Vasili Blokhin

Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (; 1895 – 3 February 1955) was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief executioner of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria.

Blokhin was selected for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926 and led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II. Blokhin was forced into retirement in 1953 after the death of Stalin and condemned during de-Stalinization shortly before his death in 1955.

Early life Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin was born on 7 January 1895 in Gavrilovskoye, Vladimir Governorate into a Russian peasant family. He worked as a shepherd in Yaroslavl Governorate from 1905 to 1910 before becoming a bricklayer in Moscow. Blokhin served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I, rising to rank of a non-commissioned officer despite his young age. After the February Revolution, he was elected the chairman of the Army Committee for the 218th Infantry Regiment. He returned home to help his father before joining the Red Army in October 1918.

Blokhin was married to Natalia Aleksandrovna Blokhina (1901–1967), and had a son, Nikolai Vasilievich Baranov (1916–1998).

Career Blokhin joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Cheka (the Bolshevik security agency) in March 1921. He was soon appointed a platoon commander in the military wing of the Cheka and its successor agencies. Though records are scant, he was evidently noted for both his pugnacity and his mastery of what Joseph Stalin termed chernaya rabota ("wetwork", or literally, "black work"): assassinations, torture, intimidation, and executions conducted clandestinely. Once he gained Stalin's attention, Blokhin was quickly promoted and within six years was appointed the head of the purposefully created Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department of the NKVD. Headquartered at the Lubyanka in Moscow, its members were all approved by Stalin and took their orders directly from him, which ensured the unit's longevity despite three bloody purges of the NKVD.

Blokhin, as chief executioner of the NKVD, had the official title of commandant of the internal prison at the Lubyanka, which allowed him to carry out his duties with a minimum of scrutiny and no official paperwork. Although most of the estimated 828,000

Role in the Katyn massacre

Blokhin's most infamous act was the April 1940 execution by shooting of about 7,000 Polish prisoners interned in the prisoner of war camp in Ostashkov, located in the Tver (then Kalinin Oblast (region). The majority were military and police officers who had been captured following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The event's infamy stems in part from the Stalin regime's ordering of the murders, and the subsequent Allied propaganda campaign which blamed Nazi Germany for the massacres in order to preserve cohesion between the USSR and other allied nations.

In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev gave the Polish government the files on the massacres at Katyn, Starobilsk and Kalinin (now Tver) as part of Glasnost, revealing Stalin's involvement. Based on the 4 April secret order from Stalin to NKVD Chief Lavrentiy Beria as well as NKVD Order No. 00485, which still applied, the executions were carried out over 28 consecutive nights at the specially constructed basement execution chamber at the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin, and were assigned, by name, directly to Blokhin, making him the official executioner of the NKVD.

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber — which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room" — for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by German police and intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.

An estimated 30 local NKVD agents, guards and drivers were pressed into service to escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, then remove the bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption.

Blokhin and his team worked without pause for 10 hours each night, with Blokhin himself executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes. On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner and a modest monthly pay premium as a reward from Stalin for his "skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks". His tally of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains the most organised and protracted mass murder by a single individual on record, and caused him being named the Guinness World Record holder for "Most Prolific Executioner" in 2010. The official cause of death was listed as suicide; however, his personnel files recorded that he died due to a heart attack.

Honours and awards Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU (V) No. 498 Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU (XV) (1932) Order of the Red Star (1936) Order of the Badge of Honour (1937) Order of the Red Banner, twice (1940, 1944) Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1943) Order of Lenin (1945) Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class (1945)