Vyacheslav Menzhinsky

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Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.

Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (Russian: Вячеслав Рудольфович Менжинский) (1874 - May 10, 1934) was a Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Party official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934. Fluent in sixteen languages (the last one, farsi, he learned specially for reading works by Omar Khayyám), Menzhinsky was the second and the last representative of the Russian nobility among Lubyanka's leaders.

[edit] Biography

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a hereditary dvoryanin, was born to a Polish family of teachers. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, Saint Petersburg University in 1898 and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1902. In 1905 he became a member of the military organization by the Petersburg Committee of the RSDRP. In 1906 Menzhinsky was arrested, but fled and emigrated. He lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, USA, working in abroad organizations of the RSDRP. In Summer 1917 he returned to Russia.

After the October revolution Menzhinsky served as the People's Commissar of Finance. Since 1919 he was a member of the Presidium of Vecheka, and five years later became a deputy chairman of its successor, the OGPU. After Felix Dzerzhinsky's death in July 1926 Menzhinsky became the chairman of the OGPU. Menzhinsky played a great role in conducting secret Trust and Sindikat-2 counterintelligent operations, during which leaders of large abroad anti-Soviet centers, Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly, were lured to the USSR and arrested.

At the same time, as a senior Chekist, Menzhinsky was loyal to Joseph Stalin, whose personality cult already began to rise, with some big purges in 1930-1931.^{[citation needed]} Trotsky, who met him before the revolution, thought him unremarkable: "He seemed more like the shadow of some other unrealized man, or rather like a poor sketch for an unfinished portrait."

Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid, suffering from acute angina which rendered him incapable of physical exertion. He conducted the affairs of the OGPU lying upon a couch in his office at the Lubyanka. He died in 1934, of natural causes, and avoided the ignominious fates which befell his successors, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrenti Beria. When Yagoda made his public confession at the Moscow Trial of the Twenty One in 1938, he claimed he poisoned Menzhinsky, but given the preposturous nature of Yagoda's confession it seems improbable.