"Case Spring"


The Case Spring or the Guards is repression of Soviet Red Army officers who previously served in the Imperial Russian Army, as well as civilians, including former White Army officers, organized by the OGPU in 1930-1931. In Leningrad alone, in May 1931, over a thousand people were shot in this case.

Business

The organizer of the initiated case "Spring" was the leader of the OGPU Izrail Leplevsky. With the support of the deputy chairman of the OGPU Genrikh Yagoda, he inflated the scale of "Spring" to the scale of the "case of the Industrial Party."
In total, according to some reports, more than 3,000 people were arrested, among them Andrei Snesarev, A.L. Rodendorf, Alexander Andreyevich Svechin, Pavel Sytin, F.F. Novitsky, Aleksander Verkhovsky, I. Galkin, Yu. K. Gravitsky, Vladimir Olderogge, V. A. Yablochkin, Nikolai Sollogub, Aleksandr Baltiysky, Mikhail Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich, N. A. Morozov, Aleksei Gutor, A. Kh. Bazarevsky, Mikhail Matiyasevich, V. F. Rzhechitsky, V. N. Gatovsky, P. M. Sharangovich, D. D. Zuev and others.

Historiography of the issue

This case gained fame with the release in 2000 of the book of the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Tinchenko “The Calvary of Russian Officers”, which essentially raised this topic for the first time and made it accessible to the general reader.
Some documents relating to the operation "Spring" were published in the USSR in a two-volume collection of documents "From the archives of the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD" dedicated to this operation.

Literature