The merchant's daughter, Lenin's friend and the threat of white officers: why Barbara Yakovleva was shot by her comrades-in-arms

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin personally appointed Varvara Yakovleva, the daughter of a Moscow merchant and friend of Nadezhda Krupskaya, at the head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Committee. At her post responsible for the cleansing, according to separate sources, she personally killed more than one hundred people. She without hesitation put signatures under the execution lists, showing unenviable cruelty. But in 1937, Yakovleva suffered the fate of her own victims, for exceptional reasons, even for a person with a similar reputation.

Wealthy revolutionary who did not deviate from the chosen path

Varvara Nikolayevna Yakovleva, a native Muscovite and daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, moved in revolutionary circles long before the events of 1917. She was a member of the metropolitan group of the Moscow Committee under the tsar, conducting propaganda work in student circles and speaking at workers' meetings. She was arrested four times and sent into exile, after which she safely resumed revolutionary activities.

Since 1917, Yakovleva was part of the Moscow party militant center. In the days of the December uprising, a talented student student, who, according to the convictions of her teachers-professors, had the gift of an astronomer and a mathematician, was already standing on the barricades with weapons in her hands. In May 1918, she was included in the collegium of the Cheka, and a little later she headed the Petrograd Chekists. However, after a short time, she was removed from office on the initiative of the same Lenin. The reason, as historians believe, was the promiscuous sexual relations of the gallant Chekist. With this way of life, she threatened, sooner or later, to give out confidential information to the enemy.

Brave security officer and revenge for his brother

As secretary of the Moscow Regional Bureau, Yakovleva took part in the struggle against the State Conference and General Kornilov, strengthening influence among the masses, creating Soviets, Bolshevik youth organizations, and publishing thematic newspapers and magazines. On October 10, in Petrograd, Yakovleva attended a secret meeting of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party, where the question of an imminent armed uprising was brought up point-blank. Yakovleva fully supported Lenin.

The last underground meeting of Russian revolutionaries took place on February 27, 1917 at the apartment of the Bolshevik doctor Vladimir Obukh. Soon news of the February Revolution came from the capital, and with it came a fertile period in the activities of the Moscow Bolsheviks. The revolution won, and Yakovleva became one of Dzerzhinsky's closest associates.

Having headed the Petrograd Cheka after the murder of Uritsky, the woman instantly turned into a storm of tsarist officers. Intoxicated by Yakovlev's powers, she eagerly directed the arrests, torture and interrogations. According to the Dutch diplomat Willem Oudendijk, the Chekist was known as a "terrible person", distinguished by "inhuman cruelty." In the fall of 1918, she learned that in Yakutia, her brother, who at that time was the Chairman of Tsentrosibir, had died at the hands of the White Guards. From that moment on, the woman literally took revenge on every adherent of the tsarist regime who fell into her Bolshevik hands.

"Sins" of a fiery Bolshevik

In the mid-1920s, Yakovleva distinguished herself by advocating party reforms, even earlier managed not to support Lenin's plan for the Brest Peace, and later completely joined Trotsky's camp. In 1926, Varvara Nikolaevna changed her mind and in writing renounced Lev Davidovich, who threatened her well-being. In the course of her stormy activities of the same period, Yakovleva worked closely with Ivan Smirnov. At that time, he, the commissar of the Fifth Red Army, was called the winner of Kolchak and the "Sviyazhsky communist conscience." It was from there that, geographically, Kolchak's troops swept east. Together with Smirnov, Yakovleva established Siberian Soviet power, traveling in his company all over Western Siberia.

The close relationship between Yakovleva and Smirnov became apparent already in Moscow, where they had a daughter. The representative of the left opposition, represented by the new passion, opposed brutal collectivization and strove for democracy in the CPSU (b). Smirnov tried to directly reproach the leaders of the USSR for their inappropriate activities. As a result, in 1936, Ivan Smirnov was on the list of the main suspects in the Trotskyite-Zinoviev terrorist center and was shot. Varvara Yakovleva doubted the father of her children, admitting the validity of his sentence, which she even shared with her own daughters. She was a revolutionary and a witness for the prosecution, currying favor with the party and blaming her closest accomplice Bukharin for all possible sins against the Soviet people.

The execution of a faithful revolutionary

Until 1930, Yakovleva was in close contact with Krupskaya, working on the RSFSR Enlightenment Committee. Her last post was the chair of the People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR. On September 12, 1937, an authoritative member of the Party, a participant in several revolutions, a delegate to many party congresses, a member of the USSR Central Committee and a financial manager was arrested as an enemy of the people.

In 1938, the convicted Valentina Polyakova, the wife of the one who was shot on the basis of the testimony of Varvara Yakovleva, was in the process of being transported in the same carriage with the latter. The former Chekist confessed to Polyakova in a private, frank conversation that she had slandered her comrades-in-arms at the insistence of the NKVD leaders. The eldest daughter of Yakovleva, who refused to renounce her mother after her arrest, also suffered because of her mother. The military collegium of the USSR Armed Forces sentenced her to twenty years of imprisonment and five years of disqualification, and in the fall of 1941, Yakovlev was still shot along with a hundred other political prisoners of the Oryol Central. In 1958, Varvara Nikolaevna was rehabilitated.

And there were more cruel women, for example, the angel of death from Auschwitz Irma Grese.