Solving a Murder

Lone researcher tracks down his ancestor’s killers, 80 years later

Denis Karagodin has done the impossible. After five years of research (reading old newspapers and relentless correspondence with the Federal Security Service and other institutions and archives with various levels of secrecy), he had it: the list of names of people directly responsible for the execution of his great grandfather, Stepan Karagodin.

Stepan Karagodin was a farmer and village foreman in the Russian Far East when he was arrested for the first time in October 1929. After spending time in Siberian exile, he was arrested again in 1937, in Tomsk, and shot on January 3, 1938, one of eight people executed at the same time.

The Karagodin family had tried to find out the truth about what happened to their relative, but it was his great-grandson who, through a combination of persistence and luck, managed to word his request for information from the FSB in a way that compelled them to hand over a copy of the execution notice, complete with names of the executioners who shot Karagodin and seven others accused of being Japanese spies. His research, he said, constructs a clear chain of command from Joseph Stalin all the way down to the local secret police agents who rounded up people in Tomsk, questioned them, signed their death warrants, and pulled the trigger.

After publishing his findings on his blog, StepanIvanovichKaragodin.org, the 34-year-old Denis began to hear from others involved in the case. In an unexpected turn of events, a descendant of one of the men named by Karagodin as an executioner reached out to him, leading to a surprising reconciliation. Another letter came from relatives of a fellow victim, Lev Londoner, who sent photographs, passport information, and an autobiography of Londoner, an auto mechanic.

Denis Karagodin has officially closed the investigation into his ancestor’s death, but he has other plans: to hold accountable the people responsible for the murder of his great grandfather, who, like hundreds of thousands of others, was later rehabilitated. That’s not enough, Karagodin said. “One man kills another and then says, ‘You know, I killed him, but here’s a certificate saying that I rehabilitated him, so now it’s all good.’ But you know, it’s not. Clearly, it’s not.” He said he plans to file a lawsuit and prosecute the killers. “Nobody in the history of Russia has ever filed such a lawsuit, nobody ever thought to see it through,” he told Radio Svoboda.

Such success in finding the truth about purge victims is rare, but Karagodin’s example has inspired others to launch their own investigations. Sergei Prudovsky has spent seven years trying to gain access to files pertaining to the so-called Harbin Case – the murder and exile of thousands of Russians in the 1930s and 1940s who were working in Manchuria prior to its seizure by Japan and then the Soviet Union. Among them was Prudovsky’s grandfather, Stepan Kuznetsov. Prudovsky set out to find the names of officers behind the fabricated cases, turning to the Supreme Court with a lawsuit to declassify the files. The court rejected the request, arguing that making the information public could harm Russian interests.

Meanwhile, in a move that may aid individuals investigating their families’ histories, the NGO Memorial recently published a wiki database of over 40,000 NKVD officers who served from 1935 to 1939: nkvd.memo.ru