from 1917 to 1921, while two were members before the revolution. Among those who joined after the revolution, one was a former SR, one an anarchist, and one was a member of Poalei Zion.170
Let us look at some of the survey data regarding those Jews who joined the Cheka during the Civil War, and went on to make a career for themselves in the organization.171 Among those of the “older generation” were Lev Belskii (Abram Levin), Iakov Genkin, and Samuil Gilman. Belskii was the son of a worker who was employed at a shipping office. He had successfully passed correspondence exams that qualified him as a private tutor and a pharmacist's apprentice. He worked as a pharmacist, joined the army in 1911, and went to the front in July 1914. He was a member of the Bund from 1905 to 1907, and joined the Bolsheviks in July 1917. In April 1918, at the age of 29, he was appointed the chair of the Simbirsk gubernia Cheka, and he continued to ascend the ranks of the organization. Genkin was the son of a teacher at a Jewish school who likewise had passed his tutor's exam. Before the revolution he worked as a mechanic and tinsmith. He completed four years at the local city school, and served in the army from 1911 to 1920. In March 1919, he joined the Bolshevik party. In 1921, at the age of 31, he was promoted from the ranks to the position of Cheka inspector of his division.
Most of those working for the Cheka were much younger, 20 years of age on average. The youngest was Mark Rogol, who had been born in Odessa to the family of a glass-blower. From the age of 13 he worked as an unskilled laborer at a tobacco factory, he joined the Bolsheviks by 15 (at the age of 17 he was expelled for drunkenness, but was later readmitted), and became an agitator for the Odessa Gubkom. Within a month (March 1920) he had joined the local Cheka, and by July was the deputy of the head of the Kremenchug Cheka. By September 1920 he was the head of Information and Intelligence for the Politburo of the Cheka of the Aleksandria uezd.
Mikhail Andreev (Sheinkman) was the son of a porter, had received a primary education, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1919. He became the deputy of the Mozyr uezd Cheka in July 1920, at the age of only 17. By December 1920 he was an investigator for the Belorussian Cheka. Isai Babich, the son of a cobbler who had completed two years at a religious school, joined the Bolsheviks in 1920 and became the assistant to the Special Plenipotentiary of the Nikolaev Cheka the same year, at the age of 18. He had transferred to the Cheka from his position as a typesetter for the political division of the Navy on the Southwest front. Abram Sapir (b. 1900) was the son of a train dispatcher and had never gone to school. His qualifications consisted of having worked at a train station as an unskilled laborer. He joined the Cheka in March 1919 as an investigator specializing in transportation matters in the Baranovichi Cheka. He joined the Bolsheviks in August 1919, and from March 1920 worked as the secretary of the Cheka section overseeing shipping in Odessa.
Mikhail Volkov (Vainer), the son of a tailor of unknown education, had worked as a clerk for a mine shopkeeper when he was a boy. He joined the Red Guard in October 1917, and joined the Bolsheviks in January 1918. He began working for the Cheka in May 1918 at the age of 18. He worked as an instructor in the Operations Section of the Kursk Cheka until June 1919, and then served in a number of Cheka organizations in the Red Army, heading the Cheka of the Thirty-second Rifle Division from 1919 to 1920, and the Eighteenth Cavalry Division in 1920.
Iakov Veinshtok, the son of a petty merchant, had finished four years at a local school (during the party purges of 1921, he was expelled for being part of the intelligentsia—apparently four years of schooling was too much for the party). Before joining the Bolsheviks in July 1919, he worked as a clerk in a trade office. He joined the Red Army in December 1919, and by the following May had joined the Cheka, serving in a number of leadership positions in a variety of military units. By September 1920 he was head of the Cheka organization attached to the Forty-first Rifle Division.
Some of the Jewish Chekists were more educated. Semen Gendin, the son of a doctor, apparently had managed to complete his courses at a gimnazium. He joined the Red Army in 1918 at the age of 16, and by 1921 was working as an investigator for the Moscow Cheka. Mark Gai (Shtokliand), the son of a hatter, finished the Kiev Art Academy and two years at the Law Faculty of Kiev University. He joined the ranks of the Red Army in October 1918, and engaged in political and managerial work with the military. He joined the Bolsheviks in March 1919, and the Cheka by May 1920. At just under 22 years of age, he was serving as the head of the Cheka Political Section attached to the Fifty-ninth Division.
The infamous brothers Berman were born to the proprietor of a brick factory in the Transbaikal oblast. Fortunately for them, their father's factory had failed early on, thus giving them a less suspicious social background. The elder, Mattvei, completed trade school, joined the army as a common soldier, graduated from the military academy in Irkutsk, and was promoted to the rank ofpraporshchik (ensign). In August of 1920 he became the chair of the Cheka in the Glazov uezd. Throughout the Civil War he served in a number of positions in the Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Verkhneudinsk, Eniseisk, and Semipalatinsk Chekas. The peak of his career saw him overseeing a gulag and the construction of the Moscow Canal, which was built mostly with prison labor. He eventually became the deputy to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, and served briefly as the People's Commissar of Communication before his arrest and execution in 1939.
Mattvei's younger brother, Boris, completed four years of schooling, and worked in a shop as a boy. He served in the Red Guard, and was able to hide from the Whites thanks to a false passport. He was later mobilized by White forces and worked as a security guard for the Chinese Eastern Railway. He joined the Irkutsk Cheka in February 1921, still under the age of 20. Later, Boris would serve as the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Belorussian SSR. He was shot two weeks before his older brother.
Semen Mirkin's story is perhaps the most bizarre of all. The son of a cobbler, he completed two years at a Jewish school before going to work as a tailor's apprentice (and later as a tailor) in numerous villages in the Pale of Settlement. In June 1915 he was in Orel, probably as a refugee. Despite being only 16 years old, he somehow ended up in the army (either freely or by conscription). On leaving the army in March 1918, he returned to his tailoring pursuits, but by July of the same year he once again found himself in the army. He continued his profession for the Red Army Cavalry School in Orel, and then as a tailor for the Ninth Infantry Division. By November 1919 he had joined the Bolsheviks, and he studied at a Party school in Rostov from April to December 1920. By January 1921, he was weaving a different kind of web as a military investigator for the Revolutionary Tribunal attached to the Thirty-first Division. He joined the Cheka in June of 1921, and was put in charge of combating banditry in the Twenty-second Infantry Division. This graduate of a heder and a Bolshevik school eventually became the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Northern Ossetian ASSR. In 1939 the former tailor was arrested, and he was executed in January of 1940.
It is not too difficult to imagine the kind of “investigations” carried out by these former tailors and typesetters, most of whom had only finished the fourth grade. Praskovia Semenovna Ivanovskaia (the daughter-i n-l aw of V. G. Korolenko and an old revolutionary) once rebuked a young female Cheka investigator, a seamstress by the name of “Comrade Rosa,” for terrorizing her charges by threatening to shoot them. Rosa replied to the charge “with heartfelt simplicity”: “But what am I to do if they don't confess?”172 In Kharkov, a former hairdresser by the name of Miroshnichenko and the 18-year-old Iesel Mankin constantly threatened their victims with death. On one occasion, Mankin leveled a Browning at the accused and said, “Your life depends on the correct answer.”173 In all likelihood, there were much worse instances of abuse as well.
In the 1920s the number of Jews serving in the OGPU (the predecessor of the NKVD) increased. They also continued to serve in the upper levels of the OGPU in approximately the same proportion as they had during the Civil War. This increase was due at least in part to the large number of Jews who moved to major cities. Among the Jewish population it was easier to find workers with an education, knowledge of foreign languages and other skills in demand. The number of Jews in the OGPU-NKVD continued to grow in the first half of the 1930s as well, reaching a peak of 39 percent
