Metadata: Collection of Extrajudicial Cases of Rehabilitated Persons
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine
- Holding institution (official language):
- Центральний державний архів громадських об’єднань України
- Postal address:
- 01011, м. Київ, вул. Генерала Алмазова, 8
- Phone number:
- 380 (044) 285-55-16
- Web address:
- http://www.cdago.gov.ua/
- Email:
- cdago@arch.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 263
- Title:
- Collection of Extrajudicial Cases of Rehabilitated Persons
- Title (official language):
- Коллекция внесудебных дел реабилитированных
- Creator/accumulator:
- The Ukrainian SSR KGB and analogous Soviet state-security agencies; the Security Service of Ukraine
- Date(s):
- 1919/1953
- Language:
- Russian
- Yiddish
- Ukrainian
- Extent:
- 34,047 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Included are archival and investigative files of rehabilitated persons who had been subjected to political repression in the period from 1919 to the 1950s (for the most part in the city of Kiev and the Kiev region) by extrajudicial entities of the GPU, NKVD, and MGB: the “pairs” [dvoiki], “troikas,” and special conferences. These materials shed light on the process of investigation, sentencing and punishment, and subsequent rehabilitation of persons accused of “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite activity,” “anti-Soviet nationalist agitation,” and involvement in the Zionist underground, including members of the Zionist Socialist Federation Dror and the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party, which operated on a clandestine basis in Kiev and the Kiev region in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. GPU and NKVD investigative files and secret agents’ dispatches of the late 1920s and 1930s also contain information on an All-Russian Dror Conference that took place in Kiev in February 1927 to elect a new central committee after this organisation was crushed in Moscow; and on Dror members’ support and dissemination of a declaration made by a group of mostly Jewish political prisoners to the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsIK) presidium on the conditions of their incarceration in the Khar’kov prison and on how the inquest in their case had been conducted; and on the growth of anti-Semitic sentiment in connection with increased Jewish representation in administrative agencies and in the sphere of education and science.
A considerable number of files pertain to Jewish writers and scholars in one way or another connected (in 1942-48) with the activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including Riva Baliasnaia, M. Ia. Beregovskii, A. M. Velednitskii, M. E. Mezhiritskii, I. N. Kipnis, Eli Shekhtman, N. G. Lur’e, and others. These same files also contain information on the functioning of Jewish research and cultural institutions and organisations, including the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Jewish (Proletarian) Culture (1928-36); the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences’ Jewish Culture Office; the Jewish section of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine; and of two tendencies in the Jewish literary milieu of the 1930s: the literary section of the All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers, and the Combat [Boi] group; these materials cover the activities of evacuated Jewish writers during their stay in the city of Ufa, and after their return therefrom in 1943-44, when the Jewish section of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine organised trips for Jewish creative intelligentsia brigades to places with high concentrations of Jewish residents (often especially in the Chernovtsy region), their impressions of these trips, etc. In particular, there is a report (attached to the file on Riva Baliasnaia) by the Jewish journalist N. Serf-Kon that sheds light on the complex situation in the city of Chernovtsy after the liberation thereof: upon returning from camps and ghettos in Transnistria to which they’d been sent by Nazi and Romanian occupation authorities, some Jews were being mobilised for labour in enterprises in the Urals and toward restoration of the Donets Basin. The file on I. Sh. Bukhbinder deals with, among other things, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s ties with Jewish organisations in the US; subjects of publications in the newspaper Eynikayt [Unity], the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee press organ; etc. Several investigative files of the late 1940s and early 1950s mention cultural figures’ repeated requests to the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine Central Committee and the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers for permission to publish a Jewish newspaper or magazine, or organise Yiddish-language radio broadcasts. There is information on the jubilee tour (Kiev, 1945) of the Ukrainian SSR State Yiddish Theater (GOSET) (at the time based in Chernovtsy, to which it had been transferred from Kiev upon its return from evacuation), which involved the staging of M. Ia. Pinchevskii’s play I Live [Ia zhivu] – a cultural moment portrayed in the materials as an event around which the Jewish intelligentsia coalesced; and information on the arrival in Kiev of Solomon Mikhoels, who was attempting to quit the theatre in Kiev and open other Jewish cultural institutions in the republic. Some investigative files contain documents, literary manuscripts, and print publications seized as “material evidence”; these include a letter from the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party Central Committee to the Dror Central Committee; the Bulletin of the Dror Federation in the USSR; reprints from Dror publications (“Our Path” and “Zionist-Socialist Thought”); manuscripts of poetry and essays in Yiddish, and of translations from Yiddish; individual issues of the newspaper Eynikayt from 1947, and of the literary almanac Der shtern; a manuscript of selected Yiddish-language verse, longer poems, and fairy tales by I. N. Kipnis, and a photocopy of his book Months and Days (Moscow, 1930); minutes of a session of the Jewish section of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine, including a petition to expel Kipnis; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
Pursuant to the Ukrainian Supreme Council presidium’s edict “On the transfer of archival documents of the Committee of State Security [KGB] of Ukraine to the republic’s state archives” (9 September 1991), these documents were forwarded for storage at the Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine from 1992-2001 by the Security Service of Ukraine (established on the basis of the National Security Service of Ukraine pursuant to the Ukrainian Law on the Security Service of Ukraine of 25 March 1992). As a republic-level component of the all-union system of state security, the Ukrainian SSR KGB underwent numerous structural and political changes over the course of its existence; and the title of this agency changed correspondingly: the All-Ukrainian Cheka (VUChK), the GPU, the NKVD, the Ministry of State Security (MGB), and the KGB. The All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Official Misconduct (the All-Ukrainian Cheka or VUChK), was established by decree (3 December 1918) of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine. Organisationally, it was part of the NKVD and answered to the government of the Ukrainian SSR. It functioned via a far-reaching network of local commissions empowered to carry out searches, arrests, and raids; investigate private individuals, officials, and organisations suspected of counterrevolutionary activity; incarcerate persons in concentration camps; and apply capital punishment.
On 22 March 1922, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsIK) decreed the VUChK reorganised as the Ukrainian SSR NKVD’s State Political Administration (GPU). Originally the GPU’s mission was to prevent and suppress openly counterrevolutionary unrest and espionage and guard the republic’s communications system and borders. From 1928 on, due to an increased tendency toward broadening the functions and authority of the GPU, its agencies could by authority of the public prosecutor’s office perform inquests and investigations pertaining to any crime whatsoever stipulated in the Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code. On 13 August 1924, after the formation of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars’ Unified State Political Administration (OGPU), the VUTsIK and Ukrainian SSR Council of People’s Commissars approved a statute on the Ukrainian SSR GPU, whose jurisdiction was transferred such that it answered directly to the Ukrainian SSR Council of People’s Commissars. Local-level agencies of the Ukrainian SSR GPU included provincial (later, regional) executive committees’ GPU departments (from 1930 on, operational sectors), special departments of Ukrainian Military Area corps and divisions, GPU departments of transportation agencies, and GPU agencies tasked with guarding the republic’s borders. In June 1929, the Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Central Committee Politburo established the Ukrainian SSR GPU collegium’s judicial “troika.” This heard criminal cases investigated by GPU agencies, except for major political cases and cases protested by the public prosecutor’s office. The latter were forwarded to the Ukrainian SSR GPU’s Special Conference [Osoboe soveshchanie]. On 2 February 1930, the OGPU ordered the establishment of “troikas” consisting of GPU agency, party, and public prosecutor’s office personnel; these extrajudicial entities heard cases involving so-called active kulak-White Guard and counterrevolutionary elements. State security agencies were empowered to apply various forms of extrajudicial repression, from administrative exile to the death penalty.
In 1930, in connection with the dissolution of people’s commissariats of internal affairs in the union republics, the police, industrial enterprises’ security entities, correctional labour camps, labour colonies, etc. were transferred to the jurisdiction of the OGPU-GPU. The Ukrainian SSR OGPU and GPU ceased to exist on 10 July 1934 with the establishment of the USSR NKVD [People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs]. Ukraine had a republic-level NKVD, and NKVD administrations and departments in its regions and districts respectively. State security agencies were introduced within the newly-formed people’s commissariat as a separate subdivision, the Main State Security Administration (GUGB), and at the local level, as NKVD-Ukrainian NKVD state security departments. In early 1941, the Ukrainian SSR NKVD was divided into two people’s commissariats, those of state security and internal affairs (the Ukrainian SSR NKGB and NKVD). When the Second World War began, these were merged once more as a single Ukrainian SSR NKVD, which existed thus until 1943, when once again the Ukrainian SSR People’s Commissariat of State Security became a separate entity; in 1946 this was renamed the Ukrainian SSR Ministry of State Security (MGB); and in 1953 it again became an Internal Affairs entity, a component of the Ukrainian SSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1954, state security entities were again transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and reorganised as the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers’ Committee of State Security (KGB) (from 1978 on, the Ukrainian SSR KGB). The latter existed until 1991, when it was abolished pursuant to the Ukrainian Supreme Rada decree “On establishing the National Security Service” (20 September 1991).
- Access points: locations:
- Chernovtsy
- Chernovtsy region
- Donets Basin
- Khar’kov
- Kiev
- Moscow
- Transnistria
- Ufa
- Access points: persons/families:
- Baliasnaia, Riva
- Bukhbinder, I. Sh.
- Kipnis, I. N.
- Lur’e, N. G.
- Mezhiritskii, M. E.
- Pinchevskii, M. Ia.
- Serf-Kon, N.
- Shekhtman, E. I.
- Velednitskii, A. M.
- Subject terms:
- Anti-Fascism
- Antisemitism
- Communism
- Communism--Communist parties and organisations
- Holocaust
- Holocaust--Survivors
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Jewish press
- Law enforcement
- Legal matters
- Literature
- Literature--Novels, poetry, and plays
- Literature--Writers, poets, and playwrights
- Manuscripts
- Prisoners
- Professions
- Professions--Journalists
- Professions--Scholars (secular), scientists, and academics
- Radio and television
- Resettlement of Jews
- Theatre
- Yiddish periodicals
- Zionism
- Zionism--Zionist organisations and parties
- System of arrangement:
- The fond’s materials are not systematised or arranged in inventories.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary