In fact, this woman's name was Antonina Makarovna Parfenova. She was born in 1921 in the village of Malaya Volkovka near Smolensk, where she went to school. The teacher incorrectly wrote down the name of the girl in the journal, who was embarrassed to give her name, and classmates shouted: “Yes, she is Makarova,” meaning that Antonina is Makar’s daughter. So Tonya Parfenova became Makarova. She graduated from high school and went to Moscow to go to college. But the war began. Tonya Makarova volunteered for the front.
But the nineteen-year-old nurse Makarova practically did not have time to serve her homeland: she ended up in the infamous Vyazemsky operation - the battle near Moscow, in which Soviet army suffered a crushing defeat. Of the entire unit, only Tonya and a soldier named Nikolai Fedchuk managed to survive and escape from captivity. For several months they wandered through the forests, trying to get to Fedchuk's native village. Tonya had to become a soldier's "camping wife", otherwise she would not have survived. However, as soon as Fedchuk got home, it turned out that he had a legal wife and lived here. Tonya went on alone and went to the village of Lokot, occupied by the German invaders. She decided to stay with the invaders: maybe she had no other choice, or maybe she was so tired of wandering through the forests that the ability to eat normally and sleep under the roof became a decisive argument.
Now Tonya had to be a "camping wife" for many different men. In fact, Tonya was simply constantly raped, in return providing her with food and a roof over her head. But this did not last long. One day, the soldiers got the girl drunk, and then, drunk, they put her to the Maxim machine gun and ordered to shoot at the prisoners. Tonya, who before the front managed to take not only courses for nurses, but also for machine gunners, began to shoot. In front of her were not only men, but also women, old people, children, and drunken Tonya did not miss. From that day on, she became Tonka the machine-gunner, an executioner with an official salary of 30 marks.
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Historians say that Anka the machine-gunner was Tonya's childhood idol, and Makarova, having become an executioner, fulfilled her childhood dream: it doesn’t matter that Anka shot enemies, and Tonya shot partisans, and at the same time women, children and the elderly. But it is quite possible that Makarova, who received an official position, salary and her own bed, simply ceased to be the object of sexual violence. In any case, she did not refuse the new “work”.
According to official figures, Tonka the machine-gunner shot more than 1,500 people, but only 168 names were restored. As an encouragement, Makarova was allowed to take the belongings of the dead, which, however, had to be washed off the blood and sewn up on them holes from bullets. Antonina shot the condemned with a machine gun, and then had to finish off the survivors with pistol shots. However, several children managed to survive: they were too small in stature, and machine-gun bullets passed over their heads, and for some reason Makarova did not fire control shots. The surviving children were taken out of the village along with the corpses, and partisans rescued them at the burial sites. So rumors about Tonka the machine gunner as a cruel and bloodthirsty killer and traitor spread throughout the district. The partisans put a reward on her head, but they failed to get to Makarova. Until 1943, Antonina continued to shoot people.
And then Makarova was lucky: the Soviet army reached the Bryansk region, and Antonina would undoubtedly have died if she had not contracted syphilis from one of her lovers. The Germans sent her to the rear, where she ended up in a hospital under the guise of a Soviet nurse. Somehow, Antonina managed to get fake documents, and, having recovered, she got a job as a nurse in the hospital. There, in 1945, a wounded soldier Viktor Ginzburg fell in love with her. The young people got married, and Tonka the machine-gunner disappeared forever. Instead, a military nurse, Antonina Ginzburg, appeared.
After the end of the war, Antonina and Viktor became an exemplary Soviet family: they moved to Belarus, to the city of Lepel, worked at a garment factory, raised two daughters and even came to schools as honored front-line soldiers to tell children about the war.
Meanwhile, the KGB continued to search for Tonka the machine-gunner: the search continued for three decades, but the trace of the executioner's woman was lost. So far, one of Antonina's relatives has not applied for permission to travel abroad. For some reason, Antonina Makarova (Ginzburg) was listed as the sister of citizen Parfenov in the list of relatives. Investigators began to collect evidence and went on the trail of Tonka the machine gunner. Several surviving witnesses identified her, and Antonina was arrested on her way home from work.
They say that during the trial, Makarova remained calm: she believed that, over the years, she would not be given a very harsh sentence. Meanwhile, her husband and daughters tried to get her released: the authorities did not say why Makarova was arrested. As soon as the family knew what exactly their wife and mother would be tried for, they stopped trying to appeal the arrest and left Lepel.
Antonina Makarova was sentenced to death on November 20, 1978. She immediately filed several petitions for clemency, but they were all rejected. On August 11, 1979, Tonka the machine-gunner was shot.
Berta Borodkina
Berta Naumovna Borodkina, aka Iron Bella, was neither a ruthless killer nor an executioner. She was sentenced to capital punishment for the systematic theft of socialist property on an especially large scale.
Berta Borodkina was born in 1927. The girl did not like her own name, and she preferred to call herself Bella. She began her future dizzying career for a woman in the USSR as a barmaid and waitress in a Gelendzhik canteen. Soon the girl with a tough character was transferred to the post of director of the dining room. Borodkina coped with her duties so well that she became an honored worker of trade and catering of the RSFSR, and also headed the trust of restaurants and canteens in Gelendzhik.
In fact, this meant that in Iron Bella's restaurants, party and state officials received perfect service - not at their own expense, but at the expense of visitors to inexpensive cafes and canteens: underfilling, underweight, using decommissioned products and banal cheating allowed Bella to release dizzying sums. She spent them on bribes and serving the ranks of the highest rank.
The scale of these acts allows us to call the Gelendzhik restaurant trust a real mafia: every bartender, waiter and director of a cafe or canteen had to give Borodkina a certain amount every month, otherwise the employees were simply fired. At the same time, connections with officials for a long time allowed Berta Borodkina to feel completely unpunished - no sudden checks and audits, no attempts to catch the head of the restaurant trust in theft. At that moment, Borodkin began to be called Iron Bella.
But in 1982, Berta Borodkina was arrested on the anonymous application of a certain citizen who reported that pornographic films were shown to selected visitors in one of Borodkina's restaurants. This information, apparently, was not confirmed, but the investigation found out that over the years of managing the trust, Borodkina stole more than a million rubles from the state - a completely incomprehensible amount at that time. During a search in Borodkina's house, they found furs, jewelry and huge amounts of money hidden in the most unexpected places: in radiators, in rolled up cans, and even in a pile of bricks near the house.
Borodkin was sentenced to death in the same 1982. Berta's sister said that in prison the defendant was tortured with the use of psychotropic drugs. So Iron Bella broke down and began to confess. In August 1983, Berta Borodkina was shot.
Tamara Ivanyutina
Tamara Ivanyutina, nee Maslenko, was born in 1941 in Kyiv, in a large family. From early childhood, parents inspired Tamara and her five brothers and sisters that the most important thing in life is material security. AT Soviet years The spheres of trade and public catering were considered the most "bread" places, and at first Tamara chose trade for herself. But she fell for speculation and got a criminal record. It was almost impossible for a woman with a criminal record to get a job, so Ivanyutina got herself a fake work book and in 1986 got a job as a dishwasher in school number 16 in the Minsk district of Kyiv. Later, she told the investigation that she needed this job to provide livestock (chickens and pigs) with free food waste. But it turned out that Ivanyutina did not come to school for this at all.
On March 17 and 18, 1987, several students and school staff were hospitalized with signs of serious food poisoning. In the next few hours, two children and two adults died, another 9 people were in intensive care in serious condition. The version of an intestinal infection, which the doctors suspected, was ruled out: the victims began to lose their hair. A criminal case was initiated.
The investigation interviewed the victims, the survivors, and it turned out that they all dined the day before in the school cafeteria and ate buckwheat porridge with liver. A few hours later, everyone felt a rapidly developing malaise. An inspection was carried out at the school, it turned out that the nurse responsible for the quality of food in the canteen died 2 weeks ago, according to the official conclusion - from a cardiovascular disease. The circumstances of this death aroused suspicion in the investigation, and it was decided to exhume the body. The examination found that the nurse died from thallium poisoning. It is a highly toxic heavy metal, the poisoning of which causes damage nervous system and internal organs, as well as total alopecia (complete hair loss). The investigation immediately organized a search of all employees of the school cafeteria and found "a small but very heavy jar" in Tamara Ivanyutina's house. The laboratory found that the jar contained "Clerici liquid" - a highly toxic solution based on thallium. This solution is used in some branches of geology, and the school dishwasher could not be needed in any way.
Ivanyutina was arrested, and she wrote a confession: according to her, she wanted to “punish” sixth graders who allegedly refused to place tables and chairs in the dining room. But Ivanyutina later stated that she confessed to the murders under pressure from the investigation, and refused to give further testimony.
Meanwhile, investigators found out that the poisoning of children and school staff was not the first murder on Tamara Ivanyutina's account. Moreover, it turned out that both Tamara Ivanyutina herself and her family members (sister and parents) had been using thallium for poisoning for 11 years since 1976. Moreover, both for selfish purposes, and in relation to people who, for some reason, simply did not like family members. They bought the highly toxic Clerici liquid from a friend: the woman worked at the Geological Institute and was sure that she was selling thallium to her friends for rat-baiting. Over all these years, she passed a poisonous substance to the Maslenko family at least 9 times. And they used it every time.
First, Tamara Ivanyutina poisoned her first husband in order to inherit the apartment. After that, she remarried, but relations with her father-in-law and mother-in-law did not work out, as a result, they died with an interval of 2 days. Ivanyutina also poisoned her husband himself, but with small portions of poison: the man began to get sick, and the killer hoped to soon become a widow and inherit a house and land plot. In addition, the episode of poisoning at school, it turns out, was not the first: earlier, Ivanyutina poisoned the school party organizer Ekaterina Shcherban (the woman died), a chemistry teacher (survived) and two children - students of the first and fifth grades. The children annoyed Ivanyutina by asking her for the remains of cutlets for their pets.
At the same time, Tamara's sister Nina Matsibora poisoned her husband in order to take possession of his apartment, and the women's parents, the Maslenkos, poisoned a neighbor in a communal apartment and a relative who reprimanded them. The father of Tamara and Nina also poisoned his relative from Tula, having come to visit her. Family members also poisoned neighbors' pets.
Already under investigation, in the pre-trial detention center, Tamara Ivanyutina explained her life principles to her cellmates as follows: “To achieve what you want, you need not write complaints, but be friends with everyone, treat them. But it is especially harmful to add poison to food.
The court proved 40 episodes of poisoning committed by members of this family, of which 13 were fatal. When the verdict was announced, Tamara Ivanyutina refused to plead guilty and apologize to the relatives of the victims. She was sentenced to be shot. Sister Ivanyutina Nina was sentenced to 15 years in prison, father and mother - to 10 and 13 years respectively. The Maslenkos died in prison, and Nina's fate is unknown.
Tamara Ivanyutina, who did not admit her guilt, tried to bribe the investigator, promising him "a lot of gold." After the announcement of the verdict of the court, she was shot.
In September 1918, the decree "On the Red Terror" was proclaimed, which gave rise to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Russia. In fact, by legalizing the methods of radical elimination of dissenters, the Bolsheviks untied the hands of outright sadists and mentally unhealthy people who enjoyed and morally satisfied from the murders.
Oddly enough, representatives of the weaker sex distinguished themselves with special zeal.
Varvara Yakovleva
At times civil war Yakovleva acted as deputy and then head of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The daughter of a Moscow merchant, she showed amazing toughness even for her contemporaries. In the name of a “bright future”, Yakovleva was ready to send as many “enemies of the revolution” to the other world without batting an eyelid. The exact number of her victims is unknown. According to historians, this woman personally killed several hundred "counter-revolutionaries".
Her active participation in mass repression confirm the execution lists of October-December 1918 published signed by Yakovleva herself. However, soon the "executioner of the revolution" was recalled from Petrograd on the personal orders of Vladimir Lenin. The fact is that Yakovleva led a promiscuous sex life, changed gentlemen like gloves, so she turned into an easily accessible source of information for spies.
Evgeniya Bosh
"Distinguished" in the field of executions and Eugene Bosch. The daughter of a German settler and a Bessarabian noblewoman, she took an active part in revolutionary life from 1907. In 1918, Bosch became the head of the Penza party committee, her main task was to seize grain from the local peasantry.
In Penza and the surrounding area, Bosch's cruelty in suppressing peasant uprisings was remembered decades later. Those communists who tried to prevent the massacre of people, she called "weak and soft-bodied", accused of sabotage.
Most historians who study the topic of the Red Terror believe that Bosch was mentally ill and herself provoked peasant uprisings for subsequent demonstrative massacres. Eyewitnesses recalled that in the village of Kuchki, the punisher shot one of the peasants without blinking an eye, which caused a chain reaction of violence on the part of the food detachments subordinate to her.
Vera Grebenshchikova
Odessa punisher Vera Grebenshchikova, nicknamed Dora, worked in the local emergency department. According to some sources, she personally sent 400 people to the other world, according to others - 700. Under the hot hand of Grebenshchikova, mostly nobles, white officers, too wealthy, in her opinion, petty bourgeois, as well as all those whom the executioner woman considered unreliable .
Dora liked more than just killing. She was pleased by the many hours of torture of the unfortunate, causing him unbearable pain. There is evidence that she skinned her victims, pulled out their nails, and engaged in self-mutilation.
Helping Grebenshchikova in this "craft" was a prostitute named Alexandra, her intimate partner, who was 18 years old. She has over 200 lives to her credit.
Rosa Schwartz
Lesbian love was also practiced by Rosa Schwartz, a Kyiv prostitute who got into the Cheka from a denunciation of one of her clients. Together with her friend Vera Schwartz, she also enjoyed practicing sadistic games.
The ladies wanted thrills, so they came up with the most sophisticated ways to mock the "counter-revolutionary elements." Only after the victim was brought to an extreme degree of exhaustion, she was killed.
Rebekah Meisel
In Vologda, another "Valkyrie of the revolution" was rampant - Rebekah Aizel (Plastinin's pseudonym). The husband of the female executioner was Mikhail Kedrov, the head of the special department of the Cheka. Nervous, embittered at the whole world, they vented their complexes on others.
The "sweet couple" lived in a railway car near the station. There were also interrogations. They shot a little further away - 50 meters from the car. Aizel personally killed at least a hundred people.
The executioner woman also managed to play tricks in Arkhangelsk. There she executed the death sentence against 80 White Guards and 40 civilians suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. On her own orders, the Chekists sank a barge with 500 people on board.
Rosalia Zemlyachka
But in cruelty and ruthlessness there was no equal to Rosalia Zemlyachka. Coming from a family of merchants, in 1920 she received the post of the Crimean regional party committee, at the same time she became a member of the local revolutionary committee.
This woman immediately outlined her goals: speaking to fellow party members in December 1920, she stated that the Crimea must be cleared of 300 thousand "White Guard elements." The purge began immediately. Mass executions of captured soldiers, Wrangel officers, members of their families and representatives of the intelligentsia and nobility who were unable to leave the peninsula, as well as "too prosperous" local residents - all this became a common occurrence in the life of Crimea in those terrible years.
In her opinion, it was unreasonable to spend cartridges on "enemies of the revolution", therefore, those sentenced to death were drowned, tying stones to their feet, loaded onto barges, and then drowned it in the open sea. At least 50 thousand people were killed in such a barbaric way. In total, under the leadership of Zemlyachka, about 100 thousand people were sent to the next world. However, the writer Ivan Shmelev, who was an eyewitness to the terrible events, stated that there were actually 120 thousand victims. It is noteworthy that the ashes of the punisher were buried in the Kremlin wall.
Antonina Makarova
Makarova (Tonka the machine-gunner) - the executioner of the "Lokot Republic" - a collaborationist semi-autonomy during the Great Patriotic War. I was surrounded, I preferred to go to the service of the Germans as a policeman. I personally machine-gunned 200 people. After the war, Makarova, who got married and changed her last name to Ginzburg, was searched for more than 30 years. Finally, in 1978, she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.
The story of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, a Soviet girl who personally executed one and a half thousand of her compatriots, is another, dark side of the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War.
Tonka the machine-gunner, as she was then called, worked on the Soviet territory occupied by the Nazi troops from the 41st to the 43rd years, carrying out the mass death sentences of the Nazis to partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those whom she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense, that then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t dreamed of a single one, ”she told her interrogators during interrogations, when she was nevertheless identified and detained - 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the bowels of the FSB special guards. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who personally killed one and a half thousand people.
Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman was called Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by status: an apartment, insignia for round dates and a scarce sausage in a grocery ration. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. Two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: still, such a heroic fate: to walk the whole war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak on the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for a feat. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best of all ...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a shopping bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby, inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to drive with us!” surrounded her, preventing her from escaping.
“Do you have any idea why you were brought here?” - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB, when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some kind of mistake,” the woman chuckled in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the machine gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, you carried out mass executions. There are still legends about your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now it's time to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations.”
“So, not in vain Last year my heart became anxious, as if I felt that you would appear, ”the woman said. - How long ago was that. Like not with me at all. Almost all life has already passed. Well, write down…”
From the protocol of interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number has changed. Usually I was ordered to shoot a group of 27 people - that's how many partisans the cell contained. I shot about 500 meters from the prison near a pit. The arrested were placed in a chain facing the pit. One of the men rolled out my machine gun to the place of execution. At the command of my superiors, I knelt down and fired at people until everyone fell dead…”
“Drop into the nettles” - in Tony's jargon, this meant to be taken to be shot. She herself died three times. The first time was in the fall of 1941, in the terrible “Vyazma cauldron”, as a young medical instructor girl. Hitler's troops then advanced on Moscow as part of Operation Typhoon. Soviet commanders threw their armies to their deaths, and this was not considered a crime - war has a different morality. More than a million Soviet boys and girls died in that Vyazma meat grinder in just six days, five hundred thousand were taken prisoner. The death of ordinary soldiers at that moment did not solve anything and did not bring victory closer, it was simply meaningless. Just like helping a nurse to the dead...
19-year-old nurse Tonya Makarova woke up after a fight in the forest. The air smelled of burning flesh. Nearby lay an unfamiliar soldier. “Hey, are you still whole? My name is Nikolai Fedchuk. “And I’m Tonya,” she didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear, didn’t understand, as if her soul had been shell-shocked, and only a human shell remained, and inside - emptiness. She reached out to him, trembling: “Ma-a-amochka, how cold it is!” “Well, beautiful, don’t cry. We will get out together, ”Nikolai answered and unbuttoned the top button of her tunic.
For three months, before the first snow, they wandered together through the thickets, getting out of the encirclement, not knowing either the direction of movement, or their ultimate goal, or where their own, or where the enemies were. They starved, breaking for two, stolen slices of bread. During the day they shied away from military convoys, and at night they warmed each other. Tonya washed footcloths for both of them in icy water, and prepared a simple dinner. Did she love Nicholas? Rather, she drove out, burned out with a red-hot iron, fear and cold from the inside.
“I’m almost a Muscovite,” Tonya proudly lied to Nikolai. - There are many children in our family. And we are all Parfenovs. I am the eldest, like Gorky's, I went out to people early. Such a beech grew, taciturn. Once I came to a village school, in the first grade, and I forgot my last name. The teacher asks: “What is your name, girl?” And I know that Parfyonova, but I'm afraid to say. The kids from the back of the desk shout: “Yes, she is Makarova, her father is Makar.” So they recorded me alone in all the documents. After school, she left for Moscow, then the war began. They called me to be a nurse. And I had a different dream - I wanted to scribble on a machine gun, like Anka the machine gunner from Chapaev. Do I really look like her? That's when we get out to ours, let's ask for a machine gun ... "
In January 1942, dirty and ragged, Tonya and Nikolai finally reached the village of Red Well. And then they had to leave forever. “You know, my native village is nearby. I'm going there now, I have a wife, children, - Nikolai told her goodbye. - I could not confess to you earlier, forgive me. Thanks for the company. Then you get out somehow.” “Don't leave me, Kolya,” Tonya pleaded, hanging on to him. However, Nikolai shook it off him like ashes from a cigarette and left.
For several days, Tonya wandered around the huts, christened, and asked to stay. Compassionate housewives at first let her in, but after a few days they invariably refused shelter, explaining that they themselves had nothing to eat. “It hurts her look is not good,” the women said. “They pester our peasants who are not at the front, climb with them into the attic, ask them to warm her up.”
It is possible that Tonya at that moment was really moved by her mind. Perhaps Nikolai's betrayal finished her off, or her strength simply ran out - one way or another, she only had physical needs left: she wanted to eat, drink, wash with soap in a hot bath and sleep with someone, so as not to be left alone in the cold darkness. She didn't want to be a hero, she just wanted to survive. At any price.
In the village where Tonya stopped at the beginning, there were no policemen. Almost all of its inhabitants went to the partisans. In the neighboring village, on the contrary, only punishers were registered. The front line here was in the middle of the outskirts. Somehow she wandered along the outskirts, half-mad, lost, not knowing where, how and with whom she would spend that night. She was stopped by people in uniform and asked in Russian: “Who is this?” “I am Antonina, Makarova. From Moscow,” the girl replied.
She was brought to the administration of the village of Lokot. The policemen complimented her, then took turns “loving” her. Then they gave her a whole glass of moonshine to drink, after which they put a machine gun in her hands. As she dreamed - to disperse the emptiness inside with a continuous machine-gun line. For living people.
“Makarova-Ginzburg told during interrogations that the first time she was taken to the execution of partisans completely drunk, she did not understand what she was doing,” recalls the investigator in her case, Leonid Savoskin. - But they paid well - 30 marks, and offered cooperation on a permanent basis. After all, none of the Russian policemen wanted to get dirty, they preferred that the execution of partisans and members of their families was carried out by a woman. Homeless and lonely Antonina was given a bunk in a room at a local stud farm, where she could spend the night and store a machine gun. She volunteered for work in the morning.”
“I did not know those whom I shoot. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. Sometimes you shoot, you come closer, and someone else twitches. Then again she shot in the head so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes a few prisoners had a piece of plywood hung on their chests with the inscription “Partisan”. Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardroom or in the yard. Ammo was plentiful…”
The former landlady of Tony from the Red Well, one of those who once also kicked her out of her house, came to the village of Lokot for salt. She was detained by the police and taken to a local prison, attributing her connection with the partisans. “I am not a partisan. Ask at least your machine-gunner Tonka, ”the woman was frightened. Tonya looked at her attentively and chuckled: "Come on, I'll give you salt."
In the tiny room where Antonina lived, order reigned. There was a machine gun, shining with engine oil. Clothes were folded in a neat pile on a chair nearby: elegant dresses, skirts, white blouses with holes ricocheting in the back. And a laundry trough on the floor.
“If I like things from the condemned, then I take pictures from the dead, why should the good disappear,” Tonya explained. - Once I shot a teacher, so I liked her blouse, pink, silk, but it was painfully covered in blood, I was afraid that I would not wash it - I had to leave it in the grave. Too bad… So how much salt do you need?”
“I don’t need anything from you,” the woman backed towards the door. “Fear God, Tonya, he is there, he sees everything - there is so much blood on you, you can’t wash off!” “Well, since you are brave, why did you ask me for help when you were taken to prison? Antonina shouted after her. - That would die like a hero! So, when the skin needs to be saved, then Tonka's friendship is good?
In the evenings, Antonina dressed up and went to a German club to dance. Other girls who worked as prostitutes for the Germans were not friends with her. Tonya turned up her nose, boasting that she was a Muscovite. She also did not speak frankly with her roommate, the typist of the village headman, but she was afraid of her for some kind of spoiled look and for the crease on her forehead that had cut through too early, as if Tonya was thinking too much.
At the dances, Tonya got drunk, and changed partners like gloves, laughed, clinked glasses, fired cigarettes at the officers. And she did not think about those next 27, whom she had to execute in the morning. It's scary to kill only the first, second, then, when the number goes to hundreds, it becomes just hard work.
Before dawn, when the groans of the partisans sentenced to death died down after torture, Tonya quietly got out of her bed and wandered for hours around the former stable, hastily converted into a prison, peering into the faces of those whom she was to kill.
From the interrogation of Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg, June 1978:
“It seemed to me that the war would write everything off. I was just doing my job for which I was paid. It was necessary to shoot not only partisans, but also members of their families, women, teenagers. I tried not to remember this. Although I remember the circumstances of one execution - before the execution, the guy sentenced to death shouted to me: “We won’t see you again, goodbye, sister! ..”
She was amazingly lucky. In the summer of 1943, when the battles for the liberation of the Bryansk region began, Tony and several local prostitutes were diagnosed with a venereal disease. The Germans ordered them to be treated, sending them to a hospital in their distant rear. When Soviet troops entered the village of Lokot, sending traitors to the Motherland and former policemen to the gallows, only terrible legends remained from the atrocities of Tonka the machine gunner.
Of the material things - hastily sprinkled bones in mass graves on an unnamed field, where, according to the most conservative estimates, the remains of one and a half thousand people rested. It was possible to restore the passport data of only about two hundred people shot by Tonya. The death of these people formed the basis of the prosecution in absentia of Antonina Makarovna Makarova, born in 1921, presumably a resident of Moscow. Nothing else was known about her...
“Our employees conducted the search case for Antonina Makarova for more than thirty years, passing it on to each other by inheritance,” KGB Major Pyotr Nikolaevich Golovachev, who was engaged in the search for Antonina Makarova in the 70s, told MK. - From time to time it fell into the archive, then, when we caught and interrogated another traitor to the Motherland, it again surfaced. Couldn't Tonka have disappeared without a trace?! It is now possible to accuse the authorities of incompetence and illiteracy. But the work was jewelry. During the post-war years, KGB officers secretly and carefully checked all women Soviet Union, bearing this name, patronymic and surname and suitable for age - there were about 250 such Tonek Makarovs in the USSR. But it's useless. The real Tonka the machine-gunner seemed to have sunk into the water ... "
“Don't scold Tonka too much,” Golovachev asked. - You know, I feel sorry for her. This is all war, damned, to blame, she broke her ... She had no choice - she could remain a person and then she herself would be among those shot. But she chose to live, becoming an executioner. But she was only 20 years old in 1941.”
But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. - It just didn’t fit in my head how many lives she claimed. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in dreams. Young, with a machine gun, stares intently - and does not look away. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and begged to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied life path all her possible relatives by the name of Makarov ... "
However, none of the investigators guessed that it was necessary to start looking for Antonin not from the Makarovs, but from the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her middle name as a surname, and allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retribution for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfyonov was going abroad. Filling out the questionnaire for a passport, he honestly listed the names and surnames of his siblings, the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfyonovs, and only one, for some reason, Antonina Makarovna Makarova, from the 45th year by her husband Ginzburg, now lives in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. The fateful meeting was attended, of course, by people from the KGB in civilian clothes.
“We were terribly afraid of jeopardizing the reputation of a woman respected by all, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. - Therefore, our employees traveled secretly to the Belarusian Lepel, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when everyone said the same thing - this is she, Tonka the machine-gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared.
Antonina's husband, Viktor Ginzburg, a veteran of war and labor, after her unexpected arrest, promised to complain to the UN. “We did not confess to him what the one with whom he lived happily all his life is accused of. They were afraid that the man simply would not survive this, ”the investigators said.
Viktor Ginzburg bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she committed some kind of crime - for example, embezzlement of money - he would forgive her everything. And he also talked about how, as a wounded boy, in April 1945, he was in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the ward. Innocent, pure, as if not at war, - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they signed.
Antonina took her husband's surname, and after demobilization went with him to godforsaken and people Belarusian Lepel, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And no more complaints.
“The arrested woman from the pre-trial detention center did not pass a single line. And by the way, she didn’t write anything to the two daughters she gave birth to after the war and didn’t ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. - When it was possible to find contact with our accused, she began to talk about everything. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and getting into our environment, she straightened out other people's veteran documents, according to which she began to live. She did not hide anything, but this was the most terrible thing. There was a feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: why was she imprisoned, what did she do SUCH terrible? It was as if she had a block of some sort from the war in her head, so that she probably wouldn’t go crazy herself. She remembered everything, each of her executions, but she did not regret anything. She seemed to me to be a very cruel woman. I don't know what she was like when she was young. And what made her commit these crimes. Willingness to survive? Minute blackout? Horrors of war? Either way, it doesn't justify it. She killed not only strangers, but also her own family. She just destroyed them with her exposure. A psychic examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane.”
The investigators were very afraid of some excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from bouts of remorse. “You can't be afraid all the time,” she said. - For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person is tormented all his life.
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she conducted executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina only looked at them in bewilderment, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and with what she killed ... For her, it was a distant past, a different life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. - Now, after the verdict, I will have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will poke a finger at me. I think they will give me three years probation. For what more? Then you need to somehow re-arrange life. And how much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I can get a job with you - the work is familiar ... "
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was passed. The decision of the court was an absolute surprise even for the people who were investigating, not to mention the defendant herself. All petitions of 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg for clemency in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared. Never later were women in the USSR executed by a court verdict.
Got it here-
Gelberg Sofa Nukhimovna (Red Sonya, Bloody Sonya). Jewish. The commander of the "flying" requisition detachment, consisting of revolutionary sailors, anarchists and Magyars. Operated since the spring of 1918 in the villages of the Tambov province. Coming to the village, she began to liquidate the “rich”, officers, priests, schoolchildren and created councils mainly from drunkards and lumpen, because the working peasants did not want to go there. Apparently, she was not quite mentally normal, as she loved to enjoy the torment of her victims, mocking them and personally shooting them in front of their wives and children. The Blood Sony squad was destroyed by the peasants. She was captured and, by the verdict of the peasants of several villages, impaled, where she died for three days (183:46).
Bak Maria Arkadievna (? -1938). Jewish. Revolutionary. Officer of the Cheka. The sister of the Chekists Solomon and Boris Bakov, who were shot in 1937-1938, and the wife of the famous Chekist B.D. Berman, head of the 3rd department of the NKVD, who was shot in 1938. She was shot, like her sister, Galina Arkadyevna (184: 106-108).
Gertner Sofia Oskarovna. Until recently, the name of this truly bloody woman was known only to a narrow circle of "specialists". A wide circle of readers of the weekly "Arguments and Facts" became aware of the name of this "glorious" Chekist woman after a question from a curious reader JI. Vereiskaya: "Is it known who was the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB?" Correspondent Sto-yanovskaya asked the head of the public relations department of the Department of the Ministry of Security to answer this question Russian Federation in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region E. Lukina. Comrade Lukin said that in the Chekist environment, Gertner Sofya Oskarovna, who served in 1930-1938, is considered the most cruel executioner in the history of the KGB. an investigator of the Leningrad Department of the NKVD and who had the nickname Sonya the Golden Leg among colleagues and prisoners. Sonya's first mentor was Yakov Mekler, a Leningrad Chekist, who was nicknamed the Butcher for especially brutal methods of interrogation. Gertner invented her own method of torture: she ordered the interrogated to be tied by the hands and feet to the table and beat the genitals several times with a shoe with all her might, without any hassle knocking out "information about espionage activities." For successful work Gertner in 1937 was awarded a nominal gold watch. Repressed during the time of Lavrenty Beria. She died in Leningrad in 1982 on a well-deserved pension at the age of 78. Was it not Sonya the Golden Leg that Yaroslav Vasilievich Smelyakov had in mind when he wrote the famous poem "Jew"? After all, it was during her “work activity” that he was repressed.
Antonina Makarovna Makarova (married Ginzburg), nicknamed Tonka the machine gunner (1921-1979) - the executioner of the collaborationist "Lokot Republic" during the Great Patriotic War. Shot from a machine gun more than 200 people.
In 1941, during the Great Patriotic War, being a nurse, at the age of 20 she was surrounded and ended up in the occupied territory. Caught in hopeless situation, she chose to survive, voluntarily joined the auxiliary police and became the executioner of the Lokot district. Makarova executed death sentences for criminals and Soviet partisans fighting against the army of the Lokot Republic. At the end of the war, she got a job in a hospital, married a front-line soldier B.C. Ginzburg and changed her surname.
The search case of Antonina Makarova was conducted by KGB officers for more than thirty years. Over the years, about 250 women were tested throughout the Soviet Union, bearing her name, patronymic and surname and suitable for age. The search was delayed due to the fact that she was nee Parfenova, but was mistakenly recorded as Makarova. Her real name became known when one of the brothers, who lived in Tyumen, filled out in 1976 a questionnaire for traveling abroad, in which he named her among his relatives. Makarova was arrested in the summer of 1978 in Lepel (Belarusian SSR), convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to death by the Bryansk Regional Court on November 20, 1978. Her request for clemency was rejected, and on August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out. In the USSR, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War and the only one in which a woman punisher appeared. After the execution of Antonina Makarova, women in the USSR were no longer executed by court order (185: 264).
Along with the "famous" female executioners who left a "noticeable mark" in the memory of the people, hundreds of their lesser-known girlfriends remain in the shadows. In the book of S.P. Melgunov "Red Terror in Russia" named the names of some sadistic women. Terrible stories of eyewitnesses and accidentally surviving witnesses are given about “comrade Lyuba” from Baku, who was shot for her atrocities. In Kyiv, under the leadership of the well-known executioner Latsis and his assistants, about fifty “cheaters” “worked”, in which many female executioners committed atrocities. Rosa (Eda) Schwartz, a former actress of the Jewish theater, then a prostitute, who began her career in the Cheka with a denunciation of a client, and ended up participating in mass executions, is a characteristic type of a Chekist woman.
In Kyiv, in January 1922, the Chekist Hungarian Remover was arrested. She was accused of unauthorized execution of 80 arrested people, mostly young people. Remover was declared mentally ill on the basis of sexual psychopathy. The investigation established that Remover personally shot not only suspects, but also witnesses called to the Cheka and who had the misfortune to arouse her sick sensuality.
There is a known case when, after the retreat of the Reds from Kyiv, a Chekist woman was identified on the street and torn to pieces by a crowd. In the eighteenth year, a female executioner Vera Grebenyukova (Dora) committed atrocities in Odessa. In Odessa, another heroine who shot fifty-two people also “became famous”: “The main executioner was a Latvian woman with an animal-like face; the prisoners called her “pug”. This sadistic woman wore short trousers and always had two revolvers behind her belt ... ”Rybinsk had its own animal in the guise of a woman - a certain Zina. There were such people in Moscow, Yekaterinoslav and many other cities. S.S. Maslov described a female executioner whom he himself saw: “She regularly appeared in the central prison hospital in Moscow (1919) with a cigarette in her mouth, with a whip in her hands and a revolver without a holster in her belt. In the chambers from which the prisoners were taken for execution, she always appeared herself. When the sick, stricken with terror, slowly gathered their belongings, said goodbye to their comrades, or began to cry with some kind of terrible howl, she rudely shouted at them, and sometimes, like dogs, she beat them with a whip. It was a young woman ... about twenty or twenty-two years old.
Unfortunately, not only employees of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB performed executioner work. If you wish, you can find ladies with executioner inclinations among other departments. This is eloquently evidenced, for example, by the following act of execution dated October 15, 1935: Dementiev prison ... carried out the sentence of July 28, 1935 on the execution of Frolov Ivan Kondratievich ”(186).
The people's judge of the city of Kemerovo T.K. also acted as an executioner. Kalashnikova, who, together with two security officers and the acting city prosecutor, on May 28, 1935, participated in the execution of two criminals, and on August 12, 1935, one. If you can, forgive them all, Lord.
Executioners-Scientists, or "Science in the NKVD"
One of the most sinister divisions of the OGPU-NKVD-MGB was the toxicological laboratory (laboratory for the use of poisons and drugs). It was created in 1921 under the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V.I. Lenin, long before Yezhov and Beria, and was called the "Special Cabinet". It is possible that Lenin asked Stalin to get him the poison from the stocks of this laboratory - "office". Poisons and drugs began to be used in the OGPU in 1926 at the direction of People's Commissar Menzhinsky. The laboratory began to serve a secret group headed by the former SR militant Yakov Serebryansky. The "Yasha Group", created to carry out terrorist acts abroad, was directly subordinate to the people's commissar and existed until 1938.
Rosalia Zemlyachka (Demon)
Jewish. Surname on the father-Zalkind
(So much hatred and anger towards white officers, their wives and children. Did Rozalia Zemlyachka hate smart, intelligent Russians? And her task was to exterminate her best people on Russian soil?)
Fury of the Red Terror
Soviet power, established in the Crimea after the departure of the Wrangel troops, marked its reign with one of the most terrible tragedies of our time: in a relatively short period, a huge number of former White Army soldiers who believed new government and those who did not leave their homeland. This cruelty also had a feminine face...
What is "friends of the people"?
Sometimes the Zemlyachka was asked: how did she, a girl from a bourgeois family, become a revolutionary? Who led her, a young schoolgirl with curly black hair and gray curious eyes, to hatred towards representatives of the class from which she herself was?
She was born in 1876. The enterprising man Samuil Markovich Zalkind owned an excellent profitable house in Kyiv, and his haberdashery shop was considered one of the best and largest in the city. He wanted to bring children into people and brought them out - they learned and became engineers and lawyers. But, alas, they did not think quite the way their father wanted. They saw the benefit of their native country in the revolution, even in its extreme and most ugly forms. All the children of Samuil Zalkind were in the royal prisons. So the merchant of the first guild, Zalkind, every now and then was forced to make a pledge, taking bail first one, then another son ...
Cruel Rose named Countrywoman.
But most of all in the family they loved Rosa. She was the most capable, the most impatient, the most insightful, and (even the brothers admitted it) the most intelligent.
In 1894, after graduating from high school, Rosa entered the University of Lyon for a course in medical sciences. In France.
A student friend gave her to read Vladimir Ulyanov's brochure "What are" friends of the people ...". And soon Rosa Zalkind joined the Kiev Social Democratic organization, becoming a professional revolutionary. And a year later, Zemlyachka (that was now her revolutionary pseudonym) was arrested.
She failed to escape prison. The prison was replaced by a link to Siberia. In exile, Zemlyachka got married and acquired another surname - Berlin. She fled from exile alone, her husband remained in Siberia and soon died. Later, she herself could not really determine the reason for her marriage: either it was sympathy for a comrade-in-arms, or she wanted to support a weaker comrade
Time spent in prisons made her violent, sometimes to the point of pathology. The new party nickname - Demon - suited her perfectly.
Upon returning to Russia in 1905participated in the organization of the turmoil of 1905, in the December battles in Moscow. She gained her first experience of shooting at the tsarist troops, which turned out to be very popular later, in the Crimea, during the executions of Wrangel officers. After the victory of the revolution, the leadership of the party entrusted her with a very responsible job ...
The demon broke free.
In 1920, the Wrangel army left the Crimea, but tens of thousands of soldiers and officers did not want to leave their native land, especially since Frunze in leaflets promised life and freedom to those who remained. Many remained.
On Lenin's instructions, two "Iron Bolsheviks" were sent to the Crimea "to restore order" with practically unlimited powers, fanatically devoted to the Soviet regime and equally hating its enemies: Rozalia Zemlyachka, who became secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and the Hungarian Cominternist Bela Kun, who was appointed special commissioner for the Crimea. 35-year-old Kun, a former prisoner of war officer of the Austro-Hungarian army, managed by that time to proclaim the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was drowned in blood, after which he came to "make a revolution" in Russia.
The Crimea was handed over to Bela Kun and Rozalia Samuilovna. The triumphant winners were invited to chair the Revolutionary Military Council Soviet Republic Crimea Leon Trotsky, but he replied: "Then I will come to the Crimea, when not a single White Guard remains on its territory." The Crimean leaders took this not as a hint, but as an order and a guide to action. Bela Kun and Zemlyachka came up with a brilliant move to destroy not only the prisoners, but also those who were at large. An order was issued: all former servicemen of the tsarist and White armies must register - name, rank, address. For evading registration - execution. There was only no notification that those who came to register would also be shot...
Red terror in Crimea, 1920-1921
With the help of this truly diabolical trick, an additional tens of thousands of people were identified. They were taken to their home addresses one by one at night and shot without any trial - according to registration lists. The senseless bloody destruction of all those who laid down their arms and remained on their native land began. And now the numbers are called different: seven, thirty, and even seventy thousand. But even if there are seven, shooting so many thousands is work. This is where the pathological cruelty, accumulated for years before in Rosalia Salkind, manifested itself. The demon broke free. It was Zemlyachka who said: "It's a pity to waste cartridges on them, drown them in the sea."
The destruction took on nightmarish forms, the condemned were loaded onto barges and drowned in the sea. Just in case, they tied a stone to their feet, and for a long time afterwards through a clean sea water dead men could be seen standing in rows. They say that tired of paperwork, Rosalia loved to sit at the machine gun...
Eyewitnesses recalled: “The outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of a stench from the decaying corpses of the executed, who were not even buried in the ground. The pits behind the Vorontsovsky Garden and the greenhouses in the Krymtaev estate were full of the corpses of the executed, lightly sprinkled with earth, and the cadets of the cavalry school (future red commanders) drove a mile and a half from their barracks, to knock out gold teeth from the mouths of the executed with stones, and this hunt always gave great booty.
Memorial plaque in memory of the massacres in the Crimea in 1920-1921.
... During the first winter, 96 thousand people out of 800 thousand of the Crimean population were shot. The slaughter went on for months. On November 28, Izvestia of the Provisional Sevastopol Revolutionary Committee published the first list of the executed - 1634 people, on November 30 the second list - 1202 people. In a week in Sevastopol alone, Bela Kun shot more than 8,000 people, and such executions went on throughout the Crimea, machine guns worked day and night. Rozalia Zemlyachka ruled the Crimea in such a way that the Black Sea turned red with blood.
The terrible massacre of officers under the leadership of Zemlyachka made many shudder. Also, without trial or investigation, women, children, and the elderly were shot. The massacres received such a wide response that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee created a special commission to investigate. And then all the "particularly distinguished" commandants of the cities presented telegrams from Bela Kun and Rozalia Zemlyachka in their defense, inciting massacres, and reporting on the number of innocent victims. In the end, this not at all "sweet couple" had to be removed from the Crimea ...
Zemlyachka died in 1947. Her ashes, like those of many other executioners of her own people, are buried in the Kremlin wall...
PS Columnist for the weekly "Kommersant. Power" Yevgeny Zhirnov, studying the history of the so-called Russian Party, got to the bottom of the fact that the famous Soviet writer Leonid Leonov (author of the novel "Russian Forest") served under Zemlyachka in the newspaper of the 18th Army. And, says Zhirnov, "far from being a young lady, every night she chose a partner for the night from the Red Army. And Leonov seemed to have to hide from her all the time." This is what "lack of privacy" means...
http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/bahit/post292919132/The famous red and proletarian poet Demyan Bedny wrote about her:
From office supplies and hibernation
To fully protect yourself
Portrait of Comrade Zemlyachka
Hang it on the wall, mate!
Then wandering around the office,
Pray that you've found out by now
Countrywoman only in the portrait,
A hundred times worse than the original!
Even the head of the Cheka, F.E. Dzerzhinsky eventually admitted that he and other leaders of his department “made a big mistake.
Crimea was the main nest of the White Guard, and in order to ruin this nest,
we sent comrades there with absolutely extraordinary powers. But we
could not think that they are using these powers in THIS way”