In the early 1950s, Lavrenty Beria's subordinates tracked down a conspiracy to assassinate 50 senior officials of the Soviet Union. The "war" to Stalin and his henchmen was declared by the Eastern Order of Assassins, known from the Middle Ages, fanatical assassins.
Who are the assassins
The assassin sect has its roots in the 11th century, when the Nizari religious movement emerged in Egypt. They broke away from Ismailism, which, in turn, was one of the offshoots of Shiism. Faced with persecution from the Seljuk sultans, the Nizari chose the tactic of targeted assassinations of high-ranking officials as a means of struggle. It was this side of their activities that received the greatest popularity, and the sectarian murderers themselves began to be called assassins (from the word "hashishiyya" - "rabble", "lower society"; according to another version, from the habit of smoking hashish). At various times, the leaders of the European crusaders, as well as Muslim emirs, viziers and sultans, became the targets of terror of specially trained saboteurs-assassins.
Interestingly, the Assassins are named among the first predecessors of communism. Early in their history, the Nizari established a harsh dictatorship in several cities in Iran, banning luxury and effectively eliminating the distinction between rich and poor. The Assassin Order was destroyed during the Mongol invasion in the 13th century.
Mysterious Egyptian
In an article by the publicist Yevgeny Zhirnov, who worked with archival documents, it is stated that in 1952, in one of the gulag camps, warders identified a suspicious prisoner. An exotic-looking man told the inhabitants of his barrack that he had allegedly come from the Middle East as an envoy of the Assassins. The ancient sect, he said, sentenced 50 high-ranking officials of the USSR to death in absentia.
Promotional video:
The NKVD investigators, who have long specialized in exposing all kinds of foreign agents, probably did not find such a confession particularly surprising. After the war, the Soviet Union supported the creation of the state of Israel, thereby making many enemies in the Muslim world. In addition, the assassins had a reason to avenge the religious oppression of their fellow believers - the Shiites-Ismailis, who constituted the main population of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region within the Tajik SSR.
However, when the Chekists took seriously the identity of the alleged assassin, their enthusiasm faded somewhat. Grigor Akopovich Mamur-Fatimi came to the Soviet Union from Egypt in 1947 at the age of 53. He was Armenian by nationality, so he used the right to repatriation. Rather than looking for loopholes and getting close to top officials, the immigrant took action in a different direction. Faced with socialist reality, he began to publicly criticize the Soviet regime, and in 1948, during a visit to the Egyptian embassy, conveyed to diplomats "slanderous information about the situation in Soviet Armenia." It was anti-Soviet agitation that brought the former Egyptian to the dock in 1949.
It is possible that Mamur-Fatimi was not any assassin, and the whole story was invented by him. At home, as the NKVD officers found out, in addition to working as an accountant, the Armenian earned a living by writing pornographic novels. So his fantasy was obviously okay. Some of the strange prisoner's speeches cast doubt on his adequacy. In particular, Grigor Akopovich went so far as to call himself “the caliph of all Muslims” from the Fatimid dynasty. As a result, experts-psychiatrists recognized the failed killer as a simulator, and he was returned to the camp.
However, the daggers of the assassins continued to appear to the inhabitants of the Kremlin. In 1954, Khrushchev and Malenkov, who learned about the case with Mamur-Fatimi, were so frightened that they forced KGB chairman Ivan Serov to collect all available information about the assassins. Tom managed to find out that “the organization“Assassin”was defeated in the 19th century, and since then its existence is in question. More, apparently, the conspiracy of the Middle Eastern murderers in Moscow was not remembered.
Timur Sagdiev
