Boris Davidovich Berman (; 15 May 1901 22 February 1939) was a leading member of the

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

, who played a prominent role in the

Great Purge The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovshchina ( , ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. After the Assassination of Sergei Kirov, assassination of ...

before he was himself arrested and shot.

Early career

Berman was born in Andiranovka, Chita, Transbaikal Oblast, to a

Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

brickyard owner. At the age of ten, Boris Berman was sent to work as a shop assistant. He fought in the civil war as a teenager. He joined the

OGPU The Joint State Political Directorate ( rus, Объединённое государственное политическое управление, p=ɐbjɪdʲɪˈnʲɵn(ː)əjə ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əjə pəlʲɪˈtʲitɕɪskəjə ʊprɐˈv ...

in 1921 and held a succession of posts. In 1928-31, he was based in

Russian Central Asia Russian Turkestan () was a colony of the Russian Empire, located in the western portion of the Central Asian region of Turkestan. Administered as a Krai or Governor-Generalship, it comprised the oasis region to the south of the Kazakh Steppe, but ...

, and for about three years, was an OGPU resident in Germany. In 1934, he was appointed deputy head of the OGPU Foreign Department, shortly before it was reorganized as the

.Who Directed the NKVD
(in Russian), (select "БЕРМАН БОРИС ДАВЫДОВИЧ")(in Russian), accessed 25 September 2019

Role in the Great Terror

When the NKVD was preparing the first of the Moscow Show Trials, by forcing confessions out of prisoners, Berman was the interrogator who induced the Old Bolshevik Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan to sign a false confession and appear in the dock, telling him that he would be spared the death penalty. Ter-Vaganyan was shot, though it may be that Berman did not know what would be the outcome. During preparations for the second trial, he handled the interrogation of

Karl Radek Karl Berngardovich Radek (; 31 October 1885 – 19 May 1939) was a revolutionary and writer active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and a Communist International leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian ...

. When

Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...

was arrested early in 1937, Berman led the team who searched his apartment. According to Bukharin's widow,

Anna Larina Anna Mikhailovna Larina (; 27 January 1914 – 24 February 1996) was the third wife of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin and spent many years trying to rehabilitate her husband after he was executed in 1938. She was the author of a memoir e ...

: In May 1937, Berman was appointed head of the NKVD in Belorussia (

Belarus Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...

). In this role, he is said to have been the first official to order his staff to use torture, and was "sadistic even by NKVD standards". His victims included a group of former high ranking communists, writers and poets, executed on 29–30 October 1937. In January 1938, he reported at a conference of regional NKVD chiefs that his staff had arrested 60,000 people over the previous eight months. Berman's mass killings in Belarus purposefully targeted the educated elite and representatives of Belarusian culture. Simultaneously, Berman supervised the

Polish Operation of the NKVD The ''Polish Operation'' of the NKVD (Soviet security service) in 1937–1938 was an anti-Polish mass-ethnic cleansing operation of the NKVD carried out in the Soviet Union against Poles (labeled by the Soviets as "agents") during the period ...

in Belarus, in which over seventeen thousand people were sentenced to death, most of them Poles. Many of Berman's mass executions were large scale, and were carried out at the

Kurapaty Kurapaty (, ) is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, where a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 during the Great Purge by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD and in particular, during the Soviet repressions i ...

mass killing site. On December 19, 1937, Berman was awarded the

Order of Lenin The Order of Lenin (, ) was an award named after Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution. It was established by the Central Executive Committee on 6 April 1930. The order was the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet ...

. In May 1938, he was promoted to head the NKVD Third Directorate. Still, he was arrested on September 24, 1938, in the same week that

Lavrentiy Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ka, ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია} ''Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria'' ( – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph ...

officially took control of the NKVD, and accused of being a spy in the pay of Polish intelligence. Berman was executed on February 22, 1939, in

Kommunarka Kommunarka is an urban-type settlement (posyolok) in Sosenskoye Settlement, Novomoskovsky Administrative Okrug, Moscow, Russia. The Kommunarka (Sokolnicheskaya line) station opened in 2019. History A mass burial site of the late 1930s, known as ...

Moscow Oblast Moscow Oblast (, , informally known as , ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (an oblast). With a population of 8,524,665 (Russian Census (2021), 2021 Census) living in an area of , it is one of the most densely populate ...

. He has not been rehabilitated. in 1956 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found no grounds to review the case of Berman for posthumous rehabilitation. On March 27, 2014, by a ruling of the Judicial Collegium for Military Personnel of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, he was found not subject to rehabilitation.

Family

Berman was the younger brother of Matvei Berman, who was head of the

Gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

(the Soviet prison camps) in the 1930s. His wife, Maria Arkadyevna Bak, was also an NKVD official, who was sacked when he was arrested. What happened to her after that is not known. One of her brothers, Boris Bak (1897-1938), was head of the Middle Volga NKVD during the period when the peasants were resisting being forced onto collective farms. In January 1930, he oversaw the deportation of 10,000 families. He was head of the NKVD in the Northern Province until his arrest on 10 August 1937. He was shot on 16 June 1938. She also had a younger brother, Solomon (1902–40), who held senior NKVD posts in the regions until his arrest on 10 October 1938. He was shot on 22 February 1939 (or, according to other sources, on 19 January 1940).

References

{{Reflist 1901 births 1939 deaths category:Russian Jews Russian anti-capitalists Old Bolsheviks Great Purge victims from Russia Jews executed by the Soviet Union Jewish socialists People executed for treason against the Soviet Union Soviet police officers NKVD officers Executed Great Purge perpetrators People executed by the Soviet Union by firearm