About the monument to Dzerzhinsky and witness Gorbachev. About the monument to Dzerzhinsky and the witness Gorbachev Chief Accountant of the Administration of the Central Committee of the CPSU

Gold of the CPSU - ten years later

Why do the “new Russian” capitalists finance the communists?

Sergei Sokolov, Sergei Pluzhnikov

It would seem that the Old Testament theme of party money remained in the last century. Since then, so much money has flowed that it’s not worth paying attention to the Central Committee-Communist Party trickle. But the fact is that it was from this trickle that the history of the new Russian business began. Like the bearded Marx, understand the history of the initial accumulation of capital and you will understand today's society of polished, talkative politicians and financial magnates more clearly.

Martyrology of the victims

On August 26, 1991, the manager of the CPSU Central Committee, Nikolai Kruchina, threw himself from the balcony of his apartment. Nikolai Efimovich left a posthumous note: “I am not a conspirator, but I am a coward. Please inform the Soviet people about this.” On the chair next to his desk, he also left a thick folder with documents containing detailed information about the illegal commercial activities of the CPSU in recent years.

On October 6, Kruchina’s predecessor as head of the Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 81-year-old Georgy Pavlov, falls from the window of his apartment. The investigation could not explain this step out of the window with anything other than suicide.

October 17 from the balcony of a 12-story building on the street. Dmitry Lisovolik, former head of the US sector of the international department of the CPSU Central Committee, is “leaving” Lisa Chaikina. No documents or posthumous notes were found during the inspection of the deceased’s apartment. But Lisovolik’s death was preceded by the seizure by investigators on Old Square of two “ownerless” millions of dollars, intended, as it turned out, for the leader of the American communists Gus Hall.

In the winter of 1992, in the entrance of his house, the chairman of Profbank, Alexander Petrov, was killed with four shots from a Nagan. The bank was created with money from the CPSU.

On November 8, 1994, Yuri Korolev, a former intelligence officer and famous photographer from the Soviet Union magazine, was killed. He was tortured before his death.

On December 22, 1996, in the Minsk suburb of Samokhvalovichi, the body of Leonid Kucheruk, a former KGB colonel who became a fairly successful businessman, was found. Leonid Georgievich worked in Mexico under the roof of the magazine "Soviet Union" and was well acquainted with Korolev. In addition, Leonid Kucheruk was once responsible for one of the chains of transferring money to the French Communist Party. He was tortured before his death.

On February 25, 1997, a colleague of Korolev and Kucheruk, a former KGB officer, Vadim Osipovich Biryukov, deputy general director of the magazine “Business People,” was found in a garage on Novolesnaya Street with signs of torture on his body.

“The corpse trail of the party’s gold” is how the MK newspaper commented on this chain of murders with torture. What secret accounts did these people possess? To whom did they owe their sudden enrichment in the early 90s? And who presented them with their bloody bill?

Personal commitment to the CPSU

The archives of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation contain 200 volumes of the criminal case "On the financial and economic activities of the CPSU Central Committee." These volumes contain the history of the initial accumulation of capital by the “new” Russian nomenklatura. But the details are still not available - the case is stamped "top secret". Naturally, not all Russian business emerged from the nomenklatura overcoat tailored on Old Square, but the party was the first to set the tone. This is exactly the conclusion we came to over ten years of our reporting research into the “myth of the party’s gold” (by the way, based on our materials, the American detective firm Kroll compiled one of the four “classified” reports for the Russian government.) In due course, in our hands I came across a rather eloquent sample of a document - “Personal commitment to the CPSU”:

I, _______, a member of the CPSU since ___, party card No____, hereby confirm my conscious and voluntary decision to become a trusted representative of the party and carry out the tasks entrusted to me by the party in any position and in any situation, without disclosing my affiliation with the institution of trusted representatives. I undertake to store and carefully use in the interests of the party the financial and material resources entrusted to me, the return of which I guarantee upon its first request. I recognize all the funds I have earned as a result of economic activities using party funds as its property, and I guarantee their transfer at any time and in any place. I undertake to maintain strict confidentiality of the information entrusted to me and to carry out the instructions of the party transmitted to me through authorized persons.
Signature of a member of the CPSU ____
Signature of the person accepting the obligation _____"

Investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office did not find the receipts themselves. They probably either turned into paper shavings in the August days of 1991, or were wisely stored and stored in some Western bank. Hot on the heels, we only managed to interrogate one of the “godfathers” of the “invisible party economy” - Colonel of the First Main Directorate of the KGB Leonid Veselovsky, who was seconded to the Kruchina department to save and increase party funds. By the way, the phrase “invisible economy” is taken from an official document of the CPSU Central Committee. The investigators were lucky - the colonel was confused, the entire KGB leadership expected repressions and dismissals, and therefore the discouraged Veselovsky wrote a fairly frank report on his activities for the Prosecutor General's Office:

From the report of L. Veselovsky to the KGB dated 09/07/91:

“In November 1990, at the request of the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee (Ivashko and Kruchin), by the decision of the department leadership (Kryuchkov and Bobkov), I was transferred from PGU to work in the Department of the CPSU Central Committee. By the decision of the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee, I was appointed to the position of deputy head of the sector for coordination of the economic activities of economic services... The basis for my reassignment to the Central Committee was the urgent need of the leadership of the Central Committee UD to create a unit capable of coordinating the economic activities of the economic structures of the party in the changed conditions... The choice fell on me, since by my education I am an international economist , I have experience of foreign work and was known to most of the leading officials of the Central Committee from his activities in the Central Committee of the Komsomol in the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In addition, Kruchina believed that such a serious issue as the organization of economic activity could only be entrusted to employees of the department, in whose honesty he never I doubted it. I believe that not the least role in the choice of my candidacy was played by the fact that, being on a long departmental business trip in a country with a difficult situation, I was entrusted with communicating with the Communist Party. which at that time was in a semi-legal position...

An agreement was reached to periodically inform Bobkov about my activities in the Administration of the CPSU Central Committee...".

Now, every eighth-grader knows what a market economy is, but at that time, advanced intelligence officers and well-read “lab leaders” like Gaidar and Aven made their careers based on elementary truths. As Sergei Aristov, the former head of the investigative group “on the CPSU case,” and now the head of one of the departments of the Prosecutor General’s Office, recently told us about this: “By and large, Veselovsky did not invent anything new. It’s just that in the nineties, that is, when we had socialism ", they introduced a market economy for the Administration of the Affairs of the CPSU Central Committee. That is, they concluded agreements, transferred money, introduced their people, and thus, in principle, began to solve both problems - partly to shelter and partly to earn money."

From the analytical note by L. Veselovsky “On additional measures to consolidate and effectively use party property.”

“... Monetary resources reflected in financial documents can be openly invested only in public, social or charitable funds, which will make it difficult to confiscate them in the future.

Funds coming in the form of income to the party treasury and not reflected in financial documents should be used to purchase anonymous shares, funds of individual companies, enterprises, banks, which, on the one hand, will ensure a stable income regardless of the further position of the party, and on the other , at any time these shares can be sold on stock exchanges with subsequent placement of capital in other areas in order to depersonalize party participation, but while maintaining control...

The adoption of these measures will require organizing the urgent selection of especially trusted persons who will be entrusted with the implementation of certain points of the program; the possibility of creating a category of secret members of the party who will ensure its functioning in any conditions of the emergency period is not excluded."

In another analytical note by I. E. Kruchina with the note: “N. E.! Confidentially, in 1 copy, if done, then only with the KGB,” it was proposed to create a network of joint-stock companies abroad:

“We are talking about creating in one of the capital countries with lenient tax legislation, for example in Switzerland, a joint-stock company engaged in all types of information and intermediary activities: trading, brokerage, intermediation, representation. Shareholders are proxies.

At the initial stage, a list of future shareholders is determined. In the banks of the country where the JSC is supposed to be based, open accounts in the name of the shareholders and deposit the corresponding amounts into these accounts... Then the immediate creation of a joint venture on the territory of the Soviet Union...

Volsky's Scientific and Industrial Union and its Simako concern enjoyed special favor among the party leadership. They received large financial subsidies and converted rubles into foreign currency through the military-industrial complex at a rate of 1.8 rubles per dollar. Here, Prime Minister Pavlov provided active assistance to the NPS and Simako. The UD received signals about Simako's participation in the trade in large quantities of weapons, military equipment, and other dubious transactions, which I reported to Grushko and Kryuchkov. But no measures were taken. Moreover, after one of these reports to the leadership of the department, Kruchina called me and informed me that Volsky persistently asked to remove me."

At the instigation of PGU officer Leonid Beselovsky, in the spring of 1991, an exemplary family of Soviet millionaires was created overnight. The CPSU entrusted her with a total of 400 million rubles. As a result, the former chief technologist of NPO Kauchuk M. N. Khotimsky, a good friend of Veselovsky, became the head of 4 companies: the small enterprise Galaktik, the limited liability company Jobrus, the company Holding LTD and the Moscow Municipal Association. And his wife, M.A. Khotimskaya, became the founder of Galaktik. But the most curious thing is that KGB Lieutenant Colonel Grebenshchikov became the general director of the largest company in this family. It turned out that, despite his formal dismissal from the department, he continued to carry a pistol and a valid service ID. Later, apparently, such control grew into the concept of “roof”.

Ten years later, we looked into the Moscow database of legal entities - and it turned out that all these guys are still thriving. Apparently, Khotimsky managed to properly manage party money. And, by the way, according to the behests of Colonel Veselovsky on the creation of joint ventures, the co-founders of the Jobrus company include the Russian-Italian-British joint venture COMMING LTD and the AIC International Establishment company. Now former (or current?) party trustees are busy with serious and useful activities - “developing investment programs, organizing and supporting investment flows.” That is, they are investing in Russia what they once exported? And Colonel Veselovsky himself has not lived in Russia for a long time; his traces have been cut short since his dismissal from the Swiss branch of Boris Birshtein’s company “Siabeko”. Let us also recall that the Deputy Chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Filipp Bobkov, to whom Colonel Veselovsky reported on his activities, in 1992 began working as the head of the analytical department at Most Bank.

Factory for the production of oligarchs?

The story of the successful entrepreneur Khotimsky, who once won at roulette on Old Square, is, of course, too private, but indicative. His business career is in full view. Unlike the monsters of Russian capital like Gusinsky, Smolensky, Khodorkovsky, Potanin... But on the other hand, according to the investigation, the Administration of the CPSU Central Committee managed to create more than 100 party firms and commercial banks before the August putsch and distributed 3 billion to them in the form of start-up capital full-fledged Soviet rubles - in terms of currency it turns out to be more than 2.5 billion dollars. (For reference, the total “weight” of all our largest Russian banks today does not exceed 2 billion dollars.) Under what obligations did these “Khotimsk” people receive such money? Remember the text of the receipt: “I undertake to store and carefully use in the interests of the party the financial and material resources entrusted to me, the return of which I guarantee upon its first request.” Of course, not everything is so simple, but look from this point of view at the unexpected ups and downs in the careers of our oligarchs:

Vladimir Gusinsky, now disgraced, was involved in a criminal case for fraud N50464 in 1986. I took 8 thousand rubles from a lawyer friend for a car, but did not give the car back. He worked as a theater director in Tula, worked as a private driver, and organized a cooperative for the production of women's jewelry and metal garages. But in 1989 he suddenly became president of Most Bank, which almost immediately became one of the ten largest banks in the country. Together with Philip Bobkov, more than a hundred KGB officers migrated to Most Bank.

Vladimir Potanin. Until 1990, he was a senior engineer at the All-Union Foreign Trade Association Soyuzpromexport and at the same time a trade union and Komsomol activist. In 1990, with the support of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, he created the Foreign Economic Association "Interros", the embryo of the future ONEXIMbank, into which over time all the main assets of Vnesheconombank of the USSR migrated.

Alexander Smolensky still reacts painfully and sharply to journalists’ questions about the origin of his starting capital. A senior foreman in the printing house, who was caught in 1980 printing incorrect editions of the Prayer Book and received 2 years of chemistry for this. Commodity manager of the trading company "Vesna". In 1988, he became a co-operator building utility blocks for summer residents. In 1989 - Chairman of the Board of the Stolichny Bank.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 1986, under the auspices of the Komsomol, he organized the Intersectoral Center for Scientific and Technical Programs - "Me-Na-Te-P".

Traded computers. Two years later, a cooperative bank is registered. With the personal permission of the Secretary General of the CPSU Gorbachev, money was passed through MENATEP to eliminate the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. At the beginning of 1990, on the special instructions of the manager of the affairs of the CPSU Central Committee, the conversion of party money took place through Khodorkovsky’s structures.

Who are they - trusted representatives? It is unlikely, of course, that Smolensky or Potanin gave anyone any receipts, but, on the other hand, their figures suited the old Soviet nomenclature quite well. Have you ever wondered who came to power as a result of rapid reforms and changes? And the last became the first? While the others were rallying, the first ones prudently looked for successors.

From Prince Obolensky to the “chemist” Smolensky

Every four years, the party in power (Yeltsin twice, Putin once so far) wins presidential elections under the slogans “communism will not pass!” And at the same time, the same newspaper Kommersant calmly states in 1997: “The following were involved in the financing of Gennady Zyuganov in the 1996 elections: Most Bank, MENATEP, SBS-Agro, Onexim and even the structures of Boris Berezovsky. Similar activities by banks , naturally, is not advertised. But what makes the new Russian capitalists finance people who clearly understand in their own way the same advertisement of the Kommersant newspaper: “Let's start our day with a fresh merchant!”?

This winter, the former head of the international department, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, former adviser to Beria, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Valentin Falin, came to Moscow for a short time from Germany. In Russia in the early nineties, he was not allowed to live in peace, and Valentin Mikhailovich was sheltered in his research institute by one of the former German dissidents. Falin interprets Soviet-Russian history in a very interesting way, and his book “Conflicts in the Kremlin,” in our opinion, should be included in the university curriculum of history departments.

So, Falin quite calmly commented on these charitable impulses of the bankers: “As for the connection with the oligarchs. I can remind you that the Bolsheviks received millions in subsidies from large industrialists, bankers, aristocrats... Prince Obolensky gave a million rubles, Rybakov - a banker - millions, Morozov - bequeathed one hundred thousand rubles and before that gave hundreds of thousands. Many understand today that without the creation of a socially balanced society, Russia is unlikely to emerge from the turmoil from that swamp."

We talked on the same topic with one of the very first Soviet businessmen, the president of the Nordex company, Grigory Luchansky, the hero of many newspaper scandals in the early 90s. Luchansky, indeed, was suspected of many tricks, but it never came down to accusations of financing communists didn’t get it: “I share the position of those people who believe that large industrial corporations worked for both ours and yours. And since we have two forces - the center right and the strong left, these guys probably financed both of them, just in case.

Why? The principle of self-preservation. Maybe they think that today’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation is no longer the CPSU. This is another structure much closer to social democracy.."

Luchansky, unlike Valentin Falin, sees a more compelling reason for the cooperation of businessmen with the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. He, in particular, recalled an indicative story about how Zyuganov’s right hand, Valentin Kuptsov, came to the Gazprom management to lobby the interests of Perm businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev: “They lobby for certain issues, apparently on a commercial basis. Why else? There is no ideology here.” Therefore, when the interests of a businessman with a dubious reputation, Rybolovlev, are defended by the leaders of the Communist Party faction, I am firmly convinced that Rybolovlev does not stand on a communist platform.

The fact is that I cannot imagine that in Soviet times the leaders of the Communist Party would support a person with such a reputation. I see only commerce here. There is nothing else."

Businessmen, go ahead!

Once upon a time, during the years of prosperity of Marxism-Leninism, there were all sorts of desperate right-wing deviationists who preached at the risk of their lives the theory of convergence - the interweaving of socialism with capitalism. Today's list of the Communist Party faction clearly demonstrates that the tormented ghosts of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev are frequent guests in the night corridors of the State Duma. Without any theories, several dozen large entrepreneurs got into parliament on the list of the Communist Party: President of Alba-Alliance Bank Igor Annensky, President of the Progress and Renewal Foundation Sergei Zolotilin, President of the oil and gas company VNIIST Rifkat Shakirov, Deputy. General Director of the Presnensky business center Evgeny Marchenko, businessman Nikolay Dykhes, etc. Others, like Avangard Bank President Kirill Minovalov, chose a different form of “convergence” with the powerful faction. Minovalov modestly became an adviser on economic issues to Gennady Seleznev. The behind-the-scenes explanations for such friendship are well known - the price of a deputy mandate costs an average of a million dollars, and entrepreneurs, in turn, in addition to the “kopkrysha,” receive immense opportunities to promote their business.

In this regard, the case of the real “red oligarch” Viktor Vidmanov is interesting. On the one hand, he is the president of the Rosagropromstroy corporation and Rosagroprostroybank. And on the other hand, he is practically an official sponsor of the party, a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (a modern analogue of the Politburo). According to the Federal Investigation Agency FLB.ru, one of the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation has collected a sufficient amount of materials about the financial abuses of Vidmanov’s corporation, but they are not letting them go. They are saving. We only know the materials of the audit of the Accounts Chamber “on the expenditure of funds allocated from the 1995 federal budget for the restoration of the economy and social sphere of the Chechen Republic,” in which the corporation of the “red oligarch” actively figures. In 1995, about 700 billion budget money or more than 150 million dollars were pumped through Vidmanov’s companies (at the 1995 exchange rate, $1 was equal to 4,500 rubles). In particular, auditors of the Accounts Chamber found that the construction services of the best friend of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation cost the state 30.8% more compared with other construction organizations. Of course, in this situation, you can afford to sponsor any party. Moreover, lucrative “Chechen” contracts were obtained by Rosagropromstroy thanks to the communists’ active lobbying of its interests in the government.

We met with Viktor Mikhailovich. He, of course, speaks with pain and sorrow about the plunder of the country, about the fact that, finally, nationally oriented entrepreneurs have appeared who have been imbued with the ideas of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and are acquiring party tickets. But Viktor Mikhailovich could not explain how the “red oligarchs” differed from the same Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky or Smolensky. In Russian business, with its peculiar laws, both are of the same blood. Everyone is equally free about the “bins of the Motherland.” “What do you want? There is a class struggle going on,” the former leader of the Communist Party during perestroika, and now an honorary pensioner, Ivan Polozkov, explained this conflict to us in a telephone conversation. “We need to earn money, we won’t fight the regime with pitchforks and rakes.”

The Communist Party faction settles scores with the regime at almost every State Duma meeting. It no longer surprises anyone that lawmaking has turned into a money-making printing press for deputies. From time to time, the Kremlin gets tired of paying the pocket communist opposition and then Comrade Zyuganov begins to frown and blackmail with impeachment or “no confidence in the government.” And in the evenings he leaves in a fancy car with flashing lights and a security jeep to the dacha of the Presidential Administration on Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway. By the way, in a narrow circle he likes to tell how he became the champion of Rublyovka in Russian billiards. He arranges battles on the green cloth with the Kremlin satraps and oligarchic capital.

In general, the convergence was a success and its implementation began ten years ago in the building of the CPSU Central Committee on Old Square from the notes of KGB Colonel Leonid Veselovsky. Veselovsky was mistaken in only one thing - no semi-Masonic oaths and secret receipts from “party trustees” are now needed. Everyone already understands each other perfectly. A socially balanced society functions successfully when dividing the state pie. And, of course, not the least role in all this prosperity was played by the “starting” 2.5 billion dollars from the CPSU Central Committee, with which, in fact, the new “invisible economy” of Russian business began.

Nikolai Efimovich Kruchina died on the night of August 25-26, 1991. He chose the third way to take his own life - he jumped out of the window. He committed his suicide at night: his wife and son were sleeping peacefully in their beds. At six in the morning his body was found under the windows of the apartment.

The wife was shocked when the doorbell rang and reported a terrible discovery: when she went to bed, Kruchina was sitting at his desk in his office and working. He hasn't slept much at all lately. The police inspected the office and the scene of the incident. Since Nikolai Kruchina was responsible for party finances, the case of his unexpected death was taken under special control. Roy Medvedev wrote about this in his article:

The search was carried out by a team of criminologists under the leadership of three investigators for particularly important cases from the USSR Prosecutor's Office and in the presence of the prosecutor of the Leninsky district of Moscow. However, no traces of any unauthorized persons being in N. Kruchina’s apartment were found. There were no signs of destruction of any papers or documents. On the contrary, it became clear that after August 19, Nikolai Efimovich transferred to his apartment many of the papers that were supposed to be stored in official safes on Old Square. But all these folders with papers were in order, with appropriate inscriptions on the covers and with authentic signatures of the highest persons. These materials were confiscated and appropriate protocols were drawn up.

The office of N. Kruchina in the Central Committee of the CPSU was in less order. Even on the evening of August 23, M. Gorbachev, who returned from Foros, ordered Kruchina to put all matters in order, and in particular, to immediately pay wages to the party apparatus workers for two to three months and give them work books. But Kruchina was unable to do this, since that same evening the large six-story Administrative Office building in the complex of buildings of the CPSU Central Committee on Old Square was captured by the “democrats.” As early as August 25, excursions were held in these buildings for Soviet and Western correspondents. They were also shown the office of N. E. Kruchina. At the same time, a journalist from the weekly Soyuz, Irina Krasnopolskaya, sat in the chair of the business manager and demanded that the photojournalist accompanying her capture this moment. The journalist rummaged through the drawers of N. Kruchina’s desk, leafed through his calendar with notes, and looked around the rest room. Even the employees of the building's commandant's office, who accompanied the tourists, were shocked.

After the suicide of N. Kruchina, his office, and all other main offices in the CPSU Central Committee, were sealed, including the office of the retired General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee - the famous office No. ... on the fifth floor of the main building of the Central Committee.

The investigation into the death of Kruchina was closely followed by the entire press of that time. On September 5, in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sergei Pluzhnikov reported:

May the relatives and friends of Nikolai Efimovich Kruchina forgive us, but we still have to. once again turn to the circumstances of his death.

As we have already reported, the manager of the affairs of the CPSU Central Committee N. E. Kruchina jumped from the balcony of his apartment at five o’clock in the morning. That night from August 25 to 26, Nikolai Efimovich’s wife and youngest son were in the apartment with him, and they could not help but hear, even in their sleep, the sound of a struggle or screams. There are a number of other compelling reasons that now allow specialists from the prosecutor’s office of the Leninsky district of Moscow to assert that it was indeed suicide.

As it turned out, Nikolai Efimovich left two posthumous notes. One of them was found immediately - on a coffee table in the hallway of the apartment. Another, more detailed one, was with the deceased. The meaning of the two notes is tragic and boils down to one thing: “...I am not a traitor or a conspirator... I am a coward.” Nikolai Efimovich wrote that his conscience was clear and asked that this be communicated to the people, adding: “I am only guilty of signing an order to protect these secretaries” (apparently, this meant members of the State Emergency Committee). Could a person lie to himself before his death?

The search of the apartment of the manager of the CPSU Central Committee was carried out by three investigators for particularly important cases of the USSR Prosecutor's Office in the presence of the prosecutor of the Leninsky district N. Popov. No traces of destruction of any papers were found. Investigators seized a number of documents. Even the names, and even more so the signatures under them, testified to the special importance of these materials.

Kruchina’s dossier, which also covered the party’s commercial activities in recent years, is now in the USSR Prosecutor’s Office. Prosecutor N. Popov refused to talk about the contents of the documents, citing some unfinished investigation, and rightly noted that dealing with the dossier was not within his competence. We tracked down one of the investigators who carried out the search. He refused to say anything about the dossier, not even accompanying his refusal with the standard statement: “an investigation is underway.”

Is this investigation ongoing? From well-informed sources in the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, we learned that the management of the BKhSS never interfered in the commercial activities of the CPSU. Until recently, there was a telephone taboo. And if individual criminal facts accidentally surfaced, little attention was paid to them or, one might say more harshly, they were hidden, and they never served as a reason for initiating criminal cases against party bosses. So, for example, it happened with the facts of illegal misappropriation of large sums of travel currency by members of the party apparatus and the government of Estonia last year (1998).

In a word, there are now no guarantees that, due to the enormous busyness of investigators with the State Emergency Committee case and the “reconstruction” in the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, Kruchina’s dossier will not get lost in the heap of operational materials.

And how correspondent Pluzhnikov looked into the water! Soon, Kruchina’s case was seized from the police and transferred to a special register with the KGB, where it was successfully closed “due to the lack of corpus delicti.”

Meanwhile, Kruchina’s death for another investigation - in the State Emergency Committee case - happened at a very bad time. Just in those days, because of the documents found, a very influential person in the CPSU was arrested - Oleg Shenin, the secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, who oversaw party work in the army and the KGB under M. Gorbachev. He was also among the conspirators. And it was Kruchina who was supposed to become a deadly noose for him, because it was planned to arrange a confrontation between Shenin and Kruchina. Alas! On the eve of this confrontation, Kruchina made his flight. Shenin spent a year in Lefortovo, but didn’t say a word. No one could convict him either: Kruchina was in the next world, Shenin was not listed among the organizers of the State Emergency Committee, and did not sign harmful documents or orders. And when they finally decided to interrogate Valentin Falin, the former secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, it suddenly turned out that he was already in Germany, and in the safe where incriminating documents were supposed to be kept, there was an open bottle of Armenian cognac... And not a single piece of paper...

True, Colonel of the First Main Directorate of the KGB Leonid Veselovsky willingly cooperated with the investigation. He even said that there is one special document that is signed by everyone who is connected with the special secrets of the CPSU, and it looks like this:

I, a member of the CPSU since..., party card No...., hereby confirm my conscious and voluntary decision to become a trusted representative of the party and carry out the tasks entrusted to me by the party in any position and in any situation, without disclosing my affiliation with the institution of trusted representatives. I undertake to store and carefully use in the interests of the party the financial and material resources entrusted to me, the return of which I guarantee upon its first request. I recognize all the funds I have earned as a result of economic activities using party funds as its property, and I guarantee their transfer at any time and in any place. I undertake to maintain strict confidentiality of the information entrusted to me and to carry out the instructions of the party transmitted to me through authorized persons.

Signature of a member of the CPSU_

Signature of the person accepting the obligation_

Veselovsky honestly admitted:

In November 1990, at the request of the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee (Ivashko and Kruchina), by decision of the department leadership (Kryuchkov and Bobkov), I was transferred from PSU to work in the CPSU Central Committee Administration... Kruchina believed that such a serious issue as the organization of economic activity could be entrusted only to department employees, whose honesty he never doubted. An agreement was reached to periodically inform Bobkov about my activities in the Administration of the CPSU Central Committee....

Monetary resources reflected in financial documents can only be publicly invested in public, social or charitable funds, which will make it difficult to confiscate them in the future. We are talking about creating a joint stock company in one of the capitalist countries with lenient tax legislation, for example in Switzerland... Then the immediate creation of a joint venture on the territory of the Soviet Union...

Volsky's Scientific and Industrial Union and its Simako concern enjoyed special favor among the party leadership. They received large financial subsidies and converted rubles into foreign currency through the military-industrial complex at a rate of 1.8 rubles per dollar. Here, Prime Minister Pavlov provided active assistance to the NPS and Simako. The UD received signals about Simako's participation in the trade in large quantities of weapons, military equipment, and other dubious transactions, which I reported to Grushko and Kryuchkov. But no measures were taken.

There were no documents confirming Veselovsky’s words, and it was impossible to ask anything from the dead Kruchina.

But Kruchina’s flight from the fifth floor of an apartment building was only the first flight. Following Kruchina, his predecessor G.S. Pavlov committed the same suicide.

On August 26, 1991, the manager of the CPSU Central Committee, Nikolai Kruchina, “threw himself out” from the balcony of his apartment, located on the fifth floor of one of the prestigious buildings on Pletnev Lane. Death occurred at about 5:30 a.m.
Nikolai Efimovich was forced to write a posthumous note:

"Personal commitment to the CPSU":

I, _____, a member of the CPSU since ___, party card No____, hereby confirm my conscious and voluntary decision to become a trusted representative of the party and carry out the tasks entrusted to me by the party in any position and in any situation, without disclosing my affiliation with the institution of trusted representatives. I undertake to store and carefully use in the interests of the party the financial and material resources entrusted to me, the return of which I guarantee upon its first request. I recognize all the funds I have earned as a result of economic activities using party funds as its property, and I guarantee their transfer at any time and in any place. I undertake to maintain strict confidentiality of those entrusted to me

information and carry out party instructions transmitted to me through authorized persons.

Signature of a member of the CPSU ____
Signature of the person accepting the obligation _____"

“...On Sunday, August 25, Kruchina returned home at 21.30,- Yevlanov, a KGB security officer, testified during the investigation. - Usually he is a friendly person, he always says hello. This time was kind of weird. I was at the entrance to the house, on the street, when his car drove up. He got out of the car, didn’t say hello, didn’t react to anything, and went up to his room. It was felt that he was upset about something. One person left in the morning, and a completely different person returned..."

The security officers (are they alive?) testified that Nikolai Efimovich did not go anywhere else that day, and no one saw him during the evening, except for his eldest son. At exactly midnight, the security officer on duty at the house closed the door, and, according to his testimony, no one left or entered the house.

“...After 10 pm he told me to go to bed,” Kruchina’s widow later said, - and he himself was going to work some more. At about 10:30 pm I lay down on the sofa in my office and fell asleep. I went to my place. However, I was unable to fall asleep, as my soul was restless. I didn't sleep almost the whole night. At 4.30 I looked at the clock and instantly fell asleep. I woke up from a strong knock on the door. When I left the bedroom, my son Sergei and police officers met me.”

The development of events on that fateful day, or rather early morning, can be learned from the testimony of the same security officer Evlanov: “...At 5.25, while inside the building, I heard a strong bang outside. The impression was as if they had thrown an explosive package. When I went outside, I saw a man lying face down on the ground. A little further away lay a folded sheet of paper...”

Plotnikov Lane, 13
Year of construction: 1985
Only senior officials of the CPSU Central Committee and ministers lived in the house :

The second note left by Kruchina was as follows: “I am not a criminal or a conspirator, I find this vile and disgusting on the part of the instigators and traitors. But I'm a coward». Nikolai Efimovich emphasized the last sentence, probably for greater persuasiveness.

It is clear that he was only afraid for his children and grandchildren: after all, just recently Boris Karlovich Pugo "shot his wife, shot himself twice in the head, put the gun on the bedside table with the Party money, lay down on the bed and died...."

Next it says: “Forgive me, Zoychik, children, grandchildren. Please take care of the family, especially the widow. No one is to blame here. It’s my fault that I signed the document regarding the protection of these secretaries. There is no more guilt than mine before you, Mikhail Sergeevich. I served honestly and devotedly. 5.15 min. August, 26th. Kruchina."

After examining the body and the scene of the incident, the investigative examination naturally came to the conclusion that N. Kruchina was not subjected to any violent physical influence before his death. During a search of the apartment, it was also established that he did not destroy any papers, did not burn them, etc. All documents related to the secrets of the Party, including financial ones, were in the apartment (!!!).

P.S. Biography:

Born on May 14, 1928 in the village of Novopokrovka, Kamensky District, Siberian Territory, now Altai Territory.
In 1949 he joined the CPSU(b)/CPSU. Since 1952 at Komsomol work. In 1952-1954 - first secretary of the Novocherkassk city committee of the Komsomol of the Rostov region. In 1953 he graduated from the Azov-Black Sea Agricultural Institute. In 1954-1957 - second, first secretary of the Kamensky regional committee of the Komsomol. In 1957-1959 - first secretary of the Smolensk regional committee of the Komsomol.
In 1959-1962 - head of the department of the Komsomol Central Committee for work among rural youth. In 1962-1963 - instructor at the Agricultural Department of the CPSU Central Committee.
In 1963-1965 - Secretary of the Tselinny Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan.
From November 1963 to April 1978 - first secretary of the Tselinograd regional committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan.
By the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated December 10, 1973, for the great successes achieved in the All-Union Socialist Competition and the demonstrated labor valor in fulfilling the obligations assumed to increase the production and sale of grain and other agricultural products to the state in 1973, Nikolai Efimovich Kruchina was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor with the presentation of the Order of Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle gold medal.
In 1978-1983 - First Deputy Head of the Agricultural Department - Department of Agriculture and Food Industry of the CPSU Central Committee.
From September 1983 to August 26, 1991 - Manager of the Affairs of the CPSU Central Committee.
Member of the Central Audit Commission of the CPSU in 1966-1971.
Candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1971-1976.
Member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1976-1991.
Awarded 2 Orders of Lenin, Order of the Red Banner of Labor, 2 Orders of the Badge of Honor, and medals.