Downfall
Dybenko was among the officers purged from the Party in 1938. At first, he was moved from his command of the Leningrad Military District officially for "lack of trust" and appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Forestry industry, as a preparation to his own arrest, in order to disconnect him from his followers. Five days later, he was arrested and accused of personal corruption, immoral behavior, neglecting his duties as commander of military district, and with espionage in favor of the United States. The factual basis of the espionage accusation was that while he contacted (on duty) American diplomats, and asked them favors for his sister, who lived in the USA. Dybenko denied the espionage accusations. In his letter to Stalin he wrote, "I could not be an American spy. I even do not speak Americanish". However, he did not deny the accusations of using state funds to organize sex and alcohol orgies. The NKVD tortured him by putting him in a small iron box.
Zinaida Viktorovna Dybenko (Дыбенко Зинаида Викторовна), Dybenko's third wife, was arrested, charged with being a "ЧСИР" - "a member of traitor's family" and with failure to inform the authorities about her husband being a traitor and a spy. She was sentenced to five years in a the "Akmolinsk's camp for the wives of traitors to the Motherland".
He was sentenced to death, and shot. Twenty years later, following the death of Stalin, Dybenko was rehabilitated.
Read more about this topic: Pavel Dybenko
Famous quotes containing the word downfall:
“Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)