Why was Yaroslavl shot? Types and variations of the death penalty

Is it true that the executioners were paid substantial bonuses for each person executed? And is it true that it was not customary to shoot women in the Soviet Union? During the post-Soviet period, so many common myths have been created around the “tower” that it is hardly possible to figure out what is true and what is speculation in them without painstaking work in the archives, which can take more than a dozen years. There is no complete clarity either with the pre-war executions or with the post-war ones. But the worst situation is with the data on how death sentences were carried out in the 60–80s.

As a rule, convicts were executed in pre-trial detention centers. Each union republic had at least one such special-purpose pre-trial detention center. There were two of them in Ukraine, three in Azerbaijan, and four in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Today, death sentences are carried out only in one single Soviet-era pre-trial detention center - in the Pishchalovsky central prison in Minsk, also known as “Volodarka”. This is a unique place, the only one in Europe. About 10 people a year are executed there. But if you count execution pre-trial detention centers in Soviet republics It is relatively easy, but even the most trained historian can hardly say with confidence how many such specialized insulators there were in the RSFSR. For example, until recently it was believed that in Leningrad in the 60-80s, convicts were not executed at all - there was nowhere. But it turned out that this was not the case. Not long ago, documentary evidence was discovered in the archives that 15-year-old teenager Arkady Neyland, sentenced to capital punishment, was shot in the summer of 1964 in the Northern capital, and not in Moscow or Minsk, as previously thought. Therefore, a “prepared” pre-trial detention center was found after all. And Neyland was hardly the only one who was shot there.

There are other common myths about the “tower”. For example, it is generally accepted that since the late 50s the Baltics did not have their own execution squads at all, so all those sentenced to capital punishment from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were transported to Minsk for execution. This is not entirely true: death sentences were also carried out in the Baltic states. But the performers were actually invited from outside. Mainly from Azerbaijan. Still, three firing squads for one small republic is too much. Convicts were executed mainly in the Baku Bailov prison, and shoulder masters from Nakhichevan were often without work. Their salaries were still “dripping” - the members of the firing squad received approximately 200 rubles a month, but at the same time no bonuses for “execution”, nor quarterly. And this was a lot of money - the quarterly amount was approximately 150-170 rubles, and “for performance” they paid one hundred members of the brigade and 150 directly to the performer. So we went on business trips to earn extra money. More often - to Latvia and Lithuania, less often - to Georgia, Moldova and Estonia.

Another common myth is that in last decades existence of the Union to death penalty women were not sentenced. They sentenced. IN open sources You can find information about three such executions. In 1979, collaborator Antonina Makarova was shot, in 1983, plunderer of socialist property Berta Borodkina, and in 1987, poisoner Tamara Ivanyutina. And this is against the backdrop of 24,422 death sentences handed down between 1962 and 1989! So, only men were shot? Hardly. In particular, the verdicts of currency traders Oksana Sobinova and Svetlana Pinsker (Leningrad), Tatyana Vnuchkina (Moscow), Yulia Grabovetskaya (Kiev), handed down in the mid-60s, are still shrouded in secrecy.

They were sentenced to the “tower”, but executed or still pardoned, it’s hard to say. Their names are not among the 2,355 pardoned. This means that most likely they were shot after all.

The third myth is that people became executioners, so to speak, at the call of their hearts. In the Soviet Union, executioners were appointed - and that’s all. No volunteers. You never know what’s on their minds – what if they’re perverts? Even an ordinary OBKhSS employee could be appointed as an executioner. Among law enforcement officers, as a rule, those who were dissatisfied with their salaries and who urgently needed to improve their living conditions were selected. They offered me a job. They invited me for an interview. If the subject approached, he was processed. It must be said that Soviet personnel officers worked excellently: from 1960 to 1990 there was not a single case in which an executioner resigned due to at will. And there was certainly not a single case of suicide among the execution staff - the Soviet executioners had strong nerves. “Yes, I was the one who was appointed,” recalled former boss establishment UA-38/1 UITU of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan SSR Khalid Yunusov, who has carried out more than three dozen death sentences. – I caught bribe-takers six years ago. I’m tired of it, I’ve only made enemies for myself.”

How, in fact, did the execution procedure itself take place? After the court announced the verdict and before it was carried out, as a rule, several years passed. All this time, the condemned man was kept in solitary confinement in the prison of the city in which the trial was taking place. When all submitted requests for clemency were rejected, the condemned were transported to a special detention center - as a rule, a few days before the sad procedure. It happened that prisoners languished in anticipation of execution for several months, but these were rare exceptions. Prisoners had their heads shaved and dressed in clothes made of striped fabric (a light gray stripe alternated with a dark gray stripe). The convicts were not informed that their last request for clemency was rejected.

Meanwhile, the head of the pre-trial detention center was assembling his firing squad. In addition to the doctor and the executioner, it included an employee of the prosecutor's office and a representative of the operational information center of the Internal Affairs Directorate. These five gathered in a specially designated room. First, the prosecutor's office employee got acquainted with the personal file of the convicted person. Then the so-called supervisory inspectors, two or three people, brought the convict into the room in handcuffs. In films and books, there is usually a passage in which the death row inmate is told that all his requests for clemency have been rejected. In fact, serving in last way this was never reported. They asked what his name was, where he was born, what article he was under. They offered to sign several protocols. Then they reported that they would need to draw up another petition for pardon - in the next room where the deputies were sitting, and the papers would need to be signed in front of them. The trick, as a rule, worked flawlessly: those sentenced to death cheerfully walked towards the deputies.

And there were no deputies outside the door of the next cell - the performer was standing there. As soon as the condemned man entered the room, a shot followed in the back of the head. More precisely, “to the left occipital part of the head in the area of the left ear,” as required by the instructions. The suicide bomber fell and a control shot was fired. The dead man's head was wrapped in a rag and the blood was washed off - there was a specially equipped blood drain in the room. The doctor came in and pronounced death. It is noteworthy that the executioner never shot the victim with a pistol - only with a small-caliber rifle. They say that they shot with Makarov and TT guns exclusively in Azerbaijan, but the lethal force of the weapon was such that close range the convicts literally had their heads blown off. And then it was decided to shoot the convicts from the revolvers of the times Civil War– they had a more gentle battle. By the way, only in Azerbaijan were those sentenced to execution tightly tied up before the procedure, and only in this republic was it customary to announce to the condemned that all their requests for clemency had been rejected. Why this is so is unknown. The binding of the victims affected them so strongly that every fourth died of a broken heart.

It is also noteworthy that the prosecutor’s office never signed documents on the execution of the sentence before the execution (as prescribed by the instructions) - only after. They said - Bad sign, worse than ever. Next, the deceased was placed in a pre-prepared coffin and taken to the cemetery, to a special plot, where they were buried under nameless tablets. No names, no surnames - only serial number. The firing squad was given a certificate, and that day all four of its members received time off.

In Ukrainian, Belarusian and Moldavian pre-trial detention centers, as a rule, they made do with one executioner. But in the Georgian special detention centers - in Tbilisi and Kutaisi - there were a good dozen of them. Of course, most of these “executioners” never executed anyone - they were only listed, receiving a large salary on the payroll. But why did the law enforcement system need to maintain such huge and unnecessary ballast? They explained it this way: it is not possible to keep secret which of the pre-trial detention center employees shoots the condemned. The accountant will always let something slip! So, in order to mislead even the accountant, Georgia introduced such a strange payment system.

Pictures in school textbooks dedicated to the pacification of the sepoy uprising in India (1857-59) by the British colonialists depict heartbreaking scenes of the execution of captured Indians. They are tied to the muzzles of cannons, from where a deadly shot should be fired, tearing the body of the unfortunate victim into pieces.

Those who watched the Soviet film “Captain Nemo” based on the works of Jules Verne should remember the same plot. There, one British officer explains to another the reasons for this particular execution of captured sepoys: according to their beliefs, it is impossible to be reborn with it. future life. The fear of death not only of the body, but of the entire soul, paralyzes their resistance.

Why, in fact, did the “cultured” Englishmen use this type of execution in some of their colonies in the middle of the “enlightened” 19th century? Let's try to figure it out.

"Devil's Wind"

Shooting from a cannon was also called “the devil’s wind.” He was mentioned in a number of works of art about pirates who spoke of earlier times. But all these stories were composed after the Sepoy Mutiny. So the “devil wind” in them is an anachronism inspired by events in India mid-19th century.

Two types of “devil wind” are known: when a cannonball was fired from a cannon and when a condemned person was killed by a blank charge of gunpowder. In the first case, death occurred almost instantly, in the second, the executed person with a broken spine and torn insides could agonize for some time. In both cases, the body of the executed person was a bloody mess with limbs and even the head separated from the body. When executed with a cannonball, the heads are guaranteed to be torn away from the body and, as described by Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin, “fly upward in a spiral.”

The same Vereshchagin was not personally present at such executions, but studied them, as they say, “from sources,” when in 1884 he painted his picture depicting this type of execution. This picture is called differently (“Execution of captured sepoys by the British”, “Suppression of the sepoy uprising by the British”, etc.). The painting was purchased at auction in New York and since then has probably been in someone's unknown private collection.

It is curious that, according to experts, it depicts executions not after the sepoy uprising, but during the reprisal against the Sikh Namdhari sect in 1872. This is evidenced by the dressing of the depicted victims in the white clothes prescribed by this sect. According to the recollections of Vereshchagin himself, when he exhibited his paintings, including this one, at an exhibition in London, many British categorically denied that they used this barbaric execution in India. At the same time, one retired British general personally boasted to the Russian artist that he himself had invented such an execution, and it was introduced by the colonial authorities on his recommendations.

Vereshchagin invented

Vereshchagin believed that such an execution would instill the greatest possible fear in the Indians. In his opinion, an Indian, especially one from a high caste, is horrified by the prospect of being intermingled with the bodies of people from lower castes:

“It is difficult for a European to understand the horror of an Indian of a high caste if he only needs to touch a fellow lower caste: he must, in order not to close off the possibility of salvation, wash himself and make sacrifices after that endlessly... Here it can happen, no more, no less, that the head of a Brahmin about three cords will lie in eternal rest near the spine of the pariah - brrr! This thought alone makes the soul of the most determined Hindu tremble! I say this very seriously, in full confidence that no one who has been in those countries or who has impartially familiarized themselves with their descriptions will contradict me.”

This is an explanation, which, as is easy to see, formed the basis for such an execution by the screenwriter Soviet film about Prince Dakkar-Captain Nemo, cannot be accepted for the following reasons.

Firstly, only pariahs are considered untouchable in India. upper castes, and all the grotesquery about religious customs produced by Vereshchagin’s words is simply a misunderstanding of the subtleties or a deliberate exaggeration, designed to catch the simple-minded public.

Secondly, rebirth after death is guaranteed for a Hindu. But even if such an image of death somehow negatively influenced subsequent reincarnation, then one would expect that, on the contrary, the desire to avoid it would give strength to resist, and the effect of this execution would be the opposite.

Thirdly, and importantly, the already mentioned Namdhari sect, which is precisely depicted in Vereshchagin’s painting, consisted precisely of former pariahs, and representatives higher varnas there was no trace of it.

Shootings from cannons were practiced by Indians before the arrival of the colonialists

There is evidence that this type of execution was not introduced by the British in India, but was only borrowed by them from the Indians themselves. It was first used back in 1526 during the conquest of India by the army of Sultan Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty. Subsequently, the Indians themselves repeatedly executed their enemies this way: both prisoners of war and state criminals, conspirators, etc.

These executions were adopted from the Indians by the first European colonizers of Hindustan: the Portuguese and the French. The first use of cannon firing in the colonies of the British East India Company dates back to 1761. Thus, during the suppression of the sepoy uprising, this execution was not invented. It only became, thanks to its mass application (due to the scale of the uprising itself), widely known, mainly to the European public, who previously knew nothing about it.

The following assumption can be made about why the Hindus themselves came up with this execution as the most terrible. IN medieval Europe The most terrible execution was considered to be burning alive at the stake. But in India this is not an execution, but a rite of voluntary death, practiced by widows and some yogis in order to achieve bliss in the future life. It is known that the women and children of an entire medieval Indian city subjected themselves to collective self-immolation so as not to fall into the spoils of the winner. Burning could not be perceived in India as a means of intimidation.

But Indians in the 16th century first became acquainted with firearms and were shocked by their deadly effects. Death, which occurred as a result of the instantaneous tearing of the body into pieces, seemed, apparently, the most terrible of all possible.

I fully admit that the footage of this French film about guillotining is staged. But, nevertheless, they, in my opinion, quite realistically reflect the main thing in the entire procedure of any “civilized” execution - what immediately precedes it. It was precisely because of this period of waiting for execution by the condemned, not only the immediate one, but also the entire waiting time preceding the execution of the sentence, that F.M. Dostoevsky, who himself once experienced this terrible experience, later life was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. His argument: There is no crime for which the equivalent retribution would be the experience of the convicted person before the sentence was carried out. This, of course, has its own logic, but only if we're talking about about such crimes as suddenly hitting an old pawnbroker on the skull with an ax, or Trotsky’s darling with an ice pick on him. Then - yes, then the death of the victim is much easier than the entire ensemble of the villain’s experiences before execution. Here Dostoevsky was apparently right.

Today we know about such atrocities, for which “civilized” people have not yet been able to come up with an adequate retribution, no matter how much they rack their brains in various intricacies. It was easier for the “uncivilized” in this matter: “The first thing to do is put the adulterer Yakin on a stake, and then after that!..”.The happy inhabitants of the Middle Ages had the opportunity to prolong their pleasure by achieving happy moment, when the condemned person himself only dreamed of the coming of death, but they did not let him go there in every possible way. Now, this was full-fledged retribution! Sometimes it even led to satisfaction. The current one a person lives It’s difficult, and I want, of course, to savage myself to my heart’s content, but they won’t let me. Indecent, they say. "Nizya!", - all sorts of bastards are causing mischief on all sides, they don’t allow you to break away, like any civilized soul, well-known case, asks. But this is in the cultural West, and the well-known Russian savages, especially the “Soviet” ones, they won’t start a tragedy out of nowhere, right? No, that's not true. Once I found out exactly how they were executed in the late, Brezhnev, at least, USSR, where the whole procedure was a secret behind seven seals. And I learned from a very authoritative source. And having learned, I marveled at that unexpected degree of humanism, which neither the “civilized” West nor the “savages” of the countries of the East could boast of. So, those who like to tickle their nerves are free, they will not be interested.

Types and variations of the death penalty. Execution. November 26th, 2014

Hello dears!
Yesterday we began a somewhat peculiar, but pressing topic of the death penalty:
Today we will continue it.
Unlike hanging, which is considered an extremely shameful execution by the majority of the world's population, the execution we will talk about today is perhaps in first place in honor, so to speak. I'm talking about execution now.
Technically, the execution is carried out by one performer or unit. Death occurs from one or more factors: damage to vital organs, such as the heart, damage to the central nervous system or from blood loss.
The phenomenon of executions has been known to us since ancient times. Suffice it to remember exactly how the commander of the cavalry of the Geitars of the army of Alexander the Great, Philotas, accused of conspiracy, was executed (he was pelted with darts) or the attempted murder of Saint Sebastian (who is now extremely popular among the LBGT community. For some reason unknown to me, they consider him their patron) .

P. Perugino. Saint Sebastian

But it reached its true scale with the advent of gunpowder and firearms. It’s understandable - cheap, fast, simple and reliable. Although some problems often arose with the latter.
A classic execution looks like this: a person sentenced to capital punishment is placed against a wall or tied to a pole. Opposite him, in steps of 5 or 10 (depending on what weapon and what kind of surface, in order to avoid ricochet), a military unit of 4 to 12 people, led by an officer, is posted. The soldiers have some of their guns loaded with blanks, some with live ones. This is done so that the person carrying out the sentence does not know whether he killed a specific person or not and does not experience moral torment. By the way, according to general rule There are no volunteers there - the officer appoints executors by his own order.
The one who is executed is placed facing the line, and at his request, he may not be blindfolded, so that he can meet death with dignity and with his head held high. At the command of the officer, or the convicted person himself, the first salvo is fired. If necessary, a second one. The officer then verifies that the convict is dead. And if not, he finishes him off with a pistol.

Painting by V. Vereshchagin "Execution in the Kremlin"

This is a classic version of execution, which was widespread until the 20th century.
This is exactly how Marshal Michel Ney, the Duke of Enghien or, say, Emperor Maximillian of Mexico were shot
However, sometimes there were problems with the system of similar, seemingly reliable executions. These are the terrible lines written by an eyewitness of the “Red Terror” in 1918-1920: “And Sometimes the shooting is unsuccessful. With one shot a person falls, but does not die. Then a series of bullets are fired at him; stepping on a person lying down, they hit him point-blank in the head or chest. On March 10-11, R. Olekhovskaya, sentenced to death for a trifling act that would be ridiculous to punish even with prison, could not be killed. 7 bullets hit her, in the head and chest. The body was trembling. Then Kudryavtsev (an extraordinary warrant officer, a very zealous one, who had recently become a “communist”) took her by the throat, tore her blouse and began to twist and knead her neck cartilage" Creepy.....
This is also why, since ancient times, attempts have been made to improve executions, to make them more reliable and error-free.

Execution of Michel Ney

The same British, who flooded India with blood after the sepoy uprising, came up with (or rather, even borrowed) a terrible, skilled execution, which was called the “devil’s wind.” If you remember, the Soviet film “Captain Nemo” shows exactly this method. The convicts were brought into a line of cannons, tied with their backs to the muzzle of the gun, and then, on a single command, they fired a cannonball or simply a powder charge. Not only is this terrible execution was 100% effective, it also greatly frightened the Indians, since the body was torn to pieces, and parts of such torn bodies were buried together, regardless of caste.

"Devil's Wind"

The advent of automatic firearms made executions even easier. Now you don't need to choose a military unit, just one person is enough to create a fairly lethal density of fire. Well, of course there are some perversions here. Especially in Asia. In Thailand, until 2001, people were shot in the back from a heavy machine gun, and in the DPRK there was recently a rumor about shooting from a mortar (I can’t even imagine what that was like). Well, the Chinese, of course. They shoot at point-blank range in the back of the head, but.....with a burst from a machine gun. And the bill for the bullets used to be sent to relatives. East is a delicate matter....
The topic of execution in our country is worthy of special mention. For the first time, official execution was introduced into use in 1715 by Pyotr Alekseevich in his “Military Article.” Execution was provided for in 7 cases:
blasphemy, malicious relapse, unauthorized drawing of a sword for the purpose of threat in the presence of a commander, negligence of an officer while on guard duty, unauthorized leaving of a guard or sleeping at a post, attack on a guard or sentry, disobedience of an order by a soldier, repeated sale of a uniform or weapon by a soldier. Some cases are very specific - but what happened, happened.

Military article of Peter I

Elizaveta Petrovna actually imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, which formally remained in effect throughout her reign. Subsequent emperors, until the mid-19th century, more or less lived within the framework of this moratorium (with the exception of punishments for rebels and crimes against the state system). The term death penalty appeared again in the Laws Russian Empire with the approval of the “Code on Criminal and Correctional Punishments” of 1845.
Two types of executions were introduced - hanging (which was used most often) and shooting. By the way, from 1845 to 1907, about 40 people were shot throughout the empire. F.M. was almost shot for participating in the “Petrashevites” circle. Dostoevsky.

The failed execution of the Petrashevites

But everything changed after the first revolution of 1906....the number of executions increased significantly..
ABOUT bloodbath I don’t want to talk about post-revolutionary terror
But it’s worth mentioning about the “great terror” of the late 30s... 681,692 death sentences were handed down and executed. Just think about these terrible numbers!
Moreover, sentences were carried out most often by single executioners, who shot people themselves. Some names are known. For example, Vasily Blokhin, who carried out executions, according to various sources, from 11 to 15 thousand people. Including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Ion Yakir, Uborevich, Nikolai Yezhov, Frinovsky, Mikhail Koltsov, Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold.

NKVD executioners

Or the same Peter Maggo, who has more than 10,000 executions.
After the war, execution became the only type of execution in the Soviet Union. The number of articles for which the “tower” was awarded constantly varied. At the end of the 80s, the Criminal Code provided for capital punishment as a possible sanction for 23 offenses, including economic offenses. Such as a bribe or speculation in especially large cases with aggravating consequences. It is interesting that in the first three and a half years of perestroika (1985-1988) more than 1 thousand people were shot in the USSR. In total, for the period 1962-1989. The judicial authorities of the USSR imposed 24,422 death sentences, of which 2,355 were pardoned.

Nagan system revolver

How exactly the supreme penalty was carried out is a great mystery. Now there are many who write and talk about this, but there are many contradictions. Personally, I heard 5 different versions, from “direct seers”. Maybe they saw it, but somehow there’s not a lot of trust. One told, for example, about how he saw the executioner personally shoot someone in the back of the head with a Nagan in a rubber room. In the 80s..... The other one is from Mauser. You understand that faith is not enough.
But in general, the scheme, as far as I understand, was as follows: a person was taken into a narrow corridor and ordered to go forward; either a machine gun or a carbine was mounted in the wall, which could be adjusted according to the height of the convict. A couple of steps and the performer pulled the trigger - the bullet went straight to the back of the head - instant death.
It remains only to add that while in last time We were shot in 1996. Since then there has been a moratorium.
Execution is officially used in the following countries:
Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Uganda, Ethiopia, China, North Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Belarus. And also in Oklahoma.
To be continued...
Have a nice day!

Is it true that executioners from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were sent on business trips to other union republics, where for years there were no people willing to carry out the “tower”? Is it true that in the Baltic states no one was executed at all, and all those sentenced to capital punishment were taken to Minsk to be shot? Is it true that the executioners were paid substantial bonuses for each person executed? And is it true that it was not customary to shoot women in the Soviet Union? During the post-Soviet period, so many common myths were created around the “tower” that it is hardly possible to figure out what is true in them and what is speculation without painstaking work in the archives, which can take several decades. There is no complete clarity either with the pre-war executions or with the post-war ones. But the worst situation is with the data on how death sentences were carried out in the 60–80s.

As a rule, convicts were executed in pre-trial detention centers. Each union republic had at least one such special-purpose pre-trial detention center. There were two of them in Ukraine, three in Azerbaijan, and four in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Today, death sentences are carried out only in one single Soviet-era pre-trial detention center - in the Pishchalovsky central prison in Minsk, also known as “Volodarka”. This is a unique place, the only one in Europe. About 10 people a year are executed there. But if it is relatively easy to count the execution detention centers in the Soviet republics, even the most trained historian can hardly say with confidence how many such specialized detention centers there were in the RSFSR. For example, until recently it was believed that in Leningrad in the 60-80s, convicts were not executed at all - there was nowhere. But it turned out that this was not the case. Not long ago, documentary evidence was discovered in the archives that 15-year-old teenager Arkady Neyland, sentenced to capital punishment, was shot in the summer of 1964 in the Northern capital, and not in Moscow or Minsk, as previously thought. Therefore, a “prepared” pre-trial detention center was found after all. And Neyland was hardly the only one who was shot there.

There are other common myths about the “tower”. For example, it is generally accepted that since the late 50s the Baltics did not have their own execution squads at all, so all those sentenced to capital punishment from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were transported to Minsk for execution. This is not entirely true: death sentences were also carried out in the Baltic states. But the performers were actually invited from outside. Mainly from Azerbaijan. Still, three firing squads for one small republic is too much. Convicts were executed mainly in the Bailov prison in Baku, and the shoulder craftsmen from Nakhichevan were often unemployed. Their salaries were still “dripping” - the members of the firing squad received approximately 200 rubles a month, but at the same time no bonuses for “execution”, nor quarterly. And this was a lot of money - the quarterly amount was approximately 150-170 rubles, and “for performance” they paid one hundred members of the brigade and 150 directly to the performer. So we went on business trips to earn extra money. More often - to Latvia and Lithuania, less often - to Georgia, Moldova and Estonia.

Another common myth is that in the last decades of the Union’s existence, women were not sentenced to death. They sentenced. In open sources you can find information about three such executions. In 1979, collaborator Antonina Makarova was shot, in 1983, plunderer of socialist property Berta Borodkina, and in 1987, poisoner Tamara Ivanyutina. And this is against the backdrop of 24,422 death sentences handed down between 1962 and 1989! So, only men were shot? Hardly. In particular, the verdicts of currency traders Oksana Sobinova and Svetlana Pinsker (Leningrad), Tatyana Vnuchkina (Moscow), Yulia Grabovetskaya (Kiev), handed down in the mid-60s, are still shrouded in secrecy.

They were sentenced to the “tower”, but executed or still pardoned, it’s hard to say. Their names are not among the 2,355 pardoned. This means that most likely they were shot after all.

The third myth is that people became executioners, so to speak, at the call of their hearts. In the Soviet Union, executioners were appointed - and that’s all. No volunteers. You never know what’s on their minds – what if they’re perverts? Even an ordinary OBKhSS employee could be appointed as an executioner. Among law enforcement officers, as a rule, those who were dissatisfied with their salaries and who urgently needed to improve their living conditions were selected. They offered me a job. They invited me for an interview. If the subject approached, he was processed. It must be said that Soviet personnel officers worked excellently: from 1960 to 1990 there was not a single case in which an executioner resigned of his own free will. And there was certainly not a single case of suicide among the execution staff - the Soviet executioners had strong nerves. “Yes, I was the one who was appointed,” recalled the former head of the institution UA-38/1 UITU of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan SSR, Khalid Yunusov, who was responsible for carrying out more than three dozen death sentences. – I caught bribe-takers six years ago. I’m tired of it, I’ve only made enemies for myself.”

Meanwhile, the head of the pre-trial detention center was assembling his firing squad. In addition to the doctor and the executioner, it included an employee of the prosecutor's office and a representative of the operational information center of the Internal Affairs Directorate. These five gathered in a specially designated room. First, the prosecutor's office employee got acquainted with the personal file of the convicted person. Then the so-called supervisory inspectors, two or three people, brought the convict into the room in handcuffs. In films and books, there is usually a passage in which the death row inmate is told that all his requests for clemency have been rejected. In fact, the person departing on his last journey was never informed about this. They asked what his name was, where he was born, what article he was under. They offered to sign several protocols. Then they reported that they would need to draw up another petition for pardon - in the next room where the deputies were sitting, and the papers would need to be signed in front of them. The trick, as a rule, worked flawlessly: those sentenced to death cheerfully walked towards the deputies.

And there were no deputies outside the door of the next cell - the performer was standing there. As soon as the condemned man entered the room, a shot followed in the back of the head. More precisely, “to the left occipital part of the head in the area of the left ear,” as required by the instructions. The suicide bomber fell and a control shot was fired. The dead man's head was wrapped in a rag and the blood was washed off - there was a specially equipped blood drain in the room. The doctor came in and pronounced death. It is noteworthy that the executioner never shot the victim with a pistol - only with a small-caliber rifle. They say that they shot from Makarov and TT guns exclusively in Azerbaijan, but the destructive power of the weapon was such that at close range the convicts’ heads were literally blown off. And then it was decided to shoot the convicts using revolvers from the Civil War - they had a more gentle fight. By the way, only in Azerbaijan were those sentenced to execution tightly tied up before the procedure, and only in this republic was it customary to announce to the condemned that all their requests for clemency had been rejected. Why this is so is unknown. The binding of the victims affected them so strongly that every fourth died of a broken heart.

It is also noteworthy that the prosecutor’s office never signed documents on the execution of the sentence before the execution (as prescribed by the instructions) - only after. They said it was a bad omen, worse than ever. Next, the deceased was placed in a pre-prepared coffin and taken to the cemetery, to a special plot, where they were buried under nameless tablets. No names, no surnames - just a serial number. The firing squad was given a certificate, and that day all four of its members received time off.