1. Vyacheslav Menzhinsky emigrated from Russia in 1907, and spent the next decade in Europe and the United States.
17 Facts About Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
1. 2.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky worked to crush resistance in the countryside during Joseph Stalin's forced agricultural collectivization.
3.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a member of the Polish nobility, was born into an Orthodox Christian Polish-Russian family of teachers.
4.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky's father was a Russified Pole and a history lecturer.
5.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky's mother was a woman of letters who sympathised with the revolutionaries.
6.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky's brother was a tsarist official, working for the Ministry of Finance.
7.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky graduated from the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg University in 1898, and practised law in Yaroslavl, while dabbling in literature.
8.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902.
9.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky was released after two weeks in prison, after going on hunger strike, and emigrated.
10.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, United States, working in foreign branches of the RSDLP.
11.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky seemed like a poor sketch for an unfinished portrait.
12.
When officials at the Russian State Bank refused to recognise the new regime, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky had the director and others arrested.
13.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky played a great role in conducting the secret Trust and Sindikat-2 counterintelligence operations, in the course of which leaders of large anti-Soviet centers abroad, Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly, were lured to the Soviet Union and arrested.
14.
Meanwhile, the Chekist, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky was loyal to Joseph Stalin, whose personality cult had already begun to form, coinciding with several important purges in 1930 to 1931.
15.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid, suffering from acute angina since the late 1920s, which rendered him incapable of physical exertion.
16.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky conducted the affairs of the OGPU while lying upon a couch in his office at the Lubyanka, but rarely interfered in the day-to-day operation of the GPU.
17.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky was cremated and his ashes was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.