Dramatic Photos

Vasili Blokhin

First and Only Person to Execute Over 10,000 People Vasili Blokhin was a Soviet Major-General who served as the chief executioner for the NKVD (Soviet secret police). He was hand-picked for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926. Blokhin led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass executions during Stalin’s reign, most notably during the Great Purge and World War II. Vasili Blokhin is recorded as having personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including 7,000 condemned Polish POWs in one mass execution, making him the most prolific official executioner in world history. During his time as executioner, Vasili Blokhin made sure he personally pulled the trigger on all high-profile cases conducted in the Soviet Union. His most infamous act was the April 1940 Katyn massacre, in which Blokhin killed 7,000 Polish officers. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria’s proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, dated 5 March 1940. The mass executions conducted by Blokhin in Poland were carried out on 28 consecutive nights. He used a specially-constructed basement execution chamber at the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin, Russia (now Tver). In April of 1940, Vasili Blokhin performed 300 executions per night. He engineered a deranged system in which the prisoners were individually led into a small chamber. The chamber was painted red and was known as the “Leninist room.” The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a long wall for the prisoners to stand against. Vasili Blokhin was outfitted with a leather butcher’s apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform. He had no procurator present and did not read any death sentences to the victims. Over and over again, Blokhin pushed the prisoner against the wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by Nazi intelligence agents, provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later. Blokhin had his men escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, and then remove the bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. He was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption. The executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until dawn. The bodies were continuously loaded on flat-bed trucks through a back door and buried in mass graves. Vasili Blokhin worked without pause for ten hours each night, executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes. The event is the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record. On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner from Joseph Stalin. In 1955, Blokhin sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died, with the official cause being “suicide.” In 1943, the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when the government officially acknowledged and condemned the event.