1937: Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky, counterrevolutionary kulak
Add comment September 5th, 2012 Meaghan
(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this date in 1937, a 51-year-old Russian peasant by the name of Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky was executed by firing squad, having been convicted of membership in a “counterrevolutionary kulak sabotage organization.”
Arzhilovsky, who had five young children by the time of his death, was evidently a nefarious thought-criminal with a record. He had sufficient literacy to join the regional administration in the nineteen-teens, which led to his arrest in 1919 in the wake of the October Revolution of two years previously.
He denied having ever persecuted Communist sympathizers, but a revolutionary tribunal sentenced him to eight years in prison.
Released after an amnesty in 1923, Arzhilovsky returned home, took up farming again, joined the peasant cooperative and took up a number of other minor civic posts. He owned 8.1 hectares of cultivated land, a house and outbuildings, two horses, two cows and other livestock. He was classified as a farmer of average means — that is, not a kulak or class enemy — but in 1929 he was convicted of “counterrevolutionary agitation” and sentenced to a decade in a labor camp.
In 1936, Arzhilovsky was released from detention early for health reasons. They expected him to go home and die, but instead he took an accounting job at a factory.
Perhaps frustrated by Arzhilovsky’s refusal to expire, the NKVD “uncovered” the “conspiracy” that lead to his death sentence. Under interrogation, he had to admit his opinions weren’t purely Soviet. Perhaps that alone was enough.
Arzhilovsky was a simple farmer, just one of the millions who died during Stalin’s Great Terror from 1936-1938. He probably would have been forgotten entirely today were it not for the forty-page diary he kept during the year prior to his death.
It was confiscated by NKVD agents when they searched his home. The diary was translated and published in 1995 in an anthology of several others from that period, under the title Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s.
On this day..
- 1962: Kartosuwirio, Darul Islam leader - 2020
- 1917: Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, Wilhelmshaven mutineers - 2019
- 1878: George Howell, family arbiter - 2018
- 1917: James Smith, Early One Morning - 2017
- 1553: Giovanni Mollio, Italian reformer - 2016
- 1789: Thomas Phipps the elder and Thomas Phipps the younger - 2015
- 1782: Bartolina Sisa, indigenous rebel - 2014
- 1981: Nasiru Bello, a little overeagerly - 2013
- 1924: Richard A. Birkes, stickup man - 2011
- 1942: Lodz ghetto "Children's Action" begins - 2010
- 2007: Duan Yihe, mistress-murderer - 2009
- 1930: Carl Panzram, rage personified - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Guest Writers,History,Other Voices,Russia,Shot,USSR
Tags: 1930s, 1937, andrei arzhilovsky, communism, purge, red terror, september 5, stalinism
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