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We will hold them all to account: from Stalin to the specific executioner in Tomsk, including the driver of the «black voronok» (Voronok – a black car used by the officers of NKVD to arrest “traitors of the country”). One man kills another, and then says: you know, I killed him, but here’s the certificate that I rehabilitated him — now everything is Okay. No, it’s not okay. And it is absolutely obvious. We believe that the discussion that never happened in the 1950s or in the 1980s has now begun!
56-year-old peasant Stepan Ivanovich Karagodin was arrested on the night of December 1, 1937 by the members of the Tomsk State Military Committee of the NKVD, convicted by the Special Conference as the organizer of a spy-sabotage group and a resident of Japanese military intelligence and was sentenced to death by shooting. The verdict was carried out on January 21, 1938. His wife and children did not know about the execution and hoped that he was alive. In the late 50’s they received a certificate of rehabilitation, which stated that Stepan Ivanovich «died in prison.»
The great-grandson of Stepan Ivanovich, who graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Tomsk University, 34-year-old Denis Karagodin decided to identify the names of those who were guilty of falsifying accusations against those arrested in the «Harbinskiy case» and trace the criminal chain — from the Kremlin initiators of the «Great Terror» to ordinary performers in Tomsk , right up to the drivers of the «black voronok» and typists who reprinted the papers of the NKVD. The archives of the Soviet secret services are extremely reluctant to share information, but Denis managed to get a lot of documents showing how the machine of Stalin’s repressions worked, killing innocent people.