January 7, 1895 - Vasili Blokhin
He carried out his work with methodical efficiency over nearly three decades, rising to lead the NKVD's corps of executioners at the height of Stalin's purges. The sheer personal scale of what he did — tens of thousands killed by his own hand, including roughly 7,000 Polish prisoners of war at Katyn in a single sustained operation — places him in a category that has no real historical parallel among state executioners. His career illustrates how institutional structures, loyalty, and bureaucratic sanction can enable individual acts of mass killing on a scale that otherwise seems almost impossible to attribute to one person.
From Wikipedia
Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (Russian: Васи́лий Миха́йлович Блохи́н; 19 January [O.S. 7 January] 1895 – 3 February 1955) was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief executioner of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria.
Blokhin was selected for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926 and led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II. Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history. Blokhin was forced into retirement in 1953 after the death of Stalin and condemned during de-Stalinization shortly before his death in 1955.
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