1/2 "[...] the so-called organs of the NKVD are in the main a degenerate organization of unprincipled, dissolute, well-kept functionaries who, enjoying the former authority of the Cheka, seeking to satisfy the pathological suspiciousness of Stalin (I fear to say more), pursuing

October 27, 1937. #OTD Alexander Kupriyanovich Komarovsky, a Belarusian national from the small village of Dobrinevo in Minsk region, was executed at age 60. He earned his living as a security guard at a brick factory in Smolensk. Komarovsky was arrested on Article 58-10 charges (anti-Soviet agitation) and executed after only one month in custody. He is interred at the Katyn Memorial Complex, which contains the bodies of not only the almost 22,000 Poles murdered in the Katyn Massacre, but also thousands of Soviet citizens killed during the terror. Alexander Kupriyanovich Komarovsky was rehabilitated on March 31, 1989, by the Smolensk Region Prosecutor's Office.

October 27, 1937. #OTD Rosa Yakovlevna Mitelman and Dmitry Mikhailovich Pines, a married Jewish couple, were executed in Arkhangelsk. The couple had been tried together on October 23, 1937, convicted of belonging to a fictitious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist organization, and condemned to death. Rosa was a doctor at the Institute for the Protection of Mothers and Children in Leningrad. She was 45. Dmitry was a literary critic who specialized in the works of Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. He was 47. Dmitry had been previously arrested on Article 58 charges and exiled to Arkhangelsk; Rosa, who remained in Leningrad, would visit him when she could, and on that basis was accused of being a liaison between an SR cell in Leningrad and the invented SR cell in Arkhangelsk. In 1956 the couple were retried (in absentia, it goes without saying) and it was proven that there had been no such SR cell operating in Arkhangelsk in 1937, and it had been a fiction created by one Junior Lieutenant Semyonov. Both Rosa and Dmitry were immediately rehabilitated.

October 26, 1938. #OTD Olga Erikhovna Anderson, a Leningrad resident of Finnish origin, was executed on charges of “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” at age 49. She was a specialist in the development of photographs at the Kirya Publishing House at the Palace of Labor in Leningrad. Her husband, Evert Iohannovich Anderson, also 49, had been executed a year prior, on November 15, 1937, and their only son, Olaviy Anderson, had been serving a sentence in the GULAG since 1932 and died just months prior to his mother, in June 1938. He was 24 when he died. Olga Erikhovna’s work at the publishing house, along with her and her family's status as Finns living near the Finnish border, are likely what contributed to their repression. Neither Olga nor her husband or son led political lives. Olga Erikhovna Anderson was rehabilitated by the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District on May 8, 1958. Her husband, Evert, was rehabilitated by the same body on May 29, 1958. And their child, Olaviy, was rehabilitated on March 19, 1958. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a picture of him.

October 25, 1937. #OTD Ivan Nikolaevich Ershkov, the chairman of the 6th Congress of Soviets Kolkhoz, a small collective farm in Odintsovo village in Moscow Oblast, was executed at age 41. This farm was named after the 1931 Congress that reshaped collectivization policy, notably by tying each worker’s wages to his or her output, and ending the former policy which had been modeled on Marx’s famous slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Ershkov was a Russian national, not a party member, and came from a peasant family in Tula Oblast. He had only a primary school education. Ershkov was accused of membership in a terrorist organization, and executed at Butovo about 5 weeks after his arrest. Ivan Nikolaevich Ershkov was rehabilitated in 1957.

October 21, 1938. #OTD Abram Meerovich Ginzburg, a Polish Jew who was a theatre student in Moscow, was executed at age 27. Ginzburg was from the Polish town of Danilovichi, and went to Moscow for his education. He spent a year in NKVD custody on charges characterized as “ties to Trotskyist terrorists” and “regretting leaving Poland” (kind of understandable in his predicament). Abram Meerovich Ginzburg was murdered and buried at Butovo. He was rehabilitated in 1989.

October 21, 1937. #OTD Yadviga Semenovna Ambrushkevich, a pensioner, was executed at Butovo. She was a Belarus-born Pole, from Grodno, and only 40 years old. She was convicted of “Trotskyist agitation.” She was rehabilitated on September 11, 1969. This is all we know about her.

October 20, 1937. #OTD Amos Anfimovich Vikulov, a carpenter at the Tomsk-2 railway station in Tomsk in western Siberia, was executed at age 42. Vikulov was from the small village of Kukushki in Tyumen Oblast. According to his grand-niece, Olga, his patronymic, Anfimovich, comes from the rare Old Believer name Anfim, and is sometimes misspelled as Amfilovich, causing difficulties in her efforts to trace her family history. She is searching for information about her great-grandfather, Anfim Vikulov, in particular, who is believed to have been repressed in the early 1930s. He worked in wool processing in that same village, Kukushki. In the second picture you can see Amos Anfimovich Vikulov with his wife, Alexandra.