Semyon Dukelsky

Semyon Dukelsky was born in Yelizavetgrad, in Kherson Governorate, Ukraine, the son of a minor official.

As head of the Cheka in Crimea in 1920, Dukelsky was party to one of the most infamous atrocities of the Russian Civil War, when thousands of officers who had been persuaded to surrender under an amnesty after the final battle were massacred.

[3] As the regional chief of police in Voronezh, Dukelsky was responsible for supervising the poet, Osip Mandelstam, who was exiled there in 1934–37.

[4] This is unlikely, but Mandelstam's widow, Nadezhda, described a meeting between her husband and someone she calls the Commandant, whom the couple visited to complain about being harassed by police informers.

During the conversation, Mandelstam offered to send Dukelsky a copy of every new poem he wrote "so you don't have to waste your men's time."

To her surprise, the meeting ended "amicably" and "the police spies vanished into thin air, and for the rest of our stay in Voronezh we were never troubled by them again.

"[5] In July 1936, Dukelsky complained to Nikolai Yezhov, the party secretary with oversight over the NKVD, that the investigation of alleged Trotskyist conspirators, which had speeded up at the start of 1935 after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, had slowed down.

In 1989, a mass grave of victims of the purge was discovered in a forests near Somovo village in Voronezh province.

[7] In the summer of 1937, Dukelsky suffered a serious car accident, which meant that he was hospitalised at the time when Yezhov was conducting the purge, during which thousands of NKVD officers were arrested and executed.

Among others, he banned what would have been a film version of one of the most popular short stories in Russian literature, The Queen of Spades, by Pushkin, directed by Mikhail Romm, with music by Sergei Prokofiev.

It was originally scheduled to come out in 1937, to mark the centenary of Pushkin's birth, but was delayed by the arrests that swept through the cinema industry that year.

"[10] On April 9, 1939, Dukelsky was appointed USSR People's Commissar for the Merchant Fleet, succeeding his former boss, Yezhov, who was arrested the following day.

[9] In 1942, several months after the German invasion, he was demoted, and put in charge of ammunition stores in the Chelyabinsk region.