The terrible true life story of Vasily Blokhin: And his Heroic before the incredible execution happen to him.

The terrible true life story of Vasily Blokhin: And his Heroic before the incredible execution happen to him.




Born in 1895 to peasants in the countryside near the city of Vladimir, he went to work as a shepherd at the age of ten before moving to Moscow to become a bricklayer.

By June 1915, the Russian Empire was deeply entangled in World War I. Blokhin joined the Imperial Russian Army and likely saw combat in Belarus. Eventually, he rose to a senior noncommissioned officer rank.

In May 1921, Blokhin joined the Communist Party, he was immediately appointed to the ranks of the already-feared “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission,” better known as the Cheka — the first of many iterations of the secret police in the Soviet Union.

Blokhin took an active part in the Cheka mission, quickly gaining the attention of his superiors. He steadily climbed the ranks and in 1926 was appointed “Commissioner of the Special Department of the OGPU” — in other words, chief executioner.

Blokhin was tasked with carrying out and supervising executions in the Lubyanka building in Moscow, which held prisoners on its top floor with Cheka offices below.

The preferred method of execution at the Lubyanka was crude. The condemned was ordered to kneel. Then, the executioner fired a bullet into the back of their skull.

The body was then moved to a crematorium of Blokhin’s own design, inaugurated in October 1927 to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution’s tenth anniversary.

During Stalin’s Great Purge which took place between 1936 and 1938, some 750,000 people were executed as dissenters. Blokhin personally shot the victims of the great show trials, as well as several of his fellow executioners when they fell under suspicion.

Blokhin’s abilities won him the personal favor of Stalin. When bureaucrats accused Blokhin of conspiring against the state in 1939, Stalin refused to sign a warrant for his execution, calling the “black work” Blokhin did invaluable.

The capture of eastern Poland delivered thousands of Polish soldiers, officers, officials, and intellectuals to the Red Army — all of whom were distrusted by Lavrentiy Beria, the new head of the NKVD.

Beria had come to power after toppling his predecessor Nikolai Yezhov, who may have been personally shot by Vasily Blokhin. To Beria, every Polish officer was a potential threat to the Soviets, and the solution he proposed to Stalin was as brutal as it was simple: execute every officer who couldn’t be convinced to join them. Stalin quickly green-lit the bloody plan.

In the spring of 1940, over 22,000 soldiers, writers, bureaucrats, police officers, and politicians were shipped to sites in western Russia, including the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk, for execution.

In charge of the organisation, Blokhin and two colleagues traveled to the outskirts of the town of Ostashkov to take part, outfitting a soundproof hut and setting themselves a quota of 300 executions a night.

Victims would first be taken to an antechamber of the hut that had been painted red and dubbed “the Lenin room” for identification. Then, they were handcuffed and taken to the execution room where Blokhin was waiting with his gun. On the very first night of the massacre, Blokhin and his colleagues shot 343 victims, a grisly accomplishment for three men working only with pistols.

Years later, ex-NKVD officer Dmitry Tokarev described how Blokhin, who’d brought a suitcase of reliable German Walther PP pistols to carry out his task instead of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 which he found unreliable. He dressed in a butcher’s leather apron with arm-length gloves, a long leather coat, and a leather cap to protect his uniform from bloodstains.

“An experienced executioner shoots in the neck, holding the barrel obliquely upwards,” Blokhin stated matter-of-factly. “Then there is a chance that the bullet will come out through the eye or mouth. If you kill 250 people a day, then cleaning the premises becomes a serious problem.”

At the end of 28 days, all but a few hundred of the captives had been shot and buried in mass graves. Blokhin himself claimed to have personally shot as many as 7,000. As a reward, he received a small raise, a gramophone, and the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest military awards in the USSR.

Even among the notoriously violent NKVD members of Stalin’s day, Blokhin stands out, with as many as 20,000 deaths credited to him. Over the course of a quarter of a century, he’d personally shot notable army generals, artists, and old revolutionaries.

The deaths of Stalin and Beria in 1953 signaled Blokhin’s downfall. Stripped of his rank and honors, he sank into alcoholism before dying by suicide in 1955.

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