It is said that the dark role of the secret services in the margins of constitutional and political legitimacy was nowhere more frightening than in the years of En Ka Ve De.
The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) cast a heavy shadow over the Soviet Union, playing a significant role in Stalin's establishment and the so-called "Great Liquidation" which would leave him the undisputed leader of the USSR.
For the common people, of course, it was nothing but a constant threat, a fear that spread over every aspect of everyday life. In addition to the usual punishments of imprisonment or exile, Stalin's executioners, the gloomy organs of death, always lurked here.
And none of these professional executors was more terrifying than Vassily Blokin, who boasted of the unimaginably large number of people who fell dead at his hands.
His star rose in the darkness of the secret police, to become the angel of death in the persecutions of Pateroulis.
And while he started killing people and cosmos from the 1920s, his bloodiest "achievements" would only come in his time. World War II.
That deadly spring of 1940, in a period of just 28 days, Blokin was in charge of planning and executing more than 20.000 Polish prisoners of war.
He personally executed more than 7.000 Poles, one after the other, sending his name to the pantheon of the most productive executioners of all time. A title of honor in some circles, no doubt.
Only his story is even darker than her Katin Massacre. Where he set up a real murder production line, allowing him to kill a man every three minutes…
Almost nothing is known about the early years of Katyn's "monster", as history would later immortalize him. Vasily Mikhailovich Blokin was born in January 1895 to a rural family somewhere in the steppes of Russia.
We find him again years later to serve in the Imperial Army of Russia, according to him World War I.. He had previously worked as a builder in Moscow, when he left his village, where he had been grazing the family sheep of a child.
In the trenches of the Great War in June 1915 he would sign his first assassination deeds and be stationed in March 1921 in the infamous Czech Republic, the first secret police of the Soviet regime.
Until then he had taken part as a Bolshevik in the revolutionary events. In 1918 we even know that he was wounded in one of the battles. He returned to his hometown and waited to see how the political developments would unfold.
Of the few that concern him at this time, we know that Blokin was known for his sadism and willingness to commit crimes. But also in what Stalin himself called "black labor": torture, intimidation and covert executions.
And so in May 1921 he officially joined the Communist Party with a reputation leading the way. He is being placed in the Pan-Russian Extraordinary Commission, the Czech Republic, in a crucial service for the new regime.
The Soviet Union's first ever internal security service (founded in December 1917) played a key role in the years of the Russian Civil War, ushering in what would become known as the "Red Terror."
The Czech members were even in charge of disciplining the newly formed Red Army, with expanded responsibilities. When they did not protect food and equipment supplies, they watched opposition and drowned in operations against Stalin.
Blokin would soon attract the attention of his superiors. And his superiors were names like Henrik Yaconda, Nikolai Yezov and Lavredi Beria. After quickly climbing the steps of the hierarchy, in 1926 he finds himself in the role he would adore with his action: state executor.
His rise was analogous to that of Joseph Stalin, who saw his power grow exponentially throughout the 1920s. Blokin carried out executions of dissidents and enemies of the regime at Moscow's infamous secret police headquarters.
There, on the top floor of Lubyanka, he was now killing people on the agenda. The way is always the same: the dying man was kneeling and Blockin was planting a bullet in the back of his head.
The bodies were cremated in a crematorium. In October 1927, a new incinerator was inaugurated to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, and it was now planned by the chief executive.
Blokin also played an active role during the years of the Stalin Liberation, 1936-1938, in which even 850.000 people may have been killed as enemies of the regime (600.000 is a safer estimate).
Yezov, the right hand of Pateroulis and architect of the Stalinist purges, established his own kingdom of terror and now had Blockin giving a real show. He was the one who executed the people after the mock trials in Moscow and some of his fellow executors did not escape from his gun.
His macabre skills even made Stalin pay attention to him. And it is said that it was a personal choice of the leader of the USSR to lead the massacres during the "Great Terror" of 1936-1938.
Their personal relationship was such that when Blokin himself was finally accused of conspiring against the state in 1939, Stalin refused to sign his sentence. It was then that he praised the "black work" of his executor, which he considered invaluable.
Stalinist persecution had subsided until September 1939, when Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland.
The Soviets had never forgotten their catastrophe in the Polish-Soviet-War of 1919-1921 and now it would be the Czech successor, En Ka Ve De, who would take the lead.
By then Blockin had turned into a Stalinist monster. As head of the En Ka Ve De branch, which was typically called the Executive Directorate, the very embodiment of Stalin's vision of "black labor," Blokin could devote himself unwaveringly to what he loved so much.
The secret service of the Ministry of Interior was based in Moscow and Blockin insisted on pushing the trigger despite being the director of the service, which was not part of his high-ranking duties.
He particularly enjoyed, as we are told relevant testimonies, the murders of historical Bolsheviks during the Moscow Trials (1936-1938), as well as the mass purges in Red Army.
He was particularly proud of the assassination of the "red" chief of staff, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but also of the assassination of two of his three bosses, both Yakoda in 1938 and Yezov in 1940.
By then he had already been awarded a medal by Stalin (in 1937) for his services to the homeland…
Blockin was now taking orders exclusively from the "red" leader, which greatly simplified his dirty work. Now he needed neither bureaucracy nor paperwork, Stalin had freed him from such scourges.
So it seemed natural for Stalin to turn to Blokin to get rid of the Polish officers of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. The leader of En Ka Ve De was now Beria and did not trust the Polish prisoners at all.
In his own extreme reasoning, every Polish soldier and officer was a potential threat to Soviet rule. The only solution the new boss of the secret police saw was, as he told Stalin, simple but barbaric: death to anyone who did not embrace communist ideology.
The blood-stained shot quickly got the green light from the Politburo (Beria's presentation was dated March 5, 1940), inaugurating the most infamous role of the blockbuster in world history.
Until that April 1940, Blokin had thousands of executions and years of know-how on his back. He arrives at Ostashkov's prisoner-of-war camp near the Katyn forest, where Polish officers and policemen who had fallen into the hands of the Red Army were being held. after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
The Slaughter of (his) forest Katin It was entirely the work of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs and the prominent member of En Ka Ve De could not be absent from the atrocity.
An estimated 22.000 Poles were killed, 7.000 of whom were killed by Blockin. Who set up his deadly arch in Kalinin, transporting there by train all the Polish prisoners who had been described as expendable.
For 28 consecutive nights he killed people with incredible efficiency and speed, writing one of the most horrific pages in the history of mass executions.
The cell he had set up in the basement of En Ka Ve De's headquarters in Kalinin was designed by the "death accountant" as he was described, to facilitate the speed of the killings.
He had pre-determined that a good death rate was 300 executions per night and built a highly efficient mechanism for exterminating and transporting corpses.
The dying were originally transported to a vestibule painted red, which Blokin called harekaka "Leninist room», For their recognition. They were then handcuffed and brought before the executioner to the next room.
Which Blokin had sounded to drown out the cries of despair of the Poles, at the same time that the sloping concrete floor was pouring blood into a siphon.
"An experienced executor shoots in the neck, holding the barrel sideways upwards," he said. sphere to come out of the eye or throat. "If you kill 250 people a day, cleaning the area can be a serious problem."
Wearing his leather uniform, the butcher's apron and his elbow-length gloves, he performed his work with unparalleled zeal. His favorite tools of death were the German Walther PPK pistols, which caught fire as soon as the sun went down.
Blokin did not trust the reliability of the Soviet TT-30 revolver, which used to overheat in ten hours of continuous use, causing many problems.
After all, he had such a murderous experience on his back that now his method was creepily flawless.
He organized the killing squad in record time, recruiting some thirty Muscovite guards, and even truckers. His incredible work in scale and brutality was such that fellow executors called him an "artist of death".
As one of his aides later testified: "Two men were holding the prisoner's hands and Blockin was shooting him at the base of his skull. That was all. "
Blokin had done all the calculations: the lethal production line he had set up allowed him to kill a man every three minutes. His shift lasted about 10 hours and was always done at night, to make it easier to transport the corpses.
But it was also the other: if the crime was ever discovered, as it was done in 1943 by them Nazi invaders, the use of German pistols would throw the burden of atrocity elsewhere.
Blokin's death line needed thirty nomads to work smoothly. But no one was faster than him. No one else had such endurance, killing people for ten whole hours.
Only the dawn of the day interrupted his murderous pandemonium. His corpses were filled with trucks, which were thrown into the nearby forest of Katyn, where the bulldozer was waiting to cover the mass graves.
Every night, according to records, 24-25 tombs of ten meters were filled to the brim with Blockin's corpses. His murderous mechanics were such that he forced everyone else to literally run if they wanted to catch up with his stormy pace.
In order not to even understand what is happening, the chief executive watered them with vodka, while he did not take a sip in his mouth. Blokin raised the bar from the first night of the massacre, killing 343 people that night.
According to his assistant, Dmitry Tokarev, what impressed everyone was how calm Blokin was during the horrific work, "almost happy," as he wrote.
While his colleagues were drowning in their remorse for alcohol, he drank only tea. And his always good mood had turned him into the best company in the body.
On April 27, 1940, "Pateroulis" secretly awarded him another heavy medal of hers. USSR, giving him a monthly bonus for "the efficient performance of his special duties". The big gift, however, was the gramophone he got for his feats.
The 7.000 bullets he used over a period of 28 days left no room for doubt as to what these "special tasks" were. More than 22.000 Polish soldiers, police, politicians, civil servants, journalists, etc. were massacred in Katyn.
When the Nazis invaded the USSR in late 1941 and heard of the massacre near Smolensk, discovering mass graves in Katyn, the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels he rubbed his hands.
In April 1943 he set up a real communication show with the exhumation of the corpses. The Soviets consistently claimed that the massacre was the work of the Third Reich and had German pistols to prove it.
Few believed their version, but even fewer wanted to spoil it with Stalin…
When Stalin died in 1953, his assassin was immediately disarmed. In fact, when his protector, Beria, left his post, Blokin was exposed to the new regime.
Ο Nikita Khrushchev could not leave him in office, he envisioned a state far removed from Stalin's footsteps. Not only was he ousted from his position, but all his heavy medals were taken back.
Blockin drank vodka and died in February 1955 as a shadow of himself. Maybe he committed suicide. Maybe they ate him again. No one cared to find out how the scary butcher died.
Blockin was finally restored posthumously in the late 1960s. He was now a lieutenant general in the Red Army and was buried with honors in a large tomb. Unlike the tens of thousands of people who were exterminated by his hands and given up in secret holes.
History today gives him around 20.000 executions. His Guinness World Record has set the world record for "most productive performer in recorded human history."
He also said that he was proud that he had killed twice as many of the second most productive Russian executioner, Peter Ivanovich Mango. And if we will never know the exact number of Blokin, we know that Mango had killed 10.000 people.
Russia only recognized the crime of the Soviet secret police in Katyn in 1990. And we had to reach 2010 for the approval of the State Duma the resolution holding Stalin accountable for the massacre.
That same year Blockin's name first appeared on Guinness World Records…