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{{Short description|
{{Infobox person
| name = Boris Veniaminovich Rodos
Line 7:
| birth_place = [[Melitopol]], [[Russian Empire]]
| death_date = 20 April 1956 (aged 50)
| death_place = [[Butyrka
| death_cause = [[Execution by shooting]]
| party = [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] (1931–1953)
| awards = {{Order of the Red Star}} (2)
| known_for =
}}
'''Boris Veniaminovich Rodos''' ({{lang-ru|Борис Вениаминович Родос}}; 22 June 1905
== Biography ==
Rodos was the son of a Jewish tailor from [[Melitopol]]
He was transferred to a minor post in NKVD headquarters in Moscow in May 1937, after the mass arrests of NKVD officers ordered by [[Nikolai Yezhov]]. In December 1938, after Yezhov had been dismissed and replaced by [[Lavrentiy Beria|Lavrenty Beria]], Rodos was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and appointed Deputy Head of the NKVD Investigation Department.
One of the first prisoners interrogated by Rodos was a fellow officer, Pyotr Zubov, who was arrested for bungling an attempted coup against the King of Yugoslavia. Rodos smashed his knees with a hammer in a failed attempt to force a confession out of him. Zubov was later cleared and returned to work as a foreign agent, but needed a walking stick because of his injuries.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sudoplatov |first1=Pavel |title=Special Tasks,the Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - a Soviet Spymaster |date=1995 |publisher=Warner |location=London |isbn=0-7515-1240-0 |pages=112, 234}}</ref> ▼
▲One of the first prisoners interrogated by Rodos was a fellow officer, Pyotr Zubov, who was arrested for bungling an attempted coup against the King of Yugoslavia. Rodos smashed his knees with a hammer in a failed attempt to force a confession out of him. Zubov was later cleared and returned to work as a foreign agent, but needed a walking stick because of his injuries.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sudoplatov |first1=Pavel |title=Special Tasks,the Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - a Soviet Spymaster |date=1995 |publisher=Warner |location=London |isbn=0-7515-1240-0 |pages=112, 234}}</ref>
In the spring and summer of 1939, Rodos was in charge of interrogating his former superior, Yezhov, who did not need to be tortured because he was so terrified that he signed everything he was told to sign.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jansen |first1=Marc and Petrov, Nikita |title=Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 |date=2002 |publisher=Hoover Institution Press |location=Stanford CA |isbn=978-0-8179-2902-2 |page=[https://archive.org/details/stalinsloyalexec00jans/page/183 183] |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/stalinsloyalexec00jans/page/183 }}</ref> Rodos also interrogated and tortured the heads of the Ukrainian communist party and government, [[Vlas Chubar]] and [[Stanislav Kosior]], and the former head of the Komsomol, Alexander Kosarev, and was part of the team who took over the interrogation and torture of [[Isaac Babel]] in September 1939.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mwBpAAAAMAAJ|title=Нераскрытые тайны|last=Vaksberg|first=Arkady|date=1993|publisher=Новости|pages=57|isbn=9785702004297|language=ru}}</ref> In February 1940, he was assigned to beat a confession out of [[Robert Eikhe]], who had been convicted and sentenced to death, but was protesting his innocence. Rodos gave him a prolonged beating, and gouged out one of his eyes, but could not break him.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Slezkine |first1=Yuri |title=The House of Government, a Saga of the Russian Revolution |date=2019 |publisher=Princeton U.P. |location=Princeton |isbn=9780691192727 |pages=841–42}}</ref>▼
▲In the spring and summer of 1939, Rodos was in charge of interrogating his former superior, Yezhov, who said at his subsequent trial that during his first interrogation "they beat me up horribly"<ref>{{cite book |last1=Brent |first1=Jonathan |title=Inside the Stalin Archives |date=2008 |publisher=Atlas & Co |location=New York |isbn=978-0-9777433-3-9 |page=2}}</ref> - but who subsequently did not need to be tortured because he was so terrified that he signed everything he was told to sign.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jansen |first1=Marc and Petrov, Nikita |title=Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 |date=2002 |publisher=Hoover Institution Press |location=Stanford CA |isbn=978-0-8179-2902-2 |page=[https://archive.org/details/stalinsloyalexec00jans/page/183 183] |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/stalinsloyalexec00jans/page/183 }}</ref> Rodos
In March 1940, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Rodos was sent to direct the deportation of Poles from Lviv, for which he was promoted in 1941 to the rank of major. In 1941, he interrogated the former People's Commissar for armaments, Boris Vannikov, whom he threw on the floor and jumped on, shouting 'Tell all, tell all.' Interrogating General [[Kirill Meretskov]], also in 1941, he broke one of his ribs (but Meretskov survived to give evidence at Rodos's trial in 1956). <ref>{{cite book |last1=Murphy |first1=David E. |title=What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa |date=2005 |publisher=Yale U.P. |location=New Haven |isbn=0-300-10780-3 |pages=228–29}}</ref> In 1943, he was promoted again, to the rank of Colonel.▼
In February 1940, he was assigned to beat a confession out of [[Robert Eikhe]], who had been convicted and sentenced to death, but was protesting his innocence. Rodos gave him a prolonged beating, and gouged out one of his eyes, but could not break him.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Slezkine |first1=Yuri |title=The House of Government, a Saga of the Russian Revolution |date=2019 |publisher=Princeton U.P. |location=Princeton |isbn=9780691192727 |pages=841–42}}</ref>
▲In March 1940, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Rodos was sent to direct the deportation of Poles from [[Lviv]], for which he was promoted in 1941 to the rank of major. In 1941, he interrogated the former People's Commissar for armaments
===Arrest and execution===
Rodos was dismissed from the [[MGB (USSR)|MGB]] (successor to the NKVD) in 1952, probably because Beria had temporarily lost control of the organisation. He was head of anti-aircraft defence staff in [[Simferopol]] until his arrest on October 5, 1953. During his closed trial, at which he was convicted of extracting confessions under torture, he was asked whether he knew what Isaac Babel did for a living. He replied that he had been told that Babel was a writer. Asked whether he had read any of Babel's stories, he replied: "What for?"<ref
In February 1956, Soviet leader [[Nikita Khrushchev]] delivered his famous "[[On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences]]" speech to the 20th communist party congress, denouncing crimes committed by the Soviet authorities during the 1930s. Khrushchev included a denunciation of Rodos:
{{cquote|The investigative judge Rodos, who in his time investigated and interrogated Kosior, Chubar and Kosarev, is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and completely degenerate morally. It was this man who was deciding the fate of prominent Party workers. He also was making judgments concerning the politics in these matters, because, having established their “crime,” he thereby provided materials from which important political implications could be drawn. The question arises whether a man with such an intellect could–by himself–have conducted his investigations in a manner proving the guilt of people such as Kosior and others. No, he could not have done it without proper directives. At the Central Committee Presidium session he told us: “I was told that Kosior and Chubar were
Rodos was sentenced to death on February 26, one day after the speech. He wrote a long appeal, claiming that he had been the 'blind instrument' of senior officers such as Beria, that he was being made a scapegoat when he was not the only officer who had beaten prisoners, and pleading to be spared the death penalty "for the sake of my innocent children
== Family ==
Rodos had a son, Valery (born 1942) who was arrested in the 1960s as a political dissident
==References==
{{Reflist}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodos, Boris}}
[[Category:NKVD officers]]▼
[[Category:1905 births]]
[[Category:1956 deaths]]
▲[[Category:NKVD officers]]
[[Category:Soviet Jews in the military]]
[[Category:Jews executed by the Soviet Union]]
[[Category:People from Melitopol]]
[[Category:Executed Great Purge perpetrators]]
[[Category:Executed Soviet people from Ukraine]]
[[Category:People convicted of torture]]
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