Leonid Mihajlovich Zakovsky (pseudonym for Henriks Ernestovich Stubis) (1894-1938 )

Born in Latvia, Zakovsky became a Bolshevik in 1913 (the exact date of his membership however has been withheld by Petrov and Skorkin). He began his career in the political police, from the beginning of the establishment of the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Active in Ukraine, he became head of the OGPU (the State Political Directorate) in Siberia and was in charge of Stalin's security in 1928, during the General Secretary of the Party's Siberian mission.

After two years (1932-1934) working in Belarus, he became head of the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in Leningrad, ten days after the murder of Kirov (December 1, 1934). He was responsible for the repressions that occurred in the Northern capital in the subsequent months. Zakovsky gave the order to shoot 1,111 prisoners of the Solovki camps in Sandarmorkh on October 16, 1937. He was elected a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937.

From January 19, 1938 he left Leningrad for Moscow where became the deputy of N. Ezhov, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and head of the NKVD for the Moscow region until March 28, 1938.

After he was dismissed from these responsibilities, he was appointed for a while to a minor job and then arrested on April 30, 1938. He was shot four months later as an “agent of the Polish and German counter-espionage” (Zalesskij, 2000)

Sources

Petrov, N. V. Skorkin, K. V., 1999, Kto rukovodil NKVD: 1934-1941, spravochnik [Who headed the NKVD: 1934-1941, a handbook], Moscow: Zvenija.

Zalesskij, K. A., 2000, Imperija Stalina: biograficheskij entsiklopedicheskij slovar' [The Empire of Stalin: a biographical dictionary], Moscow: Veche.