Vasili Ulrikh
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Vasili Vasilievich Ulrikh (July 13, 1889 – May 7, 1951) was the presiding judge at all the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, as well as many lesser trials, including a large number of secret trials that lasted only fifteen minutes or less. He was noted for the extreme speed and injustice with which he handled his cases.
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Early life
Vasili Ulrikh was born in Riga, Latvia, then a part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Latvian revolutionary of German descent and his mother was a Russian noblewoman. Because they were openly involved in socialist revolutionary activity, they were sentenced to a five-year period of exile in Irkutsk.
In 1910 Ulrikh returned to his native Riga and entered a course of study at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. He graduated in 1914, and with the beginning of World War I he was sent to the front as an officer.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky secured him entrance into the Cheka. Ulrikh subsequently served on a number of military tribunals, and came to the attention of Joseph Stalin, who apparently liked his terse, even laconic style of reporting as well as his total lack of sentiment.
Career
In 1926 Ulrikh became Chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the highest judgeship in the country. It was in this capacity that he handed down the pre-determined sentences of the Great Purges. His victims include such notables as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Tukhachevsky. He attended the executions of many of these men, and occasionally even performed executions himself.
During the Great Patriotic War, Ulrikh continued to hand down death sentences of people accused of sabotage and defeatism. When accused officers protested their innocence, Ulrikh simply yawned and told the firing squad to "get on with it." At the trial of the Estonian Separatists, he amused himself by mocking the defendants, leaving them sitting at their desks all night long while he and the members of the tribunal pretended to confer. He was also the main judge during the Trial of the Sixteen leaders of the Polish Secret State and Armia Krajowa in 1945.
After the conclusion of the war, Ulrikh presided over a number of the early trials of the Zhdanovshchina. In 1948 he made the mistake of exiling to Siberia a group of Ukrainian peasants instead of sentencing them to death. Stalin demanded his resignation, and he was subsequently reassigned to the relatively insignificant post of course director at the Military Law Academy. This transfer may have been intended as a prelude to his being given the same sort of trial and sentence as he had previously handed out. However, he died of a heart attack on May 7, 1951 and was buried without honors in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Personal characteristics
Vasili Ulrikh was neither a pleasant nor a comely man. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes him as "short and stocky," while Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko claims that he was actually quite tall, but had a habit of sitting slumped down at the bench so that one could only see his shaven head, which came to a point at the top. Gone to fat early in life, he had a puffy face with tiny eyes perpetually pink and watery from inflammation, a huge fleshy nose, and a square moustache. His voice was soft and oily, and he tended to mumble, particularly when racing through perfunctory trials.
He was unable to sustain any normal personal relationships. He had his parents sent to a retirement home for veterans of the Bolshevik Revolution so that he would not have to trouble himself with their care in their declining years. Both his marriages ended in divorce, and he effectively abandoned his son. After his second marriage, to a Communist activist by the name of Aristova-Litkene, ended in failure, he never obtained an apartment of his own. Instead he took a room in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. In his later years, as his duties grew lighter, he took to summoning prostitutes to his room. There he would often become so drunk that he would be unable to avail himself of these terrified young women's customary services, but would instead regale them with stories of the executions he had attended and even performed.
References
- Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin
- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment
- Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
- Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin's Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky
- Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy