At the end of the day, the corpses of the executed were concealed in cartridge boxes and transported to the Moscow Crematorium at Donskoe Cemetery. They were burned during the following night in the presence of the commandant on duty. He also controlled the proper placement of ashes in a secret deep pit with brick walls. Detailed reports about the cremations were sent to Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, head of Stalin’s secretariat, who informed Stalin. Executions were also carried out in the basement of the building across the street from the Military Collegium.26 Currently the mass graves at Donskoe Cemetery, which contain the ashes of thousands of victims, are maintained as a memorial.
At present, the Military Collegium building belongs to one of the oil companies and it is almost ruined. The Russian human-rights Memorial Society has appealed unsuccessfully to the Moscow city government to turn the building into a museum of repressions, but it is unclear if the building survives or it will be demolished.27
From September 1937 till 1940, because of the large number of death sentences pronounced by the Military Collegium and other Moscow military courts, condemned prisoners were also executed at the country house built for Genrikh Yagoda, former first NKVD Commissar.28 A team of NKVD executioners headed by Vasilii Blokhin, who served for 30 years as chief NKVD and then MGB (State Security Ministry) executioner, shot the condemned prisoners in the back of their heads and then buried the bodies. This site is now a memorial known as Kommunarka.
There was also a special room for Military Collegium sessions in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. Defendants sentenced to death at such sessions were shot in this prison. In some special cases, such as the February 1940 trial of former NKVD Commissar Nikolai Yezhov, a session took place in Sukhanovo Prison, which in 1938 became the most secret of Moscow’s investigation prisons.29 It even had its own small crematorium. Some Military Collegium trials were also conducted in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow and in various military districts.
NKVD Special Board
Appointing Viktor Bochkov chief prosecutor in August 1940 was not the regime’s only new lever of control over the legal system. Immediately Bochkov and USSR Justice Commissar Nikolai Rychkov signed two joint instructions giving the NKVD the final say over military tribunal decisions.30 Accordingly, if by chance a tribunal acquitted the defendant, he was returned to prison until the court secured NKVD approval for his release, which typically resulted in the opening of a new investigation against him and sentencing, usually to 5–10 years in a labor camp, by the OSO (Special Board) of the NKVD.31
The OSO procedure was a particularly Kafkaesque invention of the Soviet system. Created in 1934, the OSO was an extra-judicial court within the NKVD not mentioned in the Soviet Constitution.32 It consisted of the NKVD Commissar and two of his deputies. The chief USSR prosecutor or his deputy attended the hearings, which were conducted without the defendant being present. The OSO considered cases investigated by the NKVD under Articles 58 and 59 that could not be heard in civilian or military courts ‘because of operational reasons’. This meant that the cases were so poorly supported that they could not stand in an open trial and the NKVD did not want to identify the secret informers who had been used in the case. Also, the OSO automatically sentenced the family members (chsiry) of those who had been condemned to death by the Military Collegium as ‘traitors’, ‘spies’, etc.
Before the sessions, the OSO secretariat typed the decisions, based on pre-approved indictments written by NKVD investigators. Until the beginning of the war the OSO did not have the right to confer the death penalty, giving primarily 5–10 year sentences. It met twice a week, hearing about 200–300—later as many as 980—cases per session. No appeal of OSO decisions was possible.
In November 1941, six months after the beginning of the war, Beria reported to Stalin that 10,645 prisoners sentenced to death, mostly by military tribunals, were still in NKVD investigation prisons throughout the country waiting for the Military Collegium and Party leaders to approve their sentences.33 To help clear this backlog, Stalin approved Beria’s proposal that the OSO be given the right to sentence to death political arrestees investigated under Articles 58 and 59.34 In addition, Beria ordered all finished cases investigated under Article 58 by the central NKVD and its local branches to be sent to the OSO.35
Now Viktor Abakumov, head of military counterintelligence (at the time called the UOO), or his representative presented the OO cases at OSO hearings. Since Beria was too overwhelmed with various other duties, during the war his deputies Merkulov, Sergei Kruglov, Ivan Serov, and Bogdan Kobulov chaired the OSO meetings.
The memoirs of Nikolai Mesyatsev, who worked from 1942–43 as an investigator at the Investigation Department of the UOO, include a unique description of the OSO bureaucratic procedure:
At the Secretariat of the Investigation Department… I was ordered to fill in on a typewriter a special form of the Special Board, which had several columns.
In the first column I typed in the biographical data of the accused, whom I’ll call ‘N’: his last name, first name, patronymic name; year and place of birth; nationality; matrimonial status; last place of work; date of arrest.
In the next column, I wrote the charges as they were described in the indictment that I’d signed, which was also signed by the head of the Investigation Department [Boris Pavlovsky], and approved by the head of the NKVD Special Departments Directorate [Viktor Abakumov] and a prosecutor.
In this particular case, [it was said that] the accused ‘N’ conducted espionage activity in the Red Army’s rear for German intelligence in such-and-such form, which is punishable under Article 58-6. In the next column I wrote that the accused pleaded guilty to espionage activity and his testimony was confirmed by operational data, documents, testimonies of witnesses, and so on.
Each of such forms (the others were written by investigators from other NKVD departments) was given a number and approximately 250–300 of the filled-in forms were stitched together in a file.36
Mesyatsev also described the OSO meeting:
The meeting of the Special Board took place in an office on the so-called Narkoms’ Floor [i.e., where Commissar Beria’s huge office was located]. The office was small, and the walls were painted a deep crimson color. Curtains on the windows were closed.
To the left from the window, there were two desks positioned perpendicular to each other; on them were desk lamps, turned on. [Sergei] Kruglov, deputy NKVD Commissar, was sitting behind one of the desks, and [Viktor] Bochkov, USSR Chief Prosecutor, was behind the other…
There was a row of chairs in front of the desks occupied by investigators who would make presentations of their cases… Each of them held a sheet of paper (some had several sheets) with a number that corresponded to the number in the files that were lying in front of the two members of the Special Board.
After the Deputy Commissar called my number, I (as well as the other investigators in their turn), was obliged to say the following: ‘“N” is accused under Article 58-6 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code of espionage for German intelligence. He pleaded guilty, which is confirmed by such-and-such investigation materials.’
My presentation took no more than a minute. The Deputy Commissar suggested sentencing ‘N’ to a 10-year imprisonment. The prosecutor agreed, and the fate of the accused ‘N’ was sealed. I left the room.