Trilisser Meer Abramovich: biography, history and interesting facts

In February 1940, in the territory of the former summer residence of the head of the OGPU Yagoda, which was converted into a firing range, shots were heard. The verdict against the veteran of the revolutionary movement and the prominent Chekist Meer Abramovich Trilisser was carried out. How did his life develop, so tragically cut off behind the barbed wire of the OGPU secret object?

Unsuccessful students

Trilisser Meer Abramovich was born on April 1, 1883 in Astrakhan, in a large family of a shoemaker who moved to this city from Odessa. Despite all the efforts of his father, the family did not have wealth, but nevertheless Meer and his elder brother David graduated from the city's real school and tried even to enter Odessa University, passing an external exam for the course of the gymnasium.

But life prepared for the brothers completely different universities. Failing in the exams, but having stayed for a while in Odessa, they soon joined the circles of revolutionary youth and joined the Social Democratic Party. From that time, Meir Abramovich Trilisser takes the path of a professional revolutionary. Together with his brother he performs various party assignments both in Odessa itself and in many other cities, including Petersburg. With the outbreak of the First Russian Revolution, he manifests himself as the organizer of combat detachments.

In penal servitude and in exile

When in July 1906 there was an uprising of soldiers and sailors in the fortress of Sveaborg near Finland, Meer took an active part in it, for which he was arrested, and later, by a military court decision, sent to serve his sentence in the Shlisselburg Fortress for a period of five years. At the end of this time, he is referred to under vowel police supervision in one of the remote villages of the Irkutsk province.

Start of work in the Cheka

After the fall of the autocracy in February 1917, along with many exiles, Trilisser was also given freedom. Meer Abramovich moved to Irkutsk and within a few months edited the Social Democratic newspaper published there, and after the October revolution becomes a member of the Military Revolutionary Council of Siberia and moves to work in the Cheka. Becoming one of the leaders of this organization, he fought mercilessly against all those who were not ready to accept unconditionally the dictatorship of the new government.

In 1921, Trilisser Mikhail Abramovich (this is how his name often appears in the documents) is sent to conduct illegal work in the territories occupied at that time by the Japanese and the White Guards. In the context of the strictest secrecy, he creates an extensive intelligence network, thanks to which information on the enemy's actions was regularly received in Moscow, and after the defeat of the Japanese and the creation of the republic in the Far East, he becomes a commissar of the Amur Region and is a member of the committee of the Republican State Security.

Work in foreign intelligence

In the same year, an event occurred, from which the whole new biography received a completely new direction - Meir Abramovich Trilisser received Dzerzhinsky's order to go to the foreign department of the Cheka and set up an external intelligence system. Its main task in those years was to identify the emigrant anti-Soviet organizations based abroad, clarify their plans, and all their opposition, up to physical elimination of the leaders.

In this direction, Trilisser developed a large-scale work. He managed to introduce his residents to almost all embassies, consulates and foreign trade missions. The recruitment of agents abroad was also conducted. To this end, he personally travels abroad and visits many European states. As a result, information about all intentions and active actions of the enemy came to the operational center, where it was personally received by Trilisser.

Meer Abramovich was so well informed that even when Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly prepared a famous attempt on Soviet diplomats during a conference in Genoa, he not only controlled each step, but even knew where and at what price they bought weapons. Such highly professional work helped to put an end to the activities of many organizations hostile to our country.

Economic intelligence and disinformation of the enemy

In 1923, Trilisser was commissioned to create a special service within the foreign department of the Cheka, whose task was to carry out actions aimed at misinformation of the enemy. This new subdivision was to systematically introduce foreign special services into a delusion about the state of affairs in the Armed Forces of the country, its defense industry and the apparatus of foreign policy. Of their operations today are well known such as "Trust" and "Syndicate."

In 1925, Trilisser creates in the department subordinate to him a unit for collecting information related to the economy of foreign countries and their scientific and technical developments. A year later a subdivision was formed, thanks to which the engineers of the Soviet design bureaus received at their disposal copies of technical documentation in the field of radio engineering, defense industry, engineering and chemistry.

The peak of the career and the beginning of the sunset

Biographers of Trilisser agree that the peak of his career falls on the period 1926-1928. At this time, he, while holding the post of deputy chief of the OGPU, is also authorized under the Council of People's Commissars. Such responsible appointments were the result of a high evaluation of his work, given by F. Dzerzhinsky. Simultaneously, Meer Abramovich does not stop his work in the Department of Foreign Intelligence.

In the following period, his activities began to decline. This is largely due to the complexities artificially created by him during the country's campaign against the Trotskyites. In addition, as an agent of the OGPU Agabekov, who escaped to the West, testified in his memoirs, his career growth was stopped as a result of intrigues of the future head of the OGPU Yagoda, whose main competitor was Trilisser.

Meer Abramovich, nevertheless, continues to work as a member of the Central Control Commission of the CPSU (B.), Combining several more posts with this. In 1930, followed by a series of failures among foreign agents controlled by Trilisser. Whether his fault or failure was the result of unforeseen circumstances is unknown, but his credibility was undermined. The head of the foreign department was not accused of betrayal, but his compliance with the office was questioned.

Another wave of terror

Nevertheless, until 1938, he remains in the apparatus of the Council of People's Commissars and carries out numerous assignments connected both with matters of external intelligence and with the supervision of the activities of a large number of Soviet party and economic organizations. In particular, it ensured the work of the structures engaged in the transfer of members of foreign Communist Parties to the CPSU (b).

Meer Abramovich Trilisser, a biography whose life story and death are in many respects typical for the party functionary of those years, became a victim of the system, the creation of which he devoted many years. His arrest coincided with the beginning of another wave of repression, dubbed the "big cleansing". The victims of this campaign were thousands of Communists who unlimitedly believed Stalin. Among them there were many veterans who had passed through the tsarist prisons and penal servitude.

Sentencing verdict

In November 1938, an investigation was opened into the case of a spy and terrorist organization allegedly created among the employees and heads of the foreign department of the OGPU and the Comintern. Among others, Trilisser was arrested. He was incriminated with the former Interior Affairs Commissioner G. Yagoda, who had once seen him as his rival, and by that time had already been shot as an enemy of the people. In addition, the materials of the case indicated that Trilisser Mikhail (real name Meer Abramovich), using his official position as an employee of the Comintern, deliberately planted Trotskyites, spies and provocateurs in the ranks of fraternal Communist Parties.

The Supreme Court found the guilt fully proven and sentenced him, as well as a number of persons in this case, to death. All those who were sentenced were shot on February 2, 1940, at a specially designed shooting range for Kommunarka. Only after many years, when the main culprit of those bloody repressions - Stalin, the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, having reviewed the case, passed a resolution on rehabilitation.

Grave in the monastery cemetery

A veteran of the revolutionary movement and a prominent Chekist in Petersburg, at one of the cemeteries of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, called the "Communist platform", were buried. On the gray granite obelisk it is inscribed: "Trilisser David Abramovich, 1884-1934". Currently his name is in the streets in Astrakhan and Irkutsk.

Those who would like to get acquainted with the life of this extraordinary person, perhaps, will not be enough of the information provided by his brief biography. Meir Trilisser became the hero of many documentary works, telling about his fate. The most interesting and informative of them is a book written by his widow Olga Naumovna, Johansson. It is called "Dear Fight: An Essay on the Life and Activities of MA Trilisser."