February 19, 1894 - Eduard Berzin
His administrative role in the Soviet security apparatus gave him the institutional power to build something with lasting, catastrophic consequences: the Dalstroy forced-labor complex in Kolyma, a region whose name became synonymous with extreme suffering and mass death. The camp system he established would outlast him, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives across subsequent decades. He was himself executed during the Great Purge in 1938, consumed by the same machinery of state violence he had helped construct.
From Wikipedia
Eduard Petrovich Berzin (Russian: Эдуа́рд Петро́вич Бе́рзин, Latvian: Eduards Bērziņš; 19 February 1894 – 1 August 1938) was a Latvian Bolshevik, Chekist and NKVD officer that set up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of slave-labor camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, one of the most brutal Gulag regions, where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died or were murdered in subsequent decades.
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