Vyacheslav Menzhinsky

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky Вячесла́в Менжи́нский
Chairman of the OGPU
In office 30 July 1926 – 10 May 1934
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Felix Dzerzhinsky
Succeeded by	Genrikh Yagoda
People's Commissar for Finance of the RSFSR
In office 30 October 1917 – 21 March 1918
Premier	Vladimir Lenin
Preceded by	Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov
Succeeded by	Isidore Gukovsky
Personal details
Born	(1874-08-19)August 19, 1874 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died	10 May 1934(1934-05-10) (aged 59) Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Political party	All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)

Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (Russian: Вячесла́в Рудо́льфович Менжи́нский, Polish: Wiaczesław Mężyński; 19 August 1874 - May 10, 1934) was a Polish-Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Party official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934. Fluent in over ten languages (including Korean, Chinese, Turkish, and Persian, the last one learned especially in order to read works by Omar Khayyám), Menzhinsky was the second and last member of the Polish nobility among the Lubyanka's chiefs.

Early life

Wiaczesław Mężyński, a hereditary dvoryanin, was born into a Polish family of teachers. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg University in 1898.

Political activism

File:Menzhinsky Vyacheslav R.jpg

Menzhinsky as a young revolutionary.

He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1902. In 1905 he became a member of the military organization of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. In 1906 Mężyński was arrested, but was able to escape from Russia. He lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, USA, working in foreign branches of the RSDLP. He joined the editorial board of Vpered, aligning himself with Grigory Aleksinsky and Mikhail Pokrovsky, rejecting the concept of proletarian culture developed by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky. After the February Revolution of 1917, Mężyński returned to Russia in the summer of that year.

Later life and death

According to G. von Schantz, Menzhinsky "personally conducted the wrecking of the Russian banks, a maneuver that deprived all opponents of Bolshevikism of their financial means of warfare."

"From 1919 he was a member of the Presidium of Cheka, 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 the secret Trust and Sindikat-2 counterintelligence operations, in the course of which leaders of large anti-Soviet centers abroad, 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 had already begun to form, coinciding with several important purges in 1930-1931. Trotsky, who had 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 since the late twenties, which rendered him incapable of physical exertion. He conducted the affairs of the OGPU while lying upon a couch in his office at the Lubyanka, but rarely interfered in the day-to-day operation of the GPU. Stalin tended to deal with his first deputy Genrikh Yagoda, who essentially took over as head of the organization in all but name since the late twenties.

Menzhinsky died of natural causes in 1934. When his successor, Genrikh Yagoda, made his public confession under duress at the Moscow Trial of the Twenty One in 1938, Yagoda stated that he had poisoned Menzhinsky.

References

• Great Soviet Encyclopedia
• Template:Ru icon A Pince-nez Among Leather Jackets, a biography article at the FSB website
• The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, War Information Series No. 20, October 18, p. 9.