March 5th, 1953 was a time of celebration for a variety of people who no longer existed in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was a monster without a peer, and his policies resulted in the death of millions of Soviet citizens.
Less well known, but still just as barbaric, were the crimes of the various heads of the NKVD. The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was tasked with finding enemies of the state and ending the threat they posed to the state by any means necessary. It was run by Genrikh Yagoda, then Nikolai Yezhov, then Lavrentiy Beria and finally Sergei Kruglov in 1946 before it was split into the MGB and MVD.
Each of these people were guilty of crimes that would make your blood run cold. Some were worse than others, but the truth is that no matter how hard you try, people's legacies are stubborn things. You can kill a man, but he has a family. So you kill the family. But then they have friends. So you kill the friends. But those people have friends. Eventually, you have to eradicate whole towns if you truly want to disappear someone. And what if that person has friends in high places? What about the enemies of Stalin himself?
The above people are monsters, but we know about them. What if I told you that there was a secret head of the NKVD between 1938 and 1940 that no one has ever heard of?
We don't know his name. We don't know where he came from or what his history was. What we know is that he pioneered a new kind of unpersoning that allowed the Soviet Union to not just erase its enemies in body but in history. No longer would you need to airbrush a picture of Stalin to remove enemies of the state at his side. Here's the tricky part though. It appears that whoever this person was, he fell out of favor with Stalin as well. Beria was tasked with cleaning up the mess, I'm told. As far as we know, whatever happened to him, he took the secret of how he'd done this with him.
All this is very speculative. We've been able to piece together the vaguest sense of this from secret documents that talk about this NKVD head and his tactics. It didn't really matter too much, outside of intellectual curiosity, since we would never know how he erased people from history. Or why, in the end, his tactics were turned on himself.
But in 2018, I was following up on a story inside the Eastern Federation. I was staying in a Hostel called "Red Moscow" with a few friends and colleagues. We were about to get something to eat when we noticed a phone booth outside that hadn't been there yesterday.
I went and checked it out. Rostelecom ran quite a few payphones in the city, so it wasn't a surprise to see their branding on it when I got closer. But almost as soon as I saw the logo, the phone started to ring. I walked a little closer and looked around. No one else was there. So I picked up the phone.
A woman on the other end asked me who I was. She said she was lost and needed help. I asked her where she was, and she said she wasn't sure. It was dark there. I pulled out my notepad and started writing down everything I could. Her name was Afanasiia Zakharova. She was a mother of three children, who were all there with her. She said she'd been caught up in some sort of protest and arrested. This wasn't a wild thing to happen in Moscow in 2018, by the way. Much as the Eastern Federation likes to put on a united front, they are fracturing at the seams. You can see it everywhere.
So I asked her what she'd been protesting. She said they'd been protesting against the Soviet Invasion of Poland. That stopped me cold. I asked her to repeat herself, and she said it again. I told her that she was wrong, that the Eastern Federation hadn't invaded Poland. She had no idea what I was talking about.
I asked her where she was calling from. She said she wasn't calling. She was at the bottom of a dark hole and she was yelling up at the sky. And then the phone went dead.
Now I don't know for sure if this was a prank call or not. I looked into Afanasiia Zakharova and found no records. Not even the smallest bit of information that could point me at who she was or why she called me late one Friday night on a Moscow street corner. But it reminded me about the story about the guy with no name who never existed but who ran the NKVD for 2 years.
I worry about Russia sometimes. I worry a lot.
Sources:
Dr. Jeremiah Cimmerian
Michael Lee-Graham
