Introduction
In my last article (“Jewish Bolsheviks and Mass Murder: Rozalia Zemliachka and the Jews Responsible for the Bloodbath in Crimea, 1920”), I described a group of Communist Jews and the slaughter they perpetrated in the early years of Bolshevik rule in Russia. Over the thirty-five years that spanned the rule of Lenin and Stalin, there were hundreds of similar massacres, carried out by various delegations of Cheka-OGPU-NKVD officers (with significant Jewish representation or even outright leadership), operating in every region of the USSR. These massacres cry out for more attention, and I hope to write about more of them. In the meantime, however, I will describe three depraved Jewish executioners, each of them richly deserving infamy and execration: Mikhail Vikhman, Revekka Plastinina-Maizel, and Isai Berg. Vikhman was a leading Cheka commissar in Odessa and Crimea in 1919–1921, where he personally shot hundreds of victims, including some of the highest rank. (His later career features an exquisite irony.) Plastinina-Maizel was a Party official who barbarically murdered thousands in the Far North of Russia together with her consort, a mad Cheka official. She later enjoyed a career at the highest level of the Soviet judiciary, a fine commentary on the perversities of Soviet society. Berg, a leading NKVD official in Moscow and executioner in the Great Terror, already boasts some notoriety among anti-Communists because he pioneered the homicidal gas van, which was meant to help him in his regular job: organizing nearly twenty thousand executions at the Butovo killing grounds in 1937–1938. These three Jews alone are responsible for the death of over twenty thousand people, and their names should be at least as well-known as Eichmann or Mengele, and for better reasons