Stalin Chekists: power and powerlessness. "Berievskaya Thaw" in the Nikolaev region of Ukraine

In 1939-1941 Several hundred Chekists were convicted in the USSR for violating socialist legality, some of them were sentenced to the highest degree of punishment, the other to the long term of imprisonment in the camps. In particular, 13 people were punished in the Nikolaev region. In historiography, the thesis of clans appears as the main motive: as a result of cleaning the ranks of the secret police and the police, the most powerful clans were eliminated and they were replaced by other groups. As an alternative version, taking into account the forced process of the nationalization of the Soviet regime, which started in the summer of 1938, a new version suggests itself: the punishment campaign of "violators of socialist legality" was designed to torpedoing the patronage system and clientelers as a whole. This system was supposed to be opened first, and then eliminated for a long time. The loyalty of all personnel authorities was now addressed exclusively to the state. In conclusion, the author of the book proposes to distribute the processes against security officers in certain categories as an expression of "Stalin"s modernization".
In the seventies, a monument was erected in Nikolaev. The official name is the monument to "soldiers of law and order", the people"s monument to the Chekists.
This monument is given on the first page of the cover