The grave of the main executioner of the Stalin era is a few steps away from the entrance to the cemetery. This is the grave of Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin, who signed numerous orders on the enforcement of execution sentences that are kept in the Lubianka archives.
Blokhin was born into the family of a poor peasant in a village in the Ivanovo region. In April 1921 he joined the Communist Party and almost at once began rising through the ranks of the Secret service. From 1924 onwards, he regularly participated in shootings, and in the summer of 1926 he was appointed as the head of the commandant’s unit of the OGPU’s administrative management department. This seemingly technical position entailed “night” missions: up until Stalin’s death, Blokhin continuously headed an operational “special purpose” group that carried out death sentences. In the 1930s, the special group consisted as a rule of 5-6 people.
The execution team under Blokhin’s command was formed from various units. Blokhin personally selected people, evidently judging by their psychophysical abilities to carry out this monstrous job of killing dozens of people per night with their own hands.
What were these people responsible for? First, they received execution orders with lists of those sentenced, then they went to prisons to take the victims, executed them, removed the bodies, and if it was necessary to incinerate the remains of those killed, they brought them here. Mass dispatches to the crematorium started in 1934, though this practice most likely existed from the beginning of the 1930s. Bodies were incinerated here and then buried. Blokhin's teams organized and controlled the whole process from the very beginning.
Many of those who carried out these grim tasks worked for twenty years or more, and killed thousands of those convicted. Blokhin himself worked in law enforcement for almost 35 years and was awarded numerous state awards and titles. The total number of victims shot by Blokhin personally during his service in Lubianka is no less than 15,000 people.
Right after Stalin’s death and Beria’s repeated rise to power, Blokhin was released on pension, and at the end of 1954 he was stripped of his generalship and other ranks.
Now we will walk to the place where those executed by Blokhin and others are buried.
