Text taken from the blog of Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin.
[ColonelCassad] Order of the Prosecutor of the USSR No. 1265/70с. About the grossest violations of revolutionary legality in cases of k.r. crimes by the prosecutor's office of the Ryazan region. September 23, 1938
Archive - GAVO. F. 6466. Op. 1. D. 2. L. 7
An important document signed by Vyshinsky.
1. Even under Yezhov (he will be removed only after 2 months - formally, the period of mass repression ends with his removal) Vyshinsky demands that an investigation be carried out into the violations identified during the repressions in the Ryazan region and that the perpetrators be punished, pointing to the facts of cases based on slander and careerism and reinsurance - read fake cases formed based on denunciations. This again refers to the vulgar myth that Vyshinsky knew nothing and covered up violations during the repressions. On the contrary, he knew and took measures through the Prosecutor’s Office. Even under Yezhov. As a result, this will lead to a serious purge of prosecutorial workers in the 1939-1940s and will accelerate the fall of Yezhov.
2. This document, among others, once again exposes the myth that violations were hidden and only Khrushchev then exposed everything and released everyone. No, they began to be opened during the repressions of 1937-1938. This is actually why Yezhov and the leadership of the NKVD paid with their heads a little later for what happened. Subsequently, documents like this led to the fact that after Lavrentiy Beria came to control of the NKVD and the purge of the NKVD leadership for counter-revolutionary crimes, the 1st “Berievskaya” amnesty was held, within the framework of which hundreds of thousands of cases were reviewed and many unjust sentences were overturned. This is a serious merit of Vyshinsky, to whom one can show anything, it’s that he was somewhat late in revealing systemic violations of social law during repressions.
3. At the same time, it is worth paying attention to the accusation against the Ryazan prosecutors that in addition to conniving at violations of socialist legality and initiating illegal criminal cases, these same prosecutors negligently conducted cases against real enemies of the people, as a result of which these cases were “smeared” (read fell apart). That is, on the one hand, innocent people suffered, and on the other, enemies of the people evaded responsibility. This is already about the difficulty of analyzing the process of repression and separating the lambs from the goats in this stream.
Whether there was malicious intent here (in the Ryazan region) or whether it was simply a matter of low qualifications of the prosecutors, unfortunately, the document does not specify. In any case, a state commission was sent to the Ryazan region to check the entire local prosecutor's office on the facts of violations identified.