Mikhail Kedrov (politician)

12 February] 1878 – 28 October 1941) was a Russian Soviet communist politician, an Old Bolshevik revolutionary, secret policeman and head of the military section of the Cheka.

He moved to Yaroslavl, where he studied law, joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901, and was arrested and deported to Vologda in 1902.

He joined the Bolsheviks, after the split in the RSDLP in 1903, and donated the money he inherited from his father, approximately 100 thousand gold rubles.

After defeat of the revolution, he organised distribution of illegal Bolshevik literature, and ran a publishing house in St. Petersburg, until he was arrested.

By the end of March 1917, he was in Petrograd (St Petersburg), where he joined the Bolsheviks' military organisation, and edited Soldatskaya Pravda.

In May 1920, after defeat of the White Army in the north, Kedrov was appointed Cheka plenitpotentiary for the region, which included Arkhangelsk, Vologda, and the Solovetsky Islands, site of one of Russia's oldest monasteries.

He also set up an extermination camp at Kholmogory, near Arkhangelsk, for the mass executions of former White officers and others suspected of opposing the Bolshevik revolution.

Donald Rayfield wrote that Kedrov "slaughter[ed] schoolchildren and Army officers in northern Russia with such ruthlessness that he had to be taken into psychiatric care.

The third son, Igor, was a Chekist, who was "one of the most vicious of the interrogators"[3] who prepared the great Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, by forcing confessions out of old Bolsheviks such as Grigori Zinoviev and Karl Radek.

In a tribute to father and son, published in Pravda, Igor was described as a handsome, intelligent youth who loved music,[4] but Elizabeth Poretsky, widow of a murdered agent Ignace Reiss remembered him as a "pimpled youth with a stupid expression",[5] and a fellow NKVD officer, Alexander Orlov believed that he and his father were both mentally ill.[6] He later remarried.

[1] In February or March of 1939, Mikhail and Igor Kedrov jointly signed a letter to Stalin, denouncing Lavrentiy Beria, the recently appointed head of the NKVD.

Let my cry of horror reach your ears; do not remain deaf, take me under your protection; please, help remove the nightmare of interrogations and show that this is all a mistake.

I am an old Bolshevik, free of any stain; I have honestly fought for almost 40 years in the ranks of the Party for the good and prosperity of the nation.... Today I, a 62-year-old man, am being threatened by the investigative judges with more severe, cruel and degrading methods of physical pressure.

I am firmly certain that, given a quiet, objective examination, without any foul rantings, without any anger and without the fearful tortures, it would be easy to prove the baselessness of the charges.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had decided to denounce crimes committed by the secret police during Stalin's time, but needed to retain the support of Cheka's successor organisation, the KGB.

Khrushchev's renewed campaign against the neo-Stalinists was accompanied by a detailed account of Kedrov's and Beria's mutual enmity, in Leningradskaya Pravda, 25 February 1964.