbar on the chest. There was a small crowd around the pole. Hanging, the Germans drove all passers-by to the scene of the incident for warning. Numb with horror, I looked out the window, unable to take my eyes off the hanged man, and chattered my teeth loudly. Neither mother nor grandmother was at home at that moment. When my mother returned, I rushed to her, trying to tell about what I saw, but only burst into tears. Having calmed down, I told my mother about the hanged man. After listening to me, my mother answered me in some unnaturally calm voice that she had also seen it.

- Why him, why? I asked, tugging at my mother's sleeve. Half turning away, my mother said to the side:

- It says on the board that he is a bad judge and a friend of the Jews.

The hanged man was not filmed for almost a whole week, and he hung, powdered with snow, swaying in a strong wind. After it was removed, the pole was empty for several days, then a woman was hanged on it, calling her an apartment thief. There were people who knew her, who said that the woman, like us, moved from the broken house to another apartment, and went to her place for things.

Why were the invaders executed? Jews - for nationality, communists - for belonging to the party, the rest, as the reader has already understood, for various things - for ties with partisans and Red Army soldiers, for opposing the occupation authorities and violating the norms and rules established by it, sometimes for criminal offenses: in Pushkin at the right time occupation was hungry and cold, people got their own food as best they could.

And Olga Fedorovna Berggolts, who ended up in Pushkin literally a day after his release, recalled another crime for which local residents were threatened with execution: “On the gate leading to the courtyard of the Catherine Palace, there is a stenciled inscription on plywood in German and Russian: . Restricted area. For being in the zone - execution. Commandant of the city of Pushkin.

And at the gates of Alexander Park - two plywood boards, also in Russian and German. On one is the inscription: “Entrance to the park is strictly prohibited. For violation - execution." On the other: "Civilians, even accompanied by German soldiers, are not allowed to enter." (I am giving an inscription with all the spelling features.) We removed these boards and took them with us. Then we entered our park, for the entrance to which only yesterday a Russian person was threatened with execution ... "

There were almost no executions in Peterhof - and even then only because the Germans quickly organized the evacuation of local residents to Ropsha, but there they turned around with might and main. Witness Pulkin, interviewed by the commission in 1944, recalled the following episode: “They held a meeting at which they asked to extradite the Communists and Jews. There were no Jews, one communist Ropshinsky was present, but they did not extradite him, and the next day he was hanged anyway. It hung for a very long time, they photographed it, and then the cards appeared in the hands of many soldiers, who, boasting, showed it. I saw other cards of the hanged, even earlier, many soldiers also had them. Showing the cards, they watched the face - whether there is sympathy or compassion.

Gallows, gallows... One can imagine what impression all these reprisals made on the inhabitants of the Leningrad suburbs, for whom public execution was a distant relic of tsarism. The occupiers sowed fear, but hatred towards them was even stronger.

This hatred found an outlet in the last public execution in the history of the city. Almost eight months have passed since the day of the Great Victory - and now at 11 o'clock in the morning on January 5, 1946 on the Vyborg side of Leningrad near the cinema "Giant": "The sentence was carried out on the Nazi villains ... sentenced by the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District for committing mass executions, atrocities and violence against the peaceful Soviet population, burning and looting of cities and villages, deporting Soviet citizens into German slavery - to death by hanging ”(from the LenTASS report).

Eight people were then on the gallows: the former military commandant of Pskov, Major General Heinrich Remlinger, and Captain Karl German Strüfing, Lieutenant Eduard Sonenfeld, who served in special forces, Chief Sergeant Ernst Bem and Fritz Engel, Chief Corporal Erwin Skotki, privates Gerhard Janicke and Erwin Ernst Gerer. On account of each of them there were more than a dozen ruined lives, which they themselves admitted during the trial, which took place in the Vyborg Palace of Culture. It was about war crimes committed mainly in the current Pskov region.

The Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District has been in session since December 28, 1945; On the evening of January 4, 1946, the verdict was pronounced, and the next morning the execution took place. According to the LenTASS report, "numerous workers who were present on the square met the execution of the sentence with unanimous approval." In Leningradskaya Pravda, the war correspondent of the newspaper Mark Lanskoy briefly reported on the incident: “Yesterday, eight war criminals hung on a strong crossbar in Leningrad. In the last moments, they met again with the hating eyes of the people. They again heard the whistling and cursing that accompanied them to a shameful death.

Cars started moving… The last point of support left from under the feet of the convicts. The sentence was carried out."

The Leningrad writer Pavel Luknitsky also witnessed the execution and left a detailed description of it, which the reader will find at the end of this book. Let us quote here a short passage about the key moment of the execution: “The condemned do not move. They all froze, the last two or three minutes of their lives remained for them.

“Comrade commandant, I order that the sentence be carried out!” the prosecutor commands loudly and clearly.

The commandant, in a sheepskin coat, with his hand on his hat with earflaps, turns sharply from the "jeep" to the gallows, the general jumps out of the car, steps back. "Willis" was about to reverse, drops his chair, stops, remains in place until the end of the execution. The commandant makes a sign with his hand, says something, the fifth soldier in each car begins to throw a noose around the neck of the condemned.

I omit here the naturalistic details of the moment of execution - the reader does not need them. I will give just one single stroke. When the trucks started moving very slowly at once, and when the soil began to leave from under the feet of the convicts, each of them was forced to take several small steps, Sonenfeld, unlike the others, took a decisive step forward in order to jump off the wooden platform of the body as soon as possible, so that the noose jerked him sharper. His eyes at that moment were determined and stubborn... Sonenfeld died first. All the condemned accepted death silently and without any gestures.

On the same day, Luknitsky wrote down, summing up his own feelings: “Probably, if I had seen a public execution before the war, such an execution would have made a terrible impression on me. But, obviously, as for everyone who spent the entire war in Leningrad and at the front, nothing can be too strong an impression. I did not think that in general everything would turn out to be so comparatively unimpressive for me. And I did not see people on the square who, apart from some excitement, would be affected by the impressions of this spectacle. Probably, everyone who survived the war and hated the vile enemy felt the justice of the sentence and experienced a sense of satisfaction, knowing what kind of animal-like creatures those who were hanged today for all their countless atrocities.

The fairness of the verdict is, of course, the exact words that today do not cause the slightest doubt.

That was, let's put an end to it again, the last public death penalty in the history of the city.

The history of criminal gangs is much wider than the judicial chronicles of their deeds. It is inseparable from the historical moment that the country is going through. No wonder the best gangster films in world cinema are always epic, reflecting the spirit of the times. After the release of Stanislav Govorukhin's film "The meeting place cannot be changed" based on the novel by the Vainer brothers, the Black Cat gang became a symbol of the post-war hard times in the USSR. She is legendary in every sense of the word.

Shot from the film "The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed"

A different creature has gone wild

The end of the Great Patriotic War in the USSR was accompanied by a monstrous surge in crime. It was born not only of hunger and poverty, which brought people to the last limit. After the Stalinist amnesty in honor of the victory over Germany, thousands of criminals were released from the camps, for whom it was not difficult to arm themselves - after the war, the population had a lot of firearms. Crowds of former policemen, deserters, homeless children flocked to various gangs and gangs.

By 1947, crime had grown by almost half compared to 1945: a total of 1.2 million were registered. various kinds criminal offenses. Daring raids on savings banks, armed robberies of stores and warehouses, attacks on cash-in-transit vehicles, burglaries and murders of ordinary citizens sowed panic among the townsfolk and gave rise to many rumors. One of the main "horror stories" of that time was the Black Cat gang. This name thundered throughout the country, making people numb with horror.

Some experts consider the "Black Cat" a hoax. Others are sure that it was a well-organized structure with a developed branch network. But everyone agrees on one thing: it was a high-profile criminal brand, to which both teenage pranksters and professional criminals willingly "clung" to it.

“In fact, the archives of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs recorded traces of about a dozen bandit groups with this name, operating in different cities of the country in the mid-40s of the last century,” writes military lawyer, historian Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev in the book “War on Themis’s Scales.” - The symbol of a black cat drawn at the crime scene turned out to be attractive not only for youngsters who are keen on thieves' romance, but also for inveterate criminals.It was this "brand name", borrowed from homeless children of the 1920s, that contributed to the rapid spread of numerous rumors and conjectures among the people about the cruelty and elusiveness of the Black Cat.

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Joke written in blood

Actually, most of these gangs were teenagers, yard punks, who hunted mainly by petty theft. The "rejuvenation" of crime in general was a post-war trend. For example, in 1946, juveniles accounted for 43 percent of all those brought to criminal responsibility. They were tried for theft, robbery, hooliganism, less often - for murder.

As for the juvenile "black cats", they were let down by their love for special effects: notes with warnings, tattoos in the form of cats. Operatives split such teenage gangs pretty quickly. For example, in Leningrad in 1945, policemen investigating a series of burglaries in house No. 8 on Pushkinskaya Street, within a few weeks, got on the trail of a teenage gang and red-handed its top - students of vocational school No. 4 Vladimir Popov, nicknamed Garlic, Sergei Ivanov and Grigory Shneiderman. During a search of the ringleader, 16-year-old Popov, a curious document was discovered - the oath of the Kodla "Black Cat", under which eight signatures were affixed in blood. But since only three participants managed to commit crimes, they went to the dock. In January 1946, at a meeting of the people's court of the 2nd district of the Krasnogvardeisky district of Leningrad, the verdict was announced: the teenagers received from one to three years in prison.

But more often, the antics of juvenile "black cats" turned out to be ordinary practical jokes, which, however, required the departure of a task force, or even a lengthy investigation. Such hooligan antics spread among the people the rumor about a terrible gang. Somehow, rural boys turned the whole of Samara on their ears by hanging leaflets with the following text: "Hello to thieves, kaput fraers. On April 6, 1945, several members of the Black Cat gang arrived. They act for five days. The secretary of the" Black Cat "Singed ".

Gangster epic in Odessa

A truly cinematic story unfolded in Odessa, where, after the war, its own “Black Cat” operated, consisting of 19 people, most of them recidivist criminals. The gang was marked by high-profile robberies of confectionery factories (flour, sugar and butter in the hungry 47th were worth their weight in gold) and numerous murders. Among those killed were a district inspector, a state security officer, and several military officers. The criminals used their weapons and uniforms when they went to work. Although there may have been other reasons for the killings. There is evidence that the leader of the gang, Nikolai Marushak, and his assistant Fyodor Kuznetsov, nicknamed Kogut, had contacts with the Gestapo during the occupation.

The gang was hunted by employees of the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department, headed by David Kurlyand (by the way, this man became the prototype of the protagonist of another popular television series about post-war gangs - "Liquidation" by Sergei Ursulyak). It was not easy to take it - in the intervals between robberies, the bandits hid in the catacombs. They also hid the bodies of the dead there.

Finally, during a raid on Privoz, the operatives seized one of the leader's accomplices - he was identified by a former policeman captured there. Arrested and indicated the place where the "headquarters" of the gang was located. The criminal investigation officers set up an ambush, and when the criminals taken into the ring opened fire, they began shooting to kill. Regarding the ringleader, there was a clear setting: to take him alive. However, the seriously wounded Marushchak did not give himself up to justice. He committed suicide by biting through an ampoule of poison. Those who survived received 25 years in prison (after the abolition of the death penalty in 1947, this was the highest penalty).

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From the army "mowed down" in the gang

According to a number of versions, the first large group under the name "Black Cat" began to form even before the war, and over time, its core was made up mainly of educated young people without a criminal past - deserters who sought to evade front-line service. Their average age was 25 years. The absence of criminal records and connections in the criminal world allowed them to remain out of the sight of law enforcement officers for a long time.

By the middle of the war, the "Black Cat" had grown to the scale of the country. As Aleksey Shcherbakov, one of the researchers of its activities, writes, its "various" links "were relatively autonomous, but there was a common leadership, a common fund and, most importantly, an extensive infrastructure." The gang included criminals of all stripes - rolls, scammers, thugs, pluckers, gop-stoppers. But the main source of income was the theft of products using forged documents (a whole staff of highly qualified specialists worked on their manufacture) with subsequent resale on the black market.

In 1945, when the gang reached its peak and attracted the attention of the investigating authorities, it was decided to shift its center to Kazan as a safer place, giving a wide field of activity, primarily due to the many evacuated enterprises. Here, the "Black Cat" was marked by a grandiose theft from the Kazan distillery: the bandits, dressed in military uniforms, received five tons of products according to forged documents, no traces of the stolen were found. And they came to the criminals thanks to luck - the sister of one of the people they killed recognized his coat at a flea market.
Pulling this thread, the police learned the names, passwords, appearances. Raids began in the city, during which more than sixty people were arrested and subsequently convicted. During the investigation, the scale of this criminal group became clear. The trial was open. It took place in the House of Culture of the Sverdovsky District and lasted a month. According to the verdict of the court, twelve people were shot, the rest received long sentences. Trials of the Black Cat also took place in other republics of the USSR.

The leaders remained in the shadows

But how did it happen that such a serious criminal structure began to be called a myth, fiction? The reason is, the researchers believe, that law enforcement officers of that time had no experience of working with organized criminal groups. “According to the laws of wartime, criminals were not treated with ceremony for a long time,” writes Alexei Shcherbakov in his essay “The Truth About the Black Cat”. - During the arrest, they shot to kill. And there was no time to track the entire chain of gang connections. The leaders so remained in the shadows. But according to the estimates of the policemen involved in the exploits of the bandits, they worked calmly and methodically.

Based on materials

Zvyagintsev V.E., War on the scales of Themis: The war of 1941 - 1945 in the materials of investigative and judicial cases. - M.: TERRA - Book Club, 2006