ABSTRACT
In May 1938 Stalin sent his personal assistant Lev Mekhlis and Yezhov’s deputy Frinovsky to the Far East to ‘liquidate’ the ‘Balitsky nest’ in the NKVD and the ‘Gamarnik-Bulin gang’ in the Red Army. (A year earlier Stalin had ordered Bulin to murder Gamarnik. In June 1938 Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he called Balitsky a ‘Fascist agent’.1) Trucks with arrested NKVD and Red Army officers were delivering their human cargo to the Khabarovsk prisons. Frinovsky personally shot 16 top NKVD personnel.2
