Russian found great-grandfather executioners through 78 years after the execution

Denis Karagodin, a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of Tomsk University, identified the names of everyone who was guilty of falsifying charges and shooting his great-grandfather. He traced the criminal chain - from the Kremlin initiators of the Great Terror to ordinary executors in Tomsk, right up to the drivers of the “black funnels” and the typists who retyped the papers of the NKVD, says “Radio freedom«.

Denis managed to get a lot of documents showing how the Stalinist repression machine worked, which killed innocent people.

56-year-old peasant Stepan Ivanovich Karagodin was arrested on the night of December 1, 1937. He was convicted and then shot as the organizer of a spy-sabotage group and a resident of Japanese military intelligence (as part of the great “Harbin case”, during which almost 1937 thousand people were arrested in 1938-9). The wife and children did not know about the execution and hoped that Stepan Ivanovich was alive. In the late 50s, they received a certificate of rehabilitation, which stated that he “died in custody.”

Great-grandson spent 5 years to collect all the data bit by bit. His numerous written and oral requests always ended with the same thing — formal formal replies or reports that there was no such document.

In 2012, he began to collect information about the NKVD officers from departmental and political archives, but it turned out that the descendants of people whose relatives were shot in Tomsk can help.

“I started receiving letters through the site. From the materials sent, I piece by piece “removed” the data of the NKVD officers: who made the arrest, who searched, who was the witness, who led the investigation, who signed the arrest warrants, etc.,” Denis said.

Caught in a desperate situation and not wanting to give up, Denis developed a complex plan of action. He hoped to find help in the State Duma or even in the Russian Orthodox Church. However, after his repeated request, a letter with copies of documents about the execution and the names of the executioners unexpectedly arrived.

In total, on this day - January 21 of the year 1938 - 64 people were shot in the prison of the city of Tomsk. People not mentioned in the act, passed in the nomenclature reporting on the other sentence-lists.

The most important thing is that the document contains the names of the immediate executioners.

“It is possible that for the first time in the history of Russia such a document was issued to a person. But, of course, I don’t know this for sure. According to some information, a number of employees of the archives of the FSB departments were sincerely convinced that this act simply physically did not exist, supposedly it was simply destroyed at one time - “cleansed”, like many other documents. But I knew that this was not so, I knew that these documents existed, I was absolutely convinced of it! That’s how it turned out,” says Karagodin.

The story of Denis was widely distributed in social networks, and the next day the granddaughter of one of those who shot his grandfather contacted him. She shared the documents and asked for forgiveness. She also added that she didn’t know who her grandfather was and what she was doing. The fact that her grandmother’s father was repressed was shocking.

“That’s how it now turned out that in one family there are both victims and executioners... It’s very bitter to realize this, it’s very painful... But I will never renounce the history of my family, no matter what it is,” she writes.

Now Denis Karogodin wants to complete his investigation with this legal process. All materials necessary for the preparation of this process are collected.

“Now we have the entire chain of killers: from the Politburo to the specific executioner,” writes Denis Karagodin.

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