Andrei Sverdlov, a short biography, April 1969 (7.9)

No 7 : 30 April 1969

Based on the samizdat document:

“The unusual fate of the family members and relations of Yakov M. Sverdlov”.

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Andrei Yakovlevich SVERDLOV was the only son of Lenin’s comrade Yakov M. Sverdlov [1]. When quite young, no more than twenty years old, he began to work for the NKVD (1934-1946, forerunner of KGB). His pathological cruelty and coarseness led to Sverdlov’s rapid promotion.

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Andrei Sverdlov (1911-1969)

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To start with he dealt mainly with the children of Communist Party and government officials. Sverdlov had been at school with them and had known them well since childhood.

When Hannah Ganetskaya [2], after refusing to give evidence, saw him come into the investigator’s room, she rushed towards him. “Adik!” she exclaimed. Sverdlov let out some coarse swearwords in response. In Moscow there live at least seven people whom Andrei Sverdlov personally interrogated, using torture and brutality.

He took part also in the proceedings against Elizaveta Drabkina, who from 1918-1919 was secretary to his father, Yakov Sverdlov.

At his father’s request she took Andrei, and his sister Vera, away from the flat a few hours before his death. Andrei Sverdlov knew quite well that Drabkina had not committed the crimes with which she was charged: nevertheless he forced “confessions” and “recantations” out of her.

After a short time Andrei Sverdlov was himself arrested.

This arrest was only for show, however. The NKVD accounts department continued paying his wages, and in prison he played the role of informer, taking advantage of the confidence which his name inspired. When the prisoners discovered what he was doing, he once more donned an NKVD uniform.

After the 1940 execution of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD until 1938, Andrei Sverdlov became prominent in the entourage of his successor Lavrenty Beria.

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Following Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953, Sverdlov took up “research work” at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. In 1956 after the 20th Party Congress he lived through a year of hardship in the Kremlin hospital. Then he returned to the Institute, to the department of CPSU history.

Andrei Sverdlov was one of the first to raise a hue and cry over the 1967 discussion at the Institute of 22 June 1941, a book by Alexander Nekrich [3]. The very same day he wrote a report about this discussion’s organizers and participants, and sent it to the CPSU Central Committee’s Party Control Committee and to the Institute’s Party committee, slanderously asserting that “anti-Soviet” speeches had occurred during the discussion.

Andrei Sverdlov’s address [4] is:

Moscow, 2 Serafimovich St, apartment 319

(the same Government House “on the Embankment”, from which so many victims were taken in the 1930s).

His telephone numbers are: 231-94-97 (home), 181-23-25 (work).

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NOTES

  1. During his last two years, Yakov Sverdlov (1885-1919) was formal head of Soviet Russia’s government, the Central Executive Committee.

    Of Jewish origins, he has long been blamed in anti-Semitic circles for signing the telegramme instructing local Party officials in the Urals to kill the Tsar, which they did in July 1918. In fact, it was Lenin and other senior Bolsheviks who took the largely undocumented decision to eliminate Nicholas II and his family.

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    From 1924 to 1991 the fourth largest city in the USSR, Yekaterinburg in the Urals (1 million plus inhabitants; 1970), was known as Sverdlovsk.

    In 1978 a statue of Sverdlov was erected in Moscow in the square bearing his name, opposite the Bolshoi Theatre. For a long while it stood (or lay) with Dzerzhinsky and other deposed statues in the “Dinosaurs’ Park” next to the Artist Union’s gallery on the south circuit of Moscow’s Garden Ring, not far from the Crimean Bridge (Krymskij most).
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  2. Hannah Ganetskaya was the daughter of Yakov Ganetsky, director of the Museum of the Revolution. He was purged and shot in the late 1930s.

    Elisaveta Drabkina’s “The Winter Mountain Pass” (Novy Mir No. 10, 1968) was attacked in Sovetskaya Rossiya on 13 July 1969.
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  3. A long transcript of the discussion of Nekrich’s essay appeared in English in Survey (No. 63, 1967) and in Vladimir Petrov’s study, Soviet historians and the German invasion (1968).
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  4. Seven months after this article appeared in the Chronicle Andrei Sverdlov was dead.

    An obituary praising his work in the NKVD and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism appeared in Sovetskaya Rossiya.
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