Vasily Blokhin

Vasily Blokhin

Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (Russian: Васи́лий Миха́йлович Блохи́н; 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 hand-picked 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. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Vasily Blokhin has received more than 956,070 page views. His biography is available in 28 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 27 in 2019). Vasily Blokhin is the 2,269th most popular politician (up from 2,646th in 2019), the 225th most popular biography from Russia (up from 265th in 2019) and the 77th most popular Russian Politician.

Vasily Blokhin was a Soviet military officer and Nazi collaborator who was the head of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv during the German occupation of Ukraine. He is most famous for his role in the Babi Yar massacre, where he was responsible for killing more than 30,000 Jews.