1. Boris Veniaminovich Rodos was an officer of the OGPU, colonel of the NKVD and Ministry of State Security, deputy head of the Investigative Department of the Main Board of State Security and People's Commissariat of State Security who was notorious for torturing prisoners during interrogations.
Boris Rodos's victims came from a variety of high-ranking communists and military officials who fell victim to purges, including Yakov Smushkevich, Grigory Shtern, and Aleksandr Loktionov.
Boris Rodos joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1931 and, around the same time, became an officer of the OGPU in Ukraine.
Boris Rodos was transferred to a minor post in NKVD headquarters in Moscow in May 1937, after the mass arrests of NKVD officers ordered by Nikolai Yezhov.
In December 1938, after Yezhov had been dismissed and replaced by Lavrenty Beria, Boris Rodos was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and appointed Deputy Head of the NKVD Investigation Department.
One of the first prisoners interrogated by Boris Rodos was a fellow officer, Pyotr Zubov, who was arrested for bungling an attempted coup against the King of Yugoslavia.
Boris Rodos smashed his knees with a hammer in a failed attempt to force a confession out of him.
Boris Rodos interrogated and tortured the heads of the Ukrainian communist party and government, Vlas Chubar and Stanislav Kosior, and the former head of the Komsomol Alexander Kosarev, and was part of the team who took over the interrogation and torture of Isaac Babel in September 1939.
Boris Rodos gave him a prolonged beating, and gouged out one of his eyes, but could not break him.
In March 1940, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Boris Rodos was sent to direct the deportation of Poles from Lviv, for which he was promoted in 1941 to the rank of major.
Boris Rodos was dismissed from the MGB in 1952, probably because Beria had temporarily lost control of the organisation.
Boris Rodos was head of anti-aircraft defence staff in Simferopol until his arrest on October 5,1953.
Boris Rodos replied that he had been told that Babel was a writer.
The investigative judge Boris Rodos, who in his time investigated and interrogated Kosior, Chubar and Kosarev, is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and completely degenerate morally.
Boris Rodos had a son, Valery who was arrested in the 1960s as a political dissident.