Pavel Bulanov

Bulanov and Yagoda were arrested and charged with espionage, attempted murder and other crimes and included among the defendants in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites".

[1] In 1916, after graduating from the Penza Land Surveying School, he was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army; during the First World War he served in a reserve regiment stationed in Saratov, from August 1916 to January 1917.

In January and February 1929 he led the secret removal of Leon Trotsky, who was in exile in Alma-Ata, to Odessa and his deportation on the steamer Ilyich from the USSR to Turkey.

Bulanov was engaged in the development of the procedures for repressive actions, drawing up the regulatory documents on the manner of treating prisoners and those under investigation.

One of the confidants of Genrikh Yagoda, the People's Commissar of the NKVD, he was one of the organizers of the trial of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936.

Bulanov also acquired the reputation of being a toady for Yagoda and of distributing valuables confiscated from the arrested among the top leadership of the NKVD.

On March 29, 1937, Bulanov was arrested on Yezhov's orders, removed from the post of secretary, dismissed from the NKVD and expelled from the CPSU (b) as "an ideologically alien element".