Public discussions about the Stalinist repressions have been going on for several decades, and it seems that they will not end. Publicists of all stripes are happy to accuse their opponents of falsifying historical facts and odious positions. At the same time, half of them shout about the exaggeration of the number of victims of repressions and the indiscriminate blame of history, while others believe that the fact of terror is justified almost at the state level.
Extreme positions are harmful and often wrong. There were no "billions of those who were shot", but it is impossible to deny the very noticeable number of those who were repressed during Stalin's time. There were real criminals among the convicts, but most of the cases were of a political nature and were sometimes fabricated in a hurry.
An example of a very absurd story is the case of the Leningrad society of the deaf and dumb, in which much was typical of the era of the Great Terror, and much was extremely original.
In the 1920s, when the storms of the Civil War subsided, the Soviet government took care of social support for the disabled. For deaf and deaf-mute people, conditions were created for education, employment and even leisure - for example, in August 1932, the first All-Russian Spartakiad for the Deaf and Dumb took place in Moscow. Many events for disabled people of this type were supervised by the All-Russian Society of the Deaf and Mute (VOG), whose activities were very noticeable in Leningrad.
Since the beginning of the century, a local society of the deaf and dumb has been operating in the northern capital, and in the early 1920s the former palace of the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich on the Angliyskaya Embankment was given to it. The first in Russia theater of the deaf and dumb "Pantomime" appeared there, and then the House of Education (House of Culture) for the deaf and dumb. A school with classes for the elimination of illiteracy was also opened for young people, special film screenings with captions were also held, and part of the building was taken as living quarters.
Theater Pantomime.
In the 1930s, there were about 30 thousand deaf and dumb people in the Soviet Union. At least there were so many members of the society created to unite them. There were 6 thousand deaf and dumb people in Leningrad. Among the disabled, work was carried out to eliminate illiteracy, familiarize with sports and culture. They had their own club and workshops. A collection of poems was published under the title "On the Barricades of Silence", a brochure "Protect your hearing". The deaf and dumb walked around the city with large circles on which it was written "Take care of your hearing", and collected money, passing brochures to the curious. Children made flowers for this from thin wire and colored paper. Those who put money in a mug had a flower wrapped around a button. The money went to the organization of the Scientific and Practical Institute for diseases of the ear, throat, nose. At the end of the 30s, the deaf and dumb raised funds for the construction of aircraft and tanks "Vogovets" (from the name of the society - the All-Russian Society of the Deaf and Dumb - VOG).
Erik Totmianin was the chairman of the Leningrad department of VOG from the late 1920s. The spirit of the times did not pass him by, and in 1937 he wrote a denunciation to the head of the NKVD Directorate of the Leningrad Region that some members of his society were illegally earning money by speculation. Indeed, some of the deaf and dumb, as now, went to train stations and electric trains, trying to sell art postcards of handicraft production. Several people were arrested, searched, and among the hundreds of homemade postcards they found … several German ones with the image of Adolf Hitler.
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VOG member Alexander Stadnikov had them almost by accident. Albert Blum, a German communist who had fled from Germany, lived in the same house as he was also deaf. In Leningrad, he worked in a sewing workshop and occasionally came to visit the English Embankment. As befits a German, he preferred to smoke cigarettes from his homeland, and the boxes brought from Germany contained small factory inserts with Hitler.
Since Totmianin's denunciation accused the unfortunate disabled of illegal trade, the investigation was led by Jan Krause, head of the department for combating theft of socialist property and speculation (OBKHSS). The images of Hitler found allowed him to declare that now this story is "the case of the anti-Soviet fascist terrorist organization of the Gestapo agent A. Blum."
This is not the only time that the OBKhSS under the leadership of Krause fabricated political affairs that did not seem to belong to his department - it must have been that Krause and his subordinates wanted to curry favor and be noticeable against the background of the Great Terror raging across the country. True, in 1939 he himself was arrested for gross violations of "socialist legality", and for many years for the Leningrad militia the concept of "Krausevism" will become a curse. In 1940, a military tribunal ordered Krause to be shot.
Nikolay Deibner, Mikhail Tager-Karyelli, Eric Totmianin.
But in the summer and autumn of 1937, the Leningrad members of the VOG were arrested. Among them was the founder of the St. Petersburg Union of the Deaf and Mute Nikolai Deibner (and the union was created back in 1903), photographer Israel Nissenbaum (probably, Jewish nationality did not prevent him from working in the "fascist organization"), participants of the very first Olympics in 1932, where Leningraders took first place, the theater director Mikhail Tager-Karyelli (who created the "Pantomime" theater) and even the author of the initial denunciation Eric Totmianin. VOG member David Ginzburgsky recalled:
“I remember well how, in front of my eyes, during the dress rehearsal of a new play based on Nikolai Ostrovsky's book“How the Steel Was Tempered”, which was being prepared for the 20th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, two in civilian clothes approached the stage and, without showing any documents, asked:“Who is there Tager-Carrielli? " Some of us read the question “from the lips” of the questioner and pointed with a finger. They took it and took it away. And we were just dumbfounded and dispersed in shock …"
During interrogations, the arrested were asked about their circle of contacts and friends, and thus the number of suspects with each testimony only increased. In total, over 50 people were arrested. Mikhail Roskin, who was involved in the case, later said that his cellmate gave good advice - to call his acquaintances and friends only those who had already been arrested. Indeed, the wave of arrests after that quickly subsided.
They tried to involve translators in the fabrication of the case. One of them, Ida Ignatenko, was brought in two years later in the Krause case as an accomplice in the crimes of NKVD investigators. She confirmed that "almost all" interrogation protocols of the "deaf and dumb cases" were at variance with the verbatim testimony of the accused, and the latter, in fact, were forced to sign false testimony:
“Initially, I strongly protested against such distortions, demanding that the testimony be recorded verbatim. However, both Nemtsov and Lebedev began to find fault with me (investigators. - Approx.), Reproaching me for instability, compassion, that, they say, I sympathize with these state criminals, I feel sorry for them, etc. Being in such tense conditions, with constant threats, and, moreover, working 14-15 hours a day, I was unable to refuse to work with this method. Later, I began to sign the protocols without reading them. In these cases, Nemtsov declared: “That you do not trust us, because the accused signed. You see his signature, what else will you read “”.
The "fascist terrorist" organization of the deaf and dumb, according to the investigation, recruited its members at the factories of the defense industry, where some members of the VOG worked, prepared terrorist acts on Red Square in Moscow on May 1 and November 7, 1936 and on the square in front of Smolny in Leningrad in January 1937 of the year. Why these attacks remained unfulfilled was not explained. Also, the found portraits of Hitler made it possible to add to the accusation the distribution of fascist literature, which was supplied by the German consulate.
34 accused were shot in December 1937, and another - photographer Dmitry Khorin - was shot in January of the following year. (They were rehabilitated in 1955.) Another 19 people were sentenced to ten years in forced labor camps. However, after the Krause case in 1940, they were acquitted. Even then, their comrade David Ginzburgsky tried to meet with them. Subsequently, for many years he collected materials on the "case of the deaf and dumb", organized the Museum of the History of the Leningrad government of the VOG, and in the 1990s contributed to the public coverage of this story. In 2008, a monument was erected at the Levashovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg, not far from the place where the deaf and dumb were shot.
But already in 1939, when Ezhov was replaced by Beria, those special officers who fabricated the case of the deaf and dumb were themselves arrested. And those of the unfortunate who did not manage to be shot were released from the camps in 1940.
Nowadays, a memorial plaque hangs in the palace of culture of the St. Petersburg RO VOG.
