16 Facts About Leonid Zakovsky

Leonid Mikhailovich Zakovsky was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and NKVD Commissar 1st Class of State Security.

Leonid Zakovsky was born Henriks Stubis in Kreis Hasenpoth in the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire in a family of Latvian ethnicity.

Leonid Zakovsky was arrested twice during 1913, and on the second occasion was convicted of belonging to an anarchist group, and deported to Olonets province in north Russia.

Leonid Zakovsky later concealed his anarchist past, claiming to have been a Bolshevik since 1913.

In December 1917, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks had seized power, renaming their organisation the All-Russian Communist Party, Zakovsky became one of the founding members of the Cheka.

Leonid Zakovsky served in this organisation, under its different names, for the remainder of his career.

Leonid Zakovsky was in charge of security during Josif Stalin's visit to Siberia early in 1928, during which the General Secretary ordered grain to be seized by force from producers who were unwilling to sell, a decision which was the precursor to the forced collectivisation of agriculture.

In 1928, Leonid Zakovsky was given the additional role of head of the 'troika' system, created to administer extrajudicial reprisals against peasants who resisted the change in policy.

In 1932, Leonid Zakovsky was appointed head of the OGPU in the Belorussian Soviet Republic.

The police officers deemed responsible for this security lapse were sacked, and Leonid Zakovsky was transferred in January 1935 as head of the Leningrad NKVD, replacing Filipp Medved.

Leonid Zakovsky was planning a major trial of leading Leningrad communists, including Zhdanov's deputy, Mikhail Chudov, his wife Lyudmila Shaposhnikova, Boris Pozern, and others.

On January 29,1938, it was announced that Leonid Zakovsky had been transferred to Moscow as First Deputy head of the NKVD, second in command to the infamous Nikolai Yezhov.

Rather than have him arrested, which might have provoked foreign agents to defect, Leonid Zakovsky crept up on him while he was talking to fellow officer Mikhail Frinovsky and stupefied him with chloroform, allowing another officer to inject him with poison.

Leonid Zakovsky took part in interrogating the former head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, to get him to confess under torture to being a terrorist.

In spring 1938, Leonid Zakovsky became a victim of the Great Purge, as Order 49990, calling for the mass arrests of ethnic Latvians, was applied to serving NKVD officers.

Leonid Zakovsky was sacked on April 16,1938, and on April 19 he was arrested and accused of being part of the 'Yagoda conspiracy,' of being a spy, and of organising a Latvian nationalist clique within the NKVD.